(b Tönning, Schleswig-Holstein, 1620–21; d Utrecht, 15 Feb 1710). Danish polyhistor. He is first heard of at Königsberg, where he enrolled at the university on 20 June 1644 to study law. On 29 September 1645, however, he matriculated as a student of medicine at Leiden. Here his age is given as 24 and his birthplace as Tönning, which at that time was under the Danish crown. However, it was as a philologist and mathematician that he was to make his mark. He dedicated his Antiquae musicae auctores septem (Amsterdam, 1652) to Queen Christina of Sweden, and in May of that year he arrived at her court at Stockholm. He became assistant royal librarian, but his stay in Sweden was cut short because of a violent altercation with Bourdelot, the queen’s personal physician and favourite.
In 1653 Meibom went to Copenhagen, where he was taken under the protection of King Frederik III and granted a pension as a deserving scholar. On the title-page of his book Dialogus de proportionibus (Copenhagen, 1655) he is described as ‘consiliarus regius’, though it is not known whether any civil service duties were attached to the title. A number of archival references after 1660 show the king was using Meibom’s great learning to order and catalogue the expanding royal library, though apparently he was not given the coveted official appointment of librarian. In 1661 he declined an approach made to him on behalf of Queen Christina to become her librarian in Rome, but at the same time he made it clear that he was not satisfied with his position. His next post was director of customs at Elsinore, from 1664 to 1668. After this he emigrated with his family to Holland, where, apart from three years (1674–7) in England, he spent the rest of his life. Except for a teaching appointment which he held for a year after arriving in Amsterdam, he seems to have occupied no official position, and he refused an invitation to become professor of Hebrew at Leiden. In 1691 it was reported that he was living in poverty, supporting himself by reading proofs. In 1705 he was obliged to sell part of his library by auction; he himself prepared the auction catalogue, in which no fewer than 5848 items are carefully classified, and on the title-page he described himself, after nearly 40 years, as ‘sometime councillor to Frederik III, King of Denmark’. The rest of his library was sold in May 1711, after his death.
Antiquae musicae auctores septem is his most important contribution to musical scholarship. In its two quarto volumes he provided an edition of the Greek texts of Aristoxenus, Cleonides (under an attribution to Euclid), Nicomachus, Alypius, Gaudentius, Bacchius, Aristides Quintilianus and Martianus Capella (Satyricon, bk 9), with a Latin translation and commentary. Dialogus de proportionibus, the only other work in which he discussed music, is in the form of a dialogue between a number of Greek mathematicians, who discuss not only mathematical proportions but the musical proportions as well.
HawkinsH
J. Moller: Cimbria literata (Copenhagen, 1744), iii, 443ff
A. Hammerich: Dansk musikhistorie indtil ca.1700 (Copenhagen, 1921)
C.S. Petersen: ‘Marcus Meibom og Villem Lange’, Fund og forskning, i (1954), 1–39
JOHN BERGSAGEL