For the redoubtable Dr Mary Hobbs, the return of Bishop Henry King’s Library marked the rebirth of Chichester Cathedral Library post 1671, yet close analysis of The Old Catalogue before 1735 reveals other stories of benefactors and books in what was quite a renaissance for cathedral, city, and the surrounding region at the end of the seventeenth century.
Dr Andrew Foster spent thirty years with what is now the University of Chichester, where he was the first Director of Research between 1997 and 2008. He is an experienced historian, teacher, and writer of degrees; has co-ordinated and taught on numerous Master's programmes, supervised many research students, and spent much enjoyable time expanding access to higher education. He is a former Kent graduate and now rejoices in being an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the University of Kent where he helps with supervision of research students. He is also currently a Visiting Researcher with ‘Lincoln Unlocked’ at Lincoln College, Oxford.
Andrew has written chiefly about the early modern Church of England, with articles on bishops, clergy, dioceses, cathedrals, parishes and churchwardens' accounts. He is currently working on several inter-related projects, the chief being a history of the dioceses of England & Wales between 1540 and 1700, and a collection of the papers of Archbishop Richard Neile – the subject of his original Oxford DPhil thesis supervised by the great Christopher Hill.
Since leaving Chichester, Andrew has enjoyed being a Visiting Fellow at the University of Southampton – a university with which he worked closely (1993-2008) in the oversight of all Chichester research students. He has held Fellowships at the prestigious Huntington Library in California and the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC, and has latterly been supported in his research by a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship. This has entailed work in a large number of record offices in the UK, fuelling his abiding interest in the world of archives.