Elias Avery Lowe

Elias Avery Lowe (15 October 1879 – 8 August 1969), originally surnamed Loew, and known in print as E. A. Lowe, was a Russian-American palaeographer at the University of Oxford and Princeton University. He was a lecturer, and then reader, at the University of Oxford from 1913 to 1936, and a professor at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study from 1936.

Early life Elias Avery Loew was born on 15 October 1879 in Moscow (then part of the Russian Empire) to a Jewish family headed by Charles Loew, a silk and embroidery merchant, and his wife, Sarah Ragoler. He immigrated to New York City with his parents in 1892, becoming a citizen of the United States in 1900. In 1918, he altered the spelling of his surname to Lowe.

Education and career After studying at the College of the City of New York (now City College of New York) from 1894 to 1897, Lowe obtained a BA at Cornell University in 1902. Thereafter, he studied briefly at the University of Halle, and then at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München where, under the supervision of Ludwig Traube, he completed his doctorate in 1908. He first lectured at the University of Oxford in 1913. In 1914, he gave the Sandars Lectures on bibliography at the University of Cambridge. In the same year Oxford granted him a regular appointment as lecturer, appointing him reader in 1927. Nearly all of Lowe's paleography teaching occurred at the latter institution. Although he became one of the first professors at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study (where no teaching was required) in 1936, he continued to lecture at Oxford during Trinity terms until 1948. In addition, he acted as a consultant in paleography for the Library of Congress, and, from 1911 to 1953, as research associate in paleography for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Recognition An internationally respected authority in his field, Lowe received formal recognition from numerous academies, institutes, and scholarly societies. He was awarded the Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal in 1957, the gold medal of the Bibliographical Society in 1959, and had honorary doctoral degrees conferred on him by the University of Oxford (1936), the University of North Carolina (1946), and the National University of Ireland (1964).

Although Lowe "never abandoned his solidarity with the Jewish people", he declined to practise Judaism. Towards the end of his life he told one of his daughters that, were he to adhere to a religion, he would opt for Roman Catholicism.

Selected publications Die ältesten Kalendarien in Monte Cassino (Doctoral dissertation, Munich, 1908) Studia Palaeographica: A Contribution to the History of Early Latin Minuscule and to the Dating of Visigothic Manuscripts (Munich, 1910) The Beneventan Script: A History of the South Italian Minuscule (Oxford, 1914; 2nd ed., Rome, 1980) Codices Lugdunenses Antiquissimi. Le Scriptorium de Lyon, la Plus Ancienne École Calligraphique de France (Lyon, 1924) Handwriting: Our Medieval Legacy (Rome, 1969) Palaeographical Papers, 1907–1965, ed. Ludwig Bieler (Oxford, 1972)