Contact

For all questions, corrections, comments, and submissions:

Chris Fenner, Editor
Archives & Special Collections
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
2825 Lexington Road
Louisville, KY 40280
(502) 897–4573
cjfenner@sbts.edu

Acknowledgements

Special thanks are owed to Joseph Herl (Concordia U. Nebraska), with whom I have been in constant contact since 2011 regarding the quest for primary sources and the acquisition of images. Eric Stedfeld (NYU) assists with acquiring images from libraries in New York City; he has been a research collaborator since 2010. Debra Madera (Emory U.) presides over a wealth of resources in the Pitts Theology Library Special Collections and is always willing to assist. Emilee Smith (SBTS) is my patient colleague who facilitates a steady stream of inter-library loan requests. The professional staff at the British Library have provided many important images. The project was initially inspired and encouraged by my colleague Esther Rothenbusch Crookshank (SBTS), who laid the foundation for my earliest studies in hymnology in 2006.

Donate

Hymnology Archive is privately funded. Your contributions help support the research behind the website so we can add more historic content. If this website has been helpful for your education or research, please consider sending a financial gift. (Contributions are not tax deductible.)

Submissions

We gladly accept submissions of high-caliber scholarship. Articles for individual hymns generally follow a common structure:

Text origins. Background, authorship, and sources.
Text development. If applicable, trace key corrections, additions, and variants.
Text translations. If applicable, describe relevant translations.
Text analysis. Discuss theology, poetry, scriptural allusions as appropriate.
Tunes. Give relevant tunes, with authorship, source history, and major variants.
Bibliography. Provide any relevant sources, including sources not quoted directly in your article.

Whenever possible, interact directly with primary sources. Describe what can be learned from examining the original sources.

Need help obtaining sources? The editor might already have them or know how to find them. 

Contributors wishing to submit author data pages should try to include the following material:

Brief Biography & Portrait.
Collections of hymns. Where were this author’s hymns originally published?
Collected Works/Editions. If applicable. 
Manuscripts. Locations of MS collections, if applicable.
Biographical sources.
Relevant Books and Journal Articles. 
Related Links.

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About

Hymnology Archive is an encyclopedic website for the study of hymns, spirituals, and carols, founded in April 2018 and edited by Chris Fenner, Digital Archivist at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (SBTS; Louisville, KY). This site generally features histories for individual hymns and bio-bibliography pages for authors and composers. Additional pages include indexes (authors/composers, texts, tunes, Scriptures, and church year) and specialized bibliographies. The focus of the site is on supplying access to primary sources for scholarly study, either by offering images on hymn history pages, or links to books, journals, and hymnals on the bio-bibliography pages.

The concept behind the site started in the winter of 2006–2007 as Fenner started collecting facsimiles of historic hymns, initially as a matter of curiosity and personal research. With the support and encouragement of Dr. Esther Crookshank at SBTS, the project quickly turned into a proposed three-volume reference work called The Hymnology Sourcebook. On the strength of this concept, Fenner was invited to participate in a hymnology seminar at Calvin College (now University, Grand Rapids, MI) in 2008, sponsored by the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship. The following year, for similar reasons, Fenner attended the Hymn Society conference in Northfield, Minnesota, as a Lovelace Scholar. In pursuit of facsimiles from medieval manuscripts in European libraries, he was awarded a grant from the McElrath-Eskew Research Fund in 2011. 

In the Spring 2013 issue of The Hymn, Fenner reported on the status of the project—which he described as “the birth and adoption of a hymn presented as a feast of images”—amounting at that point to a collection of over 7,000 images and a nearly-completed draft of volume 1. The report also described a companion product called The Scholar’s Hymnal (“a type of performing urtext edition . . . with complete, unaltered texts, set to a period tune or its most commonly associated tune, also unaltered”), but this was later abandoned. Some of this research resulted in articles for The Hymn in Winter 2012 (“Theodulf”) and Winter 2014 (“VENI EMMANUEL and its manuscript sources”). 

One fruitful, continuing partnership started to develop in 2010 when Eric Stedfeld of New York University volunteered to examine and photograph hymnals in New York City libraries. Another important development happened in 2011, when Dr. Joe Herl of Concordia University Nebraska sent out a call for help in gathering primary-source images for the research behind the Lutheran Service Book Companion to the Hymns (published in 2019). This resulted in a longstanding cooperative effort, which was noted in the preface to that volume.

In spite of this progress, The Hymnology Sourcebook project went largely dormant in 2013, partly for lack of an interested publisher. In November 2016, Fenner was asked by Matt Boswell of Doxology & Theology to prepare a new edition of Charles Spurgeon’s Our Own Hymn Book. The work of editing the hymnal involved fact-checking the authorships and publication dates of all 1,130 hymns. This resulted in a new effort to gather thousands of images from primary sources, a gargantuan-but-swift process, carried out in only 14 months. In the meantime, the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology had launched in 2013, but its concise, text-only nature left open the need for a visual reference tool. Conversely, the Hymnary.org website (for which Fenner has served as a volunteer editor since 2010) was rich with images but restricted in scope (predominantly U.S. hymnals) and not set up for illustrative histories. Therefore, when the Spurgeon manuscript was finished in early 2018, Fenner immediately shifted toward reconfiguring The Hymnology Sourcebook into a website, Hymnology Archive, and launched the site in April 2018 with a small set of articles, followed by a steady push to add as many articles as possible on a regular basis.

The image-intensive project would likely not be possible without modern access to increasingly expansive digital databases. In addition to Southern Seminary’s significant collection of over 5,500 hymnals, images come from resources such as Early English Books Online, Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Early American Imprints, Google Books, Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and a growing number of European manuscript collections online. The British Library is a significant supplier, as is the Pitts Theology Library at Emory University (Atlanta, GA), plus scattered others as the needs arise, including the partnerships already named above.