Peter le Page Renouf

Who was Peter le Page Renouf?

Sir Peter le Page Renouf, Egyptologist, was born in Guernsey.

He was educated at Elizabeth College there, and proceeded to Oxford, which, upon his becoming a Roman Catholic, under the influence of John Henry Newman, he quit without taking a degree as he was unable to subscribe to the Thirty Nine Articles as required in those days.

Like many other Anglican converts, he proved a thorn in the side of the Ultramontane party in the Roman Church, though he did not, like some of them, return to the communion of the Church of England. He opposed the promulgation of the dogma of Papal Infallibility, and his treatise upon the condemnation of Pope Honorius for heresy by the council of Constantinople in AD 680 was placed upon the index of prohibited books.

He had been from 1855 to 1864 professor of ancient history and Oriental languages in the Roman Catholic university which Newman vainly strove to establish in Dublin, and during part of this period edited the Atlantis and the Home and Foreign Review, which latter had to be discontinued on account of the hostility of the Roman Catholic hierarchy.

In 1864 he was appointed a government inspector of schools, which position he held until 1886, when his growing celebrity as an Egyptologist procured him the appointment of Keeper of Oriental Antiquities in the British Museum, in succession to Dr Samuel Birch. His understudy was E. A. Wallis Budge with whom he had an acrimonious relationship. He didn't want Budge to succeed him as keeper, through a perceived lack of social skills and doubts about his abilities, objecting strongly to Budge being appointed as his successor and preferring Edouard Naville instead. Renouf was elected in 1887 president of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, to whose Proceedings he was a constant contributor.