LOWE, ELIAS AVERY

LOWE, ELIAS AVERY (1879–1969), foremost 20th century authority on Latin paleography. Born in Lithuania, Lowe (originally Loew) came to New York at an early age and after studying at City College graduated from Cornell University. In 1902, aided by the philanthropist James Loeb, he went to Germany, where he received his doctorate in 1907 under the master paleographer ludwig traube , writing on Die ältesten Kalendarien aus Monte Cassino. In Studia Palaeographica (1910) he established extremely sophisticated criteria for dating Beneventan and Visigothic minuscule manuscripts. His work The Beneventan Script (1914), a subject to which he returned with his two-volume Scriptura Beneventana (1929), was the first full-scale study of a particular Latin script. His work on the complex textual tradition of the rule of St. Benedict was an important supplement to that of Traube. In 1913 Lowe was appointed lecturer and in 1927 as reader in paleography at Oxford; but his most fruitful period was from 1936 on, when he was appointed professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, retiring in 1946. There he was a close friend of Einstein. His master work was Codices latini antiquiores, a paleographical guide to all Latin manuscripts prior to the ninth century in 11 volumes (1934–66), arranged according to the country where the manuscripts are currently to be found and containing facsimiles of sample passages of each manuscript, with important notes on their date, origin and style. At the time of his death he was at work on a 12th volume, containing a supplement and a series of indices, as well as a companion to the work explaining how it was to be used. jacob epstein , an early schoolmate, made a bust of Lowe, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (Louis Harry Feldman (2nd ed.)