Elias Ashmole Research Articles

‘A man of intrigue’: Giles Rawlins, 1631?–1662

No person proposed to the early Royal Society has a less certain biography than Giles Rawlins. A ‘Mr. Rawlins’ was proposed as a candidate for election on 26 December 1660 in a group of seven. The other members of this group were Robert Boyle, Henry Oldenburg, John Denham, Elias Ashmole, John Evelyn and Nathaniel Henshaw. But whereas these six other men are greater or lesser luminaries of the Society, Rawlins is a blank. R. E. W. Maddison in 1960 could only ‘suggest’ his likely identity; and Michael Hunter in The Royal Society and its Fellows (1982 and 1994) went no further than Maddison. 1 Following my discovery in the National Library of Ireland of Rawlins's only autograph letter, it is possible for the first time to confirm his identity. Further, this discovery allows the reconstruction of the rest of Rawlins's life: his upbringing as the son of a minor diplomat; his work in the Interregnum as a cross-Channel royalist messenger; his consequent rise and reward in the Duke of York's household; and his death in one of the most notorious duels of the Restoration.

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

Winckles, Andrew O. Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: ‘Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader .’

Winckles, Andrew O. <i>Eighteenth-Century Women’s Writing and the Methodist Media Revolution: ‘Consider the Lord as Ever Present Reader</i> <i>.’</i>

Grinling Gibbons: a Dutch master in England

Grinling Gibbons’s still-life sculpture emerged out of the artistic and proto-scientific culture of the seventeenth-century Netherlands and was understood in these intellectual terms by the sophisticated, courtly consumers of his work in Restoration England. Our fondness for a myth of Gibbons as a dazzlingly skilful but intellectually vapid artist should not blind us to the intellectual focus of his sculptures. The carved frame for Elias Ashmole’s portrait in the Ashmolean collection is a sophisticated engagement with European cultures of collecting. The Cosimo panel for Charles II engages with the witty and formidably advanced scientific discourses of the Caroline court, while the limewood reredos in St James’ church, Piccadilly reaches back to the devotional roots of floral still life, reinterpreting it in the context of English Protestantism.

John Gower’s Alchemical Afterlife in Elias Ashmole’s Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum (1652)

In the Theatrum chemicum Britannicum (1652), Elias Ashmole interprets John Gower as Geoffrey Chaucer’s alchemical mentor. This paper argues that Ashmole’s reading of Gower as an alchemical master and adept connects to Gower’s literary tradition as well as the alchemical tradition of the seventeenth century. Further clues to Ashmole’s reading can be linked to his sixteenth-century literary sources, which depict Gower as Chaucer’s literary mentor. This paper also considers Gower’s depiction of alchemy in Book IV of the Confessio amantis, particularly how Ashmole was drawn to its moral role, while also drawing upon Thomas Norton’s depiction of the moral alchemist in the Ordinall of Alchemy and Book V of the Confessio amantis. The resulting insights reveal the ways in which Gower’s alchemy was received by early modern readers in literary and alchemical traditions as well as the impact of his alchemical afterlife in the early modern period.

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346.

Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain. Elizabeth Yale. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. xii+346. Consider this depiction of “An Antiquary” offered by John Earle (ca.1600–1665), bishop of Salisbury: “A great admirer he is of the rust of old Monuments. … Printed bookes he contemnes, as a novelty of this latter age; but a Manu-script he pores on everlastingly, especially if the cover be all Moth-eaten, and the dust make a Parenthesis between every Syllable.”1 Written before some of the people in the book under review were born, Earle’s caricature catches aspects of their behavior, but only superficially. Men such as Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Anthony Wood, Edward Lhuyd, John Evelyn, and Robert Plot cannot be fully captured by the label “antiquary,” in part because their interests embraced natural history, and also because they did not work alone, as Earle implied. They were linked by correspondence in intellectual collaboration, using both manuscript and print.

