The Impact of Milton’s Of Education on the Hartlib Circle’s Understanding of Public and Private

Abstract

ABSTRACT Milton’s Of Education was an influential contribution to the Hartlibian philosophy of advancing knowledge in the 1640s. This article proposes that Milton’s blueprint for an aristocratic academy enjoyed an afterlife in the Hartlibian texts of the later 1640s. The afterlife suggests that Milton’s educational treatise demonstrated to the Hartlibians that exclusive forms of education could contribute to the public good of society. The article begins with a discussion of the Hartlibian philosophy of universal learning that the circle drew from Johannes Amos Comenius, before considering how Hartlibian texts of the late-1640s, particularly those written by John Hall, encode an attitude to education that aligns with Of Education and differs from Hartlibian texts published before 1644. The article locates Of Education in a Hartlibian discourse, as a text inspired by Samuel Hartlib, and as having the capacity to make a tangible impact on the developing Hartlibian ideology of the 1640s.