Hostname: page-component-669899f699-cf6xr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-04-25T12:22:30.229Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Oriental Scholarship and Episcopal Polity: The Reception of John Selden's Arabic-Latin Edition of Eutychius

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 September 2024

THOMAS MATTHEW VOZAR
THOMAS MATTHEW VOZAR*
Affiliation:
University of Hamburg
*
E-mail: thomas.matthew.vozar@uni-hamburg.de
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

John Selden's 1642 edition and translation of an extract from a chronicle by Eutychius (Said ibn Batriq), the tenth-century Melkite patriarch of Alexandria, can be considered the first Arabic book printed in England. This article examines the early reception of Selden's Eutychius in the European republic of letters, exploring the ways in which its testimony about the early Alexandrian Church contributed to scholarly debates over episcopacy against the backdrop of the English Revolution. In doing so it demonstrates how Selden's edition made Eutychius a touchstone in seventeenth-century confessional disputes over ecclesiastical history while attracting readers in England and abroad.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , First View , pp. 1 - 16
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2024

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

Footnotes

All translations are the author's own.

The research upon which this article is based was funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg under the Excellence Strategy of the Federal Government and the Länder. I am grateful to Alec Ryrie and to the anonymous reviewer for their helpful suggestions.

References

1 ‘De historia Arabica patriarchae Alexandriae, te obsecro, obtestor, et adiuro, ut vel ipsam, vel eius specimen des publico. Non dubito fore opus ecclesiae Dei utile, et bonis gratum’: The correspondence of Isaac Casaubon in England, ed. Paul Botley and Máté Vince, Geneva 2018, iv. 264.

2 See Hamilton, Alastair, ‘Isaac Casaubon the Arabist: “video longum esse iter”’, JWCI lxxii (2009), 143–68Google Scholar, revised in his Arabs and Arabists: selected articles, Leiden 2022, 50–86.

3 See Grafton, Anthony, ‘Protestant versus prophet: Isaac Casaubon on Hermes Trismegistus’, JWCI xlvi (1983), 78–93Google Scholar, reprinted in his Defenders of the text: the traditions of scholarship in an age of science, 1450–1800, Cambridge, Ma 1994, 145–61.

4 This was partly due to the single-mindedness of James i: ‘omnia priora studia mea funditus interiisse. Nam maximus Rex et literatissimus unico genere literarum sic capitur ut suum et suorum ingenia in illo detineat’ (‘all my previous studies have become utterly lost. For the greatest and most literate King is so captivated by a single genre of literature that he detains his own talents and those of his subjects in it’): Correspondence of Isaac Casaubon, ii. 7–8.

5 Rightly identified by Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic studies in the seventeenth century, Oxford 2013, 98, pace Correspondence of Isaac Casaubon, iv. 264 n. 4. Though it is not my concern here, for a recent study of Eutychius from the perspective of a historian of the early Islamic world see, for example, Hoyland, Robert, ‘Eutychius of Alexandria vindicated: Muslim sources and Christian Arabic historiography in the early Islamic empire’, in Letizia Osti and Maaike van Berkel (eds), The historian of Islam at work: essays in honor of Hugh N. Kennedy, Leiden 2022, 384–404CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 See Oates, J. C. T., The manuscripts of Thomas Erpenius, Melbourne 1974Google Scholar.

7 The most comprehensive treatment of Selden's life and works is Toomer, G. J., John Selden: a life in scholarship, Oxford 2009CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Other major studies include Berkowitz, David Sandler, John Selden's formative years: politics and society in early seventeenth-century England, Washington, DC 1988Google Scholar; Christianson, Paul, Discourse on history, law, and governance in the public career of John Selden, 1610–1635, Toronto 1996Google Scholar; Barbour, Reid, John Selden: measures of the holy commonwealth in seventeenth-century England, Toronto 2003CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rosenblatt, Jason P., Renaissance England's chief rabbi: John Selden, Oxford 2006CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Haivry, Ofir, John Selden and the Western political tradition, Cambridge 2017CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Rosenblatt, Jason P., John Selden: scholar, statesman, advocate for Milton's muse, Oxford 2021CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 Toomer, G. J., Eastern wisedome and learning: the study of Arabic in seventeenth-century England, Oxford 1996CrossRefGoogle Scholar, passim, and John Selden, ii. 600–14; Barbour, John Selden, 276–82 and passim; Quantin, Jean-Louis, The Church of England and Christian antiquity: the construction of a confessional identity in the 17th century, Oxford 2009, 315, 317–18Google Scholar; Loop, Jan, ‘Die Bedeutung arabischer Manuskripte in den konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen des 17. Jahrhunderts: John Selden, Johann Heinrich Hottinger und Abraham Ecchellensis’, Zeitsprünge: Forschungen zur Frühen Neuzeit xvi (2012), 75–91Google Scholar, and Hottinger, 95–101.

