Digital Calendar

People involved: Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson, Leigh Penman

Partner institution: Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield

Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) was an altogether different figure from Aubrey, Wallis, and Lister. While Aubrey descended from landed gentry in Wiltshire and Wallis from a clerical family in Kent, Hartlib was of mercantile stock: his father was a German merchant, and his maternal grandfather was the head of the English trading company in Elbing on the southern shores of the Baltic.

After the Swedish invasion undermined Elbing’s commercial position in the late 1620s, Hartlib fled war-torn central Europe to England, where he became one of the most active reformers of the late 1630s and the ensuing civil war and republican period. He thus provides our project with a landfall on the European mainland and a window on a new range of ‘cultures of knowledge’ in the turbulent decades before 1660.

‘Elbing, Ville de la Prusse Royale’, published by Pierre van de Aa. Leiden, c.1720. 25.5 by 34.5cm. (Wikimedia Commons).

Not known in his own day for his own published writings, Hartlib was virtually forgotten by posterity until the rediscovery of an archive of his personal papers. This discovery revealed his personal correspondence to have been enormous. The 20,000 folios of his archive contain over 4,250 letters written to or (mostly) from some 400 correspondents, or exchanged between third parties. Befitting Hartlib’s own origins, their geographical range was impressive, embracing eastern and central as well as western Europe, Great Britain, Ireland, and New England. Their thematic scope was no less remarkable. Baconian aspirations for the advancement of learning merged with proposals for breaking monopolies, disseminating technical discoveries, diplomatic intelligence-gathering, and employing the poor – concerns which, in the disrupted conditions of the 1640s and 50s, shaded over into utopian planning energized by millenarian expectations. Most characteristic of all was the social depth of Hartlib’s network. In sharp contrast to John Wallis, whose career played itself out entirely within one of Europe’s most stable academic institutions, Hartlib’s circle was constantly in motion, populated as it was by Protestant refugees displaced by the endemic warfare and political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century.

Leigh at the Prague workshop.

Leigh at an EMLO focus group.

‘Not known in his own day for his own published writings, Hartlib was virtually forgotten by posterity until the rediscovery of an archive of his personal papers. This discovery revealed his personal correspondence to have been enormous …’

Rationale for Inclusion

Hartlib’s archive is now recognized as one of the richest in Europe for revealing the intellectual shock waves unleashed by the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century, and Hartlib himself has taken his place at the centre of one of the great intelligencing networks of the mid-1600s. Indeed, since the 1947 publication of G. H. Turnbull’s Hartlib, Dury and Comenius: Gleanings from Hartlib’s Papers, he has formed the subject of numerous studies, conferences, and initiatives, including the pioneering digitisation of his entire extant archive between 1988 and 2002 by the Hartlib Papers Project, led at the University of Sheffield by Mark Greengrass and Michael Leslie. Yet despite these successive waves of academic attention, a great deal of unfamiliar material still requires investigation, and Hartlib’s papers themselves remain underutilised.

In order to navigate more efficiently throughout this material, in 2000 Howard Hotson set out to create a fresh database of the correspondence which makes up a large proportion of the total documents in Hartlib’s archive. Assembled for his own use and now containing 4,261 entries, this tool has proved invaluable in establishing the overall shape of Hartlib’s circle and in revealing some of the underlying structures which shaped it. Cultures of Knowledge will provide a context in which to complete and disseminate this valuable tool. Under the guidance of Howard Hotson in Oxford and Mark Greengrass in Sheffield, a Postdoctoral Fellow is checking the database against the manuscripts for accuracy and completeness, upgrading it to the standard of the other project calendars, resolving a series of outstanding problems, and adding new prosopographical material collected by Greengrass and Hotson.

Outputs & Presentations

Primary Outputs

• Digital catalogue of the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib within Early Modern Letters Online.

Launch Hartlib Catalogue

Recent Secondary Outputs

• Leigh Penman, ‘How Large was Hartlib’s Archive? A History and Reconsideration of the Correspondence of Samuel Hartlib’. Submitted to Annals of Science.
• Howard Hotson, ‘The Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia’, in Steven John Reid and Emma Wilson, eds, Ramus, Pedagogy and the Liberal Arts: Ramism in Britain and the Wider World (Aldershot, 2011), pp. 227-52.
• Howard Hotson, ‘A ‘Generall Reformation of Common Learning’ and its Reception in the English-Speaking World, 1560-1642′, Proceedings of the British Academy 164 (December 2010), pp. 193-228.
• Leigh Penman, ‘Prophecy, Alchemy, and Strategies of Dissident Communication: A 1630 Letter from the Bohemian Chiliast Paul Felgenhauer to the Leipzig Physician Arnold Kerner’, Acta Comeniana 24 (December 2010), pp. 115-132.

Recent Presentations

• Mark Greengrass, ‘Shadow Archives in Seventeenth-Century Correspondence’. Archives of Scientific Correspondence (Workshop, University of Provence, November 2011). 
• Howard Hotson, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper’s ‘Three Foreigners’ Revisited: Vulgar Baconianism, Central Europe, and the Origins of the Royal Society’ (Seminar, Forschung- und Landesbibliothek, Gotha, November 2011).
• Howard Hotson, ‘Age of Iron, Age of Gold: Towards an Intellectual Geography of the Thirty Years’ War, the Reformed Diaspora, and the Golden Age of the Dutch Universities’. Early Modern Seminar (Seminar, University of Gothenburg, September 2011).
• Leigh Penman, ‘The Intellectual Geography of a German State: Upper Lusatia during the Thirty Years’ War’. Early Modern Exchanges (Conference, University College London, September 2011).
• Leigh Penman, ‘The Intellectual Geography of the First German Philosopher: Jakob Böhme and Görlitz’. Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 (Conference, University of Oxford, September 2011).
  
• Howard Hotson, Keynote: ‘Small is Beautiful: Territorial Fragmentation and Intellectual Activity in the Holy Roman Empire, c.1550-1700′. Intellectual Geography: Comparative Studies, 1550-1700 (Conference, University of Oxford, September 2011).
  
• Howard Hotson, Keynote: ‘Cultures of Communication in an Age of Crisis: The Multilayered Network of Samuel Hartlib’. Reading Conference in Early Modern Studies: Communication and Exchange (Conference, University of Reading, July 2011).
• Leigh Penman, ‘How Large was Hartlib’s Archive?’. Cultures of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seminar, University of Oxford, June 2011).

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• Howard Hotson, ‘International and Interconfessionnal Contacts in Renaissance Correspondence: Challenges and Research Strategies’. Respublica Litteraria in Action (Conference, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cracow, October 2010).
• Mark Greengrass and Howard Hotson, Keynote: ‘Networking the Republic of Letters’. Circulating Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Networks, Knowledge, and Forms (Conference, Royal Society, London, July 2010).
• Leigh Penman, ‘Radical Roots of Pansophia? Systematic Knowledge, Encyclopedia, and Apocalypse in the Works of Dissenting Lutherans, 1570-1630′. Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560-1670 (Workshop, Semmelweis Museum, Library, and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest, April 2010).
• Howard Hotson, ‘Universal Reformation in Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670: Personal Reflections and Collaborative Opportunities’. Encyclopaedism, Pansophia, and Universal Communication, 1560-1670 (Workshop, Semmelweis Museum, Library, and Archives of the History of Medicine, Budapest, April 2010).
• Leigh Penman, ‘Some New Letters of Samuel Hartlib’. Early Modern Studies Group (Seminar, University of Sheffield, February 2010).
• Howard Hotson, ‘The Post-Ramist Roots of Comenian Pansophia’. Educational Reform, Philosophy, and Irenicism, 1560-1670 (Workshop, Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cracow, July 2009).
• Howard Hotson, ‘Intellectual Networks, Universal Reformation, and Early Modern Millenarianism’, Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy: Eschatological Expectations between East-Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670 (Workshop, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague, January 2009).

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