Jacob Bryant
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Jacob Bryant (1715 - 1804) was a British scholar and mythographer.[1]
He was educated at Eton College and and the University of Cambridge. He wrote learnedly, but paradoxically, on mythological and Homeric subjects.
His chief works were A New System or Analysis of Ancient Mythology[2](1774-76, and later editions), Observations on the Plain of Troy (1795), and Dissertation concerning the Wars of Troy (1796). In the last two he endeavoured to show that the existence of Troy and the Greek expedition were fabulous. Though so sceptical on these points he was an implicit believer in the authenticity of the Rowley authorship of Thomas Chatterton's fabrications.
He also wrote on theological subjects.
[edit] References
- This article incorporates public domain text from: Cousin, John William (1910). A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London, J.M. Dent & sons; New York, E.P. Dutton.
[edit] Notes
- ^ S. Foster Damon, A Blake Dictionary (1965), article on Bryant, says the outstanding figure among the mythagogoues who flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
- ^ Foster: Opinionated and peppery, unhampered by modern standards of scholarship, and indulging in a fantastic philology, Bryant was of the Age of Reason in that he sought to reduce all fables to common sense.
