For Lust of Knowing (15 page)

James I was arguably the only learned king ever to sit on England's throne, apart from Alfred, and it was natural that learned clerics were preferred by him. William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1633 until his beheading in 1645, was pre-eminent among those learned clerics. He had been a pupil of Andrewes and was strongly influenced by his style of Christian scholarship, as well as his commitment to Oriental learning. Laud collected Oriental manuscripts, which were eventually acquired by Oxford's Bodleian Library.
⁸
In 1630 Laud, who at that time was still Bishop of London, had become Chancellor of Oxford University and, horrified by the somnolent complacency of the place (nothing changes, some would say), he decided to try to raise its scholarship to continental standards. When the seventeenth century opened, Oxford enjoyed an international reputation as a centre for intellectual torpor. Laud was determined to make the place a centre for international learning. The presence of a first-class library in Oxford was one of the necessary preconditions for this intellectual renewal and the formation of the Bodleian Library took place in this century under the patronage of Sir Thomas Bodley, John Selden and Laud himself. Laud also attached great importance to the teaching of Oriental languages. A Hebrew professorship had existed at Oxford from the 1530s. Laud believed that close study of the original Hebrew of the Old Testament would provide vital support for the Church of England in its doctrinal struggle with the Roman Catholics. It already served as a cornerstone for biblical criticism. Arabic was of some use in elucidating some points in Hebrew vocabulary and grammar (though it was really much less useful than partisans for the Arabic language claimed).

There had already been some abortive attempts to establish the teaching of Arabic at Oxford on a regular basis. In 1610 Abudacnus had arrived in Oxford. ‘Abudacnus' was a Latinate rendering of the latter part of the name of Yusuf ibn Abu Dhaqan. ‘Joseph, Father of the Beard', therefore also known as Joseph Barbatus, was a Coptic Christian from Egypt who had travelled around Europe giving lessons in Arabic – to Erpenius among others. Although Abudacnus stayed in
Oxford until 1613, he does not seem to have been an inspiring teacher and his sojourn had little lasting impact. One problem was that he spoke the Egyptian colloquial form of the language and could not read classical Arabic properly, whereas those European scholars he had contact with were familiar only with classical Arabic. (Western scholars had little or no sense of the evolution of the Arabic language and its spawning of various colloquial forms.) In 1613 Abudacnus crossed back over to the Continent and resumed the life of a peripatetic scholar
manqué
.
⁹

Matthias Pasor (1599–1658), who arrived in Oxford over a decade later, was a more substantial scholar. A former teacher of mathematics and theology at Heidelberg and a refugee from the Thirty Years War, Pasor had arrived in Oxford in 1624, having previously and briefly studied Arabic at Leiden. He taught (though preached might be the better word) that through Arabic one could acquire a better understanding of the Scriptures and, based on that better understanding, the manifold errors of Catholicism could be more easily confuted. Pasor's
Oratio pro linguae Arabicae professione
, a speech he delivered in 1626, drew on Erpenius's earlier oration in Leiden (see below) and Pasor's speech was in turn to be extensively plagiarized and was plundered by later professors of Arabic as a source for their inaugural lectures. However, Pasor taught Arabic only for a year before moving on to Hebrew, Syriac and Aramaic. Moreover, his studies in Arabic had been hasty rather than profound. Arabic was one subject among many that had briefly engaged his interest.
¹⁰

The teachings of Abudacnus and Pasor had provided a fitful inspiration for those at Oxford who had considered studying Arabic. In the early seventeenth century, a real or pretended knowledge of Arabic became a blazon of erudition (as Mordechai Feingold has put it).
¹¹
There was a growing belief in the 1620s and 1630s that scientific information of value to astronomers, geographers and mathematicians lay buried in as yet unread Arabic manuscripts. The wealthy and flamboyant Warden of Merton College, Oxford, Sir Henry Savile (1549–1622), took the lead in promoting this sort of research. Like so many of the leading patrons of Arabic studies, he was himself a classicist. Savile entertained vainglorious dreams of rivalling Europe's most learned scholar, the mighty Scaliger. Savile translated Tacitus's
history and edited St John Chrysostom. He was also an expert on the text of the Authorized Version of the Bible and on the history of medieval English monasteries and he collected manuscripts. Moreover his classical and antiquarian studies ran in tandem with mathematical and scientific interests. He worked hard but fruitlessly at attempts to square the circle (an intellectual activity that, like the compiling of polyglot Bibles or world chronologies, subsequently went out of fashion). He studied Ptolemy's treatise on astronomy, the
Almagest
, and in 1619 he founded the Savilian Chairs of Geometry and Astronomy.
¹²

