Kenelm Digby
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Sir Kenelm Digby , wrongly also Dygbi (born July 11, 1603 in Gayhurst , Buckinghamshire (now Borough of Milton Keynes ), † June 11, 1665 ), was an English courtier, adventurer and diplomat . He also enjoyed a high reputation as a natural philosopher and was known as one of the leading Roman Catholic English intellectuals. His versatility earned him the nickname of a “magazine of all arts” (“memory of all arts”).
Early years and career
Digby came from the lower aristocracy, but his life was shaped primarily by the attachment of his family to the Roman Catholic faith. His father Everett Digby was executed for his involvement in the " Gunpowder Plot " attack perpetrated by Catholics in 1605 on the Protestant King James I.
From 1618 he attended Oxford University (Gloucester Hall, which was known for Catholic sympathies), where he was a student of the mathematician Thomas Allen , but did not earn a degree. Allen later bequeathed his library to him. After that he was on a cavalier tour of continental Europe from 1620 to 1623. According to his memoirs, he conquered Marie de Medici and made friends with the later King Charles I in Spain, where his uncle the Earl of Bristol was the English ambassador. On his return he was knighted as a Knight Bachelor on October 28, 1623 . He belonged to the closest circle around Charles I and was a member of his Privy Council. To promote his career, he joined the Anglican Church in 1630 .
In 1628 Digby was active as a privateer . With his flagship “Eagle” he captured several Spanish and Flemish ships off Gibraltar and Mallorca , intimidated North African pirates in Algiers and defeated a French-Venetian fleet lying in the port of Iskanderun . After English merchants were threatened with reprisals, Digby was forced to cease its activities. The Eagle was later renamed Arabella or Arbella and transported Puritans to America under John Winthrop in 1630 .
On his return in 1629 he became a civil servant and later head of Trinity House, which was responsible for the lighthouses and sea marks of Great Britain.
Marriage, Catholicism and Civil War, exile in France
In 1625 he married Venetia Stanley (born 1600, her real first name was probably Gwyneth), a famous beauty in court society at the time, but who died in 1633. At first she was the concubine of Richard Sackville, 3rd Earl of Dorset , with whom she had children and who gave her a pension of £ 500. Her death was mysterious and even an officially ordered autopsy did not bring any clarity. Digby was heartbroken (he was also said to be jealous in marriage) and the death of his wife, whom he had portrayed on the death bed by Anthony van Dyck , was a major turning point in his life. Digby wrote memories of their relationship in literary form (he referred to her as Stelliana and himself as Theagenes and he also used pseudonyms for other people) that appeared in 1827, cleared of sexually suggestive passages, but which were published a few years later in a further edition in Appendix published. Digby also had it immortalized in a magnificent funerary monument, which however fell victim to the fire in London in 1666.
Digby turned now to science and also returned to the Catholic faith in 1633. He experimented at Gresham College and obtained a monopoly on sealing wax in Wales and the surrounding area for his maintenance from the court and for trade with the Gulf of Guinea and Canada (the latter for 30 years with three others). From 1635 he was in Paris, where he spent most of the time until his return in 1660, including the time of the English Civil War (1642–1649). He only tried to return twice during this time: in 1641 to support Charles I in the Episcopal War and in 1642 when he left France after a duel in which he killed a French nobleman (Mont le Ros) who insulted the English king on a banquet (Digby was considered an excellent fencer). In England, however, he was imprisoned by parliament. Liberated from Austria by Anna's intervention , he returned to France, while his property in England was confiscated by the Puritan-ruled Parliament. In Paris he met Thomas Hobbes (who was also in exile there), whom he introduced to René Descartes' Discourse , and belonged to Marin Mersenne's circle . Later he was associated with the Montmor Academy and a friend of Samuel de Sorbière . He also knew Descartes personally and also Christian Huygens .
He was in correspondence with English and French mathematicians ( John Wallis , Pierre de Fermat , Frenicle de Bessy , Brouncker ). He was a founding member of the Royal Society since 1660 and in its council in 1662/63.
After the queen and wife of Charles I Henrietta Maria of France fled England in 1644, he became her chancellor, which he remained until his death. In 1645 and 1646/47 he negotiated for the royalists with the Pope in Rome. Later, however, an understanding was reached with Oliver Cromwell , who used him as a representative of the English Catholics for (unsuccessful) negotiations with the Pope in Rome in 1655. He was also likely receiving a pension from Cromwell. During the restoration he was respected at court due to his relationship with Henrietta Maria, but often came into conflict with Charles II and was banished from the court on one occasion. He likely died of kidney stones.
Character and works
Contemporaries considered Digby eccentric on the one hand because of his extroverted demeanor and on the other hand because of his scientific interests. Because of its versatility, Henry Stubbe called him the Pliny of his time. At a time when scientific procedures had not yet become established, Digby carried out intensive astrological and alchemical studies, in the 1630s partly with the painter Anthonis van Dyck . His experience in pharmacy was reflected in a book published in 1668 ( Choice and Experimental Receipts of Physick and Surgery ), which had many editions. In it he propagates a Powder of Sympathy ( Pulvis sympatheticus or ferrum sulfuricum siccum ) as a kind of panacea, made with astrological methods. It was even proposed as a solution to the longitude problem in 1687 (due to the "sympathetic" effect of administering the powder). His weapon ointment based on copper sulfate was supposed to heal wounds through a sympathetic effect by rubbing the weapon that caused it. Around 1654 he supported the alchemical experiments in the circle of Samuel Hartlib (to which Robert Boyle also belonged) and in 1661 he had his own laboratory in London with the Transylvanian alchemist Johannes Banfi Hunneades as his assistant.
