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Sir Thomas Bodley (2 March 1545 – 28 January 1613) was an English diplomat and scholar, founder of the modern Bodleian Library, Oxford. ==Biography== Thomas Bodley was born at Exeter in the second-to-last year of the reign of Henry VIII. His father, John Bodley, was a Protestant merchant who went to live abroad rather than stay in England under the Roman Catholic government of Mary. The family including Thomas' younger brother Josias Bodley (and the ten-year-old Nicholas Hilliard, who had been attached to the household by his parents, friends of Bodley) sought refuge in the Duchy of Cleves, staying in the town of Wesel, then in the imperial free city of Frankfurt, before eventually settling in Geneva, home of Calvinism and a great centre of the Reformation. There, Thomas had the opportunity to study at John Calvin's newly erected Academy. He attended lectures in Divinity given by Theodore Beza and Calvin himself and attended services led by John Knox. He learned Greek from Mattheus Beroaldus and Hebrew from Antoine Chevallier. The study of these languages remained enduring passions for Bodley throughout his life. After Mary's death in 1558 and the accession of Queen Elizabeth, the family returned to England, and Bodley entered Magdalen College, Oxford, to study under Lawrence Humphrey. In 1563 he took his B.A. degree, and was shortly thereafter, in 1564, admitted as a Fellow of Merton College. He began lecturing at Merton and in April 1565 was formally appointed as the college's first Lecturer in Ancient Greek, a post that was subsequently made permanent. He served in many college offices: in 1569 he was elected as one of the University's junior proctors and for some time after was deputy Public Orator. Leaving Oxford in 1576 with a license to study abroad and a grant from his college of £6. 13s. 4d., Bodley toured France, Italy, and the Holy Roman Empire, visiting scholars and adding French, Italian, and Spanish to his repertoire of languages. It as been suggested that during his tour in Italy he was in initiated in Forlì in some form of Pythagorean initiation in a platonic academy.〔Thomas, D. I., "A Modern Pythagorean", ''Gnosis'', 59, Summer 1997: "It as been suggested that some form of Pythagorean initiation survived through the centuries, first in the Byzantine Empire and later, as the Ottoman Turks advanced, in Italy, where the Greek intellectual elite took refuge. During the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir Thomas Bodeley is said to have been initiated in the northern Italian city of Forlì in a platonic academy, established in imitation of an older Society which had existed before the fall of the Grecian Empire in the towns of Constantinople and Thessalonica."〕 On his return to England Bodley was appointed a gentleman-usher to Queen Elizabeth and in 1584 entered the House of Commons as one of the members for Portsmouth. In 1585 he was entrusted with a mission to form a league between Frederick II of Denmark and certain German princes to assist Henry of Navarre, the future Henry IV of France. He was next dispatched on a secret mission to France. In 1586 he was elected to represent St Germans in parliament, and in 1588 he was sent to the Hague as minister, a post which demanded great diplomatic skill, for it was in the Netherlands that the power of Spain had to be fought. The essential difficulties of his mission were complicated by the intrigues of the queen's ministers at home, and Bodley repeatedly asked to be recalled. He was finally permitted to return to England in 1596, but finding his hoped-for preferment of becoming Secretary of State obstructed by the competing interests of Burghley and Essex, he retired from public life and returned to Oxford. Bodley had married Ann Ball in 1587, a widow of considerable fortune and the daughter of a Mr Carew of Bristol, when he had had to resign his fellowship at Merton, but he still had many friends there and in the spring of 1598 the college gave a dinner in his honour. G. H. Martin speculates that the inspiration to restore the old Duke Humphrey's library may have come from the renewal of Bodley's contact with Henry Savile and other former colleagues at this dinner. Once his proposal was accepted, he devoted the rest of his life to the library project. He was knighted on 18 April 1604. He died in 1613 and was buried in the choir of Merton College chapel. His monument of black and white marble, complete with pillars representing books and allegories of learning, stands on the western wall of the north transept of the chapel. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thomas Bodley」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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