Peter Turner 1586-1652

Peter TURNER 1586-1652

Biographical Note

Born in Middlesex, son of Peter Turner, physician. BA Christ Church, Oxford 1605, fellow of Merton 1607, MA 1612, MD 1636. Professor of geometry at Gresham College, London 1620-31, when he became professor of geometry at Oxford. During the 1630s he was closely involved in the revision of the University statutes. He enlisted for the royalist army in 1641, was captured and imprisoned in Southwark, and returned to Oxford in 1643. In 1648 he was ejected from his Oxford preferments and spent the last few years of his life living in much reduced circumstances with his widowed sister in Southwark.

Books

Turner was a Greek scholar as well as a mathematician and compiled a catalogue of the Barocci manuscripts shortly after their accession by the Bodleian Library in 1629 (MS Barocci 243). His brief will has no mention of books but bequeathed the residue of his estate to Elizabeth Walter, widow, of Southwark. Greek manuscripts of his were given to the Bodleian Library at this time, presumably in the aftermath of his death, though not as a direct bequest as stated by Macray. The fate of any other books he owned is not known.

Sources

• Carlyle, E. I., and H. K. Higton. '"Turner, Peter (1586–1652), mathematician."' Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• Macray, Annals of the Bodleian, 2nd edn, Oxford, 1890, p. 108.
• Philip, I. The Bodleian Library in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Oxford, 1983, p.121.