Studying Manchu in eighteenth-century Europe: the Manchu-language materials assembled by Bayer (as conserved in the archives of the Hunterian Library, Glasgow University)
(60th Annual Meeting Székesvehérvár, 2017)
Amongst the papers belonging to Gottlieb Siegfried Bayer (1694 – 1738, holder of the chair of Greek and Roman Antiquities and then of the chair of Oriental Antiquities at the then newly-established Russian Academy of Sciences) now in the possession of the Hunterian library of Glasgow University are a manuscript Russian-Chinese-Manchu dictionary (with some German glosses added in Bayer’s hand) and several documents containing fragmentary information on the Manchu language (letters from Peking from the Jesuit missionary Dominique Parrenin; Bayer’s own handwritten accounts of his meetings with Manchu diplomats in Saint Petersburg; a small square of paper where a Manchu diplomat has written phrases in Manchu and Chinese and Bayer has recopied them; drafts for Bayer’s two published essays on Manchu). The analysis of this assembly of materials sheds light on the forms in which knowledge of Manchu could reach an individual non-missionary European scholar in the early eighteenth-century and on the repertoire of techniques that might be drawn on to try to learn the language from fragmentary hard-obtained information.