Heydon’s Plagiarism of Culverwell’s Discourse, With its Deceptive Citations of Hobbes, et al.

Abstract

WHEN Nathaniel Culverwell, Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, died in 1651 at the age of 31, he left behind eight sermons, as well as a course of lectures on the natural law delivered to students in the College in 1645–46. His friend William Dillingham, who had been appointed Fellow together with Culverwell in 1642, tested the market by publishing with the University printer one of those sermons, Spiritual opticks, in 1651. Its positive reception led him to publish the lectures and the sermons together in 1652 under the title An elegant and learned discourse of the light of nature with several other treatises.1 Culverwell’s topic for his lectures, the natural law, had been popular with both continental and English writers in the thirty-odd years preceding his Discourse, and he clearly felt an instructor’s obligation to make his student audience aware of their views. Consequently, he analyses, comments on, and criticizes works by Suarez (1612), Edward Herbert (1624), Grotius (1625), and Selden (1640).2 Thomas Hobbes was also writing about the natural law at the same time, but Culverwell could not have been aware of Hobbes’s The elements of law natural and politic (1640) or of his De cive (1642), because the first had only been distributed in manuscript copies ‘to many gentlemen’, and the second had been privately printed and distributed in Paris, before being revised and commercially republished in Amsterdam in 1647, after Culverwell had finished his lectures.