Bishop Fox's Corpus Christi in Washington

(Image Credit)

The Wall Street Journal has a well-illustrated review of an upcoming exhibition of manuscripts and artifacts from the Corpus Christi Library in Oxford set to open at the Folger Library on February 4 (subscription required). The Folger Library website has this announcement:

Founded 500 years ago in 1517, Corpus Christi College, one of the oldest of the 38 self-governing colleges at the modern University of Oxford, is a repository of extraordinary treasures, few of which have ever been seen by the public. To mark its 500th anniversary, a selection of fifty manuscripts and early printed books from its celebrated Library, ranging in date from the 10th to the 17th centuries, is being brought to America for the first time.

Focusing on the first hundred years of the College’s existence, the exhibition introduces its Founder, Richard Fox, powerful Bishop of Winchester and adviser to Henry VII and Henry VIII, and its first President, John Claymond, who laid the foundations of the Library’s great collection. From the start, Corpus—the first Renaissance college at Oxford—was to pursue Humanist ideals of scholarship in three languages: not just Latin, but also Greek and Hebrew, the original languages of the Bible, along with such other subjects as Astronomy, Mathematics, Medicine, and Philosophy.

A series of display-cases present books in each of these languages, including a number that are bilingual and even trilingual. Most notable among them are a group that has been called "the most important collection of Anglo-Jewish manuscripts in the world"; these works of the 12th and 13th centuries include a series of volumes apparently commissioned by Christians from Jews, from which to learn Hebrew and study biblical texts in their original language, as well as the commentaries of Rashi and what is thought to be the oldest surviving Ashkenazi prayer book.

Highlighting Corpus’ role in the development of science and medicine at Oxford, the exhibition finishes with a series of ground-breaking works, from Galileo’s first observation of the moon using a telescope and Sir Isaac Newton’s autograph observations of Halley’s comet to Hooke’s observations of insects using a microscope and Vesalius’ studies of the human body.

Among the items on display will be Bishop Fox's crozier, shown in the photograph above in situ at Corpus Christi. Bishop Fox may have been more statesman than bishop, however, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica:

After receiving ordination into the priesthood Foxe became secretary in Paris to Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, an exiled claimant to the throne. On Richmond’s accession as King Henry VII, Foxe was made principal secretary of state and lord privy seal. He later became bishop of Exeter (1487–91), Bath and Wells (1491–94), Durham (1494–1501), and Winchester (1501–28).

Nevertheless, he neglected his ecclesiastical duties to concentrate on diplomacy. He negotiated the treaties and directed the diplomatic maneuvers that minimized the aid given by the Scots, the French, and the Dutch to rival claimants to Henry’s throne. In addition, he helped formulate and execute Henry’s ruthlessly efficient financial policies.

After Henry VII’s death in 1509 Foxe for a time remained in favour with the new ruler, Henry VIII. By 1511 he was, however, losing influence to Thomas Wolsey, who became Henry’s chief minister. Foxe resigned from the government in 1516 and—by then nearly blind—spent the last years of his life administering his diocese. His tomb in Winchester Cathedral, showing him as a wasted cadaver, is one of the most extraordinary of the period.

But The Wall Street Journal article's comments about Fox's intellectual vision for Corpus Christi, tied as it was to understanding the Holy Bible better through language arts, might indicate there was something more to Bishop Fox than politics:

Corpus Christi’s founder, Bishop Richard Fox, was a political fixture in Tudor-era England. (He served as a chief adviser to Henry VII and Henry VIII.) Part of the Renaissance spirit he envisioned for the college included a commitment to reading ancient texts, especially the Bible, in their original languages.

“There was this idea that the college would be a trilingual college, where Greek and Hebrew would be taught alongside Latin,” says the show’s curator, Peter Kidd. English scholars “realized that the only way to get back to the true meaning of the Bible was to find out what it said in Hebrew.”

