Background
Hyvernat was born at St. Julien-en-Jarret, Loire, France, in 1858. Christened Eugène Xavier Louis Henri Hyvernat, he was the fifth of nine children and youngest of four surviving sons of Claude and Léonide (Meyrieux) Hyvernat. His father was a mining engineer, who for three years after the revolution of 1848 had edited the Gazette de Lyon; his mother came of a family of mining engineers and artists. Both parents were devout Catholics.
Education
At the age of nine Henri was sent to the Petit Séminaire de St. Jean, at Lyons, where he remained until he was eighteen. There he displayed a marked talent for languages, mastering Latin, Greek, and English, and developed a strong interest in geology and the cosmological questions raised by Darwinism. After graduating from the seminary in 1876 (at which time he was also awarded a bachelor's degree by the University of France in Lyons), Hyvernat spent a year at home and then became a candidate for the priesthood, studying at Sulpician seminaries in Issy (1877 - 79) and Paris (1879 - 82). At the Paris seminary, under the influence of the Abbé Fulcran Grégoire Vigouroux, he undertook to learn Hebrew, Syriac, and ancient Babylonian.
While in Rome he obtained the degree of Doctor of Divinity (1882) from the Pontifical University.
He also received an honorary Litt. D. from the University of Michigan (1919).
Career
He was ordained on June 3, 1882, and was appointed chaplain at the church of St. Louis des Français in Rome. While in Rome he became acquainted with the leading orientalists then resident in Italy. In the next few years he wrote a series of three articles for the newspaper Le Monde (1883) on the Assyrian monuments of the Vatican, translated and edited a collection of Coptic texts, which he published as Les Actes des Martyrs de l'Égypte (1886 - 87), and an Album de Paléographie Copte (1888), and served, from 1885, both as professor of Assyriology and Egyptology at the Roman Seminary and as interpreter for Near Eastern languages in the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith.
At this time churchmen in the United States were making plans to establish a Catholic university in Washington, D. C. , and to enlist a faculty of scholars. Bishop John J. Keane, who later became the first rector, in 1887 invited Hyvernat to become professor of Semitics in the new institution. Encouraged by Pope Leo XIII, he accepted the post and, in the time intervening before the university opened, went to the Near East with a mission from the French government to study cuneiform inscriptions in Armenia, in the region around Lake Van. The report, Du Caucase au Golfe Persique (prepared by Paul Müller-Simonis), was published in 1892.
Hyvernat arrived in Washington in November 1889 for the opening of the Catholic University of America, one of the four European scholars who formed its initial faculty. Six years later he founded the department of Semitic and Egyptian languages and literatures, over which he presided for the rest of his life. He was devoted to his work in archaeology and philology and for many years combined winters of teaching and writing with summers of research in Europe and in Egypt. In the Revue Biblique and elsewhere he published a number of articles on Coptic and Arabic versions of the Bible.
In 1903 Hyvernat joined with Jean Baptiste Chabot and others to launch the Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, comprising edited texts of Arabic, Coptic, Ethiopic, and Syriac works with separately issued translations in Latin or a European language. This series was transferred in 1912 to the joint ownership of the Catholic universities of Louvain and of America, and at the time of his death some 120 volumes had been published. Hyvernat directed the Coptic section until 1930 and published the Coptic Acta Martyrum (4 parts, 1907 - 50); his pupil and later colleague Arthur Adolphe Vaschalde contributed largely to the Syriac section.
In Paris in the summer of 1910, Hyvernat learned that a dealer was offering for sale a collection of more than fifty Coptic manuscripts, found in the ruins of the Egyptian monastery of St. Michael of the Desert, near Hamuli in the Fayum oasis. The following year, when the collection was bought by the elder J. Pierpont Morgan for his library in New York, Hyvernat approached him and was commissioned to prepare a catalogue of the material and to track down scattered folios still in the hands of Egyptian dealers or in European libraries.
Hyvernat also supervised the repair of the manuscripts, carried out in the workshops of the Vatican Library, and prepared a photographic edition, which because of the interruption of World War I was not completed until 1922. In 1919 Hyvernat issued a Check List of Coptic Manuscripts in the Pierpont Morgan Library. Because of a chronic hip ailment and recurring periods of poor health, he was unable to prepare the full catalogue he had planned, but he completed an abbreviated version for the Morgan Library in 1932. In his later years he turned over to the Catholic University of America his own collection of Syriac and Arabic manuscripts, as well as his library and his bibliographical files, and provided an endowment to establish the Institute of Christian Oriental Research as an adjunct to the department he had founded.
Hyvernat died of cancer at the Providence Hospital in Washington in his eighty-third year, and was buried in the Catholic University plot in Mount Olivet Cemetery, Washington.