Thomas Morell
British scholar
Thomas Morell (; 18 March 1703 – 19 February 1784) was an English librettist, classical scholar, and printer.
Life
He was born in Eton, Berkshire and educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge (BA, 1726, MA, 1730 and DD, 1743).
He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and in 1768 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as a "Rector of Buckland in Hertfordshire, Author of the Greek Thesaurus lately published, and Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Gentleman well skilled in Natural History and every branch of Polite Literature".
He was appointed Garrison Chaplain at Portsmouth barracks in 1775.
Morell wrote the longest and most detailed surviving account of collaboration with Handel.
He died in 1784 and was buried in Chiswick, London.
Librettos
He is best known as the librettist of the following of George Frideric Handel's oratorios:
Judas Maccabaeus (1747).
Joshua (1748).
Alexander Balus (1748).
Theodora (1750).
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1526959. VIAF identifies the subject as 79159546. The Library of Congress control number is n83041694. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1703, 1784, 1726 and 1730.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Morell” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.