CHAPTER FIVE

SAMUEL HARTLIB AND THE UTOPIAN MOVEMENT

Thence to visite honest & learned Mr. Hartlib, a Publique Spirited, and ingeni[o]us person, who had propagated many Usefull things & Arts: . . . He tolde me of an Inke that would give a dozen Copies, moist Sheetes of Paper being pressed on it, & remaine perfect; & a receit how to take off any Print, without injury to the original in the least: This Gent: was Master of innumerable Curiosities, & very communicative. Evelyn, Diary (27 November 1655)

Wherever Hartlib's Utopian zeal originated-his early contact with reformers and utopianists in Germany or at Emmanuel College, Cambridge-he devoted his considerable energies to Utopian enter• prises for the better part of his life. He should be credited with in• troducing continental utopianism to England through his efforts on behalf of Comenius during the Civil War. Since Comenius was directly influenced by Andreae's writings and idealism, the main current runs direcdy from Andreae, through Comenius, to Hartlib in London. Hartlib's utopianism impelled him to an extraordinary range of projects. His many schemes to enrich the land through the better cultivation of fruit trees or bee keeping, for example, clearly issued from the same benevolent wellspring as his projects for the social or spiritual amelioration of society.1 His many projects have been treated elsewhere.2 Instead, this chapter will focus on the uto-

For a good survey of Hartlib's accomplishments, see Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor, ed., Culture and Cultivation in Early Modern England: Writing and the Land (Leicester: Leicester UP, 1992); and Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Com• munication in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994). 2 The best account of the Hartlib circle remains Turnbull's HDC, along with his earlier Samuel Hartlib: A Sketch qfHL· Life and His Relations to J. A. Comenius (London: Ox• ford UP, 1920). Richard Foster Jones, Ancients and Moderns: A Study of the Rise of the Scientific Movement in Seventeenth-Century England, 2nd ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of Califor• nia P, 1961), pp. 148-57, has a brief account of the Hartlib circle; as does Nell P. Eurich, Science in Utopia: A Mighty Design (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967), pp. 147-54. See also H. R. Trevor-Roper, "Three Foreigners," in Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change (Lon• don: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 237-93. 146 CHAPTER FIVE pian societies Hartlib labored so resolutely to establish, a story that has not been adequately told. The central figure in the story of these Utopian brotherhoods in England, Samuel Hardib, was born in Polish Prussia at Elbing about 1600. His father, a Polish merchant of German extraction, married the daughter of an Englishman with the Fellowship of Easdand Merchants, who had been granted the privilege of trading at Elbing by the Polish king in 1580. The details of his early life are largely unknown. His older brother Georg studied at the Gymna• sium in Danzig and at Heidelberg;3 the name Samuel Hardib, curi• ously enough, does not appear on the matriculation list of any ma• jor university. Based on clues from his letters, Turnbull argues that he studied until 1621 at the Gymnasium at Brieg, a well-known center of Protestantism in Silesia, then at Cambridge from 1621 to 1626, where he may have read law.4 Though all his early education at Brieg would have been in German and Latin, he was probably raised bi-lingually amidst the small English community on the Bal• tic. When he began recording noteworthy events in his Ephemerides in 1634, he wrote mostly in English (with occasional passages in Latin). At the time Hartlib first came to England, Cambridge was at its height as a center for English Puritanism. The leaders of what William Haller has called the "Spiritual Brotherhood" were all in residence: Richard Sibbes, master at St Catharine's Hall (1626- 1635); John Preston, master of Emmanuel (1622-1628); and Joseph Mede, fellow of Christ's College (1613-1638), one of Hardib's early correspondents and a supporter of Bacon.5 This generation of Puri• tan scholars certainly would have inspired him, perhaps Preston most of all, though Hartlib's sails were also filled by continental winds.

3 Georg Hartlieb matriculated at Danzig in April 1608, Danzig, p. 79; and as a theology student at Heidelberg, 14 September 1612, Heidelberg, II, 261. 4 Turnbull, HDC, pp. 11-15, 34. If he were at Brieg for a normal course of study (five to six years), he would have been a classmate of Abraham von Frankenberg (1593- 1652), the Silesian alchemist and patron of Jakob Böhme, who was at Brieg from 17 October 1611, according to K. F. Schön wälder and J. J. Guttmann, Geschichte des königlichen Gymnasiums zu Brieg (Breslau, 1869), p. 89. No full matriculation list exists for Brieg; Hartlib was not mentioned in this history. 5 William Haller, The Rise of Puritanism (New York: Columbia UP, 1938), pp. 49-82; see also Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Mediane and Reform 1626-1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 32-47.