A Rabelaisian Scotsman in King Cromwell's Court: Sir Thomas Urquhart, the Hartlib circle and the nonsense of a rational language

Abstract

The proposals for an artificial, rational language of Thomas Urquhart, laird of Cromarty, are usually seen as an eccentric, peripheral contribution to the debates about language planning of the mid seventeenth century. Yet, as this article shows, Urquhart seems to have composed his language proposals in The Jewel (1652) in direct response to the efforts of Samuel Hartlib and his intellectual network of associates to advance learning at the moment of political and religious reform in the early 1650s, and to have been taken seriously by them. As a prisoner of the Commonwealth after his capture at the Battle of Worcester, Urquhart had urgent personal reasons for impressing those with influence in the new regime. Yet Urquhart was working at the same time on his famously exuberant translation of the first two books of Gargantua and Pantagruel (1653). Urquhart's fascination with the utopian dream of linguistic transparency was undercut by his immersion in Rabelaisian episodes in which the inherent ambivalence and excessiveness of language are repeatedly the stuff of nonsense and satire; it was also shadowed by his own personal and political situation as a royalist prisoner of war in a republican Britain.