White Kennett 1660-1728

White KENNETT 1660-1728

Biographical Note

Born at Dover, son of Basil Kennett, rector of Dymchurch. BA St Edmund Hall, Oxford 1682, MA 1685. Vicar of Ambrosden 1685, rector of Shottesbrooke, Berkshire 1694, curate of St Botolph, Aldgate, London 1700. This early part of his career was marred by a personal injury in 1689 (leaving him scarred), and the early death of his first wife Sarah Carver in 1694.

Kennett became an active participant in the doctrinal controversies of the early 18th century, writing numerous tracts which gained him notice. He became a prebendary of Salisbury and archdeacon of Huntingdon in 1701, a royal chaplain in 1707 and Dean of Peterborough in 1708. He was appointed Bishop of diocese Peterborough]] in 1718. Active in his diocese, he also wrote numerous historical works (his 3-volume Compleat history of England (1706) was several times reprinted), and he was a leading figure in the Society for the Promotion of Christian knowledge and the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.

Books

Kennett acquired books all his life; beyond that, he was actively interested in the value of books and the development of libraries, and he was in many ways a pioneer of ways of collecting which were innovative in their day. As Dean of Peterborough, one of his first acts was the reforming of the Cathedral Library; he bought or gave many books from 1708 onwards. He also assembled a distinct collection of (mostly) English books, printed before 1603, designated as a Bibliotheca antiquaria and kept in a separate room in the Cathedral from the main library sequence (a catalogue of this collection, from his time, survives as Peterborough Cathedral MS 78).

In his capacity as a founder member of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel between ca.1700 and 1713 he assembled a collection of books relating to America, aiming to form as complete a collection as possible of relevant printed and manuscript works. This is one of the earliest examples of this kind of subject-oriented collecting of books in Britain. The books were presented to the SPG in 1713, and a catalogue of the whole was printed (Bibliothecae Americanae primordia, London, 1713). The collection was largely kept together until 1917, when much of it was auctioned at Sotheby's.