ABSTRACT
UNTIL the last years of the seventeenth century, writings upon the history of the Arabs had been, in England as in Europe generally, academic in their purpose and nature. The study of Arab history was not in that period a specialized discipline; oriental studies had developed as ancillaries to Old Testament studies and ecclesiastical history and polemics. Few scholars were primarily interested in Arabic; still fewer made any significant investigations of Arab history. In comparison with his contemporaries, Pococke made an outstanding contribution to historical knowledge, and in his writings he displays the temperament of an historian-a notable achievement as will appear by contrast with some of his successors. Nevertheless Pococke's work was limited both in its scope and its impact. He produced no organized body of history: his publications consisted of the text and translation of two late Christian Arabic chronicles, and the erudite notes, not confined to history but ranging over the whole field of Arab antiquities and Muslim religion, which he appended to his Specimen historiae Arabum (Oxford, 1650). Translations and notes were alike in Latin, addressed to an academic audience rather than to the educated public at large. During the last twenty-eight years of Pococke's long life (1604-91), he was preoccupied with Hebrew and the writing of commentaries on the minor prophets. He made no further contributions to the study of Muslim history.l
Humphrey Prideaux Humphrey Prideaux,2 born in 1648 in Cornwall, was a pupil at Westminster School under Dr. Busby. This was of some importance, since Busby was keenly interested in contemporary orientalism, and added Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic to the normal classical curriculum of his school. 3 In 1668 Prideaux went to Christ Church, Oxford, where in 1679 he became a lecturer in Hebrew. He left Oxford in 1686, when James II appointed a Roman Catholic as dean of Christ Church. The remainder of his life was spent in East Anglia. He had already been appointed a canon of Norwich in 1681; from 1688 to 1694 he was archdeacon of Suffolk, and from 1702 until his death in 1724 he
was dean of Norwich. When Pococke died in 1691, Prideaux was offered the chair of Hebrew at Oxford, which he declined, and in 1697 he published his most famous work, The true nature of imposturefully display'd in the life of Mahomet. With a discourse annex'd for the vindication of Christianity from this charge. Offered to the consideration of the Deists of the present age. The book won an immediate success; there were two editions in 1697 and others subsequently, while a French translation was published in 1698.
