Church Missionary Society periodicals now available online

One of the richest sources available on the role of religion and its interaction with the Western and non-Western worlds digitized for the first time

Marlborough, England, Adam Matthew today announced the launch of Church Missionary Society Periodicals, sourced from the Church Missionary Society (CMS) collection at the Crowther Mission Studies Library, Oxford.

Encompassing documents from 1804 to 2009, access to this unique material will enable new research opportunities in the fields of missiology and world Christianity, as well as providing a unique perspective on global history and cultural encounters.

Consultant editor, Professor Phillip A. Cantrell, II (Longwood University, VA, USA) states:

“A world history teacher would be challenged to find a more useful primary source material than this.”

Church Missionary Society Periodicals provides thousands of pages of published content, including journals, reports, letters and serialised accounts of indigenous peoples, family news including marriages, births and deaths as well as a register of missionaries detailing the movements of men, women and native clergy.

Titles include:

• The CMS Gleaner (continued as CMS Outlook and then Yes Magazine)
• The CMS Intelligencer (continued as Church Missionary Review)
• Ruanda Notes (MAM News)
• South American Missionary Society Magazine

Founded in 1799, the CMS quickly became a significant agency whose work led to the establishment of Anglican churches across Africa, East and South East Asia, India, the Middle East, North and South America, and New Zealand. As one of the richest sources available on the role of religion and its interaction with the Western and non-Western worlds, the Church Missionary Society Periodicals is a major new resource for research in:

• Colonialism and Decolonisation
• Education
• Medicine and Health
• Gender and Women’s Studies
• Social history
• Sociology
• Slavery and Anti-Slavery
• Evangelism

View Module I during a free 30-minute webinar on April 22nd. Module II: Medical Journals, Asian Missions and the Historical Record, 1816-1986, due for release in Spring 2016.

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Adam Matthew, an imprint of SAGE, is an award winning publisher of digital primary source collections for the humanities and social sciences. Sourced from leading libraries and archives around the world, their unique research and teaching collections cover a wide range of subject areas from medieval family life to 20th century history, literature and culture. www.amdigital.co.uk

The Church Mission Society was founded in Aldersgate Street in the City of London on 12 April 1799, its founding members being committed to three ‘great enterprises’: abolition of the slave trade, social reform at home and world evangelisation. The overseas mission work of CMS began in Sierra Leone in 1804 but spread rapidly to India, Canada, New Zealand and the area around the Mediterranean. Its main areas of work in Africa have been in Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Congo, Rwanda and Sudan; in Asia, CMS's involvement has principally been in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China and Japan; and in the Middle East, it has worked in Palestine, Jordan, Iran and Egypt.

Crowther Mission Studies Library is the successor to Partnership House Mission Studies Library which was founded in 1987 by bringing together the post-1945 collections of the former CMS and USPG libraries. Now taken over by CMS, and incorporating books from CMS's former training college at Crowther Hall, the library has a wide-ranging collection of about 29,000 books and takes about 250 current journals. It also has back copies of missionary journals, including complete runs of CMS periodicals and overseas diocesan reports.

Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham is the new home for Special Collections and Archives of the University of Birmingham. The archive consists of approximately 200,000 pre-1850 books dating from 1471 and some 4 million manuscripts.