The Respublica Litterarum Sacrarum
We may start on June 18, 1612, when Isaac Casaubon and his wife drove from London to Tottenham to visit the local vicar, William Bedwell.[8] Casaubon (1559–1614), one of the greatest Classical philologists of the era, had come to England in 1610 and in 1612 was just beginning his major work of biblical scholarship—the refutation of Baronius's Annales . Bedwell (1562?–1632) was the founder of Arabic studies in England. A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1604 he had been selected to assist the Westminster company, led by Lancelot Andrewes, in the new translation of the Bible. In 1607 Andrewes presented him to the vicarage of Tottenham and continued to assist him in his research, whose fruits included a seven-volume lexicon of Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, and Arabic words, which, left in manuscript at his death, became the basis for Castell's Lexicon Heptaglotton , published as part of Walton's magisterial Polyglot (1654–1657).
Andrewes, a close friend of Casaubon since the latter's arrival in England, was himself a student of Arabic; Casaubon remarks that the bishop owned one of the two copies of Raphelengius's Arabic dictionary available in England at the time. Apparently both Andrewes and Casaubon urged Bedwell to travel to Leiden in order to consult the rare Arabic manuscripts left to the university by Scaliger, Andrewes offering to defray expenses.
So in the same year, Bedwell arrived at Leiden with letters from both Andrewes and Casaubon to the university librarian, Daniel Heinsius (1580–1655), a biblical scholar as well as poet and classical philologist. Heinsius had been Scaliger's student at Leiden, as had Grotius (1583–1645), probably the greatest of the Renaissance exegetes as well as a distinguished jurist, dramatist, historian, and philologist. The biblical scholarship of both Heinsius and Grotius was deeply influenced by Scaliger's
teaching.[9] Scaliger introduced Heinsius and Grotius to Casaubon; in 1603–1604 they collaborated on an edition of Theocritus; Grotius and Casaubon remained friends until the latter's death. When Bedwell arrived, Heinsius was living in the former home of the Arabic scholar Franciscus Raphelengius (d. 1597)—a professor of Hebrew at Leiden and official printer to the university. But before his conversion to Calvinism, Raphelengius had been part of the cadre of Catholic scholars, including Benito Montano and Andreas Masius, who brought out the eight-volume Antwerp Polyglot in 1571; he thus supplies a link between the humanist Catholic scholarship of the mid-sixteenth century and the largely Protestant respublica litterarum of the post-Tridentine period.
Casaubon had urged Heinsius to come to England, in 1613 sending an invitation via the chaplain to Frederick V, Abraham Scultetus, himself a respected biblical scholar.[10] Heinsius, however, decided against crossing the Channel, but around the same time he began corresponding with several English scholars, among them Andrewes, Ussher, and Prideaux; from 1614 on he also maintained a close friendship with John Selden, who was a biblical scholar and Arabist as well as a jurist, member of Parliament, and student of English antiquities. Heinsius had Selden's De diis Syris reprinted in Leiden in 1636 and helped distribute several of Selden's other works on the Continent.[11] In any case, Heinsius was apparently most helpful to Bedwell, who returned to England in 1613.
Casaubon, however, had not been the first Continental scholar to visit Tottenham. We have record of at least two earlier visits. In 1610 the young Frenchman Louis Cappel, having just finished his theological studies at Sedan, commenced a peregrinatio academica to Paris, Leiden, and Oxford. While he was in England he went to see Bedwell, who apparently stimulated the beginning scholar's interest in Semitic languages. Cappel returned to France in 1613 and was appointed professor of Hebrew at Saumur, the Protestant academy founded by Mornay in 1593. In 1624 he published his Arcanum punctationis , arguing for the recent origin of Hebrew vowel-points; in 1629 the Spicilegium , a philological-historical commentary on the New Testament (reprinted in the Critici sacri ). In 1634 he completed the manuscript of the Critica sacra , a detailed and original study of the text of the Scriptures sufficiently disturbing to Protestant orthodoxy as to be unprintable. Cappel circulated it unsuccessfully for sixteen years until finally in 1650 it came out in Paris—a Catholic city.
A year before Cappel's visit, Bedwell had entertained another young scholar, Thomas Erpenius (1584–1624), who had entered Leiden in 1602 where Scaliger encouraged him to study Arabic. At that time, however,
Leiden had no professor in the field. Instead, Erpenius finished his studies in 1608 and, still uncertain about his future plans, left for England with a letter from Scaliger. As in the case of Cappel, Bedwell's influence seems to have been crucial, and Erpenius departed from England to Paris to study Arabic with a Coptic émigré. There he met Casaubon, then librarian to the French king, who lent him rare Arabic manuscripts and encouraged his studies. In 1612 Casaubon wrote Grotius and Heinsius, recommending Erpenius for the chair in Arabic at Leiden, where he remained until his death.
