Sir John Marsham (1602-1685) and the History of Scholarship

This is the first major study of the English historian, antiquarian and lawyer Sir John Marsham (1602-85) and his intellectual world. It is principally concerned with the origins, development, and impact of his last, largest, and most elaborate book, the Chronicus canon Ægyptiacus Ebraicus Græcus et Disquisitiones. It offered a new model for the way ancient history was written. Like Newton’s Principia, or Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, it was one of the many books printed during this period which changed the way Europeans thought about their world. Because of this, the Chronicus canon defies easy classification, and has little in common with earlier treatises on technical chronology. Marsham’s approach to the historiography of the ancient world must be taken on its own terms, and in its own context, as a product of his immediate circumstances, personal affiliations, and political and cultural identity. Most of the subjects of recent monographs in intellectual history have led well-documented lives, have been the subjects of earlier biographies which modern scholars use as secret guides, or have voluminous collections of correspondence, often in print. There is nothing like this for the life of John Marsham, who worked outside of the institutional settings that have preserved most of the material for the history of scholarship. This has required new approaches to his archive, with special emphasis placed on three manuscript resources. First, his Pandectae Nostri Temporis, which combines a family chronicle with a history of Britain, offers a guide to Marsham’s early biography, education and legal career, and the complex, tangible world in which he lived. This will be the foundation of the first section, which combines biography, cultural history, and a new, integrated approach to intellectual culture at Oxford in the 1620s. In turn, the origins and development of Marsham’s scholarship will emerge from the social and economic disruptions of the Civil War and will be portrayed through a close examination of his manuscript chronological tables as working compositional tools, which is based upon research from my MPhil thesis (Chapters V-VII). My study of the tables traces the increasing centrality of three principal chronological resources, which are the Parian Chronicle, Manetho’s Egyptian dynastic lists, and Ptolemy’s canon of kings, which, as I will argue, inaugurated a new style in historical chronology. This can be traced from the Restoration-era publication of the Chronicus canon, to a distinct social and intellectual circle in the 1650s. Finally, I have reconstructed Marsham’s personal library from a folio codex preserved in Maidstone, Kent, the Catalogus Librorum Bibliothecæ Marshamianæ. This allows a detailed history of Marsham’s reading techniques and scholarship, which will be traced from the earlier, narrative, biographical sections to the later, analytic, guide through to the Chronicus canon. Multiple books read together at the same time, and coordinated with the manuscripts on Marsham’s desk, were instrumental to his innovative historical synthesis, which made a sincere and committed effort to place the raw chronological materials of Scaliger’s Thesaurus Temporum, and his notes on language, religion, and culture, into tangible history. In a similar way, this study attempts to reconnect his book with the life Marsham lived, and the world he inhabited.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2021

Author dc:creator

• Mosley, Derrick

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Mandelbrote, Scott

• Antiquarianism
• Historical Chronology
• History of scholarship

Licence

• https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.87846

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/340409