He began to teach astronomy as deputy to Christopher Wren, then Savilian professor. This was from 1669, the year in which Wren became Surveyor-General of the King's Works. Eventually Wren was too busy, and resigned the chair.[4]
He died in Oxford on 12 January 1697, and was buried four days later in St John's College chapel.[1]
Works
Charles Morton's 1759 updated version of Bernard's "Orbis eruditi", comparing all known alphabets as of 1689.[12]
He spent much time on manuscripts of Apollonius of Perga, travelling to Leiden to look at the manuscript legacies of Joseph Scaliger and Levinus Warner in 1669, and working on Arabic texts in the Bodleian Library.[3][13][14][15] He returned to the Netherlands more than two decades later, to purchase at auction items from the library of Jacobus Golius, on behalf of Narcissus Marsh.[16] In parallel, he began to edit the works of Josephus in the 1680s. The geometrical work remained fragmentary, while the Josephus edition was heavily annotated but incomplete.[17]Clement Barksdale circulated some doggerel about it: "Savilian Bernard's a right learned man;/Josephus he will finish when he can."[18] His transcriptions and translations were later used by Edmund Halley in his translation of Apollonius.[19]
Much of Bernard's scholarly work remained as book annotations, and came back to the Bodleian when it purchased those books from his library after his death.
His Catalogi librorum manuscriptorum Angliæ et Hiberniæ in unum collecti (Oxford, 1697), colloquially "Bernard's Catalogue", was a catalogue of manuscripts in British and Irish libraries, and served as a major tool for scholars.[24]Humfrey Wanley assisted him with this compilation.[25]
Recent sources claim that his assertion that tenth-century Egyptian astronomer Ibn Yunis used a pendulum for time measurement, predating Galileo, has no basis in fact.[26][27]
References
Sowerby, E. M. Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, 1952, v. 1, p. 4
Notes
^ abcdClerke, Agnes Mary (1922). "Bernard, Edward". In Smith, George (ed.). Concise Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press. pp. 378–80.
^ abMordechai Feingold, Oriental Studies, p. 491 in Trevor Henry Aston, Nicholas Tyacke (editors), The History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford(1984).
^Okabe, Shoichi (25 February 1985). "Russian grammars before Lomonosov". Kanazawa University Repository for Academic resources. pp. 129–130. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
^Schmitz du Moulm H. , Un correspondant anglais de Quesnel: Lettres de Q à Edward Bernard, professeur d'astronomie à Oxford, Lias, 2 (1975), 281–312.
^Mordechai Feingold, Mathematical Sciences and New Philosophies, p. 384 in Trevor Henry Aston, Nicholas Tyacke (editors), The History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV: Seventeenth-Century Oxford(1984).
^"Parishes: Brightwell", in A History of the County of Berkshire: Volume 3, ed. P. H. Ditchfield and William Page (London, 1923), pp. 464-471. British History Online. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
^Smith, Thomas (1704) Vita clarissimi & doctissimi viri, Edwardi Bernardi (in Latin). London: A. & J. Churchill
^Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (1994), p. 69.
^"David Gregory Papers". Edinburgh University Library Special Collections Division. Archived from the original on 22 February 2007. Retrieved 5 January 2019.
^"Maths". Archived from the original on 21 March 2009. Retrieved 14 January 2009.
^Sharpe, Richard (1 December 2005). "Thomas Tanner (1674–1735), the 1697 Catalogue, and Bibliotheca Britannica". The Library. 6 (4): 381–421. doi:10.1093/library/6.4.381. ISSN1744-8581.