9 On Selden's Arabic studies see, especially, Toomer, John Selden, ii. 595–625. On Oriental studies in early modern England more generally see, inter alia, Holt, P. M., Studies in the history of the Near East, London 1973, 3–63Google Scholar; Hamilton, Alastair, William Bedwell the Arabist, 1563–1632, Leiden 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The ‘Arabick’ interest of the natural philosophers in seventeenth-century England, ed. G. A. Russell, Leiden 1993; Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning; Mordechai Feingold, ‘Oriental studies’, in Nicholas Tyacke (ed.), The history of the University of Oxford, IV: Seventeenth-century Oxford, Oxford 1997, 449–503, and ‘Learning Arabic in early modern England’, in Jan Loop, Alastair Hamilton and Charles Burnett (eds), The teaching and learning of Arabic in early modern Europe, Leiden 2017, 33–56; Thomas Roebuck, ‘Miles Smith (1552/53–1624) and the uses of oriental learning’, in Mordechai Feingold (ed.), Labourers in the vineyard of the Lord: erudition and the making of the King James Version of the Bible, Leiden 2018, 328–71; Mills, Simon, A commerce of knowledge: trade, religion, and scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–1760, Oxford 2020CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Vozar, Thomas Matthew, ‘Isaac Barrow, Ali Ufki and the Epitome fidei et religionis Turcicae: a seventeenth-century summary of Islam in the European republic of letters’, JWCI lxxxv (2022), 145–63Google Scholar.

10 Toomer notes that Selden received a second manuscript copied by Thalja Karma, brought to England by William Corderoy, treasurer of the Levant Company in Aleppo, while the book was in press: John Selden, 605–6. On Pococke in Aleppo see Mills, A commerce of knowledge, 71–95, and on his Arabic studies in the context of his broader scholarly interests see Mills, Simon, ‘Edward Pococke (1604–1691), comparative Arabic-Hebrew philology, and the Bible’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies liii (2023), 117–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Several earlier books, including some of Selden's works, featured Arabic words and short quotations (sometimes as woodcut illustrations), but his edition of Eutychius was the first substantial Arabic text printed in England. For a survey of early Arabic printing in England see Roper, Geoffrey, ‘Arabic printing and publishing in England before 1820’, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies Bulletin xii (1985), 12–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for a study of the important case of the university press at Oxford see Alastair Hamilton, ‘The learned press: oriental languages’, in Ian Gadd (ed.), The history of Oxford University Press, I: Beginnings to 1780, Oxford 2013, 398–417.

12 Bodl. Lib., ms Selden supra 109, fo. 264. All references to and transcriptions of Selden's correspondence are taken from G. J. Toomer, ‘The correspondence of John Selden (1584–1654)’, at <http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/selden-correspondence.pdf>. On the assumption that Cudworth's letters are dated Old Style, both Old and New Style dates are supplied.

13 Bodl. Lib., ms Selden supra 109, fo. 262; ms Selden supra 108, fo. 247.

14 Ibid. ms Selden supra 109, fo. 268.

15 Herbert Thorndike, A discourse of the right of the Church in a Christian state, London 1649 (Wing T1045), 142.

16 On this point see Hardy, Nicholas, Criticism and confession: the Bible in the seventeenth century republic of letters, Oxford 2017Google Scholar.

