Logo DBNL
De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 61-63 (1983-1985)

De Gulden Passer. Jaargang 61-63

(1983-1985)– [tijdschrift] Gulden Passer, De–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The victims of progress: the Raphelengius Arabic type and Bedwell's Arabic lexicon*
by prof. dr. Alastair Hamilton
(Urbino)

By 1595 the elder Frans Raphelengius had had Arabic characters designed for his press in Leiden, and in that year he published his Specimen Characterum Arabicorum, illustrating the two different type-faces in his possession - the Maghribi one, decidedly unelegant and apparently incomplete, and the Naschi one1. It is the mysterious fate of the latter type that I shall discuss in this essay.

My starting point is the summer of 1612. The elder Frans Raphelengius had been dead for fifteen years; his firm was now in the hands of his youngest sons, Frans and Joost2; and the Naschi type, first used in 1595, had been employed comparatively seldom, for the odd Arabic word in such books as Scaliger's Opus de emendatione temporum of 1598, Dousa's De itinere suo Constantinopolitano of 1599, Scaliger's édition of Manilius's Astronomicon and Grotius's Syntagma Arateorum, both of 1600, and Clusius's Exoticarum Libri decem of 1605. The Officina Plantiniana in Leiden was by no means unique in possessing Arabic type3 - rare though this was, it could be



illustratie
Ill. 1: LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, Ms. BPL, fos. 93v. - 94r. The entries in Bedwell's album amicorum by Frans Raphelengius Jr. and Joost Raphelengius. The information about Frans Raphelengius, added by a later owner of Bedwell's album, is incorrect and refers to Frans's father.


found in Rome, for example, in Paris, and in Breslau, where Peter Kirsten had had his own characters cut at his personal expense shortly before 1608 - but the owners of the Leiden firm had decided to put a part of their equipment up for sale, and, although they had started to set their father's Arabic dictionary in 16114, this included the Arabic material. Such was the position in the middle of 1612, when William Bedwell, the greatest Arabic scholar in England, resolved to pay a visit to Leiden.

Bedwell was fifty years old and, despite his interest in Oriental languages, in topography and in the art of navigation, he had never before travelled outside England. There were three main reasons for his trip to Leiden: he wished to consult the Arabic manuscripts which Scaliger had left to the university, and above all the Arabic word list which the great

scholar had compiled; he wanted to publish the Arabic version of the Johannine Epistles which he had copied from a codex in Oxford; and he hoped to purchase, at the expense of his patron Lancelot Andrewes, then bishop of Ely, Arabic type with which to print the immense Arabic-Latin lexicon on which he had been working ever since he first encountered Andrewes at Cambridge in the 1580s.

Bedwell had been seeking a printer of Arabic for many years. He had completed a specimen of his dictionary in 15965, and he had been trying to attract patrons to subsidise the printing of it since 1603 at the latest6. In 1606 he told his friend Isaac Casaubon that he would gladly turn to the Medici press in Rome for the publication of the Arabic version of the New Testament he had discovered in Oxford7. But not until 1612 did he actually find the patronage necessary for the fulfilment of his plans. He and Andrewes had toyed with the idea of applying to Guillaume Lebé in Paris with a view to buying his Arabic type, but Lebé was not ready to sell8. Leiden remained, and here Bedwell arrived in August 1612 to be welcomed by the young man to whom he had taught the rudiments of Arabic three and a half years earlier - the future professor of Arabic at the university, Thomas Erpenius9.

Erpenius asked the Raphelengius brothers about their plans for their Arabic material and, on 24 August, Bedwell wrote to Casaubon in London10:

‘Raphelengii dictionarium Arabicum post mensem unum aut alterum publicum fiet. Qui hunc librum excudit filius illius docti viri fuit. Interrogatus autem ab Erpenio an velit Grammaticam suam et Proverbia illa Arabica excudere, respondit se nolle, neque alios omnium ullos: Sed postquam paternum illud opus, quod sub praelo est, fuerit abso[lutum] se statuisse Matrices, Ponsones et reliqua illa instrumenta, divendere alii[s], Hoc valde nobis placuit. placebit, scio, R.D. Episcopo (sc. Lancelot Andrewes). Sed hoc ego in mandatis nu[nc ha]beo. Agas quaeso cum illo hac de re. Statui enim tum diu hic manere, dum resp[onsum] habuero.’11


illustratie
Ill. 2: LEIDEN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY. Ms. Pap. 15. William Bedwell's letter to Frans Raphelengius Jr. Bedwell confuses him with his dead brother Christoffel.


