Sixteenth Century Central Europeans in England

Abstract

IN the Matice Moravskd (Brno, Czechoslovakia), Prof. O. Odlozilik has just published the results of extensive researches among documents and manuscripts from British libraries and those in Holland and central Europe, under the title “Visits from Bohemia and Moravia to England, 1563–1620”. He shows how scholars in Britain and the remoter parts of the Continent managed to keep in touch with each other's discoveries, views and writings. This contact was as strong between men of science (astronomers, mathematicians and others) as it was between theologians or historians. The period under review preceded the influx of refugees from the Thirty Years' War, but the question whether Komensky (Comenius) visited England in 1613 (that is, when he was only twenty-one years of age) is again raised. Whilst it is extremely unlikely that the great educationist did come to England prior to 1641, it is clear that many Bohemian and Moravian students and savants (including Peter Vok and Thaddeus Hajek) visited Oxford and Cambridge, and made contact with such sixteenth century Englishmen as Dr. John Dee, Francis Bacon, Sir Philip Sidney, Lord Burghley and the Earl of Essex. Some, like Charles of Zero tin, acted as diplomats between Bohemian monarchs and the British Crown at this period when culture and science began to flourish again after the Dark Ages.