Robert Lowth ( ; 27 November 1710 – 3 November 1787) was a Bishop of the
Church of England
The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britain ...
,
Oxford Professor of Poetry
The Professor of Poetry is an academic appointment at the University of Oxford. The chair was created in 1708 by an endowment from the estate of Henry Birkhead. The professorship carries an obligation to lecture, but is in effect a part-time po ...
and the author of one of the most influential
textbooks of English grammar.
Life
Lowth was born in
Hampshire
Hampshire (, ; abbreviated to Hants) is a ceremonial county, ceremonial and non-metropolitan county, non-metropolitan counties of England, county in western South East England on the coast of the English Channel. Home to two major English citi ...
,
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
, Great Britain, the son of Dr
William Lowth
William Lowth D.D. (1660–1732) was an English clergyman, known as a Biblical commentator.
Life
He was the son of William Lowth, an apothecary, who was burnt out in the Great Fire of London, and was born in the parish of St Martin, Ludgate on 3 ...
, a clergyman and Biblical commentator. He was educated at
Winchester College
Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of the ...
and became a scholar of
New College, Oxford
New College is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1379 by William of Wykeham in conjunction with Winchester College as its feeder school, New College is one of the oldest colleges at th ...
in 1729. Lowth obtained his
BA in 1733 and his
Master of Arts
A Master of Arts ( la, Magister Artium or ''Artium Magister''; abbreviated MA, M.A., AM, or A.M.) is the holder of a master's degree awarded by universities in many countries. The degree is usually contrasted with that of Master of Science. Tho ...
degree in 1737. In 1735, while still at Oxford, Lowth took orders in the
Anglican Church
Anglicanism is a Western Christian tradition that has developed from the practices, liturgy, and identity of the Church of England following the English Reformation, in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Europe. It is one of the ...
and was appointed vicar of
Ovington, Hampshire
Itchen Stoke and Ovington () is an English civil parish consisting of two adjoining villages in Hampshire, England, west of Alresford town centre in the valley of the River Itchen, north-east of Winchester, and south-east of Itchen Abbas.
Itc ...
, a position he retained until 1741, when he was appointed
Oxford Professor of Poetry
The Professor of Poetry is an academic appointment at the University of Oxford. The chair was created in 1708 by an endowment from the estate of Henry Birkhead. The professorship carries an obligation to lecture, but is in effect a part-time po ...
.
Bishop Lowth made a translation of the
Book of Isaiah
The Book of Isaiah ( he, ספר ישעיהו, ) is the first of the Latter Prophets in the Hebrew Bible and the first of the Major Prophets in the Christian Old Testament. It is identified by a superscription as the words of the 8th-century BC ...
, first published in 1778. The
Seventh-day Adventist
The Seventh-day Adventist Church is an Adventism, Adventist Protestantism, Protestant Christian denomination which is distinguished by its observance of Saturday, the Names of the days of the week#Numbered days of the week, seventh day of the ...
theologian
E. J. Waggoner said in 1899 that Lowth's translation of Isaiah was "without doubt, as a whole, the best English translation of the prophecy of
Isaiah
Isaiah ( or ; he, , ''Yəšaʿyāhū'', "God is Salvation"), also known as Isaias, was the 8th-century BC Israelite prophet after whom the Book of Isaiah is named.
Within the text of the Book of Isaiah, Isaiah himself is referred to as "the ...
".
In 1750 he was appointed
Archdeacon of Winchester
The Archdeacon of Winchester is a senior ecclesiastical officer within the Diocese of Winchester.
History
Originally created as the archdeaconry of Basingstoke on 26 July 1927 within the Diocese of Winchester and from the old Archdeacon of Bourne ...
. In 1752 he resigned the professorship at Oxford and married Mary Jackson. Shortly afterwards, in 1753, Lowth was appointed
rector
Rector (Latin for the member of a vessel's crew who steers) may refer to:
Style or title
*Rector (ecclesiastical), a cleric who functions as an administrative leader in some Christian denominations
*Rector (academia), a senior official in an edu ...
of
East Woodhay
East Woodhay is a village and civil parish in Hampshire, England. The village is approximately south-west of Newbury in Berkshire. At the 2011 census the parish had a population of 2,914.
The parish contains a number of villages and hamlets, ...
