The project objectives are as follows:
• To test the hypothesis that the Guildhall Library played a key role in the production and circulation of vernacular texts used for the pastoral education of London’s lay people.
• To investigate the library’s contribution to an articulation of a specifically civic form of lay religiosity.
• To explain the hitherto unexplained explosion in pastoral anthology production that took place in fifteenth-century London.
• To produce an anthology of representative pastoral, devotional and instructional texts which appeared repeatedly in London’s books of religious instruction, and in similar handbooks from across England; these demonstrate the vitality of religious literature for lay consumption.
• To co-write a monograph reporting on project findings, and to disseminate research findings through articles and research papers.