Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson, c. 1569-1613: The Life and Letters of a Renaissance Scholar

Richard ‘Dutch’ Thomson (d. 1613), best known today as a Bible translator and one of the earliest English Arminians, was admired in his own day for his learning. This book provides the first biography of Thomson. It maps his connections with his contemporaries, reconstructs his reading, and edits his surviving correspondence, some seventy-eight letters. Thomson moved among the greatest scholars of his day, and was good friends with Joseph Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon. He travelled in Italy, Germany, and the Low Countries, became a member of five universities, and worked with manuscripts in the libraries in England, Florence, Geneva, Heidelberg and Leiden. Modern scholarship, working within national boundaries, has tended to see only a part of the whole picture.