In 1643 John Greaves became the Savilian Professor of Astronomy. Greaves (1602–52), a fellow of Merton, was a mathematician and, like the man who endowed his chair, he was convinced that there was still a great deal of worthwhile scientific material to be found in classical and Oriental manuscripts. He was particularly interested in Arabic and Persian writers on astronomy and in 1638–9, encouraged by Laud, Greaves (who at that time was Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London) travelled to Italy, Istanbul and Egypt on a hunt for scientific manuscripts. In Istanbul, he suborned an Ottoman soldier to steal a beautiful copy of Ptolemy's
Almagest
from the Sultan's library and in Egypt he made careful measurements of the Great Pyramid. Back in England in 1646 Greaves published
Pyramidagraphica or a Discourse on the Pyramids of Egypt
. His main interest was in metrology – the units of measurement used by the ancient Egyptians, Romans and others – as well as the measurement of the size of the earth. In 1648 he was disgraced as a Royalist and lost his professorship. (It is curious how closely an interest in Arabic was associated in the seventeenth century with Royalist sympathies.) In enforced retirement he published a number of treatises, including the noteworthy
Of the Manner of Hatching Eggs at Cairo
(a remarkably early study of battery farming). In 1649 he published
Elementa Linguae Persicae
, a Persian grammar. His interest in Persian was unusual as Persian was even more of a Cinderella subject than Arabic. Above all, Greaves worked on the
Zij
, astronomical tables compiled in Persian at the behest of Ulugh Beg, the Timurid ruler of Transoxiana and Khurasan in the fifteenth century. Greaves also studied the fourteenth-century Arab Syrian prince Abu al-Fida's
Geography
(but he was
dismayed by the numerous errors in that text, including getting the Red Sea quite wrong). Despite Greaves's hopes for the future of this kind of research, he was one of the last scholars to try to extract useful scientific data from medieval Arabic and Persian manuscripts. Eventually Greaves himself concluded that there was not really any useful geographic information in Abu al-Fida's work. Greaves, who was keen on getting things printed in Arabic, had a private income, which was just as well, as setting texts up in an Arabic typeface was an expensive pastime.
¹³

Greaves had been a protégé of Laud and he became a friend and ally of the man who was perhaps the greatest Orientalist of the seventeenth century, Edward Pococke (1604–91).
¹⁴
Laud was consistently sympathetic to the cause of Oriental scholarship, and the Laudian Professorship of Arabic was established in 1636 in the first instance to give Pococke suitable employment. Though Laud had never met Pococke, but only corresponded with him about exotic coins, he relied on the emphatic recommendation of Vossius, a Dutch mathematician who was convinced of the value of medieval Arabmathematical manuscripts. Pococke had studied Latin, Greek and Hebrew at Oxford and attended Pasor's lectures in 1626–7. He went on to learn what he could from Bedwell. However, Pococke was to owe his excellent knowledge of Arabic to his prolonged sojourn in Aleppo from 1630 to 1636 as chaplain to the Levant Company. The Levant Company had been chartered in 1581 to trade in the lands of the Ottoman Sultan. An embassy was then established at Istanbul and consulates in Smyrna and Aleppo. The latter was the Levant Company's main trading centre or ‘factory' in Syria and it dealt primarily in cotton, much of which was grown in Syria and Palestine, as well as in silks imported by caravans coming from points further east. The chaplaincy at Aleppo in effect served as a studentship in Arabic and Islamic studies and several other distinguished scholars were to hold this post subsequently, among them Robert Huntington, who used his sojourn there in 1671–8 to collect Oriental manuscripts which he eventually
bequeathed to Oxford's Bodleian Library. However, Pococke was the intellectual star in this learned sequence of Levant Company chaplains.

