A Brill Calendar: November 13

The Death of Erpenius

Few successors in the tradition founded in 1577 in Leyden by Willem Silvius - the first printer to the new Academy, contributed so much to its quickly growing reputation for fostering scholarship in non-western languages than Thomas Erpenius.

Born in the nearby city of Gorinchem on September 9, 1584 as Thomas van Erpe, this extraordinarily gifted and scholarly man became a Professor in Oriental Languages in 1613. In 1619 the teaching of Hebrew was added to his academic responsibilities. When the plague ran rampant in the city, taking his life away on November 13, 1624, he left to his widow and heirs a unique property: a privately owned printing press, installed in his home at the Breestraat, the ‘Typographia Erpeniana linguarum orientalium’.

It is seldom that the mutual understanding between an institute and one of its employees functioned so smoothly and fruitfully. And it is rarer still that a grammar-book, Erpenius’ ‘Grammatica Arabica’ (printed in 1613) has found such gainful employment in class-rooms and studies for some two further centuries. Lost texts originated in Classical Antiquity, but surviving in Arabic translation explain to a large extent this longevity, while Aramese and Hebrew were also indispensable for thorough study of the Old Testament in the Judeo-Christian world.

Small wonder then, that with such an exceptional legacy of exotic learning, Mrs Erpenius could do little else than sell the rich array of type, graphical symbols and apparatus to someone capable of doing something sensible with them. That someone was Isaac Elsevier, the 7th Printer to the Academy; the first Elsevier of a long and distinguished publishing dynasty, who purchased Erpenius’ linguistic resource one year later, in 1625. At a staggering price: 8000 Dutch guilders.