William Greenough Thayer Shedd

William Greenough Thayer Shedd

William M. Klimon

Center for Norbertine Studies

1820

1894

Following Pusey's English translation, a series of new translations by Protestant scholars followed, including J.G. Pilkington's version, first published in 1876 as part of a new translation of the collected works of St. Augustine, edited by Marcus Dods for the Edinburgh publisher T. & T. Clark, and Charles Biggs' 1898 version for Methuen's “Library of Devotion.” While those editions were popular in England, the edition of William G.T. Shedd, first published in Andover in 1860, went through at least editions at Andover, Boston and New York through the 1880s (the copy included here is from the 1867 Boston edition). Shedd was a conservative and cultured Presbyterian pastor and seminary professor who ended a long teaching career at Union Seminary in New York. He was renowned for his work in systematic theology, but earlier in his career he also edited a seven-volume edition of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Using both Elizabeth Peabody's 1843 version and the original Latin text (perhaps Pusey's Latin edition published in 1838, the same year as his English translation), Shedd produced the American edition of the Confessions for the latter half of the 19th century.

REFERENCES: Warfield, pp. 513-14, Handy, 19:766-67; Strout, pp. 153-62.