Richard Holdsworth
Richard Holdsworth (or Houldsworth, Oldsworth) (1590, in
Life
Richard Holdsworth was the son of Richard Holdswourth, Vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and baptised at
He was chaplain to
He was in 1629 the first Gresham College divinity lecturer appointed from the Puritan camp;[5] he held the position until 1637. A London reputation[6] brought him the presidency of Sion College in 1639. He became Archdeacon of Huntingdon.
He was a member of the
He was appointed Dean of Worcester by the King, in 1647.[9] It is also claimed that the King wanted to appoint him Bishop of Bristol; this is mentioned by Thomas Fuller.[10] Given the wartime conditions, these appointments could have been taken up only with difficulty.
Educational views
He is said to have been a modernizer in education, in the line of
He provided John Wallis with an introduction to William Oughtred, steering Wallis towards mathematics (Wallis graduated BA at Emmanuel as Holdsworth arrived).
He was also a bibliophile who amassed a private collection of 10,000 books, bequeathed to the Cambridge University Library.[14] It arrived there in 1664, after a long legal limbo caused by testamentary conditions. It is said to have been the largest private collection of the time in England.[15]
The Directions for a Student in the Universite[16] has been attributed to him. The attribution is questioned by Hill as not certain.[17] This work is a scheme of a four-year classical education.[18]
Notes
- Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 5, p. 56.
- ^ "Houldsworth, Richard (HLDT607R)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 215.
- ^ Concise Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 56.
- ^ The most celebrated preacher of Caroline LondonPDF
- ^ A List of the Members of the Westminster Assembly Archived 2008-11-08 at the Wayback Machine
- ^ Emmanuel College – About Emmanuel – College Masters
- ^ Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, p. 881.
- ^ The history of the University of Cambridge, and of Waltham abbey
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 100.
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 130.
- ^ PDF, note 118, p. 37.
- ^ PDF, p. 48.
- ^ Cambridge University Library: A historical sketch
- ^ Reproduced in Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, vol. 2, The Cambridge University Period, 1625-32 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1961), Appendix II, 623-64.
- ^ Intellectual Origins, pp. 307-9.
- ^ Mordecai Feingold, The Humanities p. 258, in The History of the University of Oxford IV, Seventeenth-Century Oxford (1997) edited by Nicholas Tyacke.
Further reading
- John A. Trentman, "The Authorship of Directions for a Student in the Universitie," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 7, no. 2, 1978, pp. 170–183.
- Brent L. Nelson, "The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500-1660," The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, Second Series, Detroit: Gale, 2003, pp. 355–377.