Colenso's Printing Press - presented by The Rev'd Dr William Whyte

 

Presented by the Rev'd Dr William Whyte, Senior Dean, Fellow and Tutor in History, St John's College, Oxford   This talk will be about two men and one object. The men were cousins and Victorian missionaries, John and William Colenso. One went to New Zealand and the other to South Africa; and both took with them a printing press. With it, they published the Bible in Maori and Zulu for the very first time. Yet their lives then took a turn for the worse. William was publicly disgraced by his affair with a Maori woman while John, although a bishop, found his views condemned as heresy by his own Church. The story of the two men and their printing press thus tells us much about the global expansion of Christianity in the nineteenth century - its success and the problems it produced.   William Whyte has been a fellow of St John's for ten years. Prior to that, he was an undergraduate and then a graduate student at Wadham College, Oxford. He is the author of Oxford Jackson: architecture, education, status and style, 1835-1924 (2006) and co-editor of four other books, including The Established Church: past, present, and future (2011) and Redefining Christian Britain: post-1945 perspectives (2007). He is also an associate priest in the parish of Kidlington with Hampton Poyle.   Thursday, 7th June in Deddington Parish Church.

 

An introduction from The Rev'd Dr William Whyte.

Audio only of "Colenso's Printing Press" - presented by The Rev'd Dr William Whyte.