membership are being mounted on the internet. 6 The Province of Berkshire, which contains Reading, has one of the largest provincial libraries, with over 13,000 books, and the library is now open daily to the general public. Berkshire was one of the first English provinces to establish a web site. 7 I am myself an incarnation of this new policy. In 2000, the University of Sheffield established, with funding from United Grand Lodge, the Province of Yorkshire West Riding and Lord Northampton, the Pro Grand Master, the first centre in a British university devoted to the scholarly study of freemasonry. 8 Although I am not a mason, I was appointed as the first Director of this Centre.
Of course, the cautiousness of the English Grand Lodge from which Yeo suffered was not shared by all the European Grand Lodges. The Grand East of the Netherlands has for many years welcomed scholars wishing to use its remarkable library. 9 Shortly after Yeo’ s book was published, Professor Margaret Jacob made use of the library of the Grand East and her resulting book, Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons and Republicans, 10 has profoundly altered our perception of the cultural history of 18thcentury Europe. 11 The willingness of the Grand East of the Netherlands to make its collections available to scholars has played a significant part in the upsurge in scholarly interest in freemasonry over the last twenty years. Trevor Stewart has recently compiled a bibliography of articles on European freemasonry which have appeared in academic periodicals since 1980. This contains 269 entries, and even this gives only a partial view of the full extent of research into freemasonry, since it excludes articles on America, Africa and Asia, as well as periodicals published by masonic bodies, theses and monographs. 12 Despite all this work, our picture of freemasonry remains fragmented. In many countries, particularly England, freemasonry is still considered an exotic subject outside the scholarly mainstream. 13 It is often forgotten by scholars even when it should loom large.
6 www. a2a. pro. gov. uk; Rebecca Coombes,“ Subject for Enquiry: Sources for Research and Historical Bibliography in the Library and Museum of Freemasonry, London”, in: R. William Weisberger, Wallace McLeod and S. Brent Morris( eds.), Freemasonry on Both Sides of the Atlantic: Essays concerning the Craft in the British Isles, Europe, the United States and Mexico, New York: Columbia University Press 2002, pp. 755-80; Rebecca Coombes,“ Genealogical Records at the Library and Museum of Freemasonry: a Survey of Resources”, Family History Monthly 73( October 2001), pp. 22-5.
7 www. berkspgl. org. uk.
8 www. shef. ac. uk /~ crf.
9 www. vrijmetserarij. nl; Evert Kwaadgrass,“ George Kloss and His Masonic Library”, Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 111( 1998), pp. 25-43.
10
London: George Allen and Unwin 1981.
11
Jacob’ s work has generally not been well received by English masonic scholars, but for a historian” s view of the fundamental importance of her work, see Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World, London: Penguin Books 2000, pp. 5-6, 30, 32.
12
Trevor Stewart,“ European Periodical Literature on Masonic Research: A Review of Two Decades of Achievement”, in: Weisberger, McLeod and Morris, op. cit., pp. 805-936.
13
John M. Roberts,“ Freemasonry: the Possibilities of a Neglected Topic”, English Historical Review 84( 1969), pp. 323-335; cf. the review by Roberts of Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, in the Times Literary Supplement, 14 January 2000, pp. 3-4.
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