Archives

• Volume 40 (2024)

  Volume 40 of VII continues a trend established over several recent volumes: bringing to light previously unpublished work by the seven authors archived at the Wade Center and their associates. That original work by these writers and thinkers continues to be revealed testifies not only to their productivity over their lifetimes but to the echoing resonance of their ideas today.

  This new volume features twenty-five previously unpublished letters written by Joy Davidman, introduced and annotated by Don W. King. While written prior to her marriage to C.S. Lewis, these letters detail Joy’s first in-person encounters with Lewis and the intellectual and emotional impact they made on her. They also reveal the very smart—and very fun—woman who would, in turn, impact Lewis’s later life so profoundly.

  Also in this volume, Sarah O’Dell introduces and situates a facsimile of a typed manuscript of a talk (and later article) given by Owen Barfield in 1980. The typescript includes Barfield’s notes and revisions as he sought to communicate the intersections of language and consciousness to his audience of educators.

  Finally, Sarah R.A. Waters takes on an oft-cited assertion that C.S. Lewis was, in his own words, not “a true Shakesperian scholar.” She dives deep into the extensive notes and commentary Lewis made in the margins of his personal copies of Shakespeare and comes away with significant evidence to refute this statement.

  We are very pleased to be able to offer much open-access material on our website with the release of this volume. Kristine A. Wolberg and Toby F. Coley both illuminate C.S. Lewis’s pastoral work’s emphasis on Christian spiritual formation, but through very different lenses: Wolberg through the work of George Herbert and the values of medieval courtesy, and Coley through a literary analysis of The Four Loves. Continuing the practice of exploring Lewis’s original annotations to works in his personal library, K. Alan Snyder and Jamin Metcalf analyze these in the context of Lewis’s published ideas about history.

  The website also presents a variety of reviews and three heartfelt reflections honoring the lives of Father Ian Boyd, Aidan Mackey, and Dr. Peter Schakel—scholars whose faithful labor significantly elevated the relevance of G.K. Chesterton’s and C.S. Lewis’s work to twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers.

  It is a privilege to give you unique access to fresh writing from these renowned authors, as well as exemplary scholarship around what continues to be the revelatory work of the seven authors archived at the Marion E. Wade Center.

• Volume 39 (2023)

  Discovering a legendary author’s previously unpublished writing is part of the sleuthing magic of scholarship. This volume of VII shares some of that newly unearthed work and sends out a call for readers to join in finding more.

  Volume 39 features twelve previously unpublished letters from C.S. Lewis, written during his tenure as general editor for the Nelson’s Medieval and Renaissance Library series. Steven Beebe and Joel Heck show how these letters reveal a rarely seen professional side of the man best known for his spiritual insight and fantastical imagination. All of these letters, part of a recently acquired archive of correspondence, are transcribed here, along with several photographs of the originals.

  Continuing to explore more deeply into the life and writings of Lewis, Clark Moreland analyzes Lewis’s response to the Cold War and the possible shift that the threat of apocalypse generated in Lewis’s thinking about war. And Carrie Birmingham examines Lewis’s preoccupation with his days as a public schoolboy and seeks to answer a common question: why did Lewis devote an outsized amount of space in Surprised by Joy to the travails of that period in his life?

  While Volume 39 is largely filled with Lewis scholarship, it also features a piece on Lewis’s contemporary and interlocutor, Dorothy L. Sayers. Kathryn Wehr looks at the source text for Sayers’s Canterbury play, The Zeal of Thy House, and shows where Sayers’s version of the fire and rebuilding of Canterbury Cathedral both diverges from and aligns with that original telling in order to elevate the story.

  Book reviews of recent publications, as well as remembrances of colleagues whose friendship and scholarship will be missed, round out this volume of VII. Finally, along with other Inklings-related publications and institutions, VII offers an exciting opportunity for crowd-sourcing original—as yet unpublished—letters from C.S. Lewis. More details are in Volume 39!

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• Volume 38 (2021/2022)

  Literary scholarship has the potential to illuminate literature in diverse ways. In this volume of VII, scholars shine the lights of their research and analysis in three particular directions: toward authors’ lives, toward authors’ thought, and toward authors’ work.

  Volume 38 of VII features a letter from the eminent Swiss theologian Karl Barth to Dorothy L. Sayers, translated into English for the first time. As translator of this and of Barth’s foreword to the German edition of The Greatest Drama Ever Staged, David W. McNutt illuminates the two writers’ little-known interaction, showing how their thinking and their brief epistolary relationship shaped them both.

  Also in this volume, Graham Shea and Doug Jackson turn the lights of their scholarship onto the work of J.R.R. Tolkien in two separate articles, giving new texture to old legends about the author and demonstrating how Tolkien, in creating worlds beyond our lived experiences, illuminated some of the deepest truths of human existence. David Rozema dives into C.S. Lewis’s unfinished, but still disputed and disparaged, novel The Dark Tower, shining a light into the recesses of one of Lewis’s darkest writings to find the value that lies there. And Landon Loftin scours the work of Owen Barfield to reveal how his philosophies of nature and humanity oriented him toward meaning-making in a context that despaired of hope and purpose.

  Volume 38 also contains many images that shine in full color here in this digital format.

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