Edward Thwaites, Heptateuchus, Liber Job, et Evangelium Nicodemi; Anglo-Saxonice. Historiæ Judith Fragmentum; Dano-Saxonice (Oxford: Sheldonian Theatre, 1698).
This volume includes the editiones principes of the Old English Heptateuch by Ælfric of Eynsham, the Old English Gospel of Nicodemus, and two other minor texts. The editor is Edward Thwaites (d. 1711), a fellow at Queen's College, Oxford, who is allegedly 'one of the most inspiring teachers which Oxford has ever produced' (Douglas, p. 67). Douglas writes that Thwaites's 'Heptateuchus ... marked an important stage in the publication of the work of Ælfric, and would alone be sufficient to establish his reputation as a scholar' (Douglas, p. 66).
The texts are printed throughout with the Junian font, which is also used in the edition of the Old English Boethius published with his assistance by his student, Christopher Rawlinson, in the same year. Thwaites dedicates this book to George Hickes, whom he assisted in the preparation of his famous Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archæologicus (1703-1705).
Preceding the title page, there is a full-page print of a scene of a 'lecture' in a library, at the top of which the beginning of Ælfric's Old English translation of Genesis is quoted. At the top of the page in which Ælfric's preface to his translation of Genesis begins, a print depicting Ælfric writing down the first words of the preface is inserted, while the preface itself begins with a large capital Æ in a miniature in which Ælfric hands a book to Æthelweard, at whose request Ælfric reluctantly translated these texts from the Old Testament.
My copy used to belong to the late Peter Clemoes (1920-1996), former Elrington and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Cambridge, who gave it on 1 October 1991 to Malcolm Godden, former Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford (perhaps congratulating him on his accession to the highly distinguished professorship at Oxford in the same year?). Both professors are editors of Ælfric's Catholic Homilies, Early English Text Society, Supplementary Series, nos. 5 (Second Series edited by Godden) and 17 (First Series edited by Clemoes).
For more information about Thwaites, see D. Douglas, English Scholars 1660-1730, 2nd, revised ed. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1951), pp. 66-68.
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