Sets are very common institutionally, with multiple copies in UK college, cathedral and parochial libraries though only 8 in the USA (Andover-Harvard Theological Library, Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary, Huntington, Library Company of Philadelphia, Library of Congress, Union Theological Seminary, UC-W.A.Clark, Yale), plus one each in Ireland, Canada, France and New Zealand, and two in Australia. However, sets appear to ne surprisingly rare commercially - Rare Book Hub lists only three sets sold in 1871, 1900 and 1966 and an odd imperfect vol. 2 unsold in 2017 and 2018; presumably auctioneers didn’t considered it worth lotting separately.
Besides several sermons, the bulk of the three stout volumes of the works of this Newcastle-born Laudian clergyman who was a Fellow and later President (from 1631) of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Dean of Peterborough (1639-40) comprise his, “great series of commentaries on the apostles’ creed in twelve books that is his major theological achievement.” (A. J. Hegarty, ODNB). Books 1 & 2 had been published together in 1613, Book 3 in 1614, Book 4 in 1615 (reprinted in 1631), Book 5 in 1625, Book 6 in 1628, Book 7 in 1634, Book 8 in 1635, Book 9 in 1638, Book 10 in 1654 (in Vol. II of the first edition of his Works collected by Barnabas Oley), Book 11 in 1657 (in Vol. 3 of his Works), and Book 12, part 1, in 1627-28. The 1hree-volume collection of his Works published between 1654 and 1657 did not include Books 4-8 for copyright reasons. This three-volume 1673 edition is the first complete collected edition and includes the first printing of Book 12, part 2.
Although his works, “despite a difficult style and some incoherence, were much esteemed by later generations of high-church and Anglo-Catholic theologians” (ODNB), Dr Thomas Jackson (1578-1640) must now be one of the most forgotten of the many forgotten Early Modern Anglican theologians and, with a corpus of something well over one and a half million words, there was much to be forgotten. If he is noticed for anything today, it is the happenstance that two of his sermons were published in 1639 with the first (unrevised version) of John Donne’s famous Sermon of Valediction at my going into Germany, at Lincolne’s-Inne, April 18, 1619.
However, as Anthony Wood noted, as a writer and preacher, “he had laid the grounds carefully in arithmetic, grammar, philology, geometry, rhetoric, logic, philosophy, Oriental languages, histories, &c. with an insight in heraldry and hieroglyphics. All which he made use of to serve either as rubbish under the foundation, or as drudges and day-labourers to Theology.” (Athenae Oxonienses). Thanks to this prodigious and wide learning, Jackson is recognised in the only modern analysis of his writings by Sarah Hutton, as a rare Oxford Platonist / Neoplatonist in a field dominated by 17th-Century Cambridge scholars (Sarah Hutton, “Thomas Jackson, Oxford Platonist, and William Twisse, Aristotelian”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 39/4 (1978), pp. 635-652.
His works were not without controversy - his pro-Arminian / anti-Calvinist position led Robert Harley to accuse him in 1627 of attempting to reintroduce popery and in 1629 he called on parliament to demand that Jackson’s books, along with those of other Arminian writers such as Richard Montagu and John Cosin, should be publicly burned.
In the 1830s, along with several other mid-17th Century anti-Calvinist or Arminian divines, he was taken-up by the Anglo-Catholic Tractarian or Oxford Movement, being cited in two of their Tracts for the Times. This resulted in the only near-modern edition of Jackson’s works (12 vols, Oxford, 1844) which reprinted the 1673 edition with some extra notes and corrections (“compiled from authentic sources”) and a new index but little else was added by its anonymous editor. It prompted what must be the last favourable review of his style by James Crossley (1800-83), the Manchester solicitor, book collector and literary editor, in his edition of The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1847), p. 282-3, n. 1:
“Few of our Theological writers have better borne the test of time than Dr. Thomas Jackson. After the lapse of two centuries, we seem in reading him to be taking up the productions of some contemporary. His phraseology has fewer archaisms than that of any divine in the early part of the seventeenth century, excepting, perhaps, Bishop Hall. Always clear, lucid, and vigorous, his learning adding to his stores of illustration, without incumbering his progress, with an original vein of thought often expressed in language eminently felicitous, Jackson is now fully installed into the rank of a classical writer in Theology, and it is not too much to say that the more he is read, the more he will be admired, and that he who is well acquainted with his works will find few questions in Divinity which he may not consider himself as prepared to grapple with.”
A survey of his writings and a bibliography by S. Mutchow Towers is in Control of Religious Printing in Early Stuart England (Boydell, 2002), chapter 2 (“Thomas Jackson and Thomas Taylor”).
Early provenance: This is the licence deposit copy delivered by the publishers in sheets to the Royal Library, St James’s Palace and sent to Samuel Mearne for binding but, following the death of King Charles II in 1685, never paid for or delivered. It is listed in a manuscript “‘Catalogue of Bookes belonging to the King’s Library … in the hands of Mr Merne” compiled by Mearne’s widow Anne and preserved in the Thynne papers at Longleat. Of f. 24r is listed on line 1: “Jacksons Works 3 Vol. fol. £4: 5: 0:-”. It is listed among the 99 “Volumes in large folio” with a total cost of £199/6/-, 64 volumes in quarto for £32 (ten shillings each) and 365 volumes in octavo for £90/5/- (five shillings each), together with 180 volumes of Hebrew books, which was “Due to Anne Mearne the Widdow of Samuel Mearne his Maties Bookbinder deceased for binding severall Books to his Maties Library Royall”. The volumes were last seen together by the antiquary Thomas Hearne in 1708 along with the Thomason Tracts, in the hands of a Mr Sisson, a druggist, and must have been sold soon after; the 180 volumes of Hebrew books being purchased by Solomon da Costa who presented them to the British Museum at its opening.
Later provenance: William Willis, M.A, with his mid-18th-century armorial bookplate with rococo mantling and motto “Voluisse sat est” on the verso of each title-page. Probably the student of Trinity College, Oxford, son of John, gentleman, of St Martin’s, Ludgate, London, who matriculated, aged 17 on 10 May 1733, graduated BA on 1 Feb. 1737 and proceeded MA in 1739 (Alumni Oxonienses). The only other William Willis graduated from the same college in 1759; the bookplate is a little earlier stylistically. The only other signs of ownership are an ink note “1814 marked Lackingtons £2” on the flyleaf of vol. 1 and a pencil price “£100” on the front pastedown of vol. 1. Anonymous sale, Lyon & Turnbull, Edinburgh, 21/6/2023, lot 228.