Medieval German Manuscripts in Oxford Libraries

Manuscripts in German have formed part of the holdings of the Bodleian Library in Oxford since the 1630s. The article discusses how they came to be acquired at that time by Archbishop William Laud, and then traces further acquisitions from Germany that came with the collections of John Selden, Franciscus Junius, Elias Ashmole, Richard Rawlinson, Jacobus Philippus D'Orville, Matteo Luigi Canonici, Francis Douce, Sir William Hamilton, James P. R. Lyell, and Alfred Ehrmann's Broxbourne Library. The collection is notable for Old High German glosses, many of them from Würzburg, for the Murbacher Hymnen, a number of significant Middle High German texts, as well as late-medieval prayer books. The finding tools for all this material consist of a series of printed catalogues from the late-seventeenth century to the present, as well as online-resources which are currently in the process of development.Deutschsprachige Handschriften waren in der Bodleian Library in Oxford seit den 1630er Jahren vertreten. Der Aufsatz beschreibt die Erwerbsgeschichte unter Erzbischof William Laud und den weiteren Aufbau des Bestands durch die Sammlungen von John Selden, Franciscus Junius, Elias Ashmole, Richard Rawlinson, Jacobus Philippus D'Orville, Matteo Luigi Canonici, Francis Douce, Sir William Hamilton, James P. R. Lyell und Alfred Ehrmanns Broxbourne Library. Bemerkenswert sind besonders die althochdeutschen Glossenhandschriften, viele aus Würzburg, die Murbacher Hymnen, mehrere nicht unbedeutende mittelhochdeutsche Texte und die spätmittelalterlichen Gebetbücher. Gedruckte Kataloge wurden vom späten 17. Jahrhundert bis in die Gegenwart veröffentlicht und werden zur Zeit durch neue Formen digitaler Erschließung ergänzt.

Annotations in copies of Thomas Johnson's Mercurius botanicus (1634) and Mercurii botanici, pars altera (1641): authorship and provenance

By an analysis of extensive and detailed annotations in copies of Thomas Johnson's Mercurius botanicus (1634) and Mercurii botanici, pars altera (1641) held in the library of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the probable author is identified as William Bincks, an apprentice apothecary of Kingston-upon-Thames, Surrey. Through Elias Ashmole, a friend of Bincks' master Thomas Agar, a link is established with the probable original owner, John Watlington of Reading, botanist and apothecary, and colleague of Thomas Johnson. The route by which the book ended up in the hands of Thomas Wilson, a journeyman copyist of Leeds, is suggested. Plants growing near Kingston-upon-Thames in the late seventeenth century, recorded in manuscript, are noted, many being first records for the county of Surrey.

Art Museums and Science Museums: Much More than Repositories.

Museums reflect the human propensity for collecting. Culturally they complement the libraries, focusing on objects rather than texts. Collections of objects were known to exist as early as 1000 BC in Mesopotamia. In Europe, the large art collections were assembled by royalty and wealthy elites. One example from the Renaissance is the collection of the Medicis in 15th century Florence, which later became the Uffizi Gallery (1). A collection of Elias Ashmole, donated to the University of Oxford in 1675, included antiquities, manuscripts, and also coins and medals. Collecting art often paralleled collecting natural curiosities and other objects (2). In the 18th century, many collections of natural curiosities and objects of art were made available to public view. Thus the Ashmolean Museum opened to the public in 1863, and the British Museum was founded in 1759, the Louvre in 1793, and the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1870. The natural history collections, either private or those maintained by scientific societies, were the precursors of today's science museums, such as the New England Museum of Natural History, now the Museum of Science in Boston, opened in …

Elias Ashmole’s collections and views about John Dee

In this paper I discuss Elias Ashmole’s collections and views about John Dee. I consider Dee as an object of collection against the broader background of Ashmole’s collecting practices. I also look at the uses to which Ashmole put some of his collections relating to Dee, as well as those which he envisaged for posterity. I argue that Ashmole’s interest in Dee stemmed from his ideas about the uses of antiquity in the reconstruction and transmission of knowledge. They partly reflected Ashmole’s interpretation of Francis Bacon’s Advancement of learning as well as the influence of William Backhouse and William Oughtred’s ideas about publishing natural philosophy in English.

