Henry Bradshaw Society

An initial meeting to plan the Henry Bradshaw Society took place in London on 3 July 1890, after which provisional subscriptions were solicited. The general meeting to inaugurate the Society took place on 25 November 1890 in the Jerusalem Chamber at Westminster Abbey. A committee was finalised and a programme of publications worked out.

One of the models for the society was the Durham-based Surtees Society, formed in 1834, which in turn received assistance from officers of the Bannatyne Club. The foundation of the new society was also linked, more by overlapping interests than organizational models, to the body then known as the St Paul's Ecclesiological Society. John Wickham Legg, who had played a significant role in the re-establishment of that society in 1879 after a decade or so of limbo, also became an important founding member of the Henry Bradshaw Society.

The Society was named after Henry Bradshaw (1831–1886), Librarian of the Cambridge University Library, who had been interested in early printing and in bibliographic description. This latter passion led to his becoming familiar with many European libraries, where he also became aware of holdings of early English liturgical manuscripts.

The promised subscribers including many Anglican bishops and other dignitaries, but also Léopold Delisle of the Bibliothèque nationale, Paris, Antonio Maria Ceriani of the Ambrosian Library, Milan and others Catholics such as W.H. James Weale, Edmund Bishop, Dom Aidan Gasquet, the abbé Louis Duchesne, and Dom Hildebrand de Hemptinne, abbot of Maredsous. The first volumes were to be printed in 500 copies and at the next meeting the Council fixed the individual subscription rate as 12 guineas (£12 12s).