Richard Bentley

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Richard Bently

Richard Bentley (born January 27, 1662 in Oulton near Leeds , Yorkshire , † July 14, 1742 in Cambridge ) was an English classical philologist and text critic .

Youth and academic years (1662–1689)

His grandfather suffered the aftermath of the English Civil War and left the family in impoverished circumstances. His mother, the daughter of a stonemason, had received so much education that she was able to give her son his first lessons in Latin . From the school in Wakefield Richard Bentley went to St John's College in 1676 , where he received a scholarship and obtained a BA (Bachelor of Arts) in 1680 and an MA (Master of Arts) in 1683.

He was never elected a fellow of his college, but - before he was 21 years old - was appointed principal of the school in Spalding . He did not stay here long, however, because he was chosen by Edward Stillingfleet , the dean of St. Paul's to be his son's teacher. This appointment brought Bentley into contact with the most distinguished men of his time and gave him access to the best private library in England. The six years that Bentley spent in Stillingfleet's family he used to extensive studies of Greek and Latin writers, accumulating knowledge that would later be of use to him.

The Oxford Years (1689–1695)

In 1689 Stillingfleet became Bishop of Worcester and his son went to Wadham College with his teacher. Here Bentley soon had close contact with the most outstanding scholars of the university, including John Mill , Humphrey Hody (1659–1707) and Edward Bernard . He reveled in the precious manuscripts of the Bodleian Library , Corpus Christi College, and other college libraries. He was concerned with the collection of material for extensive literary plans, including in particular a corpus of fragments by Greek poets and an edition of the Greek lexicographers . The Oxford (Sheldonian) printing house was preparing the edition (the editio princeps ) of the unique manuscripts of the Bodleian Library of the Greek Chronicle (a universal history up to the year 560) of John Malalas , and John Mill, principal of St Edmund Hall , had requested Bentley to to sift through the sheets and to comment on the text.

This inspired Bentley to write his Epistola ad Millium , less than 100 pages at the end of the Oxford Malala (1691). The short treatise put Bentley at the head of all living English scholars. The ease with which he restored damaged passages, the security of the emendations, and in assessing the relevance of the material are entirely different in style from the careful and arduous work of a Hody, Mill or E. Chilmead. It was evident to the small circle of students (who lacked the great text-critical reference works of the modern age) that he was a critic above normal academic standards.

Bentley was also confident and presumptuous enough to create opponents. James Henry Monk , Bentley's biographer, accused him (in his first edition from 1830) of an impropriety with which he had nothing to do: “At one point,” writes Monk, “he describes Dr Mill as ιμαννιδιον ( loiter ), an accusation, which can neither justify the confidentiality of friendship nor the use of a dead language vis-à-vis the dignified head. ”- The aim of Bentley's apostrophe was not Mill, but Johannes Malalas, to whom he appeals in a different place than“ Syrisce ”. From this publication came the mixture of admiration and dislike that inspired Bentley.

A bust of Bentley in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge

In 1690 Bentley was ordained a deacon. In 1692 he was appointed Boyle lecturer for the first time, and a second time in 1694. He was offered the appointment a third time in 1695, but now he turned it down because he was busy with too many other duties at the time. In the first series of lectures ("A Confutation of Atheism") he tried to show Isaac Newton's physics in a popular form and to place it (especially in contrast to Thomas Hobbes ) within the framework of the proof of existence for an intelligent creator. He had correspondence on the subject with Newton, who was then living in Trinity College. The second series of lectures was not published and appears to have been lost.

Bentley's most important achievement in the field of Greek philology is the proof that many verses in the Homeric epics are only metrically correct if one reads the sound w- (which he wrote v-) which is not present in the scriptures. This discovery, for which he z. B. was ridiculed by the Homer translator Alexander Pope as "Man with the V" has been confirmed by comparative linguistic research, especially by the deciphering of the early Greek script Linear-B.

The royal librarian (1695-1700)

Bentley was only just consecrated when it was presented with a benefice at Worcester Cathedral . In 1693 the position of supervisor of the royal library became vacant and considerable efforts were made by his friends to get him the job, but their influence did not go far enough. An arrangement was made that the new librarian, Henry Thynne , would step down in favor of Bentleys with an annual pension of £ 130 instead of £ 200. In 1695 Bentley received a royal chaplaincy and the right of residence in Hartlebury , in the same year he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society , in 1696 he received the degree of DD (Doctor of Divinity). The recognition of the continental scholars came in the form of a dedication by Johann Georg Graevius , which preceded a dissertation by Albert Rubens , De Vita Flavii Mattii Theodori , published in Utrecht in 1694 .

