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Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison: Discovery and Disaster in the Seventeenth Century *

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Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison: Discovery and Disaster in the Seventeenth Century * THOMAS LYDIAT'S SCHOLARSHIP IN PRISON: DISCOVERY AND DISASTER IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY * By KRISTINE LOUISE HAUGEN FROM I 627 TO I 633, the mercurial mathematician, chronologer, and Oxford alumnus Thomas Lydiat was confined to debtors' prison. 1 The experience called forth a sustained period of creativity that sharply contrasted with his intellectual quiescence in the several years preceding, during which he had devoted himself to the life of a country clergyman and perhaps, at best, kept up his scholarly notebooks. 2 Inasmuch as he now began eagerly seeking to publish his attractive new works and to gain help from the great, Lydiat's new ambition recapitulated the professional strivings of his youth twenty years before, just as his revived scholarship closely followed the themes of the work he had pursued at that time. Lydiat's grand misfortune was that his pet theory - it involved the monarchy of ancient Persia, which held great fascination for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries -was totally wrong, becoming more so with every piece of new and mistaken historical evidence that he adduced. That he managed to conduct original historical research while incarcerated, then, only compounded the regrettable fate of his conclusions. That Lydiat's discoveries were also disastrous was a verdict openly drawn by some of his readers later in the seventeenth century. Indeed, no one could read about his discoveries until later in the seventeenth century, *1 am extremely grateful to Anthony Grafton for alerting me to Lydiat 's prison work and to Mordechai Feingold for continuous and copious assistance as I researched Lydiat's strange story. Noel Swerdlow kindly discussed historical chronology with me, and Rhodri Lewis, William Poole, and Nicholas Hardy provided valuable help as well; thanks also to a reader for this journal for acute comments. But this project would have been entirely impossible without the generous support of the Renaissance Society of America's Bodleian Library Research Grant and the Bodleian Library's Centre for the Study of the Book, which enabled me to visit Oxford and study Lydiat's manuscripts and related materials in the summer of 201 I. Bodleian Library Record for Lydiat's two prison books were printed in Latin only some time after his death, which came in l 646: his large Ca nones chronologici (Chronological lists) at Oxford in 1675, and his Annotationes (Annotations) on the Greek chronological inscription known as the Parian Chronicle in 1676, within an Oxford reprint of the inscription edited by Humphrey Prideaux. The gap in this history already alerts us that Lydiat's work was perceived as suf­ ficiently important to be collected by someone following his death, then passed from hand to hand until it reached the Oxford University Press, which in the Restoration was mounting a concerted effort to print works of classical scholarship, as well as works by churchmen active before the Civil Wars. But manuscripts in the Bodleian Library tell us considerably more of the story of Lydiat's own actions and ambitions concerning his prison compositions. Already well known and often exploited is the Bodleian volume of Lydiat's letters; here, it is noteworthy that the letters show Lydiat in the act of pressing his brand-new works into the hands of friends who did not react with the enthusiasm that he perhaps expected. So far not discussed to my knowledge, however, are Lydiat's own English-language translation of the Chronological lists, distributed in multiple copies over a group of several manuscripts, and his multiple copies of the more forbidding and technical Annotations. 3 The numerous copies of these texts indicate that Lydiat intended to disseminate his works relatively widely, even if he had lost hope of immediately printing them; the existence of the English translation of the Lists indicates that he envisaged an audience reaching well beyond the international coterie of his fellow scholars; and lastly, both sets of manuscripts contain small but highly interesting textual passages that are not present in the Latin printed versions. Above all, Lydiat's manuscripts are punctuated with subscriptions of place and date (for example, 'From the King's Bench prison, l April Julian, 1629 A.O.'), which were systematically removed by Lydiat's editors later in the seventeenth century.4 Taken in combination with our understanding of Lydiat's scholarship, especially during the early years of his imprisonment, these subscriptions materially help us to grasp the story of his intellectual aims, his achievements, and his frustrations. We find, to begin with, that Lydiat's intellectual revival started on a very modest scale. His Chronological lists, which eventually became far