John Sherwood (bishop)
John Shirwood (also Sherwood ) ( † January 14, 1493 in Rome) was Bishop of Durham. He wrote a treatise on the number of fighting game. He is known today primarily through the data collected by him manuscripts and incunabula. He is regarded as the first Ambassador of England to the Holy See.
Life
The son of a town clerk of York the same name became the academic degrees of Master of Arts and a Bachelor of Theology at the University of Cambridge. At this university practiced Shirwood 1450/1451 the post of Senior Proctor from. In the fall of 1456 he was given permission to acquiring the degree of Doctor of Divinity at Oxford. Enter a time intended Shirwood in the Carthusian Order. Probably in Oxford, he met the young aristocrat George Neville, Elect of Exeter, know who patronized him in the following years. So Shirwood also received a prebend in Exeter. In a letter to Bishop Neville Shirwood was mentioned as Chancellor of Exeter Cathedral. He wrote a Versepitaph commemorating John Southwell, Neville's Seneschal.
Shirwood had the habit to write down in his books, mostly on the last sheet, where and when he had bought the book in question. In the summer of 1461 Shirwood was in London and bought a manuscript from the 13th century with the Psalterkommentar of Peter Cantor. A humanistic manuscript collection from Italy he bought in December in 1464. For George Neville he was, probably because of his good knowledge of Latin, at that time working as a secretary. He probably came in contact with Greek emigrants and began to learn Greek. When George Neville Archbishop of York, was Shirwood followed him in 1465 in the new diocese and was archdeacon of Richmond. In York Shirwood acquired in October this year, a Iustinushandschrift from the 12th century. His income grew in the following years by the accumulation of several benefices. Master of the hospitals of St. Edmund the King in Gateshead and St Nicholas in York, he had been to 1467.
After the 1470 Neville switched sides and short King Henry VI. had helped from the house of Lancaster back to the throne, Shirwood gained by the victorious Edward IV returned the end of June 1471 a general pardon. In the same year Shirwood also received the particularly rich golden prebend of Masham. Now he was wealthy enough to have write books for themselves, a Terence and Cicero's De FINIBUS reached into his library. His next book purchases -actuated Shirwood beginning in 1474 in Rome, Cicero's speeches printed by Konrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz. In that or the following year he visited his patron George Neville in his exile in Calais. To cheer this, Shirwood taught him the number of fighting game. He himself had learned in his youth by his dialectic and mathematics teachers, simplified and streamlined its rules but, as he wrote it from memory.
In 1475 Shirwood was inducted into the brotherhood of the English Hospital of St. Thomas in Rome, and elected the following spring as treasurer of this hospital. Several other prints of ancient authors found in these years by buying their way into Shirwoods library. From Pope Sixtus IV he received in the fall of 1476 the title of protonotary the Holy See. King Edward IV accredited his chaplain John Shirwood in December 1477 as his procurator in Rome. As such, he took in ecclesiastical matters the interests of his men was and has followed the affairs of other Englishmen at the Curia. Ever since his participation in a special mission in 1479 was Shirwood as orator (lat. = speaker), in the curial usage of those years hence as an ambassador of his king. Since Shirwood exercised quasi continuously this function a permanent envoy in the years leading up to his death, he is now regarded as the first ambassador of the British diplomatic service.
At least since 1480 Shirwood rented the most expensive house, which had the Thomas Hospital for rent, he lived there until 1486th He also found connection to humanist circles, his book about the number of battle he dedicated in 1480 his new patron, Cardinal Marco Barbo. The invention of the game, he wrote to an ancient philosopher (falsely ). The work was in 1482 brought to the pressure at Stephan Plannck and quickly caught throughout Europe stir. What was known in the early modern about this game, went back to this document.
End of January 1484 was John Shirwood at the instigation of the new King Richard III. elected bishop of Durham. This king also sent Shirwood as ambassador to Rome. In accompanying letter to the pope and the cardinals, Richard III sat. not only committed to making Shirwood Bishop of Durham, but killed ( unsuccessfully ) proposed to create him a cardinal. The papal commission on the chair of Durham received Shirwood on March 29, the temporalities were transferred to him on April 24, May 26, he was ordained in Rome. He took part in his role as ambassador of the King of England to papal ceremonies. Possibly tied Shirwood in Rome already contacts with envoys Henry Tudor's the Pope. In the summer of 1485 Shirwood got to the temporal and spiritual power of the Bishop of Durham. His close connection to Richard III. seems to have Shirwood not hurt after the battle of Bosworth, Henry VII appointed him in February 1486, among others, to his procurator in Rome.
At the large delegation thanked the year 1487, with the Henry VII Pope Innocent VIII for his support, John Shirwood also participated. Soon, he began again to buy books. For his church, he obtained a discharge in December 1487. When exactly he traveled to his diocese, is unknown. In 1490 he wrote from his residence in Auckland to John Paston, trying coals to wheat, wine and wax exchange. Sometime during these years devoted to the Greek emigrant George Hermonymos, had the Shirwood probably know by George Neville, and in which he had probably perfected his knowledge of Greek, the Bishop of Durham, a copy of his translation of Aristotle's De virtutibus.
Soon Shirwood already been sent back to Rome, in the spring of 1492 he was with his entourage in Italy. On June 14, he entered Rome, where he Giovanni Gigli, procurator of Henry VII to the Curia, with Pope Alexander VI. introduced. On December 14, in a consistory held Shirwood a speech before the Pope. On January 10, 1493 Shirwood ill, he died on January 14, and was buried in the church of St. Thomas 's Hospital in Rome. The Latin books from library Shirwoods earned his successor in Durham Richard Fox, who gave the he founded Corpus Christi College, Oxford. There, these books are today. Reveal marginal notes that Shirwood few of his books, Cicero and Plutarch about, really read. Nevertheless, he was with the ideas of the humanists probably more familiar than his fellow bishops. His Greek books are missing except one, a manuscript of Theodore Gaza's Greek Grammar, today.