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

As we thaw out from the February cold snap, for our inaugural Selected Record I thought we should be seasonal and start with our own variant of Old Weather. Using the ‘content’ field in basic search, I entered ‘frost’. My trawl brought up a record for a letter from one John Bennett to the antiquary and diarist Thomas Hearne (1678-1735), an EMLO stalwart responsible for 5,180 records in the catalogue. Bennett, I discovered from thirteen other abstracts in the catalogue, is the son of Sir John Bennett, and in a letter of 14 June 1708 he requests letters to be enclosed ‘to my father Sr. John Bennett, Serjeant att Law, Member of Parliament att his house in Essex Buildings in y e Strand, and then they’l be frank’t at y e Posthouse . . . ’; a quick check in the History of Parliament Online confirms this address. Presumably Bennett junior and Hearne knew each other from Oxford (a quick look in the Alumni Oxonienses confirms they were both at St Edmund Hall). The January in which Bennett wrote to his college friend saw a ‘great frost’ descend across Europe, and this is what he refers to with his tale of snow obstructing streets and unfortunate children meeting their ends in the freezing waters of the Thames. Apparently, the sustained chill was caused by decreased sun spot activity during the Maunder Minimum, which led to the coldest winter for 500 years.

Alongside the harsh winter, Bennett also mentions a variety of people, places, events, and publications, and we are now in the process of capturing these references systematically across all cards using our catalogue’s powerful online editorial interface, EMLO Edit. The Duke of Marlborough, John Churchill – at the head of his army in the Spanish Netherlands over the winter of 1708/9 and midway between the battles of Oudenaarde and Malplaquet – is mentioned en passant, before Bennett turns his attention to more local matters. He speaks of David Gregory (1659-1708), Savilian professor of astronomy at Oxford from 1691 who had died three months previously, and makes an oblique reference to his successor (a quick search on Wikipedia reveals this to be John Caswell, who held office until his death in 1712). A new professor of poetry is mentioned, and he turns out to be another EMLO correspondent, Joseph Trapp (1679-1747) (the first postholder), and Bennett informs us that Henry Sacheverell (1674-1724) was in London during the cold spell and due to preach at St Paul’s. References to publications by Johan Ernest Grabe (1666-1711), the Königsberg-born divine who settled in Oxford and became a chaplain at Christ Church, and by our very own John Selden (1584-1654) are brought into the letter and, almost as an after-thought, Livy, Tully, and Homer are thrown in. This fascinating network of contexts and connections emerge from a single query regarding inclement weather.

Letters in Focus with Miranda Lewis

Miranda is editing metadata from the Bodleian card catalogue of correspondence for our union catalogue, Early Modern Letters Online. On a regular basis, she brings us hand-picked and contextualised records.

Launch Record of the Week

The Project is delighted to announce the presentation of transcriptions of almost all of the surviving correspondence of the jurist, historian, Hebraist, and polymath John Selden (1584–1654). The transcriptions have been generously provided by Professor Gerald J. Toomer, who prepared them (originally for his own research purposes, not for publication) in the course of the research for his magnum opus John Selden: A Life in Scholarship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Selden, many of whose letters survive among the holdings of the Bodleian Library, was widely regarded as the most important scholar in Britain in the seventeenth century. He was a major antiquary and historian of English law, whose work was unrivalled before Maitland in the nineteenth century. He was also a central figure in the transmission of Oriental learning to the West, and was acknowledged in his lifetime as one of the greatest Christian authorities on Jewish law and history. He encouraged the study of Arabic, and produced the first English edition of an Arabic text. He was also an internationally recognised theorist of international law (in his Mare Clausum) and natural law (De Iure Naturali et Gentium). His works were caught up in many of the most controversial religious and political issues of the day, provoking praise and polemic in Britain and Europe. His correspondence network extended to northern Europe and eastwards to Aleppo.

The discussions which led to Professor Toomer’s generous agreement to the presentation of these transcriptions on our website were initiated at and facilitated by the international conference John Selden, 1584-1654: Scholarship in Context (Magdalen College, Oxford, 24-26 June 2010), organized by Thomas Roebuck and Jeffrey Miller in association with the Centre for Early Modern Studies and the Centre for the Study of the Book.

The transcriptions will be available in a fully searchable form within our union catalogue at its launch in September 2011. In the interim, we are pleased to be able to provide them as a pdf file (13.5 MB).

Please note that the copyright of the transcriptions remains with Professor Toomer, and that you should not quote from them in papers or scholarly publications without prior written permission (please contact the Project in the first instance). Professor Toomer would also like it to be emphasised that the document is not a conventional scholarly edition, and should not be judged by those standards; the transcriptions were prepared for private use rather than for publication, and in most cases have not been checked against the originals.