For the Sake of the Vedas: The Anglo-German Life of Friedrich Rosen 1805-1837.

• Author: Jamison, Stephanie W.

For the Sake of the Vedas: The Anglo-German Life of Friedrich Rosen 1805-1837. By ROSANE ROCHER, with AGNES STACHE-WEISKE. Abhandlungen fur die Kunde des Morgenlandes, vol. 118. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ, 2020. Pp. xx + 396.

Rosane Rocher is without doubt the leading historian of our field, the author of numerous works (some coauthored with her late husband, Ludo Rocher) on key figures and key moments in the development of the discipline of Indology in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. With her breadth and depth of knowledge, she was in a perfect position to make inspired use of a rich trove of archival material she came across, and to shape it into a compelling intellectual and personal biography of a now little-remembered pioneering Sanskritist and all-round orientalist of the early nineteenth century--the German Friedrich Rosen, whose short life lasted a mere thirty-two years, from 1805 till 1837. Among his accomplishments, Rosen was the first to earn a PhD with a dissertation on Sanskrit at the University of Berlin and the first to teach Sanskrit at a British university, London University (later University College London), where he held a professorship (twice). His knowledge of Sanskrit encompassed essentially all that was then available in the West, and he commanded Arabic, Syriac, and Persian, among other oriental languages. But he is especially to be celebrated for his trailblazing work on the editing and translation of the Rgveda. As a Vedicist I must admit, shamefacedly, that I had never heard of him before.

As Rocher tells us in her preface (p. xvi), she did not set out to write this book, but started with the modest aim of publishing the letters of August Wilhelm von Schlegel to Rosen. In the course of her epistolary sleuthing, she discovered that Rosen's letters to Schlegel survived, as well as those to Wilhelm von Humboldt, and these new materials ultimately led her to the huge archive of letters between Rosen and his father, exchanged from the time the former left home to attend university until his untimely death. This voluminous and intimate correspondence gave her access to the personal as well as the scholarly--or, better, the personal intertwined with the scholarly, as the young man agonized about his course of studies and his academy prospects, reported his discoveries and frustrations, his hesitations and false starts. In short, this correspondence opened the possibility of writing a real, rounded biography of...