1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Field, Frederick

FIELD, FREDERICK (1801–1885), English divine and biblical scholar, was born in London and educated at Christ’s hospital and Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship in 1824. He took orders in 1828, and began a close study of patristic theology. Eventually he published an emended and annotated text of Chrysostom’s Homiliae in Matthaeum (Cambridge, 1839), and some years later he contributed to Pusey’s Bibliotheca Patrum (Oxford, 1838–1870), a similarly treated text of Chrysostom’s homilies on Paul’s epistles. The scholarship displayed in both of these critical editions is of a very high order. In 1839 he had accepted the living of Great Saxham, in Suffolk, and in 1842 he was presented by his college to the rectory of Reepham in Norfolk. He resigned in 1863, and settled at Norwich, in order to devote his whole time to study. Twelve years later he completed the Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt (Oxford, 1867–1875), now well known as Field’s Hexapla, a text reconstructed from the extant fragments of Origen’s work of that name, together with materials drawn from the Syro-hexaplar version and the Septuagint of Holmes and Parsons (Oxford, 1798–1827). Field was appointed a member of the Old Testament revision company in 1870.