Lowe was born in Kalvarija to a Russian Jewish family headed by Charles Loew, a silk and embroidery merchant, and his wife, Sarah Ragoler. He emigrated to New York City with his parents in 1892, becoming a citizen of the United States in 1900. Originally named Elias Avery Loew, he altered the spelling of his name in 1918. His wife, whom he married in 1911 and with whom he had three daughters, was the translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter. Among their descendants are English artist Charlotte Johnson Wahl, and her son, journalist and politician Boris Johnson, former Mayor of London and Foreign Secretary, and current Prime Minister of the UK. Although Lowe "never abandoned his solidarity with the Jewish people", he declined to practise Judaism; towards the end of his life he told one of his daughters that, were he to adhere to a religion, he would opt for Roman Catholicism. Following his death in Bad Nauheim, Germany, his ashes were interred at Oxford's Corpus Christi College.
Education and career
After studying at the College of the City of New York from 1894 through 1897, Lowe obtained a BA at Cornell University in 1902. Thereafter he studied briefly at the University of Halle, and then at the University of Munich where, under the supervision of Ludwig Traube, he completed his doctorate in 1908. He first lectured at the University of Oxford in 1913. The following year, Oxford granted him a regular appointment as lecturer, appointing him reader in 1927. Nearly all of Lowe's palaeography teaching occurred at the latter institution. Although he became one of the first professors at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study in 1936, he continued to lecture at Oxford during Trinity terms until 1948. In addition, he acted as a consultant in palaeography for the Library of Congress, and, from 1911 to 1953, as research associate in palaeography for the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Lowe wrote several important works on early medieval palaeography, including The Beneventan Script, and his collected Palaeographical Papers, 1907–1965. He remains best known, however, for the eleven-volume Codices Latini Antiquiores which offers a palaeographical guide to all extant Latin literary manuscripts copied in scripts antedating the ninth century. Published 1934–1971, this monumental work covers over 1,800 manuscripts from repositories in twenty-one countries, providing detailed descriptions and one or more facsimiles for each manuscript. An internationally respected authority in his field, Lowe received formal recognition from numerous academies, institutes, and scholarly societies. He was awarded the Medieval Academy of America's Haskins Medal in 1957, the gold medal of the Bibliographical Society in 1959, and had honorary doctoral degrees conferred on him by the University of Oxford, the University of North Carolina, and the National University of Ireland. From 1954 until his death in 1969, he was an Honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College of Oxford University. A series of lectures on palaeography, the Triennial E. A. Lowe Lectures, continues to be held at the College in his memory.