Bedwell had thus reached a provisional agreement to buy some part, if not all, of the Raphelengius material, but the completion of the transaction depended on Lancelot Andrewes's answer and on the money the bishop was ready to provide. About Andrewes's rôle in the purchase, however, we hear no more. All we know is that, by the time he left Leiden, Bedwell was regarded as the rightful owner at least of the characters. But there was no question of Bed well's entering into possession of the material immediately, because the Arabic type was in greater demand than it had ever been since 1600. At the time of Bedwell's letter to Casaubon the Raphelengius brothers were still preparing their father's Arabic dictionary, which was to contain additions by Erpenius; they were still setting, or had just set, the Arabic version of the Epistle to Titus edited by the current lecturer in Arabic at Leiden university, Jan Theunisz (Johannes Antonides); and, within a few weeks of his letter, Bedwell himself, after collating it with a codex in Scaliger's collection12, submited for publication the Arabic version of the Johannine Epistles.

Bedwell remained in Leiden until the end of September. The many signatures he collected in his album amicorum13 - and these included the signatures of Frans and Joost Raphelengius (illust. 1) - testify to the distinction of the scholars with whom he consorted, while the letters which men like Meursius, Heinsius and Grotius wrote to Casaubon prove how well Bedwell was liked by his Dutch acquaintances. Early in October, after staying in The Hague and Middelburg, Bedwell set sail for England, leaving behind the Arabic material he had arranged to buy from the Raphelengius firm. Not long after his return he received a letter from Erpenius, begging him to authorise the Raphelengius brothers to retain the type in order to complete Raphelengius's lexicon and to set Erpenius's own Arabic grammar. Bedwell agreed, and wrote to Frans Raphelengius (whom he confused with his dead brother Christoffel)14 on 18 November (illust. 2):

‘Petiit a me per literas D. Erpenius ut ill[ius] causa tibi per aliquot septimanas usum typorum Arabicorum conced[erem]. Scito, me nihil posse huic homini denegare. Lexicon tuum Arab[icum] cum Epistolis D. Joannis frustra diu expectavimus. Forte una e[t ea] dem opera cupit D.V. simul etiam grammaticam Erpenii dare. [Hoc] pergratum erit’15

Bedwell had given his permission to Raphelengius to keep the material for a few more weeks. But the weeks turned into months, and never before had the Leiden press produced so many books with its Arabic type as in those months - Bedwell's own Johannine Epistles (illus. 3), the elder Raphelengius's lexicon, Erpenius's Arabic grammar and Erpenius's edition of the Arabic version of the Passion from the Gospel of St. Matthew16. In this last work, for what would appear to be the first time since the Specimen Characterum Arabicorum of 1595, the press also made a limited use of the Maghribi type-face. Then, towards the end of 1613, the Raphelengius brothers decided to honour their agreement. Before dispatching the material to Bedwell, however, they again used their punches and matrices in order to have a new set of characters cast which would enable them to continue to print in Arabic17. And continue to print they



illustratie
Ill. 3: William Bedwell's Arabic edition of the Johannine Epistles - D. Johannis Apostoli et Euangelistae Epistolae Catholicae Omnes, Arabicae ante aliquot secula factae... (Leiden 1612) pp. 46-7.


did, for it was with the newly cast characters that they composed the collection of Arabic proverbs originally planned by Scaliger and Casaubon, and completed by Erpenius.

The material - what it consisted of is a point to which I shall be returning later - does not appear to have reached Bedwell until the spring of 1614. And, at about the same time, the Raphelengius firm was struck by one of the worst disasters that could be fall printers of Arabic: their one compositor capable of setting Arabic type died. Erpenius was in despair. On 26 May he wrote to Casaubon18:

‘...nec typos Arabicos sufficientes, nec Typographum hic nunc habeamus. Compositor enim noster obiit; et D. Raphelengius characteres suos Arabicos fere omnes iam istuc transmisit ad D. Bedwellum...’