Ancient and Modern Gems and Jewels in the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen

The line-up for this sumptuous volume reads like the gemmological equivalent of fantasy football, with the dream team consisting of the director of the Museo Stibbert in Florence and the emeritus professor of classical archaeology at Oxford – both premier division stars in the field of incised gems – supported by the equally stellar Beatriz Chadour-Sampson and Martin Henig on the wings, all bringing their talents to bear on the historic gems, jewels, insignia and other precious objects in the Royal Collection. These are distinct from both the Crown Jewels and from The Queen's personal jewels, representing rather the unveräußerlichen Erbstücke familiar from historic Germanic princely collections, although the means by which the collection achieved its current stability are shown to be long, devious and of comparatively recent resolution. Some mention is made of a few earlier pieces from the reigns of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, but the origins of the collection as such are shown to lie in the era of Henry, Prince of Wales and his younger brother King Charles I. Following the vicissitudes of the Commonwealth (during which time it was ‘impair’d, and miserably imbezled’) and the (seemingly equally hazardous) early years of the Restoration, Elias Ashmole was engaged to see that the collection was ‘put in Order, and Methodiz’d’, but his work was not long done when most of the gems perished in the Whitehall fire of 1698. (Martin Henig contributes a particularly interesting account of this early manifestation of the collection, as famous as it is little-known, based on a series of wax impressions made by Ashmole and surviving today in the Bodleian Library.) Later contributions to the Royal Collection from Caroline of Ansbach and George III are acknowledged, and there is some stylish input too from George IV. Other well-known figures who had a hand in its accumulation or documentation over the centuries include Abraham van der Doort, Consul Smith and Horace Walpole.

A Virtuoso’s History: Antiquarianism and the Transmission of Knowledge in the Alchemical Studies of Elias Ashmole

This article examines how the seventeenth-century antiquary, Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) used antiquarian techniques to demonstrate the historical veracity of alchemy. Ashmole published three alchemical volumes and collected thousands of pages of alchemical manuscripts. He also wrote several antiquarian treatises and collected manuscripts and printed volumes on astrology, political and ecclesiastical history, heraldry, medicine, devotional treatises. Ashmole's virtuoso perspective allowed him to view knowledge as unified, even traditions that appear to be as discrete as alchemy and antiquarianism. By examining how these two traditions were related to one another, we also see how knowledge was conveyed from one generation to the next.

Cover Picture: Interpenetrating Polar and Nonpolar Sublattices in Intermetallics: The NaCd2 Structure (Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 12/2007)

The sun and the moon are not quite equal partners; the two clusters shown in the cover picture are more so. They rise and set in several incredibly complex intermetallic phases, such as NaCd2. As explained by R. Hoffmann and co‐workers in their Review on page 1958 ff., an electronic Aufbau based on these clusters generates the full NaCd2 structure in all its glory: the clusters build two interpenetrating networks that strive for the extremes of polarity and nonpolarity. The alchemical image, drawn by Robert Vaughn, is from Elias Ashmole's Theatricum Chemicum Britannicum.

The Angelical Stone of Elias Ashmole

The Angelical Stone of Elias Ashmole

Some Unnoticed Lovelace Manuscripts

IN Notes and Queries of April 1953 John P. Cutts noted that 'manuscript versions of Lovelace's poems are very rare',1 and indeed none have come to light since that article and Willa McClung Evans's researches in the 1940s. There are in the Bodleian, however, two Lovelace manuscripts which have not been noticed. In a composite volume of verse collected by Elias Ashmole (1617- 92) containing an untitled copy of 'To Althea, From Prison'2 there is, in the same hand, a version of ' To Lucasta. From Prison. An Epode' which is the only manuscript version extant of this poem.3 Secondly, a verse miscellany of the 1640s has an additional version of Lovelace's 'The Scrutinie', bringing the number of manuscript copies of this song to ten.

Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and Its Contexts

Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts. Ed. Michael Bath and Daniel Russell. (AMS Studies in the Emblem, 13) New York: AMS Press. 1999. xii + 256 pp. $78. This volume of essays is based on papers from the Third International Emblem Conference in Pittsburgh (1993). Alastair Fowler's magisterial keynote address, `The Emblem as a Literary Genre', provides a stimulating and richly suggestive opening. Alan R. Young has recently edited the manuscript emblem books of Henry Peacham in the Index Emblematicus (Vol. v), and his `Jacobean Authority and Peacham's Manuscript Emblems' is complementary to the succinct introduction he there offers. The emblem form carried its own special sort of literary authority during the Renaissance, and James I, much concerned by authority of all sorts, is known to have been interested in it. Peacham, who met James at Hinchingbrooke on the progress down England in 1603, sought his patronage, and later that of Prince Henry, for whom James wrote Basilikon Doron. Young shows that Peacham's three manuscript emblem books are related not only to James's Basilikon Doron, but also (especially in case of the heraldic emblems, which stress authority, legitimacy, and descent), to the iconography and themes of James's triumphal entry in London. The case for Peacham supporting (opportunistically or not) James's ideas of godlike, absolutist kingship is convincingly made out. Judith Dundas, `Unriddling the Antique: Peacham's Emblematic Art', explores Peacham's use and adaptation, in Minerva Britanna, of his sources, in particular Laurentius Heachtanus. The freedom of some of his verses sometimes makes their thrust more explicit (less subtle?) than the original; and the pictures, even allowing for the difference in medium, reveal that his artistic ability was rather limited. Jane Farnsworth, `An equall, and a mutuall flame: George Wither's A Collection of Emblemes 1635 and Caroline Court Culture', explores the cultural context of Wither's book. Taking with due seriousness the dedications to King, Queen, and major figures of the court, she sees the book as part of a celebration of ideas of marriage and monarchy as they could and might be, and links it with the attitudes that the `Court neo-Platonism' surrounding Henrietta Maria and Charles I encouraged. To fit the book into the search for patronage and the perennial desire to influence the great is attractive. Perhaps more attention might be given to the re-application by Wither of the blocks he took over from Rollenhagen's Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum, and the relationship between his verses and those of the earlier book. The case for Wither's originality is not entirely convincing, and Rosemary Freeman's remark about Wither's old-fashionedness still stands. Lyndy Abraham, `Arthur Dee's Hieroglyph', reminds us of Arthur Dee, son of the more famous John, himself no negligible chymist nor physician. When Doctor in Phisik to James I, in 1621 he was headhunted by Tsar Michael Romanov, and while in Moscow composed his Fasciculus Chemicus, a collection of alchemical material. Elias Ashmole treated his work with respect. Abraham's essay extends her work in the byways of alchemy, the arcane art where attempts to manipulate matter were part of a search for the transmutation of the self, a uniting, coniunctio, of heaven and earth. Bruce Lawson, `The Body as a Political Construct: Oliver Cromwell's Image in William Faithorne's 1658 Emblematic Engraving', demonstrates that this complex print, built from many visual and verbal elements available to Faithorne, is deeply ambiguous. …

:Science and the Shape of Orthodoxy: Intellectual Change in Late Seventeenth-Century Britain

Part 1 The formative generation: Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) - the founder of the Ashmolean and his world the making of Christopher Wren John Evelyn in the 1650s - a virtuoso in quest of a role. Part 2 The Royal Society and the new science: the debate over science first steps in institutionalization - the role of the Royal Society of London the Cabinet institutionalized - the Royal Society's repository and it's background the Crown, the public and the new science 1689-1702. Part 3 Science and learning: the early Royal Society and the shape of knowledge the Royal Society and the origins of British archaeology the origins of the Oxford University Press ancients, moderns, philologists and scientists. Part 4 The definition of orthodoxy: science and heterodoxy - an early modern problem reconsidered science and astrology in 17th-century England - an unpublished polemic by John Flamstead Aikenhead the Atheist - the context and consequences of articulate irreligion in the late-17th century. Appendices: a note on early English usage of the word museum the text of Flamsteed's Hecker.

:Prophecy and Power: Astrology in Early Modern England

Part 1 Introduction: this book astrology in historical context astrological theory and terminology. Part 2