InvenCaP Blog – What is a Dissenting Church Book?

By Mark Burden On 27 December 1821 the dissenting antiquarian Benjamin Hanbury supplemented his recent transcription of the eighteenth-century register of Isaac Watts’s church with a description of the original manuscript. This source text had been placed into his hands in a ‘mutilated state’, having been ‘lately bought for waste paper’; indeed, Hanbury feared that the ‘major part of the original MS. is therefore entirely lost’, although ‘what is here preserved must be exceedingly valuable to..