Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Bishop, Edmund
BISHOP, EDMUND (1846-1917), liturgiologist and historian, was born at Totnes, 17 May 1846, the youngest child of Michael Bishop, by his wife, Susan Quick. He had his schooling at Exeter and in Belgium. On leaving school at seventeen he became, for a year, literary secretary to Thomas Carlyle, and in 1864 entered the Education Office. In 1867 he was received into the Church of Rome. During these years, before and after office hours, he frequented the British Museum, examining manuscripts systematically on a large scale. He discovered, transcribed, analysed, and annotated the ‘Collectio Britannica’ of some 300 papal letters of the fifth to the eleventh centuries, most of them previously unknown. Finding no means of publishing the work in England, he presented it to the editors of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Paul Ewald in Neues Archiv for 1880, in a lengthy appreciation of this remarkable find, signalized the ‘infinite pains… thorough palæographical knowledge… brilliant conjectures…and surety of the restitutions of passages unintelligibly corrupt’, which marked Bishop’s work. This at once established his reputation on the Continent; it drew from Mommsen and the editors of the Monumenta a handsome written tribute, and put Bishop henceforth in constant communication with the group of Monumenta scholars. Bishop was a self-made scholar; but his contact as a young man with these eminent historical critics and with others, such as the Comte Riant, was to him a sufficient inspiration.
In 1885 Bishop retired from the Education Office, and shortly afterwards went to the Benedictine monastery of Downside, near Bath, with the intention of becoming a monk; his health, however, proved too frail for the life. He stayed on at Downside till 1889, and till the end of his life spent several months there almost every year. From 1893 until 1901 he resided and worked with Dom (afterwards Cardinal) Gasquet in a house near the British Museum. Growing much enfeebled in health, he passed his last fifteen years with his sister at Barnstaple, where he died 19 February 1917. He was unmarried.
Though his interests and his accumulations of knowledge ranged widely over many fields, it is principally as a liturgical scholar that Edmund Bishop will be known. It may safely be said that he knew the western liturgies in their entire sweep as no one else in his day. He had an unrivalled knowledge of the minutest details, but liturgy interested him primarily, not as texts, nor as ceremonial, but as the expression of the religious sense of the various peoples and ages; thus he regarded liturgy as a branch of the history of religion. His outstanding single contribution was the identifying of the Roman mass book of Gregory the Great, the central point, backwards and forwards, for the history of the liturgy in the west. His principal studies on the Roman liturgy, along with many other of his essays of varied character, were published at Oxford in 1918 in Liturgica Historica. He produced two other substantial pieces of work: an investigation of the early English calendars in the Bosworth Psalter (1908); and the Appendix to the Liturgical Homilies of Narsai (Texts and Studies, 1909), containing an epoch-making study on the ‘Epiclesis’. But the products that bear Bishop’s name are far from being the measure of his contributions to learning. Other scholars’ books grew out of his encouragement, advice, and gifts of material. An inquiry would call forth a letter that was a treatise involving days of labour. The amount of his work thus buried in the books of others cannot be estimated.
As a scholar Bishop has been justly compared with F. J. A. Hort, and, like Hort, he was a man of singular charm, striking appearance, and old-world courtesy. His piety was simple and sincere. His library, bequeathed to Downside, where he is buried, is a speaking record of the man; a unique collection, illustrating liturgy, made with exquisite knowledge and endless care, it was a life-long work of joy.
[Notices collected in the Downside Review, October 1917 and October 1918; Journal of Theological Studies, April 1917; Church Quarterly Review, 1918; The Christian Altar (reprinted, 1906, from the Downside Review) with bibliography to 1906 attached; personal knowledge.]