Abstract
On 11 March 1677 John Covel, then English chaplain in Constantinople,1 sent a long letter to the Cambridge scholar Henry More, in which he provided him with extensive information about the Karaites.2 Apparently, More had asked the English Ambassador for information on this point. In his turn, the Ambassador had passed on More’s request to his chaplain, then already a scholar of some renown. It remains obscure why More was interested in the Karaites; perhaps (as was the case with quite a number of seventeenth-century Protestants) because the Karaites, who in their own way adhered to the ‘sola Scriptum’ principle, were considered to be more ‘pure’ than the other Jews.3 However this may be, Covel was certainly the right man to answer the letter of his former Cambridge teacher. Born in 1638, Covel had studied at Christ’s College (the college of Henry More) from 1654–1661. After that, he was elected to a fellowship of his college and took Holy Orders. In 1670 he went out as a chaplain to the English Ambassador in Constantinople, where he stayed till 1677. Via Italy, where he stayed for some time, he returned to England in 1679.
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Notes
For Covel, see DNB s.v.; J.T. Bent (ed.), Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (Works Hakluyt Society 87), London 1893, XXVI–XXXIII (pp. 101–287 contain extracts from Covel’s Diary).
J. Covel to H. More, Constantinople, 11 March 1677, Christ’s College Cambridge, MS 21, f.28; published with the permission of the Master and Fellows of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Covel’s draught notes for this letter are in the British Library, Additional 22.911, f.373: ‘Some account of the Jewes Karaims and Rabanaims’ (undated). That More addressed his request to the Ambassador, Sir John Finch, can be explained from the fact that John Finch, a brother of More’s friend Lady Conway, had been a pupil of More; see M.H. Nicolson, Conway letters, London 1930, esp. p. 44.
For this, see J. van den Berg, ‘Proto-Protestants? The image of the Karaites as a mirror of the Catholic-Protestant controversy in the seventeenth century’ (this work, pp. 33–49).
British Library, Additional 22.910, f.164–167.
Quoted in: J. Covel, Some Account of the Present Greek Church, Cambridge 1722, The Preface’.
Cf. the remarks in his Diary on the Jews in Adrianople: Bent, Early Voyages, 189 f.
S. Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge 1968, 293.
A somewhat coloured version of the whole affair in: Hester W. Chapman, Mary II, Queen of England, London 1953, pp. 121 ff.; she describes Covel as a poor intriguer, elderly, gossiping and ill-bred.
A copy of the letter (decoded) in British Library, Additional 15.892, f.264; quoted in S.W. Singer (ed.), The Correspondence of Henry Hyde, Earl of Clarendon and of his brother Laurence Hyde, Earl of Rochester I, London 1828, 165 (with some discrepancies in spelling).
Singer, The Correspondence of Henry and Laurence Hyde, 163 f.; cf. Hans Willem Bentinck’s letter to Henry Sidney, 22 October 1685, in R.W. Blencowe (ed.), Diary of the Times of Charles the Second by the Honourable Henry Sidney II, London 1843, s; here, Covel is mentioned as ‘le malicieux espion de la maison, qui a rapporté beaucoup de choses forgées pour nuire’.
British Library, Additional 22.910, f.373–376.
In particular, he was considered an authority on the Greek Church; cf. Archbishop Thomas Tenison’s letters to Covel, written on the occasion of the visit of the Metropolitan of Philippopolis to Cambridge in 1701: G. Williams, The Orthodox Church of the East in the Eighteenth Century, Oxford and Cambridge 1868, LIX.
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© 1988 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht
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Van Den Berg, J. (1988). John Covel’s Letter on the Karaites (1677). In: Van Den Berg, J., Van Der Wall, E.G.E. (eds) Jewish-Christian Relations in the Seventeenth Century. Archives Internationales D’Histoire des Idées / International Archives of the History of Ideas, vol 119. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2756-8_7
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