The Wren deposit

The deposit arrived in three parcels in the spring of 1986, sent on by a departmental secretary who was clearing a room and who stated in her covering letter that she had been asked, some years earlier, to send them here. She did not say by whom, and the accession does not say either. The parcels were opened, listed, and shelved by the keeper of the register in the ordinary way.

Wren was born in 1918 and educated in Britain. He was academically active from the middle 1940s to the middle 1970s, and worked on funerary texts, the transmission of ritual forms, marginal religious movements, and the provenance of manuscripts. His name occurs in later Institute archival schedules. No appointment, term, or correspondence establishing the nature of that association is held, and the Institute has made no attempt to supply one.

The items held are listed below. The deposit also contained a quantity of departmental circulars and offprints of no interest, which were not retained.

What is not held: the descriptive leaf identifying the compilation, which the accession records as absent, and with it any description of the object of Wren's study. His papers refer throughout to the text, the compilation, and the sequence as copied, and never to a title, a shelfmark, or a holding library. The accession does not describe it either, and the keeper who listed the parcels noted at the time that she could not. Readers should not assume the Institute knows what he was working on.