A Chorus of Grammars: The Correspondence of George Hickes and His Collaborators on the "Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium"

George Hickes (1642-1715) was an Oxford-educated churchman, philologist, and antiquary who became perhaps the most powerful influence on Old English scholarship during the important period of its growth in the late seventeenth century. His crowning achievement was the vast compilation of grammars, texts, numismatic and philological studies, and manuscript catalogues published between 1703 and 1705 as the 'Thesaurus linguarum septentrionalium' (the revised and enlarged second edition of his 'Institutiones grammaticae Anglo-Saxonicae', published in 1689). Although Hickes was its prime author, responsible for its conception and final shape, the 'Thesaurus' was actually the result of an extraordinary collaborative effort on the part of a whole team of English and Scandinavian scholars - among them John Chamberlayne, Arthur Charlett, William Elstob, William Nicolson, Johann Peringskiöld, Olof Rudbeck, Jonas Salan, Thomas Tanner, Edward Thwaites, and, especially, Humfrey Wanley - brought together and guided throughout by Hickes. Their collaboration and the work it produced were all the more extraordinary for being carried on during a time of religious and political ferment in England, while Hickes himself was outlawed and directing operations from a series of different addresses and under a variety of pseudonyms. This volume presents 319 letters, most of them edited here for the first time, written between 1694 and 1715 by Hickes and various of his collaborators to one another, as they engaged in the process of collecting, cataloguing, transcribing, and interpreting the ancient texts and printing, publicizing, and distributing the final product. The edition is preceded by a long introduction that provides a biographical study of Hickes, places him and his collaborators in their historical, ecclesiastical, and intellectual context, chronicles the compilation and publication of the 'Thesaurus', and discusses the importance of the work. The volume is supplemented by a substantial bibliography, several appendices, and a biographical register of the main characters mentioned in the introduction and letters. It is a volume that will be of use not only to those concerned with Germanic philology and the history of Old English scholarship, but also to students of English ecclesiastical history and to all readers interested in the antiquarian movements of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.