Archive: Cultural Transformation in Samuel Whiting's Harvard Oration of 1649

Abstract: Samuel Whiting (1597–1679), a graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (BA, 1616; MA, 1620) and pastor at Lynn, Massachusetts, from 1636 to his death, delivered the Harvard commencement oration in 1649, and in his address he quotes three Arabic proverbs from Kitab al-amthal sev proverbiorvm Arabicorvm centuriæ duæ (first published in Leiden in 1614), a book of two hundred Arabic proverbs, printed in Arabic with Latin translations and commentary on the proverbs by the foremost European Arabist of the period, Thomas Erpenius (Thomas van Erpe) and the great humanist scholar Joseph Scaliger. A comparison of Kitab al-amthal with the text of the proverbs as presented by Whiting shows that he extensively edited the Leiden text. These textual changes reveal how and why an early seventeenth-century European imprint with multiple interpretive layers and rich with philological commentary was transformed into a very different text in response to the cultural dynamics of mid-seventeenth-century New England.