Richard Crackenthorpe

Richard Crakanthorpe (1567–1624) was an English clergyman, remembered both as a logician and as a religious controversialist.

His logical works still had currency in the eighteenth century, and there is an allusion in the novel Tristram Shandy. As a logician he was conservative, staying close to Aristotle and the Organon, and critical of the fashion for Ramism and its innovations. His Logicae was a substantial work, and was referred to by Samuel Johnson.

Crakanthorpe was, says Anthony à Wood,

a great canonist, and so familiar and exact in the fathers, councils, and schoolmen, that none in his time scarce went before him. None have written with greater diligence, I cannot say with a meeker mind, as some have reported that he was as foul-mouthed against the papists, particularly M. Ant. de Dominis, as Prynne was afterwards against them and the prelatists.

He was born at or near Strickland in Westmorland, and was baptised in 1568 in the nearby village of Morland. At the age of sixteen was admitted as a student at Queen's College, Oxford. According to Anthony à Wood he was first a "poor serving child", then a tabardar, and at length in 1598 became a fellow of that college. Crakanthorpe seems to have been much influenced by John Rainolds, and became conspicuous among the Puritan party at Oxford as a disputant and preacher. Wood describes him as a "zealot among them", and as having formed a coterie in his college of men of similar opinions, disciples of Rainolds. He was selected to accompany Ralph Eure, 3rd Lord Eure as his chaplain, with Thomas Morton, on a 1602 diplomatic mission to the Emperor Rudolph II and the King of Denmark.

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