William Bedell
Irish bishop and bible translator
The Rt. Rev. William Bedell, D.D. (Irish: Uilliam Beidil; 22 September 1571 – 7 February 1642), was an English Anglican bishop who served as the 5th Provost of Trinity College Dublin from 1627 to 1629. He also served as Lord Bishop of Kilmore and as a member of the Irish House of Commons from January 1628 to July 1628.
Early life and education
He was born at Black Notley in Essex, England, the son of John Bedell, yeoman. He was admitted pensioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge in 1584, where he was a pupil of William Perkins: he took B.A. in 1588/89 and M.A. in 1592, being elected a Fellow of Emmanuel College in 1593. He was ordained priest on 10 January 1596/97, by Bishop John Sterne, suffragan bishop of Colchester, and was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Divinity in 1599. He served as vicar of St Mary, Bury St Edmunds, from 1601 to 1607.
Career
Anglican priest
In 1607, he was appointed chaplain to Sir Henry Wotton, then English Ambassador to Venice, where he remained for three years, acquiring a great reputation as a scholar and theologian. He translated the Book of Common Prayer into Italian, and both corresponded and was on terms of close friendship with the Venetian Republican statesman and political theorist Paolo Sarpi.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Bedell” 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.