Thomas Reid

LC name authority rec. nr93008624

LC Heading: Reid, Thomas, -1624

Biography:

Reid, Thomas (d. 1624), philosopher, translator, and founder of the first public reference library in Scotland, was one of the family of six sons and three daughters of James Reid (d. 1602?), minister of Banchory-Ternan, Kincardineshire, and burgess of Aberdeen. He was educated at Aberdeen grammar school and Marischal College, from where he graduated MA about 1600. On 6 February 1602 he became master of the grammar school, a post he resigned the following year on being appointed one of the three regents of Marischal College on 12 October. He remained in that office until 1607, conducting a university class through the four years of its curriculum, and then travelled to the continent, where he pursued his studies, first in France and then at the universities of Rostock and Leipzig. He was admitted docent at Rostock in December 1608, and taught philosophy and humanity there, gaining a considerable reputation. As was the custom of the age, he maintained public disputations, including one on metaphysics with Henningus Arnisaeus, professor of medicine at the University of Frankfurt. Reid's contributions are characterized by elegant scholarship and considerable philosophical talent. At Rostock between 1609 and 1616 he published eight works on metaphysics, while he matriculated at Leipzig in the summer of 1613.

After returning from the continent, Reid settled in London and became in 1618 Latin secretary to James I, a position he held until his death. In collaboration with Patrick Young he produced the Latin translation of the king's collected works (published in London in 1619, reprinted in 1689 at Frankfurt and Leipzig), one of the most important of the several plain and unadorned translations into Latin of original English works produced at the time, and typical of the genre, aiming simply to communicate the text of the original in the universal language. Reid's paraphrase of Psalm 104 was printed in William Barclay's Judicium de certamine (1620), and he was, with his brother Alexander Reid (c.1570–1641), the surgeon, incorporated MA at Oxford on 28 May 1620; Wood asserts that ‘he had before been a student in this university’ (Wood, Ath. Oxon.: Fasti, 1.394) but offers no further specifics. Reid also published Latin poems, several of which appear in the collection Delitiae poetarum Scotorum (1637).

It is neither Reid's writings nor his achievements in royal service which form his enduring memorial, however, but the library which he bequeathed to Marischal College and the town of Aberdeen. Reid died, unmarried, in London in 1624, and in his will, made on 19 May that year, he left his entire collection of books and manuscripts ‘for the Love I bear to the Town of new Abd. and wishing the new College schools thereof should flourish ... to be put in the Bibliotheck of the sd. new College’, along with a bequest of 6000 merks capital to provide an annual salary of 600 merks for a ‘Bibliothecar to hold his Door open 4 days a week for the Scholars and Clergy to have the use of the Books of the sd. Bibliotheck, and no ways to be astricted in no further Duty’ (Simpson, 124–5). Reid's manuscript catalogue to his collections (in Aberdeen University Library, AU MS M 70) contains some 1350 titles; the books were duly shipped from London to Aberdeen, where the earliest catalogue of Marischal College Library, that of 1670, contains a list of Reid's printed books and manuscripts. The bequest was described by the contemporary annalist James Gordon as ‘the best Library that ever the north pairtes of Scottland saw’ (J. Gordon, History of Scots Affairs, ed. J. Robertson, 3 vols., 1841, 3.89).

Reid's collection still forms an integral part of what is today the library of the University of Aberdeen, formed by the fusion of the King's College of ‘Old’ Aberdeen with Marischal, the ‘new College’, in 1860; his brother Alexander also left books, on divinity and philosophy, to Marischal College, although his medical books he left to King's. The endowment, which had at first made the librarianship the best paid office in the college, was largely frittered away through mismanagement; from 1733 to 1737 the post of librarian was held by Reid's eminent kinsman and namesake, the philosopher Thomas Reid (1710–1796). The Marischal College section of the Aberdeen University Library, of which Reid's bequest forms the core, contains, as Montague Rhodes James put it, ‘well-nigh all that is important in the learned and artistic world in general’ (James, ix).

T. P. J. Edlin

(T. P. J. Edlin, ‘Reid, Thomas (d. 1624)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://proxy.bostonathenaeum.org:2055/view/article/23341, accessed 15 Jan 2016])