Six Unknown Letters from Mersenne to Vegelin

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)The published correspondence of the Minim friar Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) fills seventeen fat volumes, and constitutes one of the most important monuments of seventeenth-century intellectual life.1 Mersenne's appetite for information in almost every field of learning was extraordinary and unflagging; he corresponded with Italian mathematicians, Dutch and French musicians, Huguenot theologians, English philosophers and scientists, and a wide range of friars, Jesuits, savants and country gentlemen. However, the sheer bulk of the modern edition of his correspondence may give a somewhat misleading impression of the quantity of Mersenne's own letters that have survived. A significant proportion of those seventeen volumes consists, in fact, of letters between third parties which mention Mersenne or relate in some way to his own correspondence. For the year 1641, for example, exactly 100 letters are printed: 54 are letters between third parties, 39 are letters to Mersenne, and only seven are letters by him.2 The discovery of six hitherto unknown autograph letters by Mersenne - addressed to Philip Ernst Vegelin, and located among the Vegelin papers in the Provincial Archive of Friesland at Leeuwarden - therefore amounts to a significant addition to the corpus of Mersenne's own letters.3The recipient of these letters was a talented young Dutchman of German origin, who shared some of Mersenne's scientific and musical interests, and had become acquainted with Mersenne personally in Paris. His name is not unknown to Mersenne scholars: one letter from him to Mersenne is contained in the published correspondence, and the Minim friar occasionally referred to him in letters to a mutual acquaintance.4 However, almost nothing has been written about him, apart from the brief entry in the Nieuw nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, and virtually no attention has been given to the small but significant role he played as an intellectual intermediary between the Netherlands, France and England.5Philip Ernst Vegelin was born on 10 October 1613; his father, who bore the same name, came from a Protestant family, originally from Fribourg in Switzerland, which had moved to the Rhineland town of Neustadt, in the Palatinate. (The family name was probably derived from 'Vogelin'; the recipient of these letters normally signed himself 'Vegilin', but sometimes used 'Vegelin' - or, when writing in French, 'Veguelin', to indicate the hard 'g'. In later generations the spelling became fixed as 'Vegelin', which is the form used in this article.) Philip Ernst Vegelin senior served under Gustavus Adolphus, and was rewarded with an estate at Claerbergen, in the southern part of Friesland; the full family name therefore became Vegelin van (or 'de') Claerbergen.6Nothing is known of Philip Ernst Vegelin junior's education or early adulthood until the late 1630s, when he evidently spent some time in Paris: before he visited England in 1639 he was already well acquainted with the French engineer and musical theorist Jean Le Maire. This visionary but secretive inventor had developed a new form of musical notation, using individual symbols for notes of different pitch (instead of placing them on a stave); he also designed a new type of lute, called an 'Almerie' (an anagram of his name).7 No doubt it was Vegelin's own passion for music that drew him to Le Maire; it may also be a testimony to his personal charm that this notoriously unforthcoming inventor did apparently share some of his secrets with him. Whether Vegelin had also made the personal acquaintance of Mersenne by this stage is not known, though it does seem likely; he certainly knew of Mersenne's own work as a musical theorist (published in his huge folio volume, the Harmonie universelle) - as one of his later comments, noted by Samuel Hartlib and quoted below, makes clear. Nor is it known how long Vegelin spent in Paris at this time. …