2440 Eblj Article 6, 2007

A Fragment of the Library of Theodore Haak (1605-1690) William Poole Great libraries are often built on the stock of prior great libraries, as much in the early modern period as in others. As the seventeenth-century French librarian Gabriel Naudé counselled his budding collector, ‘the first, the speediest, easie and advantagious [way] of all the rest ... is made by the acquisition of some other entire and undissipated Library.’1 One of the more valuable pleasures of provenance research is the detection of such libraries- behind-libraries, often extending to two, three, or even more removes. Over time, however, many collections assembled upon earlier collections suffer mutilation, and this mutilation inevitably disturbs the older strata. One example relevant to this article is the library of the Royal Society of London: when this library was a mere toddler, it was joined in 1667 by the distinctly aristocratic Arundelian library; later, these collections effectively merged. Behind Thomas Howard, Fourteenth Earl of Arundel’s, great Caroline library lay the bulk of the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer’s collection; and at the centre of Pirckheimer’s collection was a supposed third of the books of the fifteenth-century King of Hungary Matthias Corvinus. But even in its earliest days the archaeology of the Royal Society’s ‘Bibliotheca Norfolciana’ may not have been appreciated by its new custodians. As the FRS and mathematician John Pell (1611-1685) wrote in March 1667 on the Society’s new library to the subject of this article, Theodore Haak (1605-1690), ‘I beleeve, divers of the R. S. never heard of Bilibaldus Pirkheimerus, Erasmus’s great acquaintance & Albert Durer’s greatest Patron.’2 Today, only 10% of the Arundelian Library remains, scattered among the Royal Society collections, because in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Society deemed such antiquarian holdings to be peripheral to its mission, and sold them off.3 Naudé’s ideal was the acquisition of an ‘entire and undissipated’ collection. Many buyers, however, were more likely to settle for a portion of a given library, acquired either by private arrangement, or – in England after 1676 – by sustained success at public auction. One man who excelled in both strategies was Sir Hans Sloane (1660-1753), whose collections founded the British Museum, later divided into the British Museum, the Natural History Museum, and the British Library. Yet Sloane also diverted books out of his library, and his principal beneficiary throughout the first four decades of the eighteenth century was the Bodleian Library in Oxford. This essay uncovers an atypical Sloanian shipment to Oxford, made in 1703, a section of the otherwise invisible library of Theodore Haak, diplomat, correspondent, and translator. I shall first introduce Haak, next introduce some of his books, and finally reintroduce them to each other. I am grateful to Noel Malcolm for reading a draft of this note. 1 Gabriel Naudé, Instructions concerning Erecting of a Library, tr. John Evelyn (London, 1661), p. 62. 2 Bodleian Library, MS. Aubrey 13, f. 93v. Compare also John Evelyn’s diary entries for 9 January 1667 and 29 August 1678 (text from John Evelyn, Diary, ed. E. S. de Beer, 6 vols (Oxford, 1955)). 3 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Uncovering the Arundel Library at the Royal Society: Changing Meanings of Science and the Fate of the Norfolk Donation’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, lii (1998), pp. 3-24. On the Royal Society library in the seventeenth century, see M. B. Hall, The Library and Archives of the Royal Society 1660-1990 (London, 1992), pp. 2-6. 1 eBLJ 2007, Article 6 A Fragment of the Library of Theodore Haak (1605–1690) I. Theodore Haak Theodore Haak was born in Neuhausen in the Palatinate, but eventually settled in England in the autumn of 1638 after a number of earlier visits.4 There, he formed an alliance with Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600-1662) the intelligencer and John Dury (1596-1680) the irenicist. These men and their activities were already known to him through his cousin Christopher Schloer, who had earlier settled in England, and who had corresponded with Hartlib. Haak soon lent his own aid to Hartlib and Dury’s Comenian pansophism, and when Jan Amos Comenius himself arrived in England in the winter of 1641-42, he was met by a welcoming committee consisting of Hartlib, Dury, Joachim Hübner, John Pell, and Haak himself. In 1645, according to the mathematician John Wallis, it was Haak who instigated the London meetings in experimental philosophy and medicine to which Wallis later traced the origin of the Royal Society. In the Cromwellian years, Haak served the state as a diplomat and translator, and after the Restoration he was elected to the Royal Society in 1661, proposed by the President, Viscount William Brouncker. Haak was not a particularly active experimentalist himself, but