The Mary Baker Eddy Papers: An introduction

This month, we thought we’d step back and share an overview of the Mary Baker Eddy Papers with you. While some of you have been engaging with our website content for a long time, we want to help all visitors, old and new, make the most of this wonderful resource. So here we’d like to respond to some of the most commonly asked questions we receive.

What is the Mary Baker Eddy Papers?

It is a major effort by The Mary Baker Eddy Library to annotate and digitally publish Mary Baker Eddy’s correspondence, sermons, and other manuscript materials. These comprise what we call the Mary Baker Eddy Collection.

As a pilot project, we published a first selection of Eddy’s papers, including sermons and related documents, in January 2014. The following year, the Library began to add all documents in her papers from the years 1872 to 1880. Subsequently we added documents dating from before 1872. And now we are working forward chronologically. We’ve published letters through 1886.

Occasionally, we publish documents outside of that chronological timeline, in order to support other organizational projects and priorities. An example of this involved our work on the updated edition of Robert Peel’s Years of Discovery, the first volume in his biography of Mary Baker Eddy. We collaborated on the online edition, to ensure that all footnoted documents from the Mary Baker Eddy Collection were available on the Papers website. Through this work, the full document in each footnote of the online edition is now just a click away.

I’ve never heard of a “papers” project before. Is this something special you came up with just for Mary Baker Eddy?

No. Papers projects exist beyond just the work we’re doing at The Mary Baker Eddy Library. They are part of a field known as scholarly editing, or documentary editing. The earliest projects published the papers of American presidents in print volumes. For example, the Thomas Jefferson papers began with a print volume in 1950. Work on George Washington’s papers began in 1968. Since then, scholarly editions have been created from the papers of other significant figures, and many of these projects now include digital editions.¹ The Mary Baker Eddy Papers is exclusively a digital edition, which means the content is only available on a website, rather than in a printed book.

There are best practices for this field of work, which we follow. The Papers staff also belongs to, and participates in the activities of the Association for Documentary Editing, a professional organization that helps set standards for the field.

When will I be able to take a look at the work you are doing?

The good news is that the Mary Baker Eddy Papers is available now—online and free of charge! We add documents to the website on an ongoing basis. So even though you won’t find everything contained in the Mary Baker Eddy Collection yet, many documents are already fully available now. We’re adding new documents all the time. We hope that making this resource freely available will allow a variety of visitors to make practical use of it, including church members, scholars, and the public.

Won’t these old letters be hard to read and understand?

One valuable aspect of a digital scholarly edition is that we aren’t simply providing lots of scans of old documents you need to sift through and try to make sense of. We’re providing Eddy’s papers in a complete and contextualized way. Each document is transcribed, so you don’t have to decipher nineteenth-century handwriting (unless you want to). We also write short biographies for all the people that we can identify in the letters—you can click on their names to pull up that information within each document. We include other annotations as well, such as references to Bible verses and details about significant events or terms mentioned. If one letter is related to another, we cross-link them. All of this annotation work helps stitch the stories together, so you can understand each document in context.

What is the best place to start?

There are many ways to start exploring the Mary Baker Eddy Papers. Because new documents are regularly being added, you can always start on our “Recent documents” page, to see the latest additions and find out what letters Eddy was sending and receiving on a given day.

If you have a topic of interest, or if there’s an early Christian Scientist you’d like to know more about, you can use the keyword search and advanced search features to narrow the scope and find relevant items.

If you’d like to explore geographically, check out the Map of Letters. It helps you see how Christian Science spread across the United States (and then the world) over time. If a particular place is of interest, you can dig into the correspondence from that location.

We also have lists of people, places and key terms to explore. On each of these reference lists, you’ll see related documents below each listed item.

Of course, other articles in this From the Papers series are a great place to start as well! Each article tells a story from the Mary Baker Eddy Collection and includes links to relevant documents.

How can I keep up with your work?

Subscribe to our quarterly email newsletter—it’s a great way to continue learning about the latest findings from the Mary Baker Eddy Papers. We pull together stories that you won’t find anywhere else. You can sign up here on The Mary Baker Eddy Library website.

What else would you like to know about the Mary Baker Eddy Papers? Please email us at [email protected].