‘Writen by a holy violence’: Divine Inspiration in the Eighteenth-Century Marginalia and Sermons of Christopher Lantrow

Abstract This article presents a remarkable set of writings inscribed by parochial clergyman and Cambridge college fellow Christopher Lantrow into the margins of three books from the town library of Barnstaple, Devon, in the 1720s. Only a few of the annotations refer directly to the printed text. The majority take the form of draft sermons expressing earnest support for the Hanoverian succession. Alongside these are a varied assortment of notes and memos, often relating to the author’s own life. Unusual in their form and placement, the writings are most extraordinary for the claims of divine inspiration found within them. They were, according to their own account, begun through inspiration; they also contain narratives of other, past occasions when this has occurred. Lantrow makes an unexpected figure for a self-proclaimed prophet, and his writings reveal a complex experience of Anglicanism by a highly educated conformist cleric. His own interpretation of his writing was deeply shaped by his convictions concerning God’s intervention, in a way which defamiliarizes current critical norms around the analysis of marginalia. Taken together in all their diversity, Lantrow’s writings offer rich evidence of the author’s intellectual, book-filled world and the sometimes contentious religious framework through which he understood it.