Abstract
In late 1658, the Hartlib circle was in crisis. Two of their figureheads were aging and ill and their financial as well as political patrons were struggling to assist them. Its long-held ideal of European Protestant unity was imploding on the battlefields of Northern Europe and panicky members were still considering plans to support a military attack on the Vatican.1 In a moment in which he despaired for the future of Protestantism, an emotion heightened by news of Oliver Cromwell’s death, Peter Figulus, a senior figure amongst the circle at Amsterdam, translated and circulated amongst his correspondents a series of letters from another member, Lady Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, which had been sent to him by the circle’s principal secretary and founder Samuel Hartlib.2 These letters, composed eighteen months earlier, perhaps directly to Hartlib, would see her hailed by her European readers as a ‘sybila’ whose powerful and erudite arguments could justify the network’s principles and renew their ambitions.3
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Notes
For details of this see Samuel Hartlib, published on CD-ROM, The Hartlib Papers (Sheffield: HROnline, Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield, 2002), HP 9/17/15A-16B, HP 9/17/27A-28B, HP 9/17/51A-52B. All further references will be to this edition.
See ‘Jones, Katherine, Viscountess Ranelagh’, ODNB; Ruth Connolly, ‘A Proselytising Protestant Commonwealth: The Political and Religious Ideals of Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh’, The Seventeenth Century, 23 (2008), 244–64.
Carol Pal’s unpublished doctoral thesis, ‘Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters, 1630–1680’ (Stanford University, 2007).
Elizabeth Taylor-Fitzsimon, ‘Conversion, the Bible, and the Irish language: The Correspondence of Lady Ranelagh and Bishop Dopping’, in Michael Brown, Ivar McGrath and Thomas P. Power (eds), Converts and Conversion in Ireland, 1650–1850 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), 157–82.
Lynette Hunter, ‘Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society: The Circle of Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh’, in Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), pp. 178–97.
A sense of her contemporary reputation is given in Gilbert Burnet, A Sermon preached at the Funeral of the Honourable Robert Boyle (London: printed for Richard Chiswell and John Taylor, 1692).
For Moore, see The Letters of Dorothy Moore, 1612–64: The Friendships, Marriage and Intellectual Life of a Seventeenth-Century Woman, (ed.) Lynette Hunter (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
For the family see Nicholas Canny, The Upstart Earl: A Study of the Social and Mental World of Richard Boyle, first Earl of Cork, 1566–1643 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Patrick Little, Lord Broghill and the Cromwellian Union with Ireland and Scotland (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2004).
William Robertson, The first Gate, or, The Outward Door to the Holy Tongue (London: Humphrey Robinson and G. Sawbridge, 1654).
See J. T. Young, Faith, Medical Alchemy and Natural Philosophy: Johann Moriaen, Reformed Intelligencer, and the Hartlib Circle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie and Timothy Raylor (eds), Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Stephen Clucas, ‘Samuel Hartlib’s Ephemerides, 1635–59, and the Pursuit of Scientific and Philosophical Manuscripts: the Religious Ethos of an Intelligencer’, The Seventeenth Century, 6 (1991), 33–55.
Charles Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform (London: Duckworth, 1975).
Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution’, Trevor-Roper (ed.), Religion, the Reformation and Social Change (London: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 237–93.
But for the slippages in this rhetoric see Hilda L. Smith, All Men and Both Sexes: Gender, Politics and the False Universal in England 1640–1682 (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2002).
Letters of Dorothy Moore, pp. 18–19; The text of this letter is taken from a scribal copy in the Hartlib papers, Dorothy Moore to Viscountess Ranelagh, 8 July 1643 Hartlib Papers P 21/7/1A-2B. For a discussion of similar arguments made by dissenting women see Katharine Gillespie, Domesticity and Dissent in the Seventeenth Century: English Women Writers and the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
See John Dury, Madam, although my former freedom (London: [n.p.], 1645), fol. Alr.
Copies of the manuscript letters which comprise this work are in Hartlib Papers 3/2/92A-94B; 3/2/11A-B and 3/2/145A-B. Another letter by Moore to Ranelagh is erroneously attributed in Wing to John Dury. See John Dury, Madam, ever since I had a resolution (London: [n.p.], 1645). BL Shelfmark E 288 [14]. A manuscript copy of this letter is in the Hartlib Papers 3/2/118A-121B.
Samuel Hartlib, Considerations tending to the happy Accomplishment of England’s Reformation in Church and State (London: [n.p.], 1647) The London bookseller George Thomason writes May 1647 on the title page of his copy, now in the British Library Shelfmark: E.389 [4].
Hartlib, Considerations, pp. 14–16; for the stress on Parliament as the essential driving force of reformation see pp 31–37. Robert Ashton, Counter-Revolution: The Second Civil War and its Origins (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 276.
Mark Greengrass, ‘Samuel Hartlib and Scribal Communication’ Acta Comeniana 12 (1997), 47–62 (p. 51).
Robert I. Frost. The Northern Wars, 1558–1721 (Harlow: Longman, 2000). In 1658, Figulus’s weekly letters to Hartlib contained regular updates on the progress of the war. See Hartlib Papers 9/17/6A-B to 9/17/53A-54B.
Anthony Milton, Catholic and Reformed: Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 377–417.
For context see Andrew R. Murphy, Conscience and Community: Revisiting Toleration and Religious Dissent in Early Modern England and America (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2001) pp. 75–122.
John Marshall, Locke, Toleration and Early Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
David Lowenstein, ‘Toleration and the Specter of Heresy in Milton’s England’ in Milton and Toleration, ed. Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 45–71.
Hartlib Papers 39/2/57B, 14 January 1657. See John Coffey ‘Puritanism and Liberty Revisited: The Case for Toleration in the English revolution’, Historical Journal 41 (1998), 961–85.
For a description of the persistent religious and political tensions which were re-emerging in England as these letters were being circulated, see Gary S. DeKrey London and the Restoration, 1659–1683 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 3–64.
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© 2010 Ruth Connolly
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Connolly, R. (2010). Viscountess Ranelagh and the Authorisation of Women’s Knowledge in the Hartlib Circle. In: Harris, J., Scott-Baumann, E. (eds) The Intellectual Culture of Puritan Women, 1558–1680. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230289727_12
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