Erpenius also taught Arabic to Sixtinus Amama (1593–1629), the professor of Oriental languages at the University of Franeker, which, founded ten years after Leiden, quickly became a second important Dutch center of humanistic scholarship. In 1613 Amama had gone to England to teach Hebrew and study Oriental languages with Prideaux, at that time rector of Exeter College, Oxford. The following year he went to Leiden, where he studied under Erpenius and met Heinsius. But Amama is better known as the student of Johannes Drusius (1550–1616), the first great Dutch Hebraist; Drusius died in his arms, and over the next two decades Amama published his teacher's massive commentaries and biblical essays in ten volumes.
Drusius was born to a prominent Protestant family in Flanders, but in 1567 the Inquisition forced him to escape to London, where his father had already fled. There he studied Hebrew with another exile, the French Hebraist Cevallerius. When Cevallerius became regius professor at Cambridge, Drusius and other young French exiles followed him. At Cambridge Drusius became a close friend of Thomas Cartwright, remaining at the university after Cevallerius returned to France, studying Greek and privately giving instruction in rabbinics to two English students, one of whom was Edward Lively (1545?–1605), later regius professor of Hebrew at Cambridge. In 1572 Drusius planned to return to France, but, prevented by the Saint Bartholomew massacre, he instead accepted Lawrence Humphry's offer to teach Hebrew, Chaldee, and Syriac at Oxford, where he remained until 1576. In 1577 he went to Louvain to study law but shortly thereafter was appointed professor of Hebrew at Leiden, where he taught until 1585, when the university's increasingly rigid Calvinism led him to accept a professorship at Franeker.
And here the circle begins to close, for Drusius's student, Lively, was a fellow of Trinity and taught Hebrew at Cambridge from 1575 until the year before his death in 1605. But Bedwell and Andrewes, both protégés of Chaderton at that time, were also at Cambridge during the last quarter of
the sixteenth century. Bedwell had become a scholar of Trinity in 1584; Andrewes entered Pembroke in 1575 and remained at Cambridge until 1589.[12] Given their interest in Oriental languages, it seems probable that Bedwell and Andrewes were Lively's students.[13] The three names appear in conjunction at least once: on the original list of the committee appointed in 1604 to translate Genesis through 2 Kings for the Authorized Version. A year later, Andrewes had left Cambridge for the See of Chichester and Lively was dead, but for a moment these three English citizens of the respublica litterarum converge around a stack of old Bibles.[14]
As this partial circuit of biblical scholars in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries suggests, the respublica litterarum sacrarum possessed a social existence; it is not an a posteriori label imposed on diverse materials but a close-knit textual community whose axis ran from Geneva, Sweden, and the Palatinate in central Europe through France and the Low Countries to England in the west.[15]
The fact that English scholarship belonged to this international and interconfessional milieu is significant. Although England produced no major biblical or Classical scholars, with the exception of Ussher and Selden, until the mid-seventeenth century, English erudite culture in the Renaissance was no more insular than it had been in the Middle Ages and cannot be understood except in the context of European scholarship. Beginning with Erasmus's first visit to England in 1499, important Continental biblical scholars traveled and taught there on a regular basis: Paulus Fagius, a Hebrew scholar and student of Reuchlin; Immanuel Tremellius, translator of the major Protestant Latin Bible; Cameron, the teacher of Cappel and Amyraut; Bucer, Drusius, Scaliger, Amama, Casaubon, Cappel, Erpenius, Grotius. The two great seventeenth-century compendia of Renaissance biblical scholarship both come from England: the Critici sacri of 1660, compiled by a group of high-church divines led by John Pearson (later bishop of Chester), which prints in full the works of the major Renaissance exegetes; and Matthew Poole's Synopsis criticorum (1669), an exegetical catena summarizing a vast number of Catholic as well as Protestant commentaries—somewhat surprisingly, since Poole was a nonconformist Presbyterian.
The presence of Continental biblical scholars and scholarship in England is not simply an academic matter. The leading figures in the respublica litterarum stood close to the centers of power; this was, after all, the era in which colonial administrators consulted professors of theology before moving against native insurgency, and Leiden had to request permission from the king of France to hire Scaliger in 1593.[16] When Casaubon
came to England at Archbishop Bancroft's invitation, James, who valued learning in clerics as much as good legs in courtiers, requested his company on a weekly basis. James also encouraged and underwrote Ussher's research; Buckingham bought Erpinius's library for the Irish primate. Drusius was a correspondent of King James. Grotius likewise corresponded with the king and his bishops, attempting to enlist their support for the Remonstrants and his own eirenic projects. Knowledge may always be politicized, but only in the Renaissance was biblical erudition a recognized instrument of international affairs. One cannot imagine distinguished modern philologists assuming, simply in virtue of their scholarly attainments, such proximity to power.
One should not, however, confuse Renaissance biblical scholarship with its political uses. With a few exceptions, these works were not commissioned to serve specific government agenda, nor did the respublica litterarum sacrarum as a whole align with any one ideological faction. Renaissance princes and statesmen shared an interest in sacred erudition because, as Anthony Grafton observes, these "swollen and prodigious volumes, running to hundreds of pages and studded with interminable quotations in Greek and Hebrew," constituted "the staple of Europe's intellectual life."[17] If biblical scholars formed a small, tightly linked textual community, it was not therefore a culturally marginal or isolated one.