1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Knolles, Richard

KNOLLES, RICHARD (c. 1545–1610), English historian, was a native of Northamptonshire, and was educated at Lincoln College, Oxford. He became a fellow of his college, and at some date subsequent to 1571 left Oxford to become master of a school at Sandwich, Kent, where he died in 1610. In 1603 Knolles published his Generall Historie of the Turkes, of which several editions subsequently appeared, among them a good one edited by Sir Paul Rycaut (1700), who brought the history down to 1699. It was dedicated to King James I., and Knolles availed himself largely of Jean Jacques Boissard’s Vitae et Icones Sultanorum Turcicorum (Frankfort, 1596). Although now entirely superseded, it has considerable merits as regards style and arrangement. Knolles published a translation of J. Bodin’s De Republica in 1606, but the Grammatica Latina, Graeca et Hebraica, attributed to him by Anthony Wood and others, is the work of the Rev. Hanserd Knollys (c. 1599–1691), a Baptist minister.

See the Athenaeum, August 6, 1881.