Bentley now had offices in St James's Palace and his first concern was the royal library. He went to great lengths to get the collection out of its dilapidated state and persuaded the Earl of Marlborough to ask for additional rooms in the palace - these were granted, but Marlborough then used them for its own purposes. Bentley enforced a law against publishers that brought the library nearly 1,000 volumes that had not been made available until then.

He helped John Evelyn with his numismata and was authorized by Cambridge University to procure Greek and Latin fonts for their classical books, which he apparently found in the Netherlands as well, as they have appeared in the university's books since then. Bentley did not bother with simply executing the projects it started. In 1694 he designed an edition of Philostratos , but gave it to G. Olearius (Ohlschiger), "for the joy", says Friedrich August Wolf , "by Olearius and nobody else". He provided Graevius with a summary of Cicero and Joshua Barnes with a warning about the inauthenticity of the epistles of Euripides . Barnes printed the epistles, stating that no one, except someone who was perfrictae frontis aut judicii imminuti [Latin: "[from] a shattered forehead and limited judgment"], could doubt their authenticity. Bentley added a masterful collection of annotated fragments to Graevius Callimachus (Utrecht 1697).

The dissertation on the epistles of Phalaris, Themistocles , Socrates , Euripides and the fables of Aesop , the work on which Bentley's fame is essentially based, came about by chance. William Wotton asked Bentley when he was in the process of publishing a second edition of his book on Ancient and Modern Learning in 1697, to fulfill an old promise and to write down a text on the inauthenticity of the Epistles of Phalaris . Charles Boyle , later Earl of Orrery, the Christ Church editor of the Phalaris, took this paper so badly when he found the manuscript at its edition (1695) in the royal library that he started a dispute with Bentley. Aided by his college friends, especially Francis Atterbury , Boyle wrote an answer, "a fabric," says Alexander Dyce in his 1836-1838 edition of Bentley's works, "out of superficial scholarship, sophisticated sophistry, skillful malice and cheerful mockery" . The answer was hailed as devastating by the public and a second edition was immediately added. Bentley was forced to react, resulting in "this immortal dissertation" ( Richard Porson ), which has now remained unanswered, although the truth in its conclusions was not immediately recognized.

Rector of Trinity College (1700-1740)

In 1700 Bentley received that important promotion which "soon became his reward and scourge for the rest of his life" (De Quincey). Bentley was unanimously recommended to the Crown as rector of Trinity College , Cambridge by the competent ecclesiastical officers . This college, the grandest of the university and considered its finest, had fallen from its high pedestal that year. Though no worse than the other colleges, his earlier reputation made the misuse of endowments even more obvious in this case. The eclipse had taken hold after 1660 and was due to causes that affected the entire country. The names of John Pearson , Isaac Barrow and, above all, Isaac Newton grace the college annals of this period.

These men had not infected the ranks of Trinity's fellows with their love of research and teaching. Any excuse served as grounds for a banquet on the house, and the celibacy imposed by the statutes was made as bearable as the decency in this respectable position permitted. Bentley arrived here obnoxious as a St John's alumnus and an intruder, unwelcome like any scholar whose interests lay outside the walls of the college. Bentley responded to the fellows' hidden opposition with open contempt and set about reforming the college administration. He made extensive improvements to the buildings and used his position to promote teaching in both college and university. But his energy was accompanied by a dominant mood, an overbearing disdain for the feelings and even the rights of others, and an unscrupulous use of all means when a good cause could be achieved. The continued outflow from their wallets - on one occasion the entire dividend for the year was absorbed by the new chapel building - was the reason that eventually roused the fellows to resolutely fight back.

