Seventeenth-century Orientalist scholarship could ruin its practitioners financially and physically

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

Categorization

• CANDY: A darkly comic anecdote: rats ate unsold dictionary copies and the scholar allegedly forgot his own language.