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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 April 2016
Two letters of biographical information about Inigo Jones and his disciple and relative by marriage John Webb, written by the latter’s son James, are to be found among the papers of Anthony Wood in the Bodleian Library. The letters arose from enquiries Wood made in 1681 and 1682 for his great collection of biographies of Oxford men, Athenae Oxonienses. For a time he supposed that Webb had studied at Oxford and so sought information about him and Jones. He included a brief biographical statement about Jones in the first edition of the Athenae in 1691–92, and additional information about Jones and Webb was added from his papers after his death in the second edition in 1721. He provided a note in 1692 stating that his source was letters by James Webb, but later scholars have apparently not realized that these letters are still in existence. They are printed here for the first time.
1 Since Wood discovered that neither man had any Oxford connection, he inserted the biographical statements digressively in the lives of Sir John Denham, II (1692), 302, and Walter Charlton, II (1721), 1113–14.
2 From Bodleian MS. Wood F. 45, folios 90–93.1 have retained the original spelling and punctuation of the letters except that I have followed modern practice in the distinction between u and v.
3 The Life and Times of Anthony Wood, ed. Clark, A., Oxford, II (1892), 258 Google Scholar.
4 Wood marked on the first letter: ‘To be brought in, in Dr Charlton’, and on the bottom of the second he transcribed the title-page of Webb’s book on the primitive language, An Historical Essay, second edition.
5 This error was eventually detected by Wood. In the first edition of the Athenae he gave the date, 21 July 1651, supplied by James Webb but in the second edition (11, 1113) he gave the correct statement that the date of the burial was 26 June 1652, probably from information from the register of St Benet Paul’s Wharf sent by his friend John Aubrey, who refers to his research on the subject in unpublished letters.
6 One of the manuscripts mentioned is a translation of Giovanni Tarcagnota’s Delle Historie del Mondo, which one may conjecture John Webb probably made from a copy acquired by Jones during his Italian travels: the work was printed in Venice in several editions in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. James Webb’s emphasis on writings rather than architectural works was no doubt dictated by the nature of Wood’s queries, since the Athenae was concerned primarily with writers.
7 See Colvin’s, Howard M. discussion, A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects 1600–1840 (1978), 870 Google Scholar.