After ten years of headstrong but ineffective resistance within the college, they appealed to the Visitor Moore, the Bishop of Ely . Your petition was fraught with general complaints and did not relate to any specific offense. Bentley's answer ( The Present State of Trinity College etc, 1710) shows his most overwhelming style. The "fellows" corrected their petition and added new lawsuits, in which they listed 54 separate breaches of the statutes that the rector allegedly committed. Bentley, asked for an answer, now appealed directly to the Crown, supporting his request by dedicating his Horace to the Lord High Treasurer (Harley). The Crown Attorneys ruled against him, the case was heard (1714), and the verdict was removal from office. Before it could be implemented, however, the Bishop of Ely died and the process petered out. The feud continued in various forms. In 1717 Bentley was appointed Regius Professor of Divinity in the succession of Henry James . Bentley was ousted by the university in 1718, had to appear in plain clothes before the vice chancellor as a punishment, and it was not until 1724 that the law forced the university to reinstate him. In 1733 he was tried again by the fellows of Trinity before the Bishop of Ely (Greene) and removed by sentence, but the college bylaws required the conviction by the Vice Rector (Walker), a friend of Bentley, who did not agree to it. Although the feud lasted until 1738 or 1740 (around 30 years all told), Bentley stayed in office.

Works from the time as rector

During his rectorate, except for the first two years, Bentley pursued his studies uninterruptedly, the results of which were not reflected as much in publications. In 1709 he contributed a critical appendix to John Davies' edition of Cicero's Tusculan Conversations. The following year he published his emendations on Plutos and Nubes by Aristophanes and the fragments by Menander and Philemon , the latter under the name "Phileutherus Lipsiensis", of which he answered two years later in his comments on a late discourse on free thought Deisten Anthony Collins , once again made use of it. For this he received thanks from the university in recognition of the service he had thereby rendered to the church and the clergy. His Horace, which he had pondered for a long time and which he now hastily put on paper and published in order to appease public opinion at a critical time in his quarrel in college, appeared in 1711. In the foreword he stated his intention to draw attention to it limit text criticism and correction, and ignore exegesis . Some of his 700 to 800 emendations were accepted, whereas the majority of them are now rejected as unnecessary and prosaic, though the scholarship and ingenuity inherent in them are remarkable.

In 1716, in a letter to Wake, Archbishop of Canterbury , Bentley announced his plan for a critical edition of the New Testament . During the next four years, with the help of Johann Jakob Wettstein , an eminent Bible critic who claimed to be the first to bring the idea to Bentley, he collected material for this work, and in 1720 he published Proposals for a New Edition of the Greek Testament with specimens of the way he intended to execute them. He proposed that the Greek text from the time of the Council of Nicaea be restored by comparing the text of the Vulgate with that of the oldest Greek manuscripts. A large number of subscribers were won, but the work was never finished. His Terence (1726) is more important than his Horace, and it is also, after the Phalaris, on which his reputation rests essentially.

The fables of Phaedrus and the Sententiae of Publilius Syrus belong to the same year . The Paradise Lost (1732), made at the suggestion of Queen Caroline , is usually considered to be his least satisfactory work; it is tainted by the haste of emendation and a lack of poetic feeling as in his Horace; but here there are no excuses for him that the English text did not give him the same opportunities for guesswork. He came up with the idea that John Milton employed both a secretary and an editor to be blamed for the errors, exaggerations, and interpolations - it is uncertain whether this was Bentley's excuse for his own numerous corrections, or whether he was even believed it. The intended Homer edition was not published, all of it existed, consists of some manuscripts and marginal notes owned by Trinity College. Its main importance lies in the attempt to restore the metric by inserting the lost, lost and rediscovered by Bentley Greek letter digamma .

Smaller works

Family and past years

In 1701 Bentley married Joanna, daughter of Sir John Bernard of Brampton, Huntingdonshire . She gave birth to a son, Richard, and two daughters, and died in 1740. One of the daughters married Denison Cumberland, grandson of Richard Cumberland, Bishop of Peterborough , in 1728 . Her son was the playwright Richard Cumberland.

Bentley could read well into old age, even after he was tied to an armchair; he enjoyed the company of his friends and emerging researchers such as Jeremiah Markland and John Taylor , his nephews Richard and Thomas Bentley, with whom he could discuss classical subjects. He often said that he wanted to be 80 years old, adding that such a long life was enough to read anything worth reading - he died of pleurisy six months after his 80th birthday . Though reviled as greedy by his enemies, he left less than £ 5,000. Some Greek manuscripts brought to him from Mount Athos went to the college library, and his books and papers to his nephew Richard Bentley. This in turn, who was also a fellow of Trinity College, left the papers to the college library when he died in 1786, while the books with their many valuable marginal notes were given to the British Museum.

