Born in Boston on June 4, 1744, Jeremiah (usually known as Jeremy) Belknap was the first child of leather-dresser and fur dealer Joseph Belknap and his wife, Sarah Byles, niece of minister and poet Mather Byles. Young Jeremy was given a good education at the Latin school of John Lovell, under whom he read such works as Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Caesar’s Gallic Wars, before entering Harvard College in the fall of 1758. While there he studied the usual array of subjects, from logic and ethics to rhetoric, elocution, and English composition, keeping notes on his studies and other subjects in copies of Nathaniel Ames’s Astronomical Almanacs as well as in a series of commonplace books. Among his entries are reports o…
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Citation: Franklin, Wayne. "Jeremy Belknap". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 November 2010 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=339, accessed 24 November 2024.]