. In 1754 he was awarded a
Doctorate in Divinity
A Doctor of Divinity (D.D. or DDiv; la, Doctor Divinitatis) is the holder of an advanced academic degree in divinity.
In the United Kingdom, it is considered an advanced doctoral degree. At the University of Oxford, doctors of divinity are ra ...
by Oxford University, for his treatise on
Hebrew poetry entitled ''Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum'' (''On the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews''). This derives from a series of lectures and was originally published in Latin. An English translation was published by
George Gregory in 1787 as ''"Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews"''. This and subsequent editions include the life of Bishop Lowth as a preface. There was a further edition issued in 1815. This was republished in North America in 1829 with some additional notes. However, apart from those notes, the 1829 edition is less useful to a modern reader. This is because the editor of that edition chose to revert to citing many of the scriptural passages that Lowth uses as examples, and some of the annotations by
Michaelis) and others, in Latin.
Lowth was appointed a fellow of the
Royal Societies of London and
Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
in 1765. He was consecrated
bishop of St David's
The Bishop of St Davids is the Ordinary (officer), ordinary of the Church in Wales Diocese of St Davids.
The succession of bishops stretches back to Saint David who in the 6th century established his seat in what is today the St Davids, city of ...
in Wales in 1766; however, before the end of the year he was translated to the English
see of Oxford
The Diocese of Oxford is a Church of England diocese that forms part of the Province of Canterbury. The diocese is led by the Bishop of Oxford (currently Steven Croft), and the bishop's seat is at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. It contains m ...
. He remained Bishop of Oxford until 1777 when he was appointed
Bishop of London
A bishop is an ordained clergy member who is entrusted with a position of authority and oversight in a religious institution.
In Christianity, bishops are normally responsible for the governance of dioceses. The role or office of bishop is ca ...
as well as
dean of the chapel royal
The Dean of the Chapel Royal, in any kingdom, can be the title of an official charged with oversight of that kingdom's chapel royal, the ecclesiastical establishment which is part of the royal household and ministers to it.
England
In England, ...
and
privy councillor
A privy council is a body that advises the head of state of a state, typically, but not always, in the context of a monarchic government. The word "privy" means "private" or "secret"; thus, a privy council was originally a committee of the mon ...
. In 1783 he was offered the chance to become
Archbishop of Canterbury
The archbishop of Canterbury is the senior bishop and a principal leader of the Church of England, the ceremonial head of the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diocesan bishop of the Diocese of Canterbury. The current archbishop is Justi ...
, but declined due to failing health.
Lowth was good friends with the
Scottish Enlightenment
The Scottish Enlightenment ( sco, Scots Enlichtenment, gd, Soillseachadh na h-Alba) was the period in 18th- and early-19th-century Scotland characterised by an outpouring of intellectual and scientific accomplishments. By the eighteenth century ...
figure
David Hume
David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...
, as noted by the prominent Scottish bookseller
Andrew Millar
Andrew Millar (17058 June 1768) was a British publisher in the eighteenth century.
Biography
In 1725, as a twenty-year-old bookseller apprentice, he evaded Edinburgh city printing restrictions by going to Leith to print, which was considered be ...
. Millar commented that "Hume and he are very great, tho' one orthodox and ye other Hedretox".
Lowth wrote a Latin epitaph, ''Cara, Vale'' ("Dear one, farewell!") on the death of his daughter Maria. Much admired in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it was set to music by the English composer
John Wall Callcott
John Wall Callcott (20 November 1766 – 15 May 1821) was an eminent English composer.
Callcott was born in Kensington, London. He was a pupil of Haydn, and is celebrated mainly for his glee compositions and catches. In the best known of his ...
.
[From ''New England Magazine'', 183]
Cara vale (John Wall Callcott)
accessed 20 February 2018
Lowth died in 1787, and was buried in the churchyard of
All Saints Church, Fulham
All Saints' Church is the ancient parish church of Fulham, in the County of Middlesex, pre-dating the Reformation. It is now an Anglican church in Fulham, London, sited close to the River Thames, beside the northern approach to Putney Bridge. ...
.
