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Life
He was a scholar of St. John's College, Cambridge, in 1607. He graduated BA in 1610, and became a Fellow in 1613.[2]
He was chaplain to Sir Henry Hobart, 1st Baronet.[3] He was rector of St Peter-le-Poor, London in 1624.[4]
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. He became Archdeacon of Huntingdon.
He was a member of the Westminster Assembly[7]. He was Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, for two years, and Lady Margaret's Professor of Divinity, from 1643. He lost his position as Master of Emmanuel, because of expressed royalist opinions[8]; and was briefly imprisoned by Parliament.
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 Francis Bacon and Comenius.[11], and a proponent of unadorned prose[12]. His students at St. John's included Simonds D'Ewes, whom he instructed by means of a system of note-taking[13].
He provided John Wallis with an introduction to William Oughtred, sttering 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[17] as not certain. This work is a scheme of a four-year classical education[18].
Notes
- ^ Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1665), p. 5, p. 56.
- ^ Concise Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 215.
- ^ CDNB
- ^ Hill, Intellectual Origins, p. 56.
- ^ The most celebrated preacher of Caroline LondonPDF
- ^ A List of the Members of the Westminster Assembly
- ^ 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.
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