William Bathe

Who was William Bathe?

William Bathe was a Jesuit priest, born in Dublin, Ireland.

He was a native of Drumcondra Castle, County Dublin, and his brother John Bathe was an Irish representative at the Royal Court in Madrid in the early 1600s.

Bathe was trained as a musicologist and linguist at Oxford, where he wrote A Brief Introduction to the Art of Music, published in 1584.

He taught languages in Europe, and wrote one of the world's first language teaching texts, Janua Linguarum, a juxtaposition of words and pictorial representations of them. It proved so popular that it was translated into nine languages within twenty years. The Czech educator Comenius based his work Janua linguarum reserata on this text.

For a period of time he was Director of the Irish College in Salamanca.