Old Testament scholarship
Lowth seems to have been the first modern Bible scholar to notice or draw attention to the poetic structure of the
Psalms
The Book of Psalms ( or ; he, תְּהִלִּים, , lit. "praises"), also known as the Psalms, or the Psalter, is the first book of the ("Writings"), the third section of the Tanakh, and a book of the Old Testament. The title is derived ...
and much of the prophetic literature of the
Old Testament
The Old Testament (often abbreviated OT) is the first division of the Christian biblical canon, which is based primarily upon the 24 books of the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, a collection of ancient religious Hebrew writings by the Israelites. The ...
. In Lecture 19 he sets out the classic statement of
parallelism, which remains the most fundamental category for understanding Hebrew poetry. He identifies three forms of parallelism, the synonymous, antithetic and synthetic (i.e., balance only in the manner of expression without either
synonym
A synonym is a word, morpheme, or phrase that means exactly or nearly the same as another word, morpheme, or phrase in a given language. For example, in the English language, the words ''begin'', ''start'', ''commence'', and ''initiate'' are all ...
y or
antithesis
Antithesis (Greek for "setting opposite", from "against" and "placing") is used in writing or speech either as a proposition that contrasts with or reverses some previously mentioned proposition, or when two opposites are introduced together f ...
). This idea has been influential in Old Testament Studies to the present day.
Work on English grammar
Lowth is also remembered for his publication in 1762 of ''A Short Introduction to English Grammar''. Prompted by the absence of simple and
pedagogical
Pedagogy (), most commonly understood as the approach to teaching, is the theory and practice of learning, and how this process influences, and is influenced by, the social, political and Developmental psychology, psychological development of le ...
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
textbooks in his day, Lowth set out to remedy the situation. Lowth's grammar is the source of many of the prescriptive
shibboleth
A shibboleth (; hbo, , šībbōleṯ) is any custom or tradition, usually a choice of phrasing or even a single word, that distinguishes one group of people from another. Shibboleths have been used throughout history in many societies as passwor ...
s that are studied in schools, and established him as the first of a long line of usage commentators who judge the English language in addition to describing it. An example of both is one of his footnotes: "''Whose'' is by some authors made the
possessive case
A possessive or ktetic form (abbreviated or ; from la, possessivus; grc, κτητικός, translit=ktētikós) is a word or grammatical construction used to indicate a relationship of possession in a broad sense. This can include strict owne ...
of ''which'', and applied to things as well as persons; I think, improperly."
His most famous contribution to the study of grammar may have been his tentative suggestion that sentences ending with a
preposition
Prepositions and postpositions, together called adpositions (or broadly, in traditional grammar, simply prepositions), are a class of words used to express spatial or temporal relations (''in'', ''under'', ''towards'', ''before'') or mark various ...
—such as "what did you ask for?"—are inappropriate in formal writing. (This is known as
preposition stranding Historically, grammarians have described preposition stranding or p-stranding as the syntactic construction in which a so-called ''stranded'', ''hanging'' or ''dangling'' preposition occurs somewhere other than immediately before its corresponding o ...
.) In what may have been intentional
self-reference
Self-reference occurs in natural or formal languages when a sentence, idea or formula refers to itself. The reference may be expressed either directly—through some intermediate sentence or formula—or by means of some encoding. In philoso ...
, Lowth used that very construction in discussing it. "This is an Idiom which our language is strongly inclined to; it prevails in common conversation, and suits very well with the familiar style in writing; but the placing of the Preposition before the Relative is more graceful, as well as more perspicuous; and agrees much better with the solemn and elevated Style."
2 Others had previously expressed this opinion; the earliest known is
John Dryden
''
John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the per ...
in 1672.
Lowth's method included criticising "false syntax"; his examples of false syntax were culled from Shakespeare, the
King James Bible
The King James Version (KJV), also the King James Bible (KJB) and the Authorized Version, is an Bible translations into English, English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England, which was commissioned in 1604 and publis ...
,
John Donne
John Donne ( ; 22 January 1572 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet, scholar, soldier and secretary born into a recusant family, who later became a clergy, cleric in the Church of England. Under royal patronage, he was made Dean of St Paul's ...
,
John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem '' Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and political ...
,
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poe ...
,
Alexander Pope
Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 O.S. – 30 May 1744) was an English poet, translator, and satirist of the Enlightenment era who is considered one of the most prominent English poets of the early 18th century. An exponent of Augustan literature, ...
