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Volume 40 of VII continues a trend established over several recent volumes: bringing to light previously unpublished work by the seven authors archived at the Wade Center and their associates.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This new volume features twenty-five previously unpublished letters written by Joy Davidman, introduced and annotated by Don W. King.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.