Early orientalists pursued Arabic scholarship at ruinous personal cost

Evidence

Castell regarded himself as being on some kind of holiday if he worked less than sixteen hours a day. But he was always miserable and full of complaint and by the time he had finished his polyglot dictionary, people had lost their enthusiasm for studying the polyglot Bible. Castell ruined himself in his typographically extravagant enterprise. Five hundred copies remained unsold at the time of his death and rats ate much of what was left. Yet more copies perished in the Great Fire of London. Not only did he lose a small fortune but he plunged so deep into the study of Oriental languages that he allegedly had forgotten his own. He ended up a half-blind pauper. — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 173 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Some Orientalists pursued their scholarship to the point of ruin; Seventeenth-century Orientalist scholarship could ruin its practitioners financially and physically — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists…, 173; Early orientalists made extreme personal sacrifices incompatible with venal motives — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting…, 2062

Broader Connections

• Some Orientalists pursued their scholarship to the point of ruin #corroborates (0.95)
• Seventeenth-century Orientalist scholarship could ruin its practitioners financially and physically #corroborates (0.95) — Robert Irwin, For Lust of Knowing, 173