Hartlib Circle

J. T. Young writes:Young, J. T. (1998), Faith, Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle p.248

At its nexus, it was an association of personal friends. Hartlib and Dury were the two key figures: Comenius, despite their best efforts, always remained a cause they were supporting rather than a fellow co-ordinator. Around them were Hübner, Haak, Pell, Moriaen, Rulise, Hotton and Appelius, later to be joined by Sadler, Culpeper, Worsley, Boyle and Clodius. But as soon as one looks any further than this from the centre, the lines of communication begin to branch and cross, threading their way into the entire intellectual community of Europe and America. It is a circle with a definable centre but an almost infinitely extendable periphery.

Examples given of the "periphery" are John Winthrop and Balthazar Gerbier.{{cite book|author=Ted-Larry Pebworth|title=Literary circles and cultural communities in Renaissance England|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=Ih1sRzuOAhMC&pg=PA93|accessdate=3 April 2012|year=2000|publisher=University of Missouri Press|isbn=978-0-8262-1317-4|pages=93}}

• Agriculture and horticulture: Ralph Austen,{{ODNBweb|id=905|title=Austen, Ralph|first=James Grantham|last=Turner}} John Beale,{{ODNBweb|id=1802|title=Beale, John|first=Patrick|last=Woodland}} Robert Child,{{ODNBweb|id=53661|title=Child, Robert|first=Stephen|last=Clucas}} Cheney Culpeper, Cressy Dymock,{{ODNBweb|id=54119|title=Dymock, Cressy|first= M.|last=Greengrass}} Gabriel Plattes,{{ODNBweb|id=22360|title=Plattes, Gabriel|first= Anita|last=McConnell}} Adolphus Speed.{{cite DNB|wstitle=Speed, Adolphus}}
• Alchemy, chemistry, mineralogy: Robert Boyle,{{ODNB|id=3137|title=Boyle, Robert|first=Michael|last=Hunter}} Frederick Clod, Cheney Culpeper, John Worthington,{{Cite web|url=https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/library/special/hartlib|title=Hartlib Papers - Special Collections - the University Library - the University of Sheffield|date=10 January 2018}} Ezechiel Foxcroft,{{ODNBweb|id=53695|title=Foxcroft, Elizabeth|first=Sarah|last=Hutton}} John French,{{ODNBweb|id=10164|title=French, John|first=Peter|last=Elmer}} Johann Moriaen, Gabriel Plattes.
• Finance: Cheney Culpeper,{{Cite web|url=https://everydayecon.wordpress.com/2016/07/11/on-adam-smiths-straw-man/|title = On Adam Smith's Straw Man|date = 11 July 2016}} William Potter{{Cite web |url=https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-03-08/how-alchemists-invented-modern-finance-echoes |title=Archived copy |website=Bloomberg News |access-date=13 July 2016 |archive-date=6 August 2016 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160806165229/https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2012-03-08/how-alchemists-invented-modern-finance-echoes |url-status=dead }}
• Mathematics: John Pell, Robert Wood.{{cite book|author=Donald R. Dickson|title=The Tessera of Antilia: Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=jfDMQ_xtKUsC&pg=PA239|accessdate=9 July 2013|year=1998|publisher=BRILL|isbn=978-90-04-11032-8|page=239}}
• Medicine: William Rand,Gillian Darley, John Evelyn: Living for ingenuity (2006), p. 146. Thomas Coxe{{cite book|author1=S.-J. Savonius-Wroth|author2=Jonathan Walmsley|author3=Paul Schuurman|title=The Continuum Companion to Locke|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=8KcCE_NSaiIC&pg=PA84|accessdate=8 August 2013|date=6 May 2010|publisher=Continuum|isbn=978-0-8264-2811-0|page=84}}
• Pansophism: Hartlib and Dury were close allies of Comenius.
• Protestantism: Sarah Hewley,{{ODNBweb|id=13156|title=Hewley, Sarah|first=P. J.|last=Withington}} John Dury,G. H. Turnbull, Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers, London, University Press of Liverpool (Hodder & Stoughton), 1947, pp. 127-316. John Sadler, John Stoughton.{{cite book|author=Graeme Murdock|title=Calvinism on the Frontier, 1600-1660: International Calvinism and the Reformed Church in Hungary and Transylvania|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=UESVpu-do8sC&pg=PA89|accessdate=28 March 2012|date=21 September 2000|publisher=Oxford University Press|isbn=978-0-19-820859-4|page=89}}
• Settlement of Ireland: Gerard Boate and his brother Arnold Boate,{{cite DNB|wstitle=Boate, Gerard}} William Petty, Benjamin Worsley.

Educational reform was topical and central to the pansophist programme. Hartlib compiled a list of "advisers", and updated it. It included Jeremy Collier, Dury, Thomas Horne, Marchamont Nedham, John Pell, William Rand, Christian Ravius, Israel Tonge, and Moses Wall.Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (1979), pp. 146–7.Charles Webster, Samuel Hartlib and the Advancement of Learning (2010), p. 58; [https://books.google.com/books?id=Ep3J07h3EqYC&pg=PA58 Google Books]. The staff proposed for Durham College was influenced by the Circle's lobbying. John Hall was another associateBarbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (2003), p. 210. who wrote on education. In the period 1648–50 many works on education appeared from Circle authors (Dury, Dymock, Hall, Cyprian Kinner, Petty, George Snell, and Worsley).Webster, p. 51; [https://books.google.com/books?id=Ep3J07h3EqYC&pg=PA51 Google Books].

