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Samuel Hartlib

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Samuel Hartli(e)b (ca. 1600 – 1662) was a German Briton polymath, an expert in many subjects, called "the Great Intelligencer of Europe".[1] Interested in fields such as science, medicine, agriculture, politics, and education, he settled in England, where he married and died. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle and Isaac Newton.

Hartlib set out with the goal "To record all human knowledge and to make it universally available for the education of all mankind".[citation needed] His work has been compared to modern internet search engines.[2]

Life

Hartlib was born in Elbing (Elbląg) in the Polish province of Royal Prussia. He studied at the Gymnasium in Brieg (Brzeg), and at the Albertina. He was briefly at the University of Cambridge, supported by John Preston.[3]

Hartlib, taking refuge from the Thirty Years War that ravaged large parts of Germany, relocated to England with the Scottish preacher John Dury in 1628. He had to flee religious persecution in his homeland, and the Parliament of England invited him as a man of great Protestant vision before the English Civil War broke out in 1642.

Hartlib unsuccessfully established a school in Chichester and then lived in London. He was a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard and also in Duke's Place next to the 17th century synagogue in Bevis Marks.

Hartlib is often described as an "intelligencer". His main aim in life was to further knowledge and so he kept in touch with a vast array of contacts, from high philosophers to gentleman farmers. He maintained a voluminous correspondence and much of this has survived; it is housed in a special Hartlib collection at the University of Sheffield in England. He became one of the best-connected intellectual figures of the Commonwealth era, and was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed-machines and siege engines. His letters, in German and English, have been the subject of close modern scholarship.

In 1655 he wrote 'The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees' in which Christopher Wren had designed and built a glass enclosed bee-hive. Hartlib died in poverty probably because he was associated with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth and so was sidelined after Charles II's Restoration.

Baconian

Hartlib was indebted to Francis Bacon for a general theory of education, and this formed common ground for him and Jan Comenius.[4] Hartlib put much effort into getting Comenius, of the Protestant Moravian Brethren, to visit England. Hartlib's two closest correspondents were John Dury, and Comenius. The latter had the concept of a "tree of knowledge", continuously branching out and growing. He also put his own spin on Bacon's ideas.

Men like Hartlib and Comenius wanted to make the spread of knowledge easier, at a time when most knowledge was not categorised or standardised by any widespread conventions or academic disciplines, and libraries were mostly private. They wanted to enlighten and educate, and to improve society, as religious people who saw this as the work of God. Comenius arrived in England in 1641, bad timing considering that a civil war was breaking out. His presence failed to transform the position in education, though a substantial literature grew up, particularly on university reform, where Oliver Cromwell set up a new institution.

Bacon had formulated a project for a research institute, under the title "Salomon's House" in his New Atlantis of 1624. This theoretical scheme was important for Hartlib, who angled during the 1640s for public funding for it. He was unsuccessful except for a small pension for himself, but gathered like-minded others: Dury, John Milton, Kenelm Digby, William Petty, Frederick Clod (Clodius).[5]

Milton dedicated his 1644 Of Education to Hartlib, whom he had come to know the year before and who had pressed him to publish his educational ideas. But he gave the Comenian agenda short shrift in the work. Barbara Lewalski considers his dismissive attitude as disingenous, since he had probably used texts by Comenius in his own teaching.[6]

Hartlib Circle, Invisible College, and the Royal Society's background

The 'Hartlib circle' of contacts and correspondents, built up from around 1630, was one of the foundations of the Royal Society of London which was established a generation later, in 1660. 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.

