The Appropriation of Joseph Mede: Millenarianism in the 1640s

Abstract

In 1664 John Worthington published his magisterial edition of The Works of the Pious and Profoundly Learned Joseph Mede, B.D. Worthington’s edition was a labor of love: “toilsome” is the word he uses to describe it in the General Preface. He had worked on it throughout the period after his ejection from Cambridge in 1660. Convinced of “how advantageous” it would be to readers, he emphasized the scholarship that had gone into his edition. In his preface, he records his care in checking Mede’s text against the manuscript originals, not once but several times; his meticulous observance of the letter of Mede, to the point where he put words of doubtful legibility in square brackets; his scrupulousness in identifying Mede’s quotations from other sources and in printing them in full in the original language (even when Mede had quoted them in Latin) together with an English translation, “for the benefit of those Readers who had not the advantage of such Education as would have enabled them to understand words in those Tongues.”1 Worthington added materials which had not been published before and he made corrections to works that had seen print previously. He also included some of Mede’s correspondence in the edition. Worthington was very much a modern editor, and one with the best interests of his reader in mind, as he understood them. His edition was reprinted in 1673 and 1677 and it probably ensured the continuing interest in Mede as an interpreter of Scripture and especially of biblical prophecy. For Mede was to become one of the most influential of that kind in seventeenth-century England. He was cited as a principal authority on the Book of Revelation by such notable English students of that topic as Henry More and Isaac Newton. His reputation extended to Europe: the Protestant theologian Pierre Jurieu, the Dutch pastor Daniel van Laaren and the German Kabbalist scholar, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth are some of his continental admirers.2 He was still being cited in the eighteenth century — for example, by William Whiston — and he features as a key figure in that extraordinary believer’s history of millenarianism, Le Roy Edwin Froom’s The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, published last century.3