Seminar: The Rev. William Arderne Shoults His Life and Legacy

Friday, 25th August 2023 4:00 PM

A Seminar hosted by the Theology Programme, University of Otago

Burns 4, Arts Building

Speaker: Dr Donald Kerr

Former Special Collections Librarian at the University of Otago and author of Awakening a Curate's Library: The Rev. William Arderne Shoults (1839-1887) His life, his book collection and his legacy to New Zealand (Bibliographical Society of Australia and NZ, 2022) 

The Shoults Collection has been in Dunedin since 1893, firstly at Selwyn College and then at Special Collections, University of Otago. This collection of some 5600 books and manuscripts contains medieval manuscripts, incunables, books on ecclesiastical history and primitive church rites and rituals, philology, bibliography, science, travel, and Arabic and Persian texts. Very little is known about the collector the Rev William Arderne Shoults (1839-1887). He did not get to New Zealand and his library arrived here through the visionary initiative of Samuel Nevill, first bishop of Dunedin.  This talk will cover Shoults’s life at college (St. John’s, Cambridge), his work in ritualistic parishes of London, his association with the Rev. Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837–1908), the controversial, enthusiastic, revivalist known as ‘Father Ignatius’, and the Shoults Collection. The survival of it is remarkable. It exists as a fine example of what a nineteenth-century curate could collect.  

 ALL WELCOME