We thus have a picture of the Raphelengius press without a compositor, ‘nearly all’ its Arabic characters sold to Bedwell - a press, in short, no longer in a position to print Arabic. And indeed, the Raphelengius brothers never used their Arabic type again. Erpenius himself, aware of

the impossibility of having any further Arabic works published by them had his own Arabic type made and founded his own printing press in 161519. His type, inspired by one of the smaller type-faces of the Medici press in Rome20, was far more economical and practicable than the Raphelengius characters which had been inspired by the largest Medici typeface, and, as time went by, it appeared that Erpenius, rather than having suffered from the inability of his first publishers to produce any further works in Arabic, had in fact benefited from the situation.

But what became of the Raphelengius characters, recast in 1613 and used on a single occasion - so large, so clumsy and, if compared to those made for Erpenius, so obsolete? What became of all the Arabic material which had not been sent to Bedwell in England? Shortly before the characters were recast, in June 1613, Frans Raphelengius assured his cousin Balthasar Moretus in Antwerp that he wanted to keep as much of his equipment as possible in the family21:

‘De conditie van coop van poinçoenen ende matricen accepteren wij, ende zijn blij dat die in 't geslacht blijven sullen. Is 't dat wij niewe Arabiqs doen steken, sullen die niet quijt maeken of sullen u.l. die voor presentatie doen: of verkoopen, sullen een afslag voor ons en u.l. bedingen.’

We next hear of the Arabic material from the Raphelengius brothers in 1619. On 15 January Frans informed Balthasar Moretus that he was prepared to sell ‘the Arabic letters’ to him ‘cheaply’22, and on 18 October Joost added that the material was, to all intents and purposes, brand new and had only been used to print the Arabic proverbs23. In February 1620 Frans provided further details about the casting of the new letters, offering Balthasar his Arabic and his Double Median Hebrew characters for

the price of 120 guilders24. Moretus agreed to the purchase and, in March 1621, Frans Raphelengius asked him whether they should continue to be stored in Leiden or how and when they should be transferred to Antwerp25, This seems to be the last reference to the Raphelengius Arabic type in the surviving correspondence between the cousins in Leiden and Antwerp. lf the material was indeed conveyed to the Southern Netherlands - and there is no reason to think that it was not - it has since disappeared from the Plantin Museum. Not only did Balthasar Moretus never use it, but he appears to have found it unsatisfactory, for, injune 1624, he wrote to the Raphelengius brothers announcing his intention of reprinting the Biblia Regia and of replacing the Aramaic paraphrase by an Arabic one. Could his cousins advise him, he asked, about having new Arabic punches made or acquiring new matrices?26

If Balthasar Moretus was dissatisfied with his purchase, William Bedwell was even more dissatisfied when he got round to examining the material sent to him from Leiden. In 1638, six years after Bedwell's death, John Greaves, the Orientalist and mathematician who had been such a close friend of Bedwell's in the last years of his life, wrote from Gresham College to Peter Turner at Oxford. Oxford university was itself acquiring Arabic type27 and Greaves warned Turner that ‘Mr Bedwell when he bought Raphelengius his Arabicke press, found some characters defective, which he desired to have perfited, and made suitable to the rest, but was never able to effect it.’28 How hard Bedwell had tried to ‘perfit’ his Arabic characters we will never know, Certainly he never used them, but the reason would seem to be as much connected with the history of his Arabic lexicon as with any deficiency in the characters.

By the time Bedwell died in 1632 the lexicon, which he had originally hoped to have published some thirty years earlier, had grown into a work so vast that it defeated all those functional purposes to which he put his shorter works, his translations of texts on mathematics and other subjects intended for the use of travellers, merchants, navigators, engineers and students. In contrast to those handy short-cuts to learning which Bedwell excelled in producing, so cheap, so simple, so eminently pocketable, his Arabic lexicon ran into nine manuscript volumes (quite apart from specimens and other subsidiary glossaries) - nine volumes of learned comparisons with Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic which, if published, would never have been cheap, simple or pocketable. And what would have been the point in printing Bedwell's work after the appearance of Raphelengius's shorter and more convenient dictionary in 1613?

