Humphrey Hody Anthony Alcock This biographical sketch was written by Samuel Jebb as a preface (pp. vi-xxxix) to his edition of Hody's two volume de graecis illustribus linguae graecae literarumque humaniorum instauraroribus (1742), a study of scholars from southern Italy and Constantinople who taught Greek in northern Italy and thus provided northern Europeans with direct access to the learning of the classical and post-classical world. Jebb himself was a physician interested, as he says in his foreword, in the medical works that had been preserved in Greek and were studied in Italy by physicians such as Thomas Linacre (1460-1520), who went to Florence to study Greek with Angelo Poliziano and himself later taught, among others, Erasmus and Thomas More in addition to translating much of Galen into English. Hody is known among students of theological and ecclesiastical matters as the first scholar to take seriously the doubts 1 about the genuineness of the Letter of Aristeas, which claimed that the Egyptian king Ptolemy II in the mid-3rd cent. BC commissioned a Greek version of the Hebrew scriptures for his new library at Alexandria. Doubts about this document were expressed for the first time by Luis Vives in his commentary on Augustine de civitate Dei in 1522. Hody published his study in 1684 when he was 25. I have not read Hody's work on the Aristeas letter, so I cannot comment on the accuracy of Jebb's summary of it. Apart from his scholarly writing Hody engaged in the political and ecclesiastical affairs of his time, and a certain amount of space is devoted by Jebb to a major controversy of the day, the background of which is as follows: in 1685 James II, who had converted to Catholicism in 1668, ascended the English throne and was generally in favour of abolishing laws that discriminated against Catholics; in 1687 he published a document called the Declaration of Indulgence, also known as Liberty of Conscience, the intention of which was to abolish anti-Catholic legislation, but seven bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, refused to endorse it. Hody became involved in the matter of whether civil authority was justified in deposing Bishops. Appeal is made to antiquity in the form of the schism caused by the question of whether it was possible and, if so, under what conditions to re-admit those who had lapsed during the persecution in 250 AD. William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1651 lost his fellowship of a Cambridge College for refusing to take the Oath of Engagement to support the new Commonwealth of Oliver Cromwell after the execution of Charles I. Over thirty years later he, with six other bishops, was arrested and tried, unsuccessfully, for refusing to endorse a document issued by James II, the last Catholic monarch of England: the Declaration of Indulgence. In 1690 he was finally removed from his see for refusing to swear allegiance to the Dutch William of Orange, who had virtually invited to 1 Dissertatio contra historiam Aristeae (1689) 1