Abraham Wheelocke

Who was Abraham Wheelocke?

Abraham Wheelocke was an English linguist. He was the first Adams Professor of Arabic at the University of Cambridge, from around 1632. According to Robert Irwin he regarded it as part of his academic duty to discourage students from taking up the subject. Thomas Hyde was one of his pupils.

Wheelocke was librarian of the "Public Library", and was also Reader in Anglo-Saxon. He produced the editio princeps of the Old English version of Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. In the same work he published an important edition—and the first in England—of Bede's Ecclesiastical History in its original Latin text opposite the Old English version, along with Anglo-Saxon laws. Many of the notes in this edition consist of the Old English homilies of Aelfric of Eynsham, which Wheelocke translated himself into Latin.

He graduated MA from Trinity College, Cambridge in 1618, and became Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge in 1619.

Quatuor evangeliorum domini nostri Jesu Christi versio Persica Syriacam & Arabicam suavissimè redolens was a trilingual version of the Four Gospels, published in the same year as the London Polyglot, to which he also contributed.