Bedwell's lexicon, to which he added until his death, was indeed a monument of scholarship; it was indeed of inestimable value to students of Semitic languages, some of whom were duly to make their way to the Cambridge library in order to consult it; but it could not hope to compete on a market which could offer the dictionaries of Raphelengius and, after 1632, of Antonio Giggei. Before his visit to Leiden in 1612 Bedwell had been

sure that his would be the first major Arabic lexicon to be printed29, an enduring honour to its sponsors and patrons. The publication of Raphelengius's dictionary put paid to that hope, for Raphelengius's was a dictionary attractive to, and largely intended for, the merchant and the traveller. It followed the accepted Arabic alphabetical order while Bedwell (and Scaliger) had followed the Hebrew one, and it made Bedwell's lexicon seem almost as impracticable as the Arabic characters he had purchased in order to print it.

Nevertheless, undeterred by the poor quality of the characters, Bedwell appears to have hoped to have his dictionary printed until the last. At his death he left both the lexicon and the type to the university of Cambridge30, and his son-in-law John Clarke, writing in the name of Bedwell's widow and executrix, insistently urged Abraham Wheelock and Barnabas Oley at the university31 ‘to acquainte the Heades what hee hath given namelye his Lexicon with the types to print it and if they will not undertake to print it that they would accept of a booke when it is printed and let them have it that will print it.’32 Neither ‘the Heades’ nor anyone else ever did have Bedwell's lexicon printed, however. The Cambridge university library kept - and still keeps33 - the dictionary well, and, shortly after Bedwell's death, ‘the Heades’ allowed Edmund Castell to consult it and put it to the best possible use in his Lexicon Heptaglotton. What the university does not seem to have kept, on the other hand, is the Arabic type, and this leaves us with the problem of what exactly Bedwell got from the Raphelengius brothers and what was sold to Balthasar Moretus in Antwerp.

The evidence is inconclusive. Punches and matrices are specifically mentioned in Bedwell's letter to Casaubon from Leiden, written in August 1612, and in Frans Raphelengius's letter to Balthasar Moretus of 21 June 1613, though in the latter case it is not clear whether Raphelengius meant the Arabic punches and matrices in particular or those of other type-faces. Both letters, moreover, were written before a sale had been actually concluded. Otherwise we only hear of ‘characters’: Erpenius refers to ‘characteres’ in his letter to Casaubon; the Raphelengius brothers refer to

‘letteren’ in their letters to Moretus: John Clarke refers to ‘the types’ in his letters to Wheelock and Oley. Bedwell, we know for sure, had the old Raphelengius type, while Moretus obtained the newly cast characters which had only been used for Erpenius's edition of the Arabic proverbs. The disappearance of the letters could mean that they had been melted down and the lead used for the casting of other type, but this possibility leaves us none the wiser as to the last proprietor of the punches and matrices. What may, of course, have happened is that neither Lancelot Andrewes nor Balthasar Moretus were prepared to pay for more than the characters, and that the punches and matrices remained in the hands of the Raphelengius brothers.

Summary:
‘The victims of progress: the Raphelengius arabic type and Bedwell's Arabic lexicon’

The Arabic printing material of the Officina Plantiniana has disappeared. No trace can be found today of the Arabic type cast for Frans Raphelengius the Elder and first used in 1595, and there have hitherto been two theories about its fate. According to the first theory all the equipment made its way into the hands of the Arabist William Bedwell in England, and according to the second, the punches and matrices, at least, were sold by Frans Raphelengius the Elder's sons to Balthasar Moretus in Antwerp. The present article examines the available evidence in the Plantin-Moretus archives and elsewhere and shows that, while William Bedwell definitely acquired the original Arabic characters and Balthasar Moretus obtained a freshly cast set of characters, neither Bedwell nor Moretus seems to have received the punches and matrices.


Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs