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Samuel Hartlib or Hartlieb (c. 1600 – 10 March 1662) The Galileo Project; M. Greengrass, "Hartlib, Samuel (c. 1600–1662)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004) Retrieved 26 April 2016, pay-walled for date of death. was a Polish born, English educational and agricultural reformer of German-Polish origin who settled, married and died in England. He was a son of George Hartlib, a Polish people, and Elizabeth Langthon, a daughter of a rich English people merchant. Hartlib was a noted promoter and writer in fields that included science, medicine, agriculture, politics and education. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle, whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard, London, in the early 1660s. He studied briefly at the University of Cambridge upon arriving in England.
Hartlib became one of the best-connected intellectual figures of the Commonwealth era. He was responsible for patents, spreading information and fostering learning. He circulated designs for calculators, double-writing instruments, seed machines and siege engines. His letters in German, Latin, English and other languages have been subjected to close modern scholarship.
Hartlib set out with a universalist goal: "to record all human knowledge and to make it universally available for the education of all mankind". The Hartlib Papers Project – University of Sheffield His work has been compared to modern internet search engines. Eine Vorgeschichte der Internet-Suchmaschine.
Hartlib met the Scottish preacher John Dury in 1628. In the same year, Hartlib relocated to England, faced with the prospect of being caught in a war zone, as Imperial armies moved into the western parts of Poland and the chance of intervention by Sweden grew. He first unsuccessfully set up a school in Chichester, in line with his theories of education, and in 1630 moved permanently to London, living in Duke's Place, Holborn.Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution", The Crisis of the Seventeenth Century: Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, Indianapolis, 1967, p. 232. An early patron was John Williams, the Bishop of Lincoln, who was leading the clerical opposition to Archbishop William Laud.Roper 1967, p. 237; Hugh Trevor-Roper, From Counter-Reformation to Glorious Revolution (1992), p. 256. Another supporter was John Pym; Pym would use Hartlib later, as a go-between with Dutch Calvinists in London, in an effort to dig up evidence against Laud.Roper 1992, p. 257.Ole Peter Grell, Dutch Calvinists in Early Stuart London: The Dutch Church in Austin Friars, 1603–1642 (1989), p. 245. Hugh Trevor-Roper argues in his essay Three Foreigners (referring to Hartlib, Dury and the absent Comenius) that Hartlib and the others were the "philosophers" of the "country party" or anti-court grouping of the 1630s and early 1640s, united in their support for these outside voices if agreeing on little else.Roper 1967, pp. 237–293, especially p. 258. Three Foreigners, online text.
During the Civil War, Hartlib occupied himself with the peaceful study of agriculture, publishing various works of his own and printing at his own expense several treatises by others on the subject. He planned a school for the sons of gentlemen, to be conducted on new principles, and this probably was the occasion of his friend John Milton's Tractate on Education, addressed to him in 1644, and of William Petty's Two Letters on the same subject, in 1647 and 1648. We may assume that Chisholm relates to The Advice to Hartlib (1647); the other letter may have been the pamphlet on Double Writing (1648). Another associate in that period was Walter Blith, a noted writer on husbandry.
For his various labours, Hartlib received a pension of £100 from Oliver Cromwell, afterwards increased to £300, as he had spent all his fortune on his experiments. But Hartlib died in poverty: Samuel Pepys in 1660 noted that Hartlib's daughter Nan was penniless. Pepys's Diary 1 July 1660. His association with Oliver Cromwell and the Commonwealth resulted in him being sidelined after Charles II's Restoration. He lost his pension, which had already fallen into arrears. Some of his correspondents went so far as to ask for their letters from his archive, fearing they could be compromised by them.Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: the outstanding career of Sir Christopher Wren (2002), p. 88.
Men like Hartlib and Comenius wanted to make the spread of knowledge easier at a time when most knowledge was not categorised or standardised by any widespread conventions or academic disciplines and libraries were mostly private. They wanted to enlighten, educate and improve society, as religious people who saw this as the work of God. Comenius arrived in England in 1641 – bad timing considering that war was imminent. His presence failed to transform the position in education, though substantial literature grew up, particularly on university reform, where Oliver Cromwell set up a new institution. Comenius left in 1642; under Cromwell elementary schooling was expanded from 1646, and Durham College was founded, with staff from Hartlib's associates.Roper 1992, p. 225.
Bacon had formulated a project for a research institute entitled "Salomon's House" in his New Atlantis of 1624. This theoretical scheme was important for Hartlib, who angled during the 1640s for public funding for it. He failed except for a small pension for himself but gathered like-minded others: Dury, John Milton, Kenelm Digby, William Petty, and his son-in-law Frederick Clod (Clodius).Markku Peltonen, The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (1996), pp. 164–165.
Milton dedicated his 1644 Of Education to Hartlib, whom he had come to know the year before and who had pressed him to publish his educational ideas. But he gave the Comenian agenda short shrift in the work. Barbara Lewalski considers his dismissive attitude as disingenuous, as he had probably used texts by Comenius in his own teaching.Barbara Lewalski, The Life of John Milton (2003), pp. 172–173. Hezekiah Woodward, linked in the minds of Presbyterians and officialdom with Milton as a dangerous writer, was also significant as an educational follower of Comenius and Bacon and a friend of Hartlib.Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution (1965), p. 102.
In 1641, Hartlib wrote Relation of that which hath been lately attempted to procure Ecclesiastical Peace among Protestants. After Comenius left England, and in particular from 1646 onwards, the Hartlib group agitated for religious reform and toleration, against the Presbyterian dominance in the Long Parliament. They also proposed economic, technical and agricultural improvements, notably through Sir Cheney Culpeper and Henry Robinson.J. P. Cooper, Social and Economic Policies under the Commonwealth, pp. 125 and 131, in G. E. Aylmer, ed., The Interregnum (1972). Benjamin Worsley, Secretary to the Council of Trade from 1650, was a Hartlibian.Christopher Hill, God's Englishman (1972 edition), p. 126.
Hartlib valued knowledge: anything to raise crop yields or cure disease. Agriculture was a great interest. He worked to spread Dutch farming practices in England, such as the use of nitrogenous crops like cabbage to replenish the nitrogen in the soil and raise the next season's yield. In 1652 he issued a second edition of Richard Weston's Discourse of Flanders Husbandry (1645). Hartlib corresponded with many landowners and academics in his quest for knowledge.
From 1650 Hartlib had an interest in and influence on fruit husbandry. A letter on the subject by Sir Richard Child was published in one of his books: Samuel Hartlib, his Legacy, or an Enlargement of the Discourse of Husbandry used in Brabant and Flanders. Hartlib introduced John Beale, another author on orchards, to John Evelyn, who would eventually write an important work in the field, Sylva (1664).Adam Smyth, A Pleasing Sinne: Drink and Conviviality in Seventeenth-century England (2004), pp. 163–165. In 1655 Hartlib wrote The Reformed Commonwealth of Bees, featuring a transparent glass beehive to a design by Christopher Wren.Lisa Jardine, On a Grander Scale: the outstanding career of Sir Christopher Wren (2002), p. 108. Evelyn showed him the manuscript of his Elysium Britannicum, at the end of the 1650s.Therese O'Malley, John Evelyn's "Elysium Britannicum" and European Gardening (1998), p. 143.
Hartlib was interested in theories and practices that modern science would deem irrational, or superstitious – for example, sympathetic medicine, based on the idea that things in nature that bore a resemblance to an ailment could be used to treat it. Hence a plant that looked like a snake might be used to treat snake bites, or a yellow herb to treat jaundice.
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