ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Sacred Institution: The Hartlib Circle and the Religious Foundations of Scientific Community

• In Event: Sciences and Spiritualism

English Abstract

The Hartlib Circle was a seventeenth-century pan-European community that pursued the universal reform of society, including the processes of making and disseminating knowledge. This community centred around the correspondence of Samuel Hartlib and his extraordinary Ephemerides. One strand of scholarship on the Hartlib Circle has looked at science, medicine, and the role of the network in founding the Royal Society of London. Another important strand focuses on the Hartlib Circle as a Republic of Letters and as a group of intelligencers with an eye to politics. This paper looks at the surprising centrality of religion, drawing on a new study of the Ephemerides and a close reading of correspondence materials. I argue that the Hartlib Circle’s organisational principles, often viewed in strictly secular terms, must be understood as driven by the extended tradition of the care of souls. While the thesis of desacralisation in the formation of modern science has been roundly challenged in terms of the objects and explanations of science, the persistent importance of the care of souls points to a corresponding sacred character in founding institutional infrastructures of early modern and modern scientific communities. Reframing this history in spiritual terms allows an explanation of the often-obscured role of care in the assumptions and operations of science past and present.

Author

• Bo van Broekhoven, The University of Edinburgh