Elias Avery Lowe
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Early life
Elias Avery Loew was born on 15 October 1879 in Moscow (then part of the Russian Empire) to a Lithuanian Jewish family headed by Charles Loew, a silk and embroidery merchant, and his wife, Sarah Ragoler. He emigrated 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.
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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 University of Munich 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 palaeography 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 palaeography for the Library of Congress, and, from 1911 to 1953, as research associate in palaeography for the Carnegie Institution of Washington.
Lowe wrote several important works on early medieval palaeography, including The Beneventan Script (his 1914 study of the oldest extant manuscript of St Benedict's rule), and his collected Palaeographical Papers, 1907–1965 (published posthumously in 1972). He remains best known, however, for the eleven-volume Codices Latini Antiquiores (CLA) which offers a palaeographical guide to all extant Latin literary manuscripts copied in scripts antedating the ninth century. Published 1934–1971, this monumental work covers over 1,800 manuscripts from repositories in twenty-one countries, providing detailed descriptions and one or more facsimiles for each manuscript.
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). From 1954 until his death in 1969, he was an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College of Oxford University.
Personal life and death
In 1911, Lowe married the translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. The couple had three daughters. Among their descendants are English artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, and her son, journalist and politician Boris Johnson, the former Prime Minister of the UK.
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.
Lowe died on 8 August 1969 in Bad Nauheim, Germany. His ashes were interred at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
Legacy
A series of lectures on palaeography, the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures, continues to be held at Corpus Christi College in his memory.