John Dury’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper: Information and its Intellectual Contexts in Seventeenth-Century England

Abstract

Reading John Dury’s Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) against the background of ideas on the advancement of universal learning expounded by Samuel Hartlib and his associates, this article suggests that Dury’s ideal library and librarian can be understood in the context of visions for public ‘agencies’ of learning emanating from the Hartlib circle, notably the idea of an Office of Address. The reading of Dury’s first library-keeper letter in its contemporary intellectual context indicates that Dury’s tract may gain in meaning when seen as a contribution to the history of information — specifically, to the programme of empirical data collection and dissemination championed by Bacon. In turn, Dury’s second library-keeper letter, in which Baconian ideas on the advancement of learning join with the Comenian millennial idea, commands attention as a characteristic expression of the context within which the ideas on information collection and dissemination in the first library-keeper letter could take root.