more complex and combative, started out as a straightforward backbone comprised of simple lists of ancient kings. These lists had everything in common with Lydiat's own 1609 book titled Emendatio temporum (Emendation of times), of which it would be quite right to call the early Chronological lists an abstract or rechauffe. Why would Lydiat prepare anything so boring to himself as well as others? Surely to attempt to 184 Thomas Lydiat's Scholarship in Prison invade the market for textbooks - a large and even international market, in principle, if one were writing in Latin. The conclusion is strengthened by the retrospective date subscription informing us that this earliest layer of the Chronological lists was completed on 21 January 1626/7, 'Three weekes before mine imprisonment'. 5 It is not a stretch to imagine that Lydiat, knowing that he had co-signed for imposing amounts of debt on his brother's behalf, was belatedly grasping that extraordinary measures might be advisable, even hoping that the publication of a new book might somehow keep him out of prison. In fact, such a small work could probably not have raised even the fifty pounds needed to discharge the personal debt that Lydiat had contracted, to say nothing of the additional one hundred and fifty pounds for which he was responsible along with his brother. 6 The key for us, however, is that already three weeks before going to prison Lydiat had begun the attempt to revive his studies; that he had resolved to pursue historical chronology, a field that had occupied his youth; and that he had undertaken to tread very strictly in the same methodological paths he had earlier laid down. Soon after his arrival in prison, Lydiat became entranced with the idea that, beyond raising actual cash to erase his debts, he might also induce powerful friends to intercede in some way for his release. We know this because of the way in which he treated his second prison work, the one that he both began and ended while incarcerated: his commentary on the newly discovered ancient Greek chronological inscription known as the Parian Chronicle, a publication that was evidently brought to him in prison by some scholarly friend. In the end, this commentary was not printed during Lydiat's lifetime; but when theAnnotations had been freshly composed, he seems to have thought they had the power to conjure music from the stars. He sent copies to the politician William Boswell, the scholar Patrick Young, and the adventurer William Petty, all men \vho appreciated learning and who stood close to more influential figures. This bore no fruit, except that Young informed Lydiat his notes were too brief to be printed by themselves. 7 Worse, Lydiat apparently incurred the wrath of John Selden, the great oriental scholar who had deciphered and published the Greek inscription for the first time and who resented someone else supple­ menting the commentary he himself had provided in his edition. When Lydiat was finally released from debtors' prison, it was not out of influence, properly speaking, but charity. No great noble whispered in the royal ear on his behalf; rather, highly placed churchmen simply raised the amount of Lydiat's debt and paid it off. Although the consequence was fortunate for him, then, and his prison writings may well have served to persuade this consortium of well-wishers that he was a worthy object for help, Lydiat had 185 Bodleian Library Record neither earned his way to freedom with money nor established any lasting relationship with a single, valuable patron. Meanwhile, however, on the intellectual front, Lydiat's technique had distinctly altered from the supine recopying of his older research that had marked the beginning of his new Chronological lists. And it is precisely this story which the manuscripts, with their inscriptions of date and place, allow us to reconstruct. Although he had with him virtually no books, while in prison Lydiat managed to obtain two newly published ancient Greek sources that bore directly on the same historical questions that had preoccupied him decades earlier. 8The Parian Chronicle was the first, while the forged letters attributed to theAthenian general Themistocles were the second. That is, he was able to draw the same triumphant conclusions as before, but with the aid ofevidence that was completely new to the European scholarly world. Lydiat, with no hint of a joke, referred to this congruence as providential. We might view it instead as the work ofa mischievous angel, for in fact Lydiat was wrong about Persia in the Emendation oftimes nearly two decades before, wrong in his Annotations on the Parian Chronicle, and wrong yet again in his finished Chronological lists. And so, in harmony with that mixture of brilliance and misguided fervour that always characterized his intellectual life, Lydiat's personal renascence in prison turned out to be a renascence oferror; the more he argued his case, the more he compounded the utter impossibility of his claims. Thus far, in summary, the story that will be told in this article.
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