American philologist
Albert Stanburrough Cook (March 6, 1853 – September 1, 1927) was an American philologist, literary critic, and scholar of Old English. He has been called "the single most powerful American Anglo-Saxonist of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries."[1][2]
Life
Cook was born in Montville, New Jersey.[3] He began working as a mathematics tutor at sixteen and was offered chemistry professorship in Fukui, Japan before entering college, which he declined.[4] He graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree from Rutgers College in 1872, writing a thesis on "The Inclined Planes of the Morris Canal," and taught there and at Freehold Academy while completing a Master of Science degree.[4][5]
Having already learned German, he went on to study in Göttingen and Leipzig from 1877 to 1878, where he began learning languages including Latin, Greek, Italian, and Old English.[4] He returned to the United States for two years as an associate in English at Johns Hopkins University,[6] then in 1881 he spent time in London with phoneticist Henry Sweet studying manuscripts of Cynewulf and the Old Northumbrian Gospels at the British Museum.[4] This work allowed him to complete a PhD in 1882 at the University of Jena, where he studied under Eduard Sievers.[1] Cook became a professor of English in the University of California in 1882, where he re-organized the teaching of English in the state of California, introduced English requirements for university admission, and edited many texts for reading in secondary schools.[4][6] He became chair of English language and literature at Yale University in 1889, where he remained for thirty-two years until his death and became a prolific editor of major English works and literary criticism. In contrast to the prejudices of many of his peers, a number of female PhD students - including Elizabeth Deering Hanscom, Martha Anstice Harris, Laura Lockwood, Mary Augusta Scott, and Caroline Louisa White - studied under Cook at a time when such students were rare.[7]
Cook's best-known scholarly work is in Old English and in poetics, fields in which he produced over three hundred publications.[6] He translated, edited, and revised Sievers' Old English Grammar (1885), edited Judith (1888), The Christ of Cynewulf (1900), Asser's Life of King Alfred (1905), and The Dream of the Rood (1905), and prepared A First Book in Old English Grammar (1894). He also edited, with annotations, Sidney's Defense of Poesie (1890); Shelley's Defense of Poetry (1891); Newman's Poetry (1891); Addison's Criticisms on Paradise Lost (1892); The Art of Poetry (1892), being the essays of Horace, Vida and Boileau; and Leigh Hunt's What is Poetry (1893); and published Higher Study of English (1906).[1]
Cook married twice: first to Emily Chamberlain (1886), then to Elizabeth Merrill (1911).[4] He died on September 1, 1927, in New Haven, Connecticut.[8]
