Samuel Hartlib And The Advancement Of Learning

This book focuses on Samuel Hartlib and his vision of education towards the natural sciences.

Samuel Hartlib was a key figure in the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth century. Originally from Elbing, in Prussig, Hartlib settled permanently in England from the late 1620s until his death in 1662. His aspirations formed a distinctive and influential strand in English intellectual life during those revolutionary decades. This volume reflects the variety of the theoretical and practical interests of Hartlib's circle and presents them in their continental context. The editors of the volume are all attached to the Hartlib Papers Project at the University of Sheffield, a major collaborative research effort to exploit the largely untapped resources of the surviving Hartlib manuscripts. In an introduction to the volume they explore the background to the Hartlib circle and provide the context in which the essays should be read.

The Kingdom of Science examines Baconian utopias as blueprints for a scientific sociologyøof knowledge that founded a new social and economic world in the seventeenth century. Looking backward, Paul A. Olson begins with More's Utopia and Shakespeare's The Tempest, static state utopias designed to woo us toward a moral as opposed to a scientific reform. To these, Olson then contrasts the primary subjects of his study?Bacon's New Atlantis, the Commonwealth educational utopias, and the utopianism of Adam Smith and his Utilitarian followers. These later utopias increasingly point to an ideal world to be dominated by a science linked to technology, compelled education, and competitive capitalism. They posit as their end the conquest of nature and use as their means the routinizing of research and education. Their visions, Olson argues, lie at the center of the educational models adopted by mainstream British and American policymakers in the last century and a half?despite the warnings of both conservative and radical critics concerning their potential consequences for the environment and for culture. The challenge Olson presents for those responsible for forging our social future is creating visions sufficient to energize human groups while allowing both for the critical reflection necessary for constructive policy debate and for the action necessary to prevent environmental chaos and cultural disruption. The Kingdom of Science is a companion to Olson's earlier book, The Journey to Wisdom, and carries the assumptions of that patristic-medieval study into the early-modern and modern periods.

A study of European utopias in context from the early years of Henry VIII’s reign to the Restoration, this book is the first comprehensive attempt since J. C. Davis’ Utopia and the Ideal Society (1981) to understand the societies projected by utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to the political idealism and millenarianism of the mid-seventeenth century. Where Davis concentrated on understanding utopias historically, Renaissance Utopia also seeks to make sense of utopia as a literary form, offering both a new typology of utopia and a new history of European humanist utopianism. This book examines how the utopia was transformed from an intellectual exercise in philosophical interrogation to a serious means of imagining practical social reform. In doing so it argues that the relationship between Renaissance utopia and Renaissance dialogue is crucial; the utopian mode of discourse continued to make use of aspects of dialogue even when the dialogue form itself was in decline. Exploring the ways in which utopian texts assimilated dialogue, Renaissance Utopia complements recent work by historians and literary scholars on early modern communities by providing a thorough investigation of the issues informing a way of modelling a very particular community and literary mode - the utopia.

This volume of collected essays takes a new approach to this problematic subject by rethinking its broad foundations. From a variety of perspectives, its authors situate mercantilism against the backdrop of wider transformations in seventeenth-century Britain, Europe, and the Atlantic, from the scientific revolution to the expansion of empire.--

'Scottish and English Christians are greatly indebted to George Ella for reviving and greatly expanding their knowledge of the tireless and many-sided work of one of their own Christian scholars, who lived in troubled times and laboured in many parts of Europe as well as in his own country to expand learning and to foster international Protestant understanding.' Roger T. Beckwith, M.A., B.D., D.D. Former Warden, Latimer House, Oxford. 'George Ella has written a rich and compelling account of a seminal seventeenth-century figure. Scholars of puritanism and its intellectual contexts across the disciplines will be enormously in his debt.' Prof. Dr. Crawford Gibben, B.A., M.A., Ph.D., F.R. Hist.S., F.T.C.D.. Trinity College, Dublin

Originally published in 1973,this book describes the medieval origins of the British education system, and the transformations successive historical events – such as the Reformation, the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution – have wrought on it. It examines the effect on the educational pattern of such major cultural upheavals as the Renaissance; it looks at the different parts played by church and state, and the influence of new social and educational philosophies.