he was useful to the Society on account of his international reputation as an intermediary and intelligencer. His interventions in Royal Society meetings therefore centred around correspondence received from and books presented by European intellectuals (see Appendix 2), although he did propose ‘a compendious way of repertory’ (presumably a data storage system), and a way of ‘recovering and increasing the attractive power of a magnet’.5 His portrait in the Royal Society shows him with what is probably his magnet. Many of the Society’s foreign correspondents who wrote to its secretary Henry Oldenburg included lavish formal notice of Haak in their letters; and when, after Oldenburg’s death, his secretaryship was assumed by Robert Hooke, the septuagenarian Haak could still broker correspondence between Hooke and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Hooke’s later journal frequently mentions Haak and their games of chess, and despite a note on Haak’s sudden decline in early 1689, Haak actually remained fairly active in his last years, pottering round London bookshops, meeting Hooke, and attending Royal Society meetings. 4 Biographical material derives chiefly from Pamela Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. (1605-1690). The First German Translator of ‘Paradise Lost’ (The Hague, 1962), supplemented by the mentions of Haak in Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626-1660, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2002); Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611-1685) and His Correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: The Mental World of an Early Modern Mathematician (Oxford, 2005). See also Dorothy Stimpson, ‘Hartlib, Haak and Oldenburg: Intelligencers’, Isis, xxxi (1940), pp. 309-26. 5 Thomas Birch, The History of the Royal Society of London, 4 vols (London, 1756-57), vol. i, pp. 123, 127 (repertory); vol. iv, pp. 68, 209, 490 (magnet). Though not a prominent experimenter, Haak had the means to conduct experiments, which were occasionally reported by him to the Royal Society (e.g. Birch, History, vol. i, p. 362, vol. ii, p.22, vol. iii, p. 393, vol. iv, pp. 68, 209). For another glimpse of Haak experimenting, see Robert Boyle, The Works of Robert Boyle, ed. Michael Hunter and Edward B. Davis, 14 vols (London, 1999- 2000), vol. iv, pp. 534, 540-1. Haak’s ‘repertory’ is intriguing, and is possibly related to Thomas Harrison’s ‘Ark of Studies’, an early filing-cabinet. See Noel Malcolm, ‘Thomas Harrison’s ‘Ark of Studies’: An Episode in the History of the Organisation of Knowledge’, The Seventeenth Century, xix (2004), pp. 196-232, esp. pp. 197-201. A few of Haak’s scientific papers are preserved in the Royal Society Archives. 2 eBLJ 2007, Article 6 A Fragment of the Library of Theodore Haak (1605–1690) II. Haak’s Books Haak’s greatest significance is as an intelligencer, but he was also an important translator both into and out of English; he is remembered today primarily for his fragmentary German translation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost.6 Yet the exact fate of Haak’s books and papers upon his death has hitherto been an unasked question. He died in the house of Frederick Slare, the son of Christopher Schloer, who later told Thomas Birch that he blamed Haak’s death on Hooke’s dubious medical advice.7 Frederick was thus Haak’s first cousin once removed, and was also an FRS himself and a chemical experimenter of note.8 Haak and Slare lived together for several years, and in Hooke’s journal the two are often coupled. Hooke eventually proposed Slare to the Royal Society in late 1680, and in 1683 Slare was appointed the Society’s Curator of Experiments in Chemistry. Haak’s will, dated 9 June 1676, bequeathed his goods and chattels to his ‘deare Cousin Fredrick Skler [i.e. Schloer/Slare] of the Citty of Westminster’, whom he also named his executor.9 To Slare, then, Haak’s books, papers, and any experimental apparatus will have passed.10 Slare’s own will, unlike Haak’s, mentions explicitly such a stock of instruments, manuscripts, and printed books, with specific directions concerning their dispersal.11 6 Anthony Wood, Athenæ Oxonienses, ed. Philip Bliss, 4 vols (London, 1813-20), vol. iv, pp. 278-80, lists Haak’s translations as the English translation of the ‘Dutch Annotations’ (1657), commissioned by the Westminster Assembly; three translations into German of English devotional works; ‘half ’ of Milton’s Paradise Lost into German; some German-to-English and Spanish-to-German collections of proverbs; and ‘other’ unprinted works. Documents relating to Haak’s official work as the translator of the Dutch Annotations are calendared in D. F. McKenzie and Maureen Bell, A Chronology and Calendar of Documents relating to the London Book Trade 1641-1700, 3 vols (Oxford, 2005). Compare Barnett, Haak, Appendix 2. 7 Add. MS. 4460, f. 71r. 8 Marie Boas Hall, ‘Frederick Slare, F.R.S.

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