A letter from Hartlib to John Milton prompted the tract Of Education (1644), subtitled To Master Samuel Hartlib. But Milton's ideas were quite some way from those of the Comenians.Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (2003), pp. 172–3.

Individuals involved with the Hartlib Circle played an important role in Sweden's scientific revolution, as they travelled to consult on educational and religious reform, as well as tutored Swedish students who were sent abroad.{{Cite journal |last=Wennerlind |first=Carl |date=2022 |title=Atlantis Restored: Natural Knowledge and Political Economy in Early Modern Sweden |journal=American Historical Review |volume=127 |issue=4 |doi=10.1093/ahr/rhac419 |url=https://history.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/20/2023/01/rhac419_CarlWennerlind.pdf}}

{{further|Invisible College}}

Robert Boyle referred a few times in his correspondence to the 'Invisible College'. Scholarly attention has been paid to identifying this shadowy group. The social picture is not simplistic, since en masse Hartlib's contacts had fingers in every pie.

Margery Purver concluded that the Invisible College coincided with the Hartlib-led lobbyists, those who were promoting to the Parliament the concept of an Office of Address.Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), p. 205. The effective lifetime of this idea has been pinned down to the period 1647 to 1653, and as the second wave of speculation on the ideal society, after Comenius left England.J. C. Davis, Utopia and the Ideal Society: A Study of English Utopian Writing, 1516-1700 (1983), p. 315.

In the later Interregnum the "Invisible College" might refer to a group meeting in Gresham College.{{Cite web|url=http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Societies/RS.html|title = London Royal Society}} According to Christopher Hill, however, the 1645 group (the Gresham College club that was convened from 1645 by Theodore Haak, certainly a Hartlibian) was distinct from the Comenian Invisible College.Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 105. Lady Katherine Ranelagh, who was Boyle's sister, had a London salon during the 1650s, much frequented by virtuosi associated with Hartlib.Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke (2003), p. 88.

One of Hartlib's projects, a variant on Salomon's House that had more of a public face, was the "Office of Address" — he envisaged an office in every town where somebody might go to find things out. This might well be compatible with Baconian ideas, and a related public office scheme was mooted under James I (by Arthur Gorges and Walter Cope).{{cite book|author1=John Barnard|author2=D. F. McKenzie|title=The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain|date=2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-66182-9|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=JadSMrXPraMC&pg=PA308 308] note 28}} But the immediate inspiration was Théophraste Renaudot and his Paris bureau d'adresse.Hugh Trevor-Roper, Renaissance Essays (1985), p. 188. For example, at a practical level, Hartlib thought people could advertise job vacancies there — and prospective employees would be able to find work. At a more studious level, Hartlib wanted academics to pool their knowledge so that the Office could act as a living and growing form of an encyclopedia, in which people could keep adding new information.

The Office of address idea was promoted by Considerations tending to the happy Accomplishment of Englands Reformation in Church and State (1647), written by Hartlib and Dury, a pamphlet also including an ambitious tiered system of educational reform.Denis Lawton, Peter Gordon, A History of Western Educational Ideas (2002), p. 74. There was a limited implementation, by Henry Robinson, in 1650.Kathleen Anne Wellman, Making Science Social: The Conferences of Théophraste Renaudot, 1633-1642 (2003), p. 42.

In 1660 Hartlib was at work writing to John Evelyn, an important broker of the royal charter for the eventual Royal Society. He was, however, not promoting a purist Baconian model, but an "Antilia". This was the name chosen by Johann Valentin Andreae for a more hermetic and utopian fellowship. The proposal, which conformed to Comenian ideas as more compatible with pansophia or universal wisdom, was in effect decisively rejected. Hartlib was relying on a plan of Bengt Skytte, a son of Johan Skytte and knighted by Charles I,Marjory Harper, Emigrant Homecomings: The Return Movement of Emigrants, 1600-2000 (2005), p. 63. and the move was away from Bacon's clearer emphasis on reforming the natural sciences. Despite some critical voices, the Hartlib-Comenius trend was written out of the Royal Society from the beginning. Hartlib himself died shortly after the Society was set up.Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), p. 206-234.

Hartlib was noted as a follower of Francis Bacon and Comenius, but his background in the German academies of the period gave him a broad view of other methods and approaches, including those of Petrus Ramus, Bartholomäus Keckermann, and Jacobus Acontius.{{cite book|author1=John Barnard|author2=D. F. McKenzie|title=The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain|date=2002|publisher=Cambridge University Press|isbn=978-0-521-66182-9|pages=[https://books.google.com/books?id=JadSMrXPraMC&pg=PA311 311]}} Further, the Hartlib Circle was tolerant of hermetic ideas; Hartlib himself had an interest in sigils and astrology.Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 270 and p. 346. Boyle too attempted to straddle the opening divide between experimental chemistry and alchemy, by treating the latter in a less esoteric way; he did distance himself to an extent from the Hartlib group on moving to Oxford around 1655.Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), pp. 71-2.

Both Boyle and William Petty became more attached to a third or fourth loose association, the group around John Wilkins, at this period, now referred to as the Oxford Philosophical Club. Wilkins was to be the founding Secretary of the Royal Society.Markku Peltonen, The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996), pp. 166.

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Category:Early modern period

Category:History of the Royal Society

Category:Literary circles