Abstract
This article discusses a new source with which to reconstruct a lost artificial language scheme of the mid-seventeenth century, the author of which was said to have translated parts of Homer into his artificial character. Other than that he was an émigré (and presumably Francophone) scholar named Champagnolla, little has been known about this author or what his scheme involved. A much fuller account of it is provided by a manuscript in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth; it records the thoughts of those who had, at the instigation of King James I, been set to assess the value and practicability of proposals for an artificial language put forward by an anonymous French scholar. They provide a clear picture both of what Champagnolla had intended, and the political contours of intellectual life at the end of the Jacobean period.
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