Collections
- Archives and Manuscripts
- Periodicals
- Exhibits Online
- Richard C. Kessler Reformation Collection
- English Religious History Collections
- English and American Hymnody and Psalmody Collection
- Wesleyana Collection
- Reverend Gordon Taylor Collection of Church Histories
- North European Theological Dissertations
- Thomas Merton Collection
- Sub-Saharan African Collections
- Digital Image Archive
- Sermon Collections
- Digital Collections
- The Alonzo L. McDonald Lecture Materials
- Suggest a Purchase
Wesleyana Collection
The foundation of the Pitts Library Wesleyana Collection is the Thursfield Smith collection of pamphlets, manuscripts, and first editions acquired for Emory University by Bishop Warren Candler in 1915. Though most of the manuscripts from that collection are now in the Emory Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Book Library, Pitts Library has a manuscript of Charles Wesley's poetic paraphrase of the Psalms, a portion of which is in his handwriting , and several pieces of correspondence to and from John Wesley.
Publications of others in the Wesley family
are also represented in the
collection, including a first edition of Samuel Wesley's The Life
of Our Blessed Lord & Saviour Jesus Christ. An Heroic Poem
(1693), which
contains copper plates of biblical scenes designed by W. Fairborn.
The library also has realia, including a pulpit used by John Wesley while in Georgia, a medicine spoon owned by Francis Asbury, and a black bonnet donated by Bishop Warren Candler, as well as many objects from Methodist commemorative events.
- Methodist Materials
- Wesleyana Artifacts
Controversial Literature
The strength of the Wesleyana Collection at Pitts is the quantity of materials from the prolific Wesley brothers and their associates and the collection of corresponding materials that establish the broader context of Methodism within English religious history. For example, both John Wesley and John Fletcher had an ongoing dialog in pamphlets with representatives of the religious establishment such as Sir Richard Hill and George Lavington, Bishop of Exeter. These "debates in print" can be found by using the author's name or "Methodist Church controversial literature" as search terms and then limiting the search by the dates of interest.
The Wesleyana Collection also includes portraits of Methodist clergy, engravings of Methodist Chapels, and sketches of important persons in the history of the denomination, digitizied versions of which can be found in the Pitts Digital Image Archive.
To better understand the historic and cultural context of the Methodist Movement in Great Britain, see also the English Religious History Collection.