Edmund Chilmead

Edmund Chilmead (1610 – 19 February 1654) was an English writer and translator, who produced both scholarly works and hack-writing. He is also known as a musician.^[1]

Life

He was born in 1610 at Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire. ^[2] He studied at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated M.A. in 1631. He became a chaplain (canon) of Christ Church, Oxford, in 1632, from where he was ejected in 1648.

Chilmead died on 19 February 1653-4 in London, and was buried in the churchyard of St Botolph's Aldersgate. ^[2]

Works

He produced the editio princeps of the Chronographia of Malalas.^[3] He translated:

• Robert Hues's Tractatus de globis (A Learned Treatise of Globes, 1639)
• the De Monarchia Hispanica of Tommaso Campanella^[4] (Discourse Touching the Spanish Monarchy, 1654)
• Jacques Ferrand on 'erotic melancholy',^[5]
• the Riti Ebraici of Leon of Modena (The history of the rites, customes, and manner of life, of the present Jews, throughout the world,' 1650)
• the Curiositez of Jacques Gaffarel,^[6] (Unheard-of Curiosities Concerning the Talismanical Sculpture of the Persians, 1650)

and other works. He produced a catalogue of the Greek manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. He was a clerical defender of astrology,^[7] in his translation of Gaffarel.

Anthony Wood described him as "a choice mathematician, a noted critic, and one that understood several tongues, especially the Greek, very well" (Wood, Ath. Oxon., 3.350–51)

Notes

1. ↑ HOASM: Edmund Chilmead
2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 Gibson 1887.
3. ↑  "John Malalas". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
4. ↑  "Tommaso Campanella". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. 
5. ↑ PDF, in French, p. 1; published in 1640 as Erotomania or a Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptomes, Prognosticks, and Cure of Love, or Erotique Melancholy.
6. ↑ Bibliographie Astrologique : Catalogue Alphabétique des Textes Astrologiques Français (C.A.T.A.F.) - par Jacques Halbronn
7. ↑ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 451 of Penguin edition.

References

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Gibson, John Westby (1887). "Chilmead, Edmund". In Stephen, Leslie. Dictionary of National Biography 10. London: Smith, Elder & Co. 
• Concise Dictionary of National Biography
• Mordechai Feingold, Penelope M. Gouk, An early critique of Bacon's Sylva Sylvarum: Edmund Chilmead's treatise on sound, Annals of Science, Volume 40, Issue 2 March 1983, pp. 139–157