Cultures of Knowledge: An Intellectual Geography of the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters

Dr Leigh Penman, the Project’s Samuel Hartlib Postdoctoral Fellow, will this week deliver a paper in the Oxford History Faculty’s Early Modern Europe Seminar entitled ‘Prester John’s Legacy: The Hartlib Circle, Andreas Haberweschel, and the Fantasy of a Christian Kingdom in the Orient in Seventeenth-Century Europe’. As Leigh describes it, ‘in 1643, word reached the London-based intelligencer Samuel Hartlib that diplomats from a heretofore unknown Christian kingdom had recently visited an obscure Bohemian physician, Andreas Haberweschel, at The Hague. Anticipating funds and weapons for Protestant Europe, Hartlib and his compatriots greeted the news, despite its dubious provenance, with delight and enthusiasm. Yet, perhaps predictably, not everything was as it seemed. In this paper, which draws extensively on the Hartlib Papers, I shall unpack some of the contemporary codes and contexts that made news of this Christian kingdom of the ‘Indies’ plausible for those that heard it. I want to use the incident as a looking glass in which we might reflect on the activities and expectations of Hartlib and his circle, as well as of European Christians more broadly. For this incident not only tells us much about the nature of contemporary Reformed eschatology, but also sheds light upon the contemporary reception and assimilation of geopolitical news, methods of constructing ideas of the Christian self through the projection of values on to the other, as well as nascent aspects of imperial ideological discourse’. The paper will take place at 2.15pm on Friday 4 December in the Rees Davies Room of the History Faculty.

Cultures of Knowledge is delighted to announce a new collaboration with Dr Brynley F. Roberts and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies in Aberystwyth. The partnership features the letters of Edward Lhwyd, the second Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum and a prominent naturalist, archaeologist, and linguist, who corresponded extensively in English, French, Latin, and Welsh with a wide range of natural philosophers and antiquaries. Around 1,500 of his letters are known to survive (most among the holdings of the Bodleian Library), some 1,000 of which have already been indexed and transcribed by Dr Roberts. This valuable resource can now be completed and made accessible to international scholarship by means of an online calendar and, ultimately, a full digital edition. For further details on Edward Lhwyd and how his letters now feature in the Project, please see here.