William Bedwell

Who was William Bedwell?

William Bedwell was an English priest and scholar, specializing in Arabic and other "oriental" languages as well as in mathematics.

Bedwell was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. He served the Anglican Church as Rector of St Ethelburga's Bishopsgate and Vicar of All Hallows, Tottenham from 1607. He was the author of the first local history of the area, A Briefe Description of the Towne of Tottenham.

He published in quarto an edition of the Epistles of John in Arabic, with a Latin version, printed by the Raphelengius family at Antwerp in 1612. He also left many Arabic manuscripts to the University of Cambridge and a font of type for printing them. According to McClure, it was Bedwell, and not Thomas Van Erpen, who was the first to revive the study of Arabic literature in Europe. His uncompleted preparations for an Arabic Lexicon were eclipsed by the publication of a similar work by Jacobus Golius in 1653. Bedwell's manuscripts were loaned, following his death, to the University of Cambridge, where they were consulted by Edmund Castell during the creation of the monumental Lexicon Heptaglotton.