In Europe, back in the 1600s, there was a sort of a culture clash between the medieval values of stability and unchanging devotion to what everybody (who cared) “knowing everything there was to know,” and the new ideas from what we now call Renaissance humanists to recover and understand the culture, knowledge, and arts of ancient Greece and Rome. This was before the idea, which came later, that maybe there was actually new learning to be had.
There was a famous-at-the-time tome by Charles Perrault, a French author and scholar, called Parallels between Ancients and Moderns (well, his title was in French, but you get the idea), and the debate between the traditionalists and the humanists (who were the “modernists” of the day) was labeled the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns in a pun that’s still shared. Like I just did. Anyway, I told you that in order to tell you this:
On August 13, 1666, William Wotton was born in Suffolk, England. He was a child prodigy and taught himself to read before the age of six. And not just read — by six years old he could read English, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. He was lucky to have been born to the Rev. Henry Wotton, the rector of a church, who had Bibles in those languages.
Little William went to school at Cambridge when he was 9 years old and graduated when he was 12. By then he could also read, write, and speak Arabic, Syriac, and Aramaic. He’d also learned logic, philosophy, math, geography, and history. He continued on to earn a Master’s degree and a doctorate, by which time he was the ripe old age of 20. He got a job as a curate (a sort of pastor, which was one of the few jobs available for the academically-oriented) and was elected into the Royal Society, which was still quite a new organization.
Wotton worked on various translations and books, and is primarily remembered nowadays for his Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning, which was all about… the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns! Which by now I bet you’ve heard of.
Wotton was a prolific writer of histories and biographies, but in his personal life he was evidently…well, someone who knew him said he was “a most excellent preacher but a drunken whoring soul.” He also had very expensive tastes, and renovated the little house that came with his rectory job into a 32-room mansion. He ended up deeply in debt, and for seven years lived in Wales under the name of William Edwards.
While he was in Wales, Wotton evidently reformed, went back to studying and writing, and learned Welsh. Not just contemporary Welsh; he created a bilingual edition of medieval Welsh laws, translating them into both modern Welsh and Latin. The work was published in 1730, three years after Wotton died of “dropsy,” which we would call edema. He left a long list of publications, but most of them dealt with subjects that were interesting to other scholars in the 1600s and 1700s, but are mostly of historical interest today. In the Quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, by the way. Wotton was firmly on the side of the moderns.
