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Classical scholar and theologian Richard Bentley, master of Trinity College, was one of the most controversial personalities at Cambridge University in the early eighteenth century. Students of British literature are familiar with Bentley as the pompous and ill-mannered pedant ridiculed by Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, and their "Scriblerian Club." Classicists know him as perhaps the greatest philologist of all time and the founder of modern textual criticism. He is remembered among Greek Testament scholars as the first to devise a plan for reconstructing the entire text directly from the oldest documents available. Although most of his works are in Latin, he was one of the outstanding exponents of the plain English prose style in the transitional period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With regard to philosophy, his main role was to lay groundwork that made possible several different modes of philosophical speculation, resulting from this distinctive combination of attributes.
Bentley was born on 27 January 1662 in the village of Oulton, near Wakefield in the West Riding of Yorkshire, into a family of wealthy yeomen whose fortune had suffered somewhat as a result of Royalist loyalties during the English Civil War.
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