- William Bedwell
William Bedwell (born 1561 – died
May 5 ,1632 nearLondon ) was an English priest and scholar, specializing inArabic and other "oriental" languages as well as inmathematics .Bedwell was educated at
St John's College, Cambridge . He served theAnglican Church as Rector ofSt Ethelburga's Bishopsgate and Vicar ofTottenham High Cross . He died at his vicarage at the age of 72.He published in quarto an edition of the
Epistles of John in Arabic, with aLatin version, printed by the heirs ofFranciscus Raphelengius atAntwerp in 1612. He also left many Arabic manuscripts to theUniversity of Cambridge and a font of type for printing them. According to McClure, it was Bedwell, and notThomas Van Erpen , who was the first to revive the study ofArabic literature in Europe. His uncompleted preparations for an Arabic Lexicon were eclipsed by the publication of a similar work byJacobus Golius in 1653. Bedwell's manuscripts were loaned, following his death, to theUniversity of Cambridge , where they were consulted byEdmund Castell during the creation of the monumental "Lexicon Heptaglotton" (1669). Another manuscript, for a Dictionary of Persian, was in the possession ofWilliam Laud ,Archbishop of Canterbury , and now resides at theBodleian Library . Besides his Arabic Epistles of John, his most well-known published work was "A Discovery of the Impostures of Mahomet and of the Koran", (1615). He was among the "First Westminster Company" charged byJames I of England with the translation of the first 12 books of theKing James Version of the Bible .Bedwell also invented a ruler for geometrical purposes, similar to the Gunter's scale.
References
*McClure, Alexander. (1858) "The Translators Revived: A Biographical Memoir of the Authors of the English Version of the Holy Bible". Mobile, Alabama: R. E. Publications (republished by the Marantha Bible Society, 1984 ASIN B0006YJPI8 )
*Nicolson, Adam. (2003) "God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible." New York: HarperCollins ISBN 0-06-095975-4
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