He probably got his first contact with experimenters during his time in the naval office at Trinity House in Deptford . After the death of his wife, he threw himself into experiments at Gresham College on a wide variety of topics such as magnetism, optics and medicine and anatomy (growth of the embryo, blood circulation in the successor to William Harvey ). His most important work was Discourse concerning the vegetation of plants (1661) on botany. He was one of the first to recognize the importance of oxygen (“vital air”) for the metabolism of plants. In addition to his search for universal medicine, he was interested in medicines and cosmetics made from metal salts, the construction of ovens and the transformation of metals. During his stay in Paris in the 1650s, he received instruction from Nicolas Lefèvre in the Jardin Royale.
Digby was one of the founding members of the Royal Society in 1660 .
Only after his death was a cookbook published by him . Digby also developed an improved manufacturing technique for making wine bottles by incorporating a wind tunnel into the kiln and using higher levels of potash and lime in glass production. He is credited with developing the modern wine bottle, for which he received a patent in 1662.
In 1638 Digby published his A Conference with a Lady about Choice of a Religion , the apology for his conversion to Catholicism, in which he defended the infallibility of the Catholic Church. In 1644 Digby published the philosophical treatises The Nature of Bodies and On the Immortality of Reasonable Souls , which followed both the Aristotelian philosophy and an atomistic worldview and which represent his main works of natural philosophy.
Translations
- Opening of different secrets of nature. Translated by H. Hupka. Balthasar Christoph Wust, Frankfurt am Main 1660 (several new editions) - writing about the invention of the pulvis sympatheticus .
literature
- Robert T. Petersson: Sir Kenelm Digby, the Ornament Of England . Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1956.
- Eric W. Bligh: Sir Kenelm Digby and his Venetia . Low Marston Publ., London 1932.
- Thomas Longueville: The life of Sir Kenelm Digby . Longmans, Green, et al. Co., London 1896 ( Archives ).
- Antoine-Jacques-Louis Jourdan : Kenelm Digby . In: Dictionnaire des sciences médicales. Biography médicale . Volume 3, Panckoucke, Paris 1821, pp. 478–482 (digitized version )
- Kenelm Digby: Private Memoirs of Sir Kenelm Digby . Saunders and Otley, London 1827 ( Archives ).
- HM Digby: Sir Kenelm Digby and George Digby, Earl of Bristol . Digby, Long and Co., London 1912.
- Roy Digby Thomas: Digby. The Gunpowder Plotter's Legacy . Janus Publ., London 2001, ISBN 1-85756-520-7 .
- Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs : Studies in the natural philosophy of Sir Kenelm Digby , Ambix, Volume 18, 1971, pp. 1-25, Volume 20, 1973, pp. 143-163, Volume 21, 1974, pp. 1-28
- Marie Boas Hall , Kenelm Digby, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
- Martha Baldwin: Kenelm Digby. In: Claus Priesner , Karin Figala Alchemie: Lexicon of a hermetic science , CH Beck 1998, pp. 110–111.
- Lawrence M. Principe : Sir Kenelm Digby and His Alchemical Circle in 1650s Paris: Newly Discovered Manuscripts, Ambix, Volume 60, 2013, pp. 3-24.
Web links
- Galileo Project
- Medicina experimentalis Digbaeana, that is: Extraordinary and proven Artzeney remedies: outside Count Digby ... Manuscriptis brought together; trans. and given on day . Digitized edition of the University and State Library Düsseldorf
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://198.82.142.160/spenser/BiographyRecord.php?action=GET&bioid=33241 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ On the occasion of the King's visit to Cambridge in 1624, which he accompanied, he received a Magister Artium degree there
- ↑ In his memoirs he describes a street fight with Spaniards in Madrid, Paul Kirchner The extraordinary street fight of Sir Kenelm Digby
- ^ William Arthur Shaw: The Knights of England. Volume 2, Sherratt and Hughes, London 1906, p. 183.
- ↑ Biography of John Aubrey
- ↑ He portrayed her a total of three times, once as part of a family portrait and once allegorically as cleverness
- ↑ He probably had his first contacts with experimenters via Trinity House in Deptford during his time in the naval office
- ^ The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. VIII.
- ^ Richard Westfall : Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England , 1973, p. 16.
- ↑ The Closet of the Eminently Learned Sir Kenelme Digbie Knight Opened, 1669, issue of the Project Gutenberg . With biography of Digby.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Digby, Kenelm |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Memory of all arts |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | English courtier, diplomat, natural philosopher |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 11, 1603 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Gayhurst , Buckinghamshire , now the Borough of Milton Keynes |
| DATE OF DEATH | June 11, 1665 |