You can read a brief history of the Peter Martyr Society here.
Last week, after several months of discussions between the officers of each organization, the Peter Martyr Society presented a formal request to be adopted by the Davenant Trust, placing its current assets under the administration of Davenant and its future projects under the oversight of the board of the Davenant Trust.
The Davenant board voted unanimously to receive the Peter Martyr Society on the proposed terms, and extended an invited to Prof. W.J. Torrance Kirby, current President of the Society and until now a member of Davenant’s Board of Advisors, to become an ex officio member of Davenant’s Board of Directors. The Peter Martyr Society will remain a distinct entity with its own President and Treasurer, but will conduct all its operations as a part of the Davenant Trust as long as this agreement lasts.
Commenting on the arrangement, Davenant Trust President Brad Littlejohn said:
We at the Davenant Trust are humbled at this opportunity to join with the esteemed Peter Martyr Society and the fine scholars who have contributed to its work over the past few decades. The labors of the Society represent exactly the sort of essential work in Protestant resourcement that Davenant seeks to encourage, bringing the forgotten riches of the Reformation to contemporary scholars, students, and churchmen. Few Reformers were as important as Vermigli, and it is our hope that by combining the resources of our two organizations, we can reinvigorate the effort to retrieve his writings for readers today.
LEARN MORE: THE STORY OF THE REFORMATION THROUGH THE LIFE OF PETER MARTYR VERMIGLI
Dr. Kirby is similarly enthusiastic about this development:
Affiliation of the Peter Martyr Society with the Davenant Trust promises to bring a welcome stability to our future editorial and scholarly undertakings. The central enterprise of the Peter Martyr Library is the translation from Latin to English of the works of a great 16th-century divine. This complements a key facet of the work of the Trust, namely the Davenant Latin Institute. It is to be hoped that graduates of the Latin Institute will contribute to the main task of translation for these new editions.