, and other famous writers. His understanding of grammar, like that of all linguists of his period, was influenced by the study of
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
, though he was aware that this was problematic and condemned "forcing the English under the rules of a foreign Language"
1. Thus Lowth condemns
Addison
Addison may refer to:
Places Canada
* Addison, Ontario
United States
*Addison, Alabama
*Addison, Illinois
*Addison Street in Chicago, Illinois which runs by Wrigley Field
* Addison, Kentucky
*Addison, Maine
*Addison, Michigan
*Addison, New York
...
's sentence "Who should I meet the other night, but my old friend?" on the grounds that the thing acted upon should be in the "Objective Case" (corresponding, as he says earlier, to an
oblique case
In grammar, an oblique (abbreviated ; from la, casus obliquus) or objective case (abbr. ) is a nominal case other than the nominative case, and sometimes, the vocative.
A noun or pronoun in the oblique case can generally appear in any role exc ...
in Latin), rather than taking this example and others as evidence from noted writers that "who" can refer to direct objects.
Lowth's dogmatic assertions appealed to those who wished for certainty and authority in their language. Lowth's grammar was not written for children; however, within a decade after it appeared, versions of it adapted for the use of schools had appeared, and Lowth's stylistic opinions acquired the force of law in the schoolroom. The textbook remained in standard usage throughout educational institutions until the early 20th century.
Literary critic
Lowth has been regarded as the first imagery critic of Shakespeare's plays and highlighted the importance of the imagery in the interpretation of motives and actions of characters and dramatic movement of the plot and narrative structure.
3
See also
*
Linguistic prescription
Linguistic prescription, or prescriptive grammar, is the establishment of rules defining preferred usage of language. These rules may address such linguistic aspects as spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, and semantics. Sometimes infor ...
*
Lindley Murray
Lindley Murray (7 June 1745 – 16 February 1826) was an American Quaker lawyer, writer and grammarian, best known for his English-language grammar books used in schools in England and the United States.
Early life
Lindley Murray was born ...
Notes
*
1''A Short Introduction to English Grammar'', p. 107, condemning
Richard Bentley
Richard Bentley FRS (; 27 January 1662 – 14 July 1742) was an English classical scholar, critic, and theologian. Considered the "founder of historical philology", Bentley is widely credited with establishing the English school of Hellen ...
's "corrections" of some of
Milton
Milton may refer to:
Names
* Milton (surname), a surname (and list of people with that surname)
** John Milton (1608–1674), English poet
* Milton (given name)
** Milton Friedman (1912–2006), Nobel laureate in Economics, author of '' Free t ...
's constructions.
*
2''A Short Introduction to English Grammar''., pp. 127–128.
*
3"Notes & Queries (OUP)" in 1983 Vol. 30, pp. 55–58 by Sailendra Kumar Sen, ''Robert Lowth :the first imagery critic of Shakespeare''.
Citations
Further reading
*
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
Ingrid Marijke Tieken-Boon van Ostade (born 1954, The Hague) is a professor emeritus of English Sociohistorical Linguistics at Leiden University's Centre for Linguistics. She has researched widely in the area of English socio-historical linguistic ...
, "The anonymity of Lowth's grammar". In: ''Ontheven aan de tijd. Linguïstisch-historische studies voor Jan Noordegraaf bij zijn zestigste verjaardag''. Ed. by Lo van Driel & Theo Janssen. Amsterdam: Stichting Neerlandistiek VU, Amsterdam & Münster: Nodus Publikationen 2008, 125–134.
* Tieken-Boon van Ostade, I. M. (2010), ''The Bishop's Grammar: Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism''. Oxford: OUP
External links
Robert Lowthat th
Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive (ECPA)1815 Edition of ''"Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews"''*
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...
.]
*
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lowth, Robert
1710 births
1787 deaths
Bishops of London
Deans of the Chapel Royal
Bishops of Oxford
Bishops of St Davids
Doctors of Divinity
Archdeacons of Winchester (ancient)
Fellows of the Royal Society
Alumni of New College, Oxford
Linguists of English
Writers from Winchester
People educated at Winchester College
18th-century Church of England bishops
Oxford Professors of Poetry
Burials at All Saints Church, Fulham
18th-century Welsh Anglican bishops
18th-century biblical scholars
18th-century Anglican theologians