Papers of Stephen Sewall

The papers of Stephen Sewall consist of a small assortment of his personal papers, four volumes of lectures delivered at Harvard College, and three volumes containing an Aramaic (known as Chaldee in the 18th century) and a Greek lexicon. The materials were created over more than three decades and reflect Sewall's work as a professor and scholar of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. The papers are divided into five series: correspondence, lectures, funeral orations for Harvard President Edward Holyoke and Harvard Professor John Winthrop, lexicons, and a power of attorney between Sewall and Thomas Wigglesworth. Sewall used the small notebook containing the funeral oration of John Winthrop as a commonplace book in which he also copied substantial excerpts from the poetry of Elizabeth Singer Rowe, as well as small excerpts from James Boswell's Account of Corsica, and a poem by John Andre (HUG 1782 Box 9). The correspondence series includes a letter from Yale President Thomas Clap praising Sewall's Hebrew Grammar and a letter from Sewall's mother Mehetabel Preble discussing her health and thoughts on death. Additional correspondence written by Oxford scholar Benjamin Kennicott and French intellectual Antoine Court de Gébelin is located in the Lectures series.

The lectures and lexicons are uniformly bound in leather bindings and consist of Sewall's handwritten manuscripts of lectures delivered to students at Harvard, and Chaldee and Greek dictionaries. The lectures generally focus on aspects of the Semitic languages, especially Hebrew and Chaldee, Scripture, and characteristics and origins of languages. The collection offers a resource for studying undergraduate education at Harvard, as well as the scholarly work being done by one of Massachusetts' leading classical and linguistic scholars in the 18th century.