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This chapter chronicles the life of John Pell from 1629 to 1638. Pell's first employment was at Collyer's School, a grammar school at Horsham founded by Richard Collyer in 1533. Within a few months of the termination of his employment in Horsham, Pell was put in touch with Samuel Hartlib, who set up a school Chichester in the summer of 1630 and employed John Pell to teach in it. For the young John Pell, whose experience of schooling (both as pupil and as teacher) up to the summer of 1630 may have been confined to the traditional methods of the grammar schools, his time in Chichester was probably quite liberating; he was able to devise a mathematics course of his own. Before the end of 1638 Pell would at last begin to acquire — thanks to the efforts of his friend Samuel Hartlib to publicize his work — an international reputation as a mathematical thinker.

This chapter focuses initially on John Hall of Durham, who had been under Stanley's patronage since 1642 and was a key member of his London literary group. Hall was also an avid reader of Milton's prose and an associate of the educational reformer and intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, who regarded the dissolution of the court as an opportunity to reform learning in England. The first section of the chapter examines Hall's correspondence with Hartlib and his (failed) effort to bring the Stanley circle and Hartlib network together. The second section looks at Milton's sonnets in the mid-1640s and examines in particular how Milton's anti-Presbyterianism in these sonnets is accompanied by a softening attitude towards the Cavalier culture that he previously attacked. There is an extended reading of Milton's sonnet to his old Cavalier friend, the musician Henry Lawes. The third section traces the development of both Hall's Parliamentarianism and his anti-Presbyterianism.

This chapter examines the massive surviving set of papers collected by the Prussian émigré, Samuel Hartlib. These include his diaries, and the letters and documents generated by the network of correspondence he orchestrated from London. Hartlib's ‘ephemerides’ (a set of notes in diary form), offers an insight into his rationale for note-taking as a process that linked scribal and print culture. His views are on show in his response to Thomas Harrison's invention of an index cabinet that encouraged collective notes. The views of William Petty and John Pell, two of Hartlib's correspondents, reveal different approaches to ways in which notes consolidate information, respectively, in the empirical and mathematical sciences.

Katherine moved to London and separated from her husband, though they did not officially divorce. The English Civil War had just begun, and she tried to promote peace and engaged in politics by writing letters to powerful individuals, including Edward Hyde and the sister of Charles I, Elizabeth Stuart, the exiled Queen of Bohemia. It was during these years when Ranelagh first met Samuel Hartlib and John Dury and became active in what is now called the Hartlib Circle. She became a central member of this diverse correspondence network, aligning herself with many of the Protestant and Puritan correspondents, including the poet, John Milton, Benjamin Worsley, and Dorothy Moore. When her brother Robert returned from his Grand Tour of the continent, he moved into her London home and she may have joined his Invisible College. Boyle later moved to Stalbridge and she continued to encourage his early moral writings and early publications on ethics. She was a witness at the religious conversion of prophetess Sarah Wight and initiated a political correspondence with Sir Cheney Culpeper regarding a proposal to limit the rights of the monarch.

This chapter describes how John Winthrop, Jr. had achieved an international reputation as an alchemist by the time he became governor of Connecticut in 1657. During his travels to Europe he had met and made a lasting impression on members of the European republic of alchemy, several of whom he had sustained correspondence with once back in New England. Alchemists from New England who had known Winthrop and later relocated to England spread reports about him that further enhanced his reputation. In 1660, Samuel Hartlib wrote Winthrop, “You cannot believe what secret reports I have heard of you of which I would be so willingly informed.” He indicated he had been told Winthrop had perfected, or nearly perfected, both the alkahest and the elixir that would effect transmutation.

This chapter examines Bengt Skytte's draft and propositions that would establish a ‘College of the Wise’ in England. In 1660, when he was staying in London, Skytte, a Swedish scholar and noble, sent Samuel Hartlib a draft ‘Royal Charter’ and a list of propositions defending this College of the Wise. Certain historians of early restoration science who have examined Skytte's project argued that the College of the Wise was a catalyst for the Royal Society's formalisation. Drawing on new source material, this chapter reassesses Skytte's project in the context of his intellectual activities and political projects in London. In particular, it looks at Skytte's College of the Wise in relation to a complex set of broadly similar proposals which, taken together, yield insights into perceptions of science and state on the eve of the Restoration. It also considers the timing and some of the features of Skytte's plan with reference to his struggle to secure patronage in a context which proved favourable to the Gresham College group.

This chapter considers Robert Boyle's views on memory and note-taking in the light of his relationship with Samuel Hartlib, and especially as revealed in his correspondence in the 1660s with John Beale. The young Boyle thought and wrote about the mental and moral cultivation of the mind, independent of the use of notes. He was therefore potentially receptive to Beale's emphasis on memory training, and on abbreviation, reduction and systematic display of information. However, Boyle was suspicious of premature systems and also aware of the need for rich empirical detail gathered over a lifetime. Moreover, in Boyle's case, deep personal memory consolidated by his episodic memory, enriched his scientific thinking.

Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, and Johann Amos Comenius step from central Europe's Reformed world into the pages of English intellectual history as if from out of a void. The places where they studied — Elbing, Brieg, Herborn — are towns which few Anglo-Saxon scholars could even locate unassisted on the map of central Europe. Historians have considered Johann Heinrich Alsted as the culmination of Herborn's accomplishments. German scholars often portray Alsted as a pillar of Calvinist orthodoxy, a pioneer of Reformed scholasticism, a participant at the Synod of Dort. In English scholarship, his primary association is with millenarianism. In Spain, he is a disciple of the medieval Catalan mystic, Ramon Lull. To students of his encyclopedism, Alsted is characterized especially by his tendency to combine Aristotelianism, Ramism, Lullism, and the arts of memory in a pursuit of universal knowledge similar to that of yet another of his favorite authors, Giordano Bruno. Thus, every main phase and aspect of Alsted's intellectual career can be illuminated by examining it in the context of the movement for further reformation.

The collapse of Charles I’s Personal Rule did not end projecting activities. This chapter uses the well-documented case of the reforming circle of Samuel Hartlib during the 1640s and 1650s to explore how public distrust of the projector came to condition the promotion of useful knowledge, especially the evaluation of credibility and the practices of collaboration and exclusion in the reforming network. Many promoters came to avoid the style of fiscal impositions reminiscent of early Stuart projectors. The chapter discusses how projecting activities thereby began to evolve away from the early Stuart model, with far-reaching implications for subsequent developments, not only in terms of political economy, but also of natural and experimental philosophy.

This chapter describes a course that explores the public humanities by combining service learning with historical documentary analysis. Students pair with community partners working to address a range of pressing local, national, and global issues. Through analysis of public and historical records, they develop broad strategies for understanding and contextualizing “competing views of social justice, radicalism, patronage, network analyses, structure and agency, and the practical application of the liberal arts.” They then deploy similar strategies in analyzing digitally archived primary sources on seventeenth-century polymath Samuel Hartlib and his pan-European circle of scholars. Comparing the circle’s utopian ideals of pansophia—universal wisdom—with its more severe proposals for reform amidst the turbulent contexts of war and social change, students historicize these discrepancies and gain critical purchase on contemporary approaches to solving similar social problems.

Although typically identified with English Puritanism, the nucleus of the correspondence network which Samuel Hartlib envisaged in 1634 was originally composed primarily by intellectuals displaced, as he was, from central Europe by the Thirty Years War (section 6.i). A brief survey of contacts which Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius maintained with the easternmost figures at the top of his list—Alsted and Bisterfeld in Transylvania—exemplifies the extent of his network, its tempo of communication, and some of the common interests which bound it together (section 6.ii). A more general census reveals a large number of Hartlibian correspondents educated in Herborn, Heidelberg, Bremen, Zerbst, Brieg, and Danzig. Responses to Hartlib’s circulation of Comenius’ first pansophic tract suggests the extraordinary similarity of pedagogical interests and aspirations which helped bind this far-flung network together (section 6.iii).

This chapter develops the concept of the “data state”—a condition of being governed by number. It notes that government by number emerges from “political anatomy” and “political arithmetic.” It focuses on the emergence of these political forms as engines for counting and calculating natural and political objects. It examines Samuel Hartlib and William Petty's designs and concludes with the great innovations in censuses and cartography developed in Ireland in the first half of the nineteenth century. It argues that the modern census is a political technology engineered by bringing metering and graphing into a simultaneously practiced and representational relationship.

Chapter One argues that seventeenth-century English householders experimenting in their homes brought thrifty attitudes to new forms of natural knowledge-making, and while historians have focused on the new and dedicated materials of this period they have overlooked how experimenters exploited their existing possessions. This thrifty science involved, in particular, "making use of things" – using everyday items as best as possible, a practice which met derision from some quarters, but which various experimenters claimed was a critical feature of the new science. The chapter highlights different opinions on the nature of household practice as experimental knowledge. For some, domestic experiment was sufficient in itself as a new form of science, but others argued that it needed to be extracted from the home for testing and accreditation elsewhere. Many things might be "experiments" but only some could be "natural philosophy."

Since the function and form of Comenian pansophia derived from the previous post-Ramist tradition, its sources and basic working methods naturally betrayed the same family resemblance. Far from proceeding on strictly empirical principles, Comenius adopted from Alsted the idea that pansophia must derive from the ‘three books of God’: sense, reason, and revelation (section 8.i). Like Alsted, Comenius also collected and processed this huge variety of material within a system of commonplaces; while Hartlib and Dury, for their part, proposed using Alsted’s Encyclopaedia as the structure of a collaborative information processing centre known as the Office of Address for Communications. However bookish these methods may seem, they were not as far removed from Bacon’s actual practice as is commonly supposed (section 8.ii). The fatal disjuncture underlying the universal reform programme was not between empiricism and commonplacing but between philosophical and pedagogical goals. The fundamental objective was to expound a reformed system of universal knowledge in the systematic manner in which it could be propagated universally. But the reformation of knowledge in the patient, incremental manner advocated by Bacon required resistance to premature systematization. The Baconian pansophists were therefore forced to choose between pursuing the best means of transmitting received knowledge and the best means of transforming it. Since there was no point in communicating knowledge which remained fundamentally flawed, the universal reform agenda collapsed amongst Hartlib’s successors into the more coherent and manageable task of reforming natural philosophy alone (section 8.iii).

This chapter considers the role played by imitatio in John Milton’s Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. It shows how the traditional opposition between a ‘living’ imitation of a past text and a mere simulacral resemblance of it shapes the way Milton represents the imitated world of hell. It goes on to contextualize Milton’s understanding of imitatio. Milton was influenced by changing ways of presenting localized allusions or ‘imitations’ in editions of classical texts, by the educational thinking of the circle around Samuel Hartlib, and by the ways in which his friend Francis Junius interpreted Quintilian’s Institutio. Paradise Lost was composed in a period during which the word ‘imitation’ came to be used in new ways. It could be applied to translations which adapted classical texts to the manners of the present, and also to pastiches in the vernacular of another author’s style. Milton both resisted and responded to these developments. The chapter then shows how Milton was among the earliest writers to treat classical texts as (in a rather literal sense) ‘models’, which provide not words or images for a later writer but scalar templates for future works. The history of that word is explored, as is Milton’s use of the dizzying effects of scale which follow from an imitator regarding the texts which he imitates as ‘models’ in this sense. The chapter concludes with a discussion of such scalar effects in relation to the representations of both Rome and the Temple at Jerusalem in Paradise Regained.

The following two chapters show how crucial elements of the educational reforms developed above all by Comenius and propagated by Hartlib and his associates emerged out of common roots in the post-Ramist pedagogical traditions of central Europe. The goal of pansophia—expressed by Comenius as ‘Omnes, Omnia, Omnino’, that is, to teach all things to all human beings thoroughly and completely, by all available means—is the ultimate logical extension of the basic aim of Ramus and the tradition deriving from him: to provide a broader education to a wider segment of the population as quickly, easily, and inexpensively as possible (section 7.i). The means proposed to achieve these goals were also very similar: namely, to produce readily digestible compendia governed by Ramus’ three laws of method (section 7.ii). No less important for Comenius’ pedagogical programme were the praecognita, systemata, and gymnasia which structured Keckermann’s textbooks, together with the lexica added by Alsted. Even the most ‘Baconian’ of Comenius’ textbooks, the famous Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), emerged from a lengthy discussion amongst Hartlib’s friends undertaken in terms far more reminiscent of Keckermann and Alsted than of Bacon himself (section 7.iii).

Alsted and Bisterfeld, Hartlib and Comenius, Welsch and Leibniz all proposed to emend the Encyclopaedia of 1630, and all failed. Contemplating the failure of these attempts opens up the broadest vista attained by this study. The idea of an ‘enkyklios paideia’, a cycle or circle of instruction or education, is an ancient one which gradually took literary shape during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three successive generations of reform—led by Agricola, Ramus, and Keckermann—and a fourth generation of collective effort by a whole community generated the most perfect literary manifestation of this idea in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (section 11.i). For at least two generations after its appearance in 1630, scholars across Europe acknowledged the Encyclopaedia as the leading work of its kind and sought to revise or replace it. During this lengthy period, the connotations of the term ‘encyclopaedia’ shifted from designating a ‘cycle of studies’ to a genre of books which sought to summarize the circle of learning in print (section 11.ii). But with the failure to replace Alsted’s work, the systematically organized, pedagogically orientated, Latin encyclopaedias worthy of the name exploded into innumerable discrete topics which were reorganized in alphabetical order in the various European vernaculars to create a new genre of academic reference works inappropriately labelled ‘(en)cyclopaedias’ first by Chambers in 1728 and then by D’Alembert and Diderot in 1751. The implications of this transformation for the shape of European knowledge were profound. The demise of the age-old tradition culminating in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia can therefore be regarded as a major watershed in European intellectual history created by the simultaneous political, military, confessional, and intellectual crises of the mid-seventeenth century (section 11.iii).

Vigorous, invigorating georgic communities and political sodalities included a large group of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century horticultural and arboricultural writers including Gervase Markham, Evelyn, John Beale, Ralph Austen, Walter Blith, and agricultural improvers (and protesters) such as Moffat, Samuel Hartlib, and the anonymous Fen Tigers who wrote against drainage projects. These writers included urban, mandarin, and establishment figures as well as remote, rural, and demotic ones, of varying ideological and theological stripes. Many corresponded with each other; all were devoted to what might be called a pragmatic utopian project, where advancement of learning expressed itself in horny-handed agricultural toil and accompanying georgic works of combined idealism, nationalism, piety, and the rules of cultivation. This chapter considers the most diverse styles of writing—for example, planting manuals and calendars of husbandry, the fantasy gardens of John Evelyn, and the poems of vegetation and soil like Abraham Cowley’s Plantarum and John Phillips’s Cyder.