Bernhard Egidius Konrad ten Brink

Bernhard Egidius Konrad ten Brink (January 12, 1841 in Amsterdam – January 29, 1892 in Strasbourg) was a German philologist.

He was of Dutch origin, but was sent to school at Düsseldorf, and afterwards studied at Münster, and later under Diez and Delius at Bonn. In 1866 he began to lecture at the Münster Academy on the philology of the English and Romance languages. In 1870 he became professor of modern languages at Marburg, and after the reconstitution of Strassburg University was appointed professor of English there in 1873. In 1874 he began to edit, in conjunction with Wilhelm Scherer, E. Martin and Erich Schmidt, "Quellen und Forschungen zur Sprache und Kulturgeschichte der germanischen Völker". He devoted himself for many years to the study of Chaucer. In 1877 he published "Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwickelung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften"; in 1884, "Chaucers Sprache und Verskunst". He also published critical editions of the "Prologue" and the "Compleynte unto Pity". Ten Brink's work in this direction stimulated a revival of Chaucer study in the United Kingdom as well as in Germany, and to him was indirectly due the foundation of the English Chaucer Society. His "Beowulf-Untersuchungen" (1888) proved a hardly less valuable contribution to the study of Early English literature. His best known work is his "Geschichte der englischen Literatur" (1889–1893), (English by H. Kennedy in Bohn's "Standard Library"), which was unfortunately never completed, and broke off just before the Elizabethan period. It was his intense admiration of Shakespeare that first attracted him to the study of English, and five lectures on Shakespeare delivered at Frankfurt were published after his death (1893).

According to the "Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition", "he was considered a great teacher as well as an accurate and brilliant writer, and from many countries students flocked to his lecture-room."

References

*1911|article=ten Brink, Bernhard Egidius Konrad