Anthony Higgin was

Dean of Ripon The Dean of Ripon is a senior cleric in the Church of England Diocese of Leeds. The dean is the head of the chapter at Ripon Cathedral – his predecessors were deans of the same church when it was previously the cathedral of the Diocese of Ripo ...

from 1608 until his death in 1624. Anthony Higgin was the son of Thomas Higgin of

Manchester Manchester () is a city in Greater Manchester, England. It had a population of 552,000 in 2021. It is bordered by the Cheshire Plain to the south, the Pennines to the north and east, and the neighbouring city of Salford to the west. The t ...

and his wife, Elisabeth Birch, and was probably born in the early 1550s. The family was clearly of a certain standing and his uncle was a Fellow of

Corpus Christi College, Cambridge Corpus Christi College (full name: "The College of Corpus Christi and the Blessed Virgin Mary", often shortened to "Corpus"), is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. From the late 14th century through to the early 19th century ...

. Anthony was educated at

St John's College, Cambridge St John's College is a Colleges of the University of Cambridge, constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the House of Tudor, Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corpo ...

, matriculating in 1568 and taking his BA in 1571-72. He remained in Cambridge after graduation, taking his M.A. in 1575 and BD in 1582. In 1583 he left Cambridge to become Rector of

Kirk Deighton Kirk Deighton is a village and civil parish in the Harrogate district of North Yorkshire, England. It is situated north-west of Wetherby, to which it is contiguous, and near the A1(M). The village was in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Wether ...

near

Wetherby Wetherby () is a market town and civil parish in the City of Leeds district, West Yorkshire, England, close to West Yorkshire county's border with North Yorkshire, and lies approximately from Leeds City Centre, from York and from Harrogat ...

. In 1605 he was appointed Master of St. Michael’s Hospital in the village of Well, north of Ripon, and in 1608 he was made Dean of Ripon. However it seems likely that he continued to reside in Well since it is there that he made his will in 1624, shortly before his death in that same year. By the time of his death, Higgin had assembled what was, by contemporary standards, a very substantial library. Around 1250 volumes survive as part of the

Ripon Cathedral The Cathedral Church of St Peter and St Wilfrid, commonly known as Ripon Cathedral, and until 1836 known as Ripon Minster, is a cathedral in Ripon, North Yorkshire, England. Founded as a monastery by monks of the Irish tradition in the 660s, i ...

Library, but the original figure was undoubtedly significantly higher, perhaps approaching 2,000. The majority were in Latin; theological writings and the classical authors constituted the majority although medicine, geography, astronomy and law were also represented. In his will, Higgin bequeathed his books to his cousin, William Cleburne (who was a prebend of Ripon from 1616) and to his nephew Mr. Lumley, but with the condition that when they died, they should give the books to Ripon Cathedral “for a library”. In the 1980s the Ripon Cathedral Library was acquired by the Library of the University of Leeds. One of the books owned by Higgin was a book on rhetoric by Lorenzo Gulielmo Traversagni, ''

Epitome margaritae eloquentiae The ''Epitome margaritae eloquentiae'' in Leeds Special Collections is the only surviving copy of a book on rhetoric written in Latin by Lorenzo Guglielmo Traversagni (c.1425-1503). The author also appears in catalogues as under the pen names La ...

.''

References

Alumni of St John's College, Cambridge Deans of Ripon 1624 deaths Clergy from Lancashire {{ChurchofEngland-dean-stub