Article contents
Sir William Jones, Biblical Orientalism and Indian Scholarship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 November 2008
Extract
For many students of late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century British intellectual and literary history, Sir William Jones (1746–94) has lately come to seem a figure of great significance for our understanding of the period. A notable if implicit claim for his importance is to be found in Jerome McGann's revisionist New Oxford Book of Romantic Period Verse (1993); A Hymn to Na'ra'yena (1785), Jones's translation from the Sanskrit, is symbolically placed as the anthology's first item. This essay will argue that Jones's Indian scholarship will be better understood in the light of its links with contemporary developments in biblical criticism.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996
References
1 For further discussion of Jones's place in McGann's anthology see Butler's, Marilyn review, London Review of Books (20 October 1994), pp. 33–4 (p. 34).Google Scholar
2 The Works of Sir William Jones, with a Life of the Author by Lord Teignmouth, 13 vols (London, 1807), III, 325.Google Scholar
3 The British Discovery of Hinduism in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Marshall, P. J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 35.Google Scholar
4 The Study of Language in England, 1780–1860 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 124.Google Scholar
5 Discourses Delivered at the Asiatick Society 1785–1792 (London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1993), p. vi.Google Scholar
6 Ibid., p. x.
7 Stromberg, R. N., Religious Liberalism in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Oxford University Press, 1954), pp. 26–7;Google ScholarHarrison, Peter, ‘Religion' and the Religions in the English Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 139–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
8 Sketches of the History of Man, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1774), I, 39–40.Google Scholar
9 Quoted in Mukherjee, S. N., Sir William Jones: A Study in Eighteenth-Century British Attitudes to India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), p. 119.Google Scholar
10 Works, III, 5.
11 The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East 1680–1880, translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 5.Google Scholar
12 The Spectator, ed. by Bond, Donald F., 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), III, 256 (no. 333, 22 03 1712).Google Scholar
13 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. by Halsband, Robert, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), I, 333.Google Scholar
14 Price, Richard, A Sermon, delivered to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters, at Hackney, On the 10th of February last, being the Day appointed for a General Fast. The Second edition. To which are added, Remarks on a Passage in the Bishop of London's Sermon on Ash-Wednesday, 1779 (London, 1779), p. 7.Google Scholar
15 Teignmouth, ‘Life of Sir William Jones’ in Works, I, 62–6.Google Scholar
16 Ibid., VI, 1.
17 See for example ibid., VI, 125, 182.
For the originality of Lowth's views on prophecy see Kugel, James L., The Idea of Biblical Poetry: Parallelism and Its History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 280–2.Google Scholar
18 Works, X, 363, 372–3.Google Scholar
19 Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews, transl. by Gregory, G., 2 vols (London, 1787), I, 113–14.Google Scholar
20 Ibid., I, 144–6. Lowth's myth of Ancient Israel may well be indebted to the neo-Harringtonian tradition in political theory; see Goldie, Mark, ‘The civil religion of James Harrington’, in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. by Pagden, Anthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 197–222 (p. 211).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
21 Works, X, 347.
22 Collins, Anthony, A Discourse on the Grounds and Reasons of the Christian Religion (London, 1724), p. 40;Google ScholarHarris, Victor, ‘Allegory to Analogy in the Interpretation of Scriptures’, PQ 45 (1966), 1–23 (p. 15).Google Scholar
23 Lectures, I, 247–9.
24 Wilkes MS, reproduced by Bredvold, Louis I. in The Contributions of John Wilkes to the Gazette Littéraire de l'Europe', Contributions in Modern Philology, 15 (1950), p. 15.Google Scholar
25 Works, IV, 230, 234.
26 Ibid., IV, 211.
27 Ibid., IV, 235.
28 See Vidyankar, Jai Dev, ‘Origin of Allegory in Sanskrit Literature’, in Recent Studies in Sanskrit and Indology, edited by Gupta Dharmendra, Kumar (Patiala: Ajanta, 1982), pp. 115–26 (pp. 115–17).Google Scholar
29 Works, IV, 222.
- 17
- Cited by