17 ‘Sicut ergo presbyteri sciunt se ex Ecclesiae consuetudine ei qui sibi praepositus fuerit, esse subjectos: ita episcopi noverint se magis consuetudine, quam dispositionis Dominicae veritate, presbyteris esse maiores’: PL xxvi.563; ‘nam et Alexandriae a Marco evangelista usque ad Heraclam et Dionysium episcopos presbyteri semper unum de se electum et in excelsiori gradu conlocatum episcopum nominabant’: CSEL lvi.310. See Quantin, Church of England and Christian antiquity, 99.

18 Pétau, Denis, Dissertationes ecclesiasticarum libri duo, Paris 1641Google Scholar; Walo Messalinus [Claudius Salmasius], De episcopis et presbyteris contra Dionysium Petavium dissertatio prima, Leiden 1641.

19 For the preceding period see Kevin Sharpe, The personal rule of Charles I, New Haven 1992.

20 See the recent account of Anthony Milton, England's second reformation: the battle for the Church of England, 1625–1662, Cambridge 2021, 101–43. Milton frames the measures of 1640–2 as an ‘abortive reformation’.

21 John Milton, The reason of church-governement urg'd against prelaty, London 1641 (Wing M2175), 19, 29. For an overview of Milton's antiprelatical tracts see Nigel Smith, ‘The anti-episcopal tracts: republican Puritanism and the truth in poetry’, in Nicholas McDowell and Nigel Smith (eds), The Oxford handbook of Milton, Oxford 2009, 155–73. Milton would of course later become Salmasius’ polemical adversary after the French scholar attacked the regicides and the revolutionary regime in his Defensio regia (1649); on Selden's supposed involvement in that controversy see Thomas Matthew Vozar, ‘Selden's reply to Salmasius, an alternative title for the Pro populo Anglicano defensio, and why Milton deserves to be strangled: rumour and opinion in the correspondence of Guy Patin’, Seventeenth Century xxxvii (2022), 937–47.

22 ‘Constituit item Marcus Evangelista duodecim Presbyteros cum Hanania; qui nempe manerent cum Patriarcha, adeo ut cum vacaret Patriarchatus, eligerent unum e duodecim Presbyteris cuius Capiti reliqui undecim Manus Imponerent eumque benedicerent et Patriarcham eum crearent’: Eutychius, Ecclesiae suae origines, ed. John Selden, London 1642 (Wing E3440/ E3440A), pp. xxix–xxx.

23 For treatment of this passage in modern studies of the early Alexandrian Church see, for example, Charles Gore, ‘On the ordination of the early bishops of Alexandria’, JTS iii (1902), 278–82; Telfer, W., ‘Episcopal succession in Egypt’, this Journal iii (1952), 1–13Google Scholar; and Eric Waldram Kemp, ‘Bishops and presbyters at Alexandria’, this Journal vi (1955), 125–42.

24 ‘Gravissima atque plurimum vexata … Quaestio, de Ordine Hieratico’: Eutychius, Origines, p. i.

25 Ibid. pp. ii–iii.

26 ‘Circumvolitant etiam in Anglia nostra libelli non pauci operosius confarcinati’: ibid. pp. iii, iv.

27 ‘Beda … Aegyptius’: ibid. p. xxvi. It is perhaps worth noting that Abraham Wheelocke, the first Adams Professor of Arabic at Cambridge and a correspondent of Selden, would publish the editio princeps of the Anglo-Saxon version of Bede the following year: Bede, Historiae ecclesiasticae gentis Anglorum libri v, Cambridge 1643 (Wing B1661). See, most recently, Rebecca Brackmann, Old English scholarship in the seventeenth century: medievalism and national crisis, Woodbridge 2023, ch. ii.

28 ‘Il faut que Mons. Blondel voye cet escrit devant que le sien soit achevé. S'il n'est à Paris, il le faut faire venir de Londres’: Correspondance intégrale d'André Rivet et de Claude Sarrau, ed. Hans Bots and Pierre Leroy, Amsterdam 1978, i. 339. Dates in this corpus are assumed to be Gregorian.

