Thomas Allen (mathematician)

[9] He had a wide range of pupils and followers: Kenelm Digby[3] and Brian Twyne[10] in natural philosophy, with Theodore Haak coming later.

[14] Northumberland invited Allen to visit, and he spent some time with the Syon House group around the Earl; he became acquainted with Thomas Harriot, John Dee, and other mathematicians.

[20] There is a surviving 62-page horoscope cast for the teenage Philip Sidney in the Ashmole manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, in the period 1570–2 when he was studying at Oxford, where Leicester was Chancellor, and it has been attributed to Allen; the case has also been made that it was by Dee.

[2] There Allen's name is coupled with Dee's as atheists, in a series of claims that Leicester found physicians and other lackeys for his evil-doing at Oxford and elsewhere.

[28] He wrote a Latin commentary on the second and third books of Claudius Ptolemy of Pelusium, Concerning the Judgment of the Stars, or, as it is commonly called, Of the Quadripartite Construction, with an Exposition.

[1] He also acquired manuscripts from dissolved monasteries, such as Reading Abbey, for which his sources may have been Gerbrand Harkes, the Protestant dealer, and Clement Burdett.

[30] A considerable part of Allen's collection was presented to the Bodleian Library by Sir Kenelm Digby, to whom it had been left:[2] over 200 manuscripts, which were rebound in calf.

He was a significant supporter of Sir Thomas Bodley's effort to found the Library; and gave it a number of works.

[31] The Cuthbert Gospel of St John, seen in his library by James Ussher, appears to have left his possession by 1622, as it is not in a catalogue of that date.

Ussher wrote to Camden in 1606 of the help he had had from Allen's collection, consulting William of Malmesbury, and a papal bull from Giraldus Cambrensis via Johannes Rossus.