On his return to England in 1636, he was given the Chair that Laud had founded. Pococke was Professor not just of Arabic, but also of Hebrew and, although his interest in Arabic was intense and he had a good mastery of the language, nevertheless Arabic took second place to his study of Hebrew and of the Old Testament in Hebrew. He emphasized the value of commentaries on religious matters written by Jews who wrote in Arabic, for example the twelfth-century rabbi, philosopher and physician Maimonides, and one of his major works was an edition of Maimonides's
Porta Mosis
, a set of discourses on the Mishna, which Maimonides had written in Arabic but using Hebrew letters. Although today Pococke is chiefly famous (in so far as he is famous at all) as an Arabist, he was a Hebraist of first rank and one of the greatest scholars to work in that field. Like most Orientalists in the early modern period, Pococke studied Arabic in order to understand the Bible better and, like Bedwell, he had a strong interest in the Oriental Christians. Although Pococke's interest in Islam was entirely hostile, his was a kind of hostility that was conducive to sound scholarship, as he was particularly concerned to discredit Western folklore and crude polemical lies about the Prophet and Muslim doctrine in order that Islam's real errors could be exposed. It was, Pococke thought, better to study the Qur'an and its commentaries critically than to waste time fabricating incredible nonsense about great magnets holding Muhammad's tombup in the air and similar medieval legends.

In 1637 Pococke took time off from his teaching and went to Istanbul to hunt for manuscripts. He did not return until 1641, by which time Laud was imprisoned in the Tower (where Pococke visited him) and the Long Parliament was in session. The years that followed were difficult ones, as Pococke was known to be a fervent Royalist. Under the Commonwealth the Laudian Professor of Arabic received no stipend and Pococke struggled to survive by teaching Hebrew. Though his position was precarious, he was protected to some extent by his international reputation as a scholar, as well as by a few influential friends on the Parliamentary side, most notably the jurist,
historian, antiquarian and respected Parliamentarian John Selden (1584–1654). Selden's interests ranged rather widely and he wrote on matters such as the history of trial by combat and of tithes in medieval England. But he was also interested in Oriental religions, especially those of ancient Syria. His treatise,
De Diis Syriis
(1617), made him famous as an Orientalist. His Hebrew was good and he had a smattering of Arabic and he collected manuscripts in both languages (and they also ended up in the Bodleian Library). Although Selden's main Oriental interest was in rabbinical law, he had translated from Arabic a fragment of the
Nazm al-Jawhar
(‘String of Pearls'), a Christian history of the world from the Creation onwards, written by the Melkite Patriarch of Alexandria, Said ibBitriq Eutychius (876–940). Selden recruited Pococke to assist him in editing a small section of this chronicle in order to make contemporary polemical points against those who maintained the primacy of bishops. Later in 1652 Pococke would produce an edition and translation into Latin of the whole of Eutychius. Erpenius was the only other person hitherto to have translated an Arabic chronicle into Latin.

Eutychius and what Eutychius had to say about such matters as the fifth-century Council of Chalcedon was Selden's ruling passion, but, as far as Pococke himself was concerned, the work he did on Bar Hebraeus was much closer to his own interests and of far greater significance for the development of Orientalism in general. Bar Hebraeus, also known as Abu al-Faraj, was a thirteenth-century Christian Arabchronicler who drew heavily on Muslim chronicles to compile his own history from the Creation to his own time. In 1650 Pococke published the
Specimen historiae Arabum
(1650), in which a long extract translated into Latin from Bar Hebraeus's work served as a vehicle for the copious annotations that were based on Pococke's much more general knowledge of Middle Eastern history and culture. For a long time this work was to be among the first ports of call for anyone studying the history of Islam.

During the hard times of the Commonwealth, Pococke, like several other Royalist scholars who were out of favour, also found refuge of a kind in working on a new polyglot Bible. Just as several of the sixteenth century's leading Orientalists had come together to work on the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, so in 1655–7 a team of English scholars
with Oriental interests came together to work on the London Polyglot Bible. Besides Pococke himself, they included Abraham Wheelocke (the Cambridge Professor of Arabic), Edmund Castell (later Professor of Arabic), Thomas Hyde (a Persianist) and Thomas Greaves (like his brother John, an Arabist). The London Polyglot was even grander and more scholarly than the predecessor produced in Antwerp and it included Syriac and Arabic versions of parts of the text. By the seventeenth century, however, most Catholics had come round to the view that the Latin Vulgate sufficed for faith, whereas Protestants were more committed to close philological study of the biblical text. Pococke advised on the Arabic text of the Pentateuch. Wheelocke described the enterprise as ‘the vindicating of the Gospel opposed by ranting enthusiasts in these dayes'.
¹⁵
The publication of the London Polyglot Bible was not particularly wellreceived. Onecritic denouncedit for ‘affording a foundation for Mohammedanism; as a chief and principal prop of Popery; as the root of much hidden Atheism in the world'.
¹⁶
The fashion for such grandiose philological projects came to an end with this expensive publication and there were to be no further polyglots.