29 David Blondel, De la Primauté en l'Eglise, Geneva 1641.

30 ‘Cet Arabe ayant vescu dans le 10e siecle, son tesmoignage n'est pas de grand authorité. Dans le texte, il y a pour les uns et pour les autres. Les Notes aussi ne tranchent pas net et semble que le commentateur veuille nager entre deux eaues pour se ranger du costé de ceux qui seront les plus forts a la campagne. Il y a tousiours de bonnes recerches et curieuses et il merite bien d'estre leu. Je l'aime de ce qu'en la Preface il penche, quoi que delicatement, du costé de Walo Messalinus’: Correspondance d'André Rivet et de Claude Sarrau, i. 350.

31 ‘Les affaires d'Angleterre sont longtemps sur le penchant du precipice’: ibid.

32 Eutychius, Origines, p. iii; Bodl. Lib., ms Selden supra 109, fo. 262.

33 ‘nuper a summo viro Johanne Seldeno, Arabice et Latine editis’: Claudius Salmasius, Librorum de primatu papae pars prima, Leiden 1645, 77 (references are to the separately paginated ‘Apparatus ad libros de primatu’).

34 Ibid. 48.

35 ‘Quod Eutychius nescivit, cui idem usu venit quod omnibus ferme scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis Graecis Latinisque, ut dum morem sui temporis spectant, a principio sic semper fuisse existimarint’: ibid. 87.

36 ‘Quid enim nobis ex communi saltem fama et per manus derivata traditione de originibus Alexandrinae ante 700 annos scriptis consignavit Eutychius Patriarcha?’: Blondel, David, Apologia pro sententia Hieronymi de episcopis et presbyteris, Amsterdam 1646, 17Google Scholar.

37 Ibid; he undoubtedly derived this information from the preface in Eutychius, Origines, p. xv.

38 ‘ex quibus excerpta quaedam mecum communicavit D. Abraamus Ecchelensis, Syriacae et Arabicae linguae in Academia Parisiensi Professor Regius’: Denis Pétau, Theologicorum dogmatum tomi quarti pars altera, Paris 1650, 725.

39 On Ecchellensis see Rietbergen, Peter J. A. N., ‘A Maronite mediator between seventeenth-century Mediterranean cultures: Ibrahim al Hakilani, or Abraham Ecchellense (1605–1664) between Christendom and Islam’, Lias xvi (1989), 13–41Google Scholar, and Orientalisme, science et controverse: Abraham Ecchellensis (1605–1664), ed. Bernard Heyberger, Turnhout 2010.

40 ‘habemus praeter Eutychium illum eo vetustiorem alterum’: Pétau, Theologica dogmata, 725.

41 Ecchellensis, Abraham, Chronicon orientale, Paris 1651, 166Google Scholar, noted by Toomer, John Selden, 606 n. 98.

42 ‘sciscitans quid de istis originibus censeret’: Jean Morin, Commentarius de sacris ecclesiae ordinationibus, Paris 1655, 155 (in the separately paginated ‘pars tertia’).

43 ‘Imo si penitius perspiciendum est, nequaquam Eutychium Alexandrinum, sed personatum Anglum sub Eutychij nomine, et larva in scenam prodeuntem comperies’: Abraham Ecchellensis, Eutychius patriarcha Alexandrinus vindicatus, Rome 1661, pt i, 5. The sense of Latin ‘larva’ as a mask or disguise (and by extension, a character or role) is certainly operative here, given the references to impersonation (‘personatum’) and the stage (‘scena’), but Ecchellensis, with Selden's death in mind, also seems to be playing on the primary meaning of the word as a ghost or spectre. For previous discussion of Ecchellensis's response to Selden see Loop, ‘Die Bedeutung arabischer Manuskripte in den konfessionellen Auseinandersetzungen’, and Hottinger, 96–9.

44 Eutychius, Contextio gemmarum, sive, Eutychii patriarchae Alexandrini annales, ed. Edward Pococke, Oxford 1656 (Wing E3438), and Eutychii patriarchae Alexandrini annalium tomer alter, ed. Edward Pococke, Oxford 1658 (Wing E3439). A variant title page for the second volume seems to have been printed as early as 1654 (Wing E3437), perhaps to have something to show Selden before his death. See Falconer Madan, Oxford books: a bibliography of printed works relating to the university and city of Oxford or printed or published there, Oxford 1912, iii. 51–2, 81, 100; Toomer, Eastern wisedome and learning, 164–5; and Jason Peacey, ‘“Printers to the University”, 1584–1658’, in The history of Oxford University Press, 50–77 at pp. 73–5.

