Laurence (or Lawrence) Nowell (c. 1515 â€" c. 1571) was an English antiquarian, cartographer and pioneering scholar of Anglo-Saxon language and literature.
Life
Nowell attended King's School in Westminster from the early 1530s until 1549 before attending Christ Church, Oxford, where he received an M.A. in 1552. By 1562, he was living in the London house of his patron, Sir William Cecil, where he collected and transcribed Anglo-Saxon documents and compiled the first Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, the Vocabularium Saxonicum. During this time he became the friend and mentor of William Lambarde, another early scholar of Anglo-Saxon. In 1563, Nowell came into possession of the only extant manuscript of Beowulf. The manuscript is bound in what is still known as the Nowell Codex (Cotton Vitellius A. xv). He also studied the Exeter Book, annotating folios 9r and 10r amongst others.
In 1568 Lambarde, with Nowell's encouragement, published a collection of Anglo-Saxon laws, Archaionomia, which was printed by John Day. In the introduction he acknowledges Nowell's contribution. This publication included a woodcut map depicting the seven kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England, which is thought to be the first map of any sort ("Lambardes map") to have been designed, printed and published in England, and which is very likely to have been the work of Laurence Nowell.
Nowell devoted much effort in the 1560s to a large-scale atlas of Anglo-Saxon Britain, though he never completed the work. For Cecil, he made the first accurate cartographic survey of the East coast of Ireland, as well as a small, accurate pocket-sized map of Britain, which Cecil always carried with him.
In 1563, Nowell was made the tutor of Cecil's ward, Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. Nowell visited the Continent to study in 1568, and probably died there between 1570 and 1572. His books and manuscripts passed into the possession of William Lambarde.
Identification
Two 16th-century English cousins, one an antiquarian and the other a churchman, were named Laurence Nowell. Their biographies were confused from 17th century. Both William Dugdale and Anthony Wood made the mistake, and it persisted through the Dictionary of National Biography and into the twentieth century. In the 1970s, however, Retha Warnicke's analysis of a 1571 court case made it clear that there were two different Laurence Nowells, and their biographies have since been disentangled.
References
- Grant, Raymond (1996). Laurence Nowell, William Lambarde and the Laws of the Anglo-Saxons. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
- Hill, David (2004). "Laurence Nowell, Cartographer, Linguist, Archivist and Spy, and his Anglo-Saxon Atlas of 1563." Paper read before the Society of Antiquaries of London, February 12, 2004.
- McConica, James, ed. (1986). The History of the University of Oxford, Vol. III: The Collegiate University. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
- Warnicke, Retha (1974). "Note on a court of requests case of 1571." English Language Notes, xi, pp. 250â€"256.
- R. Flower, Laurence Nowell and the Discovery of England in Tudor Times, Proceedings of the British Academy 21 (1935) 47-73. A discussion of Nowell-Lambarde books and manuscripts.