Some anecdotes were passed down by his grandson Richard Cumberland in the first volume of his memoirs (1807). The hat he always wore when reading to protect his eyes and his fondness for port and claret (which he says would be “port if it could”) are recorded in Alexander Pope's caricature (Dunciad, b. 4) . He didn't give up smoking until he was 70. He remained Archdeacon of Ely with two apartments, but received no higher ecclesiastical dignity. He was offered the impoverished diocese of Bristol , which he refused, and when asked which promotion would receive his approval, he replied: "Those who give him no reason to want to move."

effect

Bentley was the first Englishman to be classified among the heroes of classical research. Before him there was only John Selden and, in a more limited area, Thomas Gataker and John Pearson. “Bentley opened a new era in the art of textual criticism. He pointed a new path. With him the criticism grew. Where researchers previously offered suggestions and guesswork, Bentley made decisions with unlimited control over all of the material. ”Bentley, says Bunsen ,“ was the founder of historical philology ”. And Jacob Bernays says to his corrections of the Tristia , damage that previously opposed to even the mighty attempt this British were a hint Samson away . The English Hellenistic school, which flourished in the 18th century and which included names like Richard Dawes , Jeremiah Markland, John Taylor, Jonathan Toup , Thomas Tyrwhitt , Richard Porson, Peter Paul Dobree , Thomas Kidd and James Henry Monk a product of Bentley. And even the Dutch school of the same time, in spite of its own tradition, was in no small measure stimulated and controlled by Bentley's example, whose letters to the young Frans Hemsterhuis on his edition of Julius Pollux influenced him so much that he became one of Bentley's greatest Was admiring.

Bentley was a source of inspiration for the next generation of scholars. He had taught himself everything, created his own science, and yet there was no contemporary scientific guild in England against which his strength could be measured. In the Phalaris controversy, his academic opponents suffered utter defeat. Garth's rhymes - "So diamonds take a luster from their foil, And to a Bentley 'tis we owe a Boyle" - expressed the belief in the scientific and literary world of the time. The attacks by Alexander Pope, John Arbuthnot and others are evidence of their inability to appreciate his work: to them, textual criticism seemed pedantry and useless work. In a university where teaching the youth or the religious controversy of the day were the only occupations, Bentley was an isolated phenomenon. He seems to have acquired all of his immeasurable knowledge and all of his original points of view before 1700. After this time he bought little and showed only convulsive efforts - Horace, Terence and Milton.

literature

  • Friedrich August Wolf: Literary Analects , Volume 1; 1816
  • James Henry Monk: Life of Bentley ; 1830
  • J. Mahly: Richard Bentley, a biography ; 1868
  • RC Jebb: Bentley ; "English Men of Letters" series; 1882 (with a list of authorities based on Bentley's life and work.)
  • His letters in Bentlei et doctorum-virorum ad eum Epistolae ; 1807
  • C. Wordsworth (Ed.): The Correspondence of Richard Bentley ; 1842
  • John Edwin Sandys : History of Classical Scholarship , Volume 2; 1908; Pp. 401-410
  • AT Bartholomew, JW Clark: Bibliography of Bentley ; Cambridge, 1908
  • Charles Oscar Brink : English Classical Scholarship: Historical Reflections on Bentley, Porson, and Housman . Cambridge 1986. Paperback 2010
    • German translation by Marcus Deufert : Classical studies in England: historical reflections on Bentley, Porson and Housman . Stuttgart / Leipzig 1997
  • George Patrick Goold (Ed.): Richard Bentley, Epistola ad Joannem Millium. University of Toronto Press, Toronto 1962 (reprinted with extensive introduction by GP Goold).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Richard Claverhouse Jebb, Bentley, Richard (1662-1742) in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 04 on Wikisource.

Web links

Commons : Richard Bentley  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
predecessor Office successor
Henry James Regius Professur of Divinity
1580 -? 		John Whalley
personal data
SURNAME Bentley, Richard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English classical philologist and text critic
DATE OF BIRTH January 27, 1662
PLACE OF BIRTH Oulton near Leeds , Yorkshire
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 1742
Place of death Cambridge