March 29, 1602

John Lightfoot (March 29, 1602 to December 6, 1675) was an eminent English churchman. During Cromwell's decade he was Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cambridge, and until his own death he was Master of St Catharine's Hall, which is a college within Cambridge. We read in unreliable sources that he left in his will, an archive of Old Testament documents to Harvard University. Where the volumes were destroyed in a fire a century later.

The books he authored harken to another time and yet are comprehensibly of interest.  Here is a title from 1642: A Few and New Observations upon the Book of Genesis: the most of them certain; the rest, probable; all, harmless, strange and rarely heard of before.
And his first book was titled Erubhin or Miscellanies...Penned for Recreation at Vacant Hours (1629). It was dedicated to a patron, Sir Rowland Cotton, and begins this way:

My creeping and weak studies, neither able to go, nor speak for themselves, do (like Pyrrhus in Plutarch), in silence, crave your tuition. For they desire, when they now come to light, to refuge to you, who, next to God, first gave them life. Your encouragement and incitation did first set me forward to the culture of holy tongues ; and here I offer you the first fruits of my barren harvest.

The book is well named' miscellanies' for it is composed of brief chapters, each composed of one or two paragraphs, on assorted subjects of an interest to the religious, which of course was everybody then. For instance we learn that Bede wrote "Britain in my time doth search and confess one and the same high truth and true sublimity in five tongues...namely in the English, Britain, Scottish, Pict, and Latin tongues."  And chapter 55 includes this allusion to the religion of the ancient Egyptians: 

[W]hat man could have held laughing to have seen....an Egyptian on his marrowbones adoring a dog, or praying to an ox,—or, especially, to see him mourning and howling over a sick cat; fearing lest his scratching god should die.

So we may conclude the 17th century lacked much empathy for other cultures. Yet I sense in Lightfoot's mind a wide-ranging curiosity and vivacity.