Accordingly, the collection contains 13 rare Hebrew manuscripts, an extraordinary number for one library. A 12th-century prayer book once owned by a Sephardic Jew who traveled to England contains notes that use Hebrew characters to write Arabic words on the fly-leaves—the only such example from medieval England. A 13th-century book of psalms includes side-by-side Latin and Hebrew versions. The college’s scholars likely would have used these works, which will be part of the tour, to learn Hebrew.

This juxtaposition of judgments reminds me again how complex the past is and how careful we have to be in "labeling" a person (in the past or present).

"A Little Latin and Less Greek"

No, I'm not talking about Shakespeare--I am speaking of myself. I did study Latin--four years in high school--and Greek--two semesters in college--but except for the fact we've been attending the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite of the Latin Liturgy the past few years, of course, I've forgotten it all.

This article reminded me of one of parts of translating Latin in high school I enjoyed: the Greek names for all the figures of speech like metonymy and synecdoche, litotes, polysyndeton and asyndeton. We would play with these figures of speech in English and try to write sentences using them to great rhetorical effect--trying to emulate Cicero (see image) in our periodic sentences. Yes, I was a wild child in high school (meiosis!).

One of my favorite uses of polysyndeton, by the way, is this prayer by Blessed John Henry Newman:

May He support us all the day long, till the shades lengthen and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever of life is over, and our work is done. Then in His mercy may He give us a safe lodging, and a holy rest and peace at the last.
Amen.

Columnist Bryan A. Garner has this article in the May issue on the ABA Journal:

Have you ever wondered what it’s called when a speaker adds a superfluous syllable to the middle of a word, as by pronouncing athlete as /ATH-uh-leet/ instead of /ATH-leet/? Or Realtor as /REEL-uh-tur/ instead of /REEL-tur/? There’s a word for it: epenthesis (/ee-PEN-thuh-sis/). Just knowing this term could have a preventive (not “preventative”) effect on mispronunciations.

There are nuanced layers of technicality within the astonishingly large English vocabulary. For vowel epenthesis, as with the schwa sound that some speakers insert in athlete and Realtor, the more precise term (I kid you not) is anaptyxis. And what’s the word for the vowel itself—the one that gets thrust into the middle of a word so needlessly? We had to go to Sanskrit to import a word into English, and now it finds itself nicely ensconced in unabridged English dictionaries: the svarabhakti vowel (/swahr-uh-BAHK-tee/).

Like the Molière character who didn’t realize he’d been speaking prose all his life, you may not have known that you’ve been hearing (perhaps even pronouncing) svarabhakti vowels all your life: mostly the epenthetical schwa.

Garner also cites Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric which I have posted on before:

If you delight in technical terms and are an aficionado of classical rhetoric, check out Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric. The dean at the University of Texas law school, Ward Farnsworth is perhaps the world’s leading expert on classical figures of speech.

Farnsworth doesn’t shrink from using big words and teaching about them. The very first word in his very first chapter I’ve long considered my all-time favorite since discovering it at age 16: epizeuxis (/ep-i-ZOOK-sis/), meaning emphatic repetition of a word. Think of Hamlet’s answer to Polonius, who asked what he was reading: “Words, words, words.”

And what if it’s a phrase that gets repeated, not a single word? That’s called epimone (/ee-PIM-uh-nee/). Think of perhaps the greatest 19th-century lawyer, Daniel Webster, speaking on the Senate floor in 1833: “The cause, sir, the cause! Let the world know the cause!” Or, if you prefer, the character Tattoo in the 1970s series Fantasy Island: “The plane! The plane!”

This website lists many of the classical tropes with some examples.

UPDATE: I watched just a few minutes of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on C-SPAN this Sunday. I was so impressed by his humble gratitude to those at Holy Cross, as he said, who knew more than he did and told him what he needed to learn, including Latin. He regretted that he did not study more Greek and some other subjects. This contrasts so much of what I hear so often from those taking classes in those degree completion programs (the ones with short duration courses with adjunct instructors and once a week meetings). What they usually say is "give me my A and leave me alone! Next class, please!".