First edition of this scarce Latin compendium of Hebrew grammar, edited for the first time from the famous medieval Jewish grammarian David Kimchi by a Cambridge Hebraist, Ralph Baines (c.1504-59), Catholic bishop of Lichfield and Coventry under Mary I. He was professor of Hebrew at the Royal Collège de France in Paris between 1549 and 1554. This book is a Latin abstract or paraphrase of the first part of Kimchi s Hebrew grammar, dealing with the alphabet and accents, nouns and their conjugation, verbs, changes in punctuation, some account of pronunciation and reading, prefixes and suffixes, and numbers. Ralph Baines was one of the chief restorers of Hebrew learning in [England] (Gillow). He was educated at St. John s College, Cambridge, where he opposed Latimer. He returned from Paris on the accession of Mary, became Bishop of Lichfield and Coventry in 1554, and received his DD from Cambridge the following year. After Elizabeth ascended the throne, he was deprived and imprisoned in 1559, and died the same year. Dodd, in his Church History, states that he was a divine of great note, very dexterous in expounding the Scriptures, and remarkably skilled in the three sacred languages (Gillow)..