45 Ecchellensis, Eutychius patriarcha Alexandrinus vindicatus, pt i, 129; pt ii, 360.

46 ‘tot enim apud vos sunt religiones, quot capita … Decreta vestri Senatus, seu Parlamenti ante quatuor ferme annos edita de religione statuenda a vestris theologis et ministris hoc satis superque testantur’: ibid. pt i, 11.

47 Confessio fidei in conventu theologorum authoritate Parliamenti Anglicani indicto elaborata, Cambridge 1656 (Wing C5737).

48 ‘Pseudoprophetam … longe mitius, humaniusque egisse cum Episcopis, Presbyteris, Eremitis, et Monachis, quam tui mox fecere Christiani, pii, humanissimi Angli’: Ecchellensis, Eutychius patriarcha Alexandrinus vindicatus, pt i, 184.

49 The letters and journals of Robert Baillie, ed. David Laing, Edinburgh 1841, i. 303.

50 Selden, John, Table-talk, London 1689 (Wing S2437), 8Google Scholar.

51 On Selden and the Westminster Assembly see Toomer, John Selden, ii. 569–75.

52 See The minutes and papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–1652, ed. Chad Van Dixhoorn, Oxford 2012.

53 John Gregory, Notes and observations upon some passages of Scripture, Oxford 1646 (Wing G1920), 165; cf. Eutychius, Origines, 58–9.

54 Thomas Hobbes, Historia ecclesiastica, ed. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson, Paris 2008, 175, 373.

55 Henry Stubbe and the beginnings of Islam: the originall & progress of Mahometanism, ed. Nabil Matar, New York 2014, 91 (where Stubbe's use of the title Origines Alexandrini indicates the use of Selden's edition, rather than Pococke's), 92; see pp. 24–6 for Matar's discussion of Eutychius.

56 Proposed as early as John Milton, Paradise lost, ed. Thomas Newton, London 1749, ii. 349. Newton's suggestion has been reiterated by Don Cameron Allen, ‘Milton and the sons of God’, Modern Language Notes lxi (1946), 73–9, but contested by Sung Ryol Kim, ‘Milton's sons of God: a reconsideration’, Milton Quarterly xxviii (1994), 61–8.

57 Hammond, Henry, An answer to the animadversions on the dissertations touching Ignatius's epistles, and the episcopacie in them asserted, London 1654 (Wing H514), 218Google Scholar; Baxter, Richard, Which is the true Church?, London 1679 (Wing B1453), 92Google Scholar.

58 Pococke's edition of Eutychius remained current for over two centuries, and his Latin version was reprinted in PG cxi.889–1236. A new Arabic text did not appear until Eutychius, Eutychii patriarchae Alexandrini annales, ed. Louis Cheikho, Beirut 1906–9, followed later by the critical edition and German translation, Das Annalenwerk des Eutychios von Alexandrien: ausgewählte Geschichten und Legenden, ed. Michael Breydy, Louvain 1985.

59 Hiob Ludolf, Ad suam historiam Aethiopicam antehac editam commentarius, Frankfurt 1691, 438.

60 ‘De Archivis autem Alexandriae, quibus Annales tot debere putat, prorsus incredibile est’: John Pearson, Vindiciae epistolarum S. Ignatii, Cambridge 1672 (Wing P1010), 171.

61 Humphrey Prideaux, The true nature of imposture fully displayed in the life of Mahomet, London 1697 (Wing P3416), 178. Prideaux is referring to John Selden, The historie of tithes, London 1618 (STC 22172), which was suppressed shortly after publication on account of clerical hostility: Toomer, G. J., ‘Selden's Historie of tithes: genesis, publication, aftermath’, Huntington Library Quarterly lxv (2002), 345–78Google Scholar, and John Selden, i. 257–310.

62 Severus ibn al-Muqaffa, Historia patriarcharum Alexandrinorum Jacobitarum, trans. Eusèbe Renaudot, Paris 1713, 28.

63 Mather, Cotton, A letter of advice to the churches of the non-conformists in the English nation, London 1700 (Wing M1119), 24Google Scholar.

64 Quantin, Church of England and Christian antiquity.