Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T04:34:01.613Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Philemon Holland, Translator and Schoolmaster

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

Extract

In 1763 the Clarendon Press at Oxford issued a Greek Testament printed from a fount newly cut for them by John Baskerville of Birmingham. It was the beginning of a new era in Greek typography in England. For the crabbed and curly abbreviations which perpetuated in print the obscurities of manuscript, following the sixteenth-century type of Robert Estienne, were substituted clearly formed letters pleasant to see and easy to read. Some abbreviations there still were, for the basis was still a written hand of not a century later than Estienne, but they were not obscure. Estienne, printer to the King, Francis I, had taken as his model the letters drawn for him by the King's scribe, a Cretan, Angelos Vergetios: Baskerville borrowed from the school library of Coventry a manuscript written by an English schoolmaster, Euclid's Harmonics copied by Philemon Holland, and ‘partly formed his characters from it’.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1933

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)