EVENING LECTURE: 'Doing Justice to the Memory of Benjamin Kennicott, 1718-1783’ - Martin Calder

Friends, Patrons, University Men, and Well-Connected Women: Doing Justice to the Memory of Benjamin Kennicott, 1718-1783

Martin Calder

Part of our 2025-26 series of evening lectures, responding to the theme of  "A New Leaf"

The Devon & Exeter Institution holds in its collection a volume of poems, in hand-written fair copy, by the eminent eighteenth-century Hebrew scholar Dr Benjamin Kennicott, born at Totnes in 1718. The existence of the volume presents a literary-historical puzzle. Only one of the poems, ‘On the Recovery of the Hon. Mrs. Eliz. Courtenay,’ was ever published. The poems are not in Kennicott’s own hand and are undated. Another hand-written volume of the same poems is held in the archives of Princeton University Library in the United States, copied out by John Cooke, a fellow native of Totnes and a contemporary of Kennicott at Oxford. While the source of the poems remains a mystery, they offer a window onto the life, mind and connections of Benjamin Kennicott, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, Canon of Christ Church, Keeper of the Radcliffe Library and Rector of Culham.

His great scholarly enterprise was to produce a collation of all the known manuscripts of the Bible in Hebrew, for which he created and maintained an international network of patrons and scholars in the British Isles, across Europe, and beyond, extending the project to Egypt, China and North America, working together for more than a decade. Scholars collating manuscripts in Rome, Florence, Turin, Milan, Paris, Berlin, Helmstadt, Hamburg, Parma and Madrid were sent common instructions in Latin. It was one of the most extensive collaborative academic research projects of the age and showed global thinking. Kennicott documented progress in annual reports that seem to anticipate interim reports submitted to modern research grant awarding bodies. Kennicott was invited to present the finished work to George III. He is mostly remembered now for the illuminated ‘Kennicott Bible’, the lavish Hebrew manuscript produced at Corunna in Spain in 1476, purchased by the University through Kennicott, and now the jewel in the crown of Jewish manuscripts in the Bodleian. The Bible is an expression of devotional art and cross-cultural collaboration, mixing Jewish, Christian and Islamic elements. In the personal sphere, his well-connected and sociable wife Anne had a circle of friends that encompassed many of the cultural luminaries of her time, including Eva-Marie Garrick, Hannah More and William Wilberforce. Sixteen years after his death, The European Magazine published an article on Kennicott’s life and work, concluding: ‘We cannot […] refuse ourselves the hope that some friend will do justice to his memory, while it is yet in his power, by drawing his character in the manner it deserves.’ That was written in 1799. I cannot be that friend who will draw his character in the manner it deserves, when all I have to go on are the leavings of History; but I do have an interest in seeing his memory restored, since Benjamin Kennicott was my first cousin, eight generations removed.

Martin Calder is an independent researcher, with specialisms in 18th-century literature and ideas and garden history, which I used to teach in the French Department at the University of Bristol. I have a number of publications. The present study arises in part from recent research into my family history. I gave a short paper on Kennicott’s wife Anne at the British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies annual conference at Pembroke College, Oxford in January.

Join us for a drinks reception from 6pm. The lecture will start at 6.30pm and afterwards there'll be time for questions.