One of Hartlib's pet 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. 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 encyclopedia, in which people could keep adding new information. 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.[7]

In the later Interregnum the "Invisible College" might refer to a group meeting in Gresham College.[8] According to Christopher Hill, however, the Gresham College club that was convened from 1645 by Theodore Haak, certainly a Hartlibian, was distinct from the Comenian Invisible College.[9] Lady Ranelagh, who was Boyle's sister, had a London salon during the 1650s, much frequented by virtuosi associated with Hartlib.[10]

One distinguishing feature of the Hartlib Circle was its tolerance of hermetic ideas; Hartlib himself had an interest in sigils and astrology.[11] 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.[12] Both Boyle and William Petty became more attached to a third or fourth loose association, the Oxford group around John Wilkins, at this period; Wilkins was to be the founding Secretary of the Royal Society.[13]

In 1660 Hartlib was at work writing to John Evelyn, an important broker of the royal charter for the eventual Society, but promoting not 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, 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.[14]

Economic, agriculture, politics

Hartlib valued useful knowledge that could increase crop yields, cure disease and so on. One of Hartlib's great interests was agriculture. He worked to spread Dutch farming practices in England, such as using nitrogenous crops like cabbage to replenish the soil with nitrogen, to increase the yield of next season's crop. Hartlib wrote to many ordinary landowners, as well as to leading academics, in his quest for knowledge.

The utopian tract Macaria appeared under Hartlib's name. It is now considered that it was written by Gabriel Plattes (1600–1655), a friend.[15][16]

After Comenius left England, and in particular from 1646 onwards, the Hartlib group agitated for religious reform and toleration, against the Presbyterian dominance in the Long Parliament. They also proposed economic, technical and agricultural improvements, particularly through Sir Cheney Culpeper, and Henry Robinson.[17]

Science and medicine

The work of Paracelsus, a religious zealot who made bold claims for his science, was also one of the inspirations to Hartlib and early chemistry. He was very open-minded. He often tested the ideas and theories of his correspondents. For his own trouble with kidney stones he took to drinking diluted sulphuric acid — a cure that may have in fact been the death of him.

He was interested in theories and practices that modern science would laugh at — for example, sympathetic medicine. This involved using things in nature that bear a resemblance to the ailment. Hence, a sympathetic cure might be to take a kidney bean (looks like a kidney) and to bury it in the dead of night on the full moon.

Work

  • Hartlib's correspondence and notes, over 25,000 pages, were published in 1995 on CD.

Literature

  1. ^ Arved Hübler, Peter Linde, John W. T. Smith. Electronic Publishing '01: 2001 in the Digital Publishing Odyssey. IOS Press. 2001. ISBN 1586031910
  2. ^ Eine Vorgeschichte der Internet-Suchmaschine [1]
  3. ^ Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Seventeenth-Century British Philosophers (2000), article Hartlib, Samuel, pp. 393-5.
  4. ^ John Paul Russo, The Future Without a Past: The Humanities in a Technological Society (2005), p. 90.
  5. ^ Markku Peltonen, The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996), pp. 164-5.
  6. ^ Barbara Kowalski, The Life of John Milton (2003), pp. 172-3.
  7. ^ Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), p. 205.
  8. ^ http://www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/Societies/RS.html
  9. ^ Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 105.
  10. ^ Lisa Jardine, The Curious Life of Robert Hooke (2003), p. 88.
  11. ^ Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), p. 270 and p. 346.
  12. ^ Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), pp. 71-2.
  13. ^ Markku Peltonen, The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996), pp. 166.
  14. ^ Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (1967), p. 206-234.
  15. ^ http://www.answers.com/topic/samuel-hartlib
  16. ^ John L. Brooke, The Refiner's Fire: The Making of Mormon Cosmology, 1644-1844 (1996), p. 20.
  17. ^ J. P. Cooper, Social and Economic Policies under the Commonwealth, p. 125, in G. E. Aylmer, editor, The Interregnum (1972).
  • H. M. Knox: William Petty's Advice to Samuel Hartlib, British Journal of Educational Studies, Vol. 1, No. 2 (May, 1953), pp. 131-142

External links

  • Samuel Hartlib at The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, and the Temple: Biblical metaphors of knowledge in early modern Europe. Published by the Museum of the History of Science at at the University of Oxford.

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