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Copyright

Charles Webster;

ISBN

Paperback978-1-80511-691-2
Hardback978-1-80511-692-9
PDF978-1-80511-693-6
HTML978-1-80511-695-0
EPUB978-1-80511-694-3

Language

  • English

THEMA

  • NHB
  • JNB
  • DNBH
  • JPA
  • DSB

BISAC

  • HIS015040
  • POL010000
  • BIO006000
  • EDU016000
  • LIT004120

Keywords

  • Samuel Hartlib
  • Hartlib Circle
  • Commonwealth and Protectorate
  • 17th-century intellectual networks
  • Hartlib Papers
  • English Civil War

    A Portrait of Samuel Hartlib

    In Search of Universal Betterment

    • Charles Webster (author)
    FORTHCOMING
    The 2013 digitization of the vast Hartlib Papers archive highlighted the pressing need for a comprehensive modern study of Samuel Hartlib (1600–1662), a central figure in seventeenth-century intellectual life. Though educated in Eastern Europe, Hartlib spent his adult life in London, where he became a prolific correspondent and chronicler. His Ephemerides, spanning 1634 to 1660, and his extensive correspondence with leading thinkers across Britain and Protestant Europe offer an unparalleled window into the era’s religious, political, and scientific ferment.
    This volume goes beyond previous studies in both scope and depth, drawing extensively on archival sources and offering new interpretations of Hartlib’s network and influence. Organized chronologically, it explores the wide-ranging social, economic, and ideological pursuits of Hartlib and his collaborators—many of them renowned figures in their own right—and his close alignment with the Cromwellian cause.
    Providing the most complete portrait to date of the Hartlib circle’s emergence and impact, this study sets a new benchmark for scholarship and invites renewed engagement with one of the early modern period’s most visionary projects of knowledge, reform, and communication.

    Contributors

    Charles Webster

    (author)
    Emeritus Fellow at University of Oxford

    Charles Webster studied at University College London, where he took a degree in Botany and Microbiology. From 1959 to 1965 he was a science teacher at the City Grammar School, Leopold Street, Sheffield. Simultaneously he began private historical studies. His first historical paper was published in the journal Nature in 1962. He obtained an M.Sc. and D.Sc. at London University. After a short spell in the Philosophy Department at Leeds University, in 1968 he became a research fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. In 1972, he was made a University Reader, also attached to Corpus. He remained in this post until 1988, when he became a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, a post which he retained until his retirement. Currently he is an Emeritus Fellow at both Corpus and All Souls. In connection with his early work, especially 'The Great Instauration', in 1980 he was elected an FBA.