The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly

Extract

In writing this review I am in no small danger of running short of superlatives. To put it simply, this is a sublime scholarly achievement. Knowing the intense labour and demanding exactitude of a project like this, I am very impressed. It is difficult to conceive how Chad van Dixhoorn could have done a better job of putting these minutes and papers at the service of the scholarly community. He had help along the way, to be sure, and the skilful guidance of David F. Wright and John Morrill, but one quickly gets the sense that this is the fruit of his singular vision. If we count his years as a Cambridge PhD student, van Dixhoorn has worked full-time on the Westminster Assembly for longer than it existed in the first place. I recall being told that he had calculated (I think with tape measure in hand) that, yes, all the members of the assembly could squeeze into the smallish Jerusalem Chamber in which they met; he had even taken a shrewd guess, based on the voting records, as to which groups of divines sat next to whom, and where. He once had a dream, he tells us, in which one of the Scottish commissioners to the assembly, Samuel Rutherford, offered to help interpret the nearly impenetrable handwriting of the assembly's main scribe, Adoniram Byfield. It is as good an indication as any of the all-consuming nature of van Dixhoorn's task. Perhaps we should add here a note of thanks not just to him (and his assistants) but to his wife and children as well. For this set represents a generous gift to scholars of the seventeenth century and to all those interested in the development of Reformed Protestantism in the English–speaking world and beyond.