Curzon, Robert

Curzon circa 1840s

Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche (16 March 1810 – 2 August 1873), styled The Honourable Robert Curzon between 1829 and 1870, was an English traveller, diplomat and author, active in the Near East. He was responsible for acquiring several unimportant and late Biblical manuscripts from Eastern Orthodox monasteries.

Curzon was the son of the Hon. Robert Curzon, younger son of Assheton Curzon, 1st Viscount Curzon, and his wife Harriet Anne Curzon, 13th Baroness Zouche. He was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. In 1831 he succeeded his father as Member of Parliament for Clitheroe, a seat he only held until the following year.^[1] In his Visits to Monasteries in the Levant (1849), he described and justified his takings. He visited Mount Athos in 1837, and at the Monastery of St Paul, he recounts how the abbot said 'We make no use of the old books, and should be glad if you would accept one,' upon which he took two, including a fourteenth-century illuminated Bulgarian gospel, now in the British Library.

Lord Zouche succeeded his mother in the barony in 1870. He died in August 1873, aged 63, and was succeeded in the title by his son Robert.

In 1834 he brought some manuscripts from Palestine (codices 548, 552-554) and in 1837 from the Athos peninsula (among them codices 547, 549-551). After his death they were deposited in the British Museum.

[edit] See also

• Obituary in The Times

[edit] References

[edit] External links

Wikisource has original works written by or about: Robert Curzon

• Works by Robert Curzon at Project Gutenberg – Visits To Monasteries in the Levant – plain text and HTML
• Archival material relating to Robert Curzon, 14th Baron Zouche listed at the UK National Register of Archives