author
Richard Raby
A little-known 19th-century Catholic writer, he is best remembered for a lively historical sketch of Pope Adrian IV, the only English pope. His surviving work suggests a writer interested in church history and in making old sources readable for a broader English audience.
1 Audiobook
Pope Adrian IV: An Historical Sketch
by Richard Raby
About the author
Richard Raby was a 19th-century author whose best-known surviving book is Pope Adrian IV: An Historical Sketch, published in 1849. Library and catalog records identify him as a writer active in the 19th century, and LibriVox describes him as an author writing for the English public from Munich.
In the preface to Pope Adrian IV, Raby explained that he wanted to give English Catholics an accessible account of the only English pope. Rather than claiming groundbreaking archival discoveries, he presented his book as a connected narrative drawn from older chronicles and modern writers, with a clear sympathy for Catholic history and for Pope Adrian IV in particular.
Very little biographical information about Raby appears to be widely documented online, which makes him one of those authors known more through a surviving work than through a detailed life story. Based on the sources available here, the safest picture is of a mid-19th-century Catholic historical writer whose work aimed to bring church history to general readers.