Richard Holdsworth (orHouldsworth, Oldsworth) (1590, in Newcastle upon Tyne – 22 August 1649) was an English academic theologian, and Master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge from 1637 to 1643. Although Emmanuel was a Puritan stronghold, Holdsworth, who in religion agreed,[1] in the political sphere resisted Parliamentary interference, and showed Royalist sympathies.
Richard Holdsworth was the son of Richard Holdswourth, Vicar of Newcastle-on-Tyne, and baptised at St Nicholas, Newcastle on 20 December 1590. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge as a scholar in 1607, graduated B.A. in 1610, and became a Fellow in 1613.[2]
He was in 1629 the first Gresham College divinity lecturer appointed from the Puritan camp;[5] he held the position until 1637. A London reputation[6] brought him the presidency of Sion College in 1639. He became Archdeacon of Huntingdon.
He was appointed Dean of Worcester by the King, in 1647.[9] It is also claimed that the King wanted to appoint him Bishop of Bristol; this is mentioned by Thomas Fuller.[10] Given the wartime conditions, these appointments could have been taken up only with difficulty.
He is said to have been a modernizer in education, in the line of Francis Bacon and Comenius,[11] and a proponent of unadorned prose.[12] His students at St. John's included Simonds D'Ewes, whom he instructed by means of a system of note-taking.[13]
He provided John Wallis with an introduction to William Oughtred, steering Wallis towards mathematics (Wallis graduated BA at Emmanuel as Holdsworth arrived).
He was also a bibliophile who amassed a private collection of 10,000 books, bequeathed to the Cambridge University Library.[14] It arrived there in 1664, after a long legal limbo caused by testamentary conditions. It is said to have been the largest private collection of the time in England.[15]
The Directions for a Student in the Universite[16] has been attributed to him. The attribution is questioned by Hill as not certain.[17] This work is a scheme of a four-year classical education.[18]
^Reproduced in Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual Development of John Milton, vol. 2, The Cambridge University Period, 1625-32 (Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1961), Appendix II, 623-64.
John A. Trentman, "The Authorship of Directions for a Student in the Universitie," Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society, vol. 7, no. 2, 1978, pp. 170–183.
Brent L. Nelson, "The Social Context of Rhetoric, 1500-1660," The Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 281: British Rhetoricians and Logicians, 1500-1660, Second Series, Detroit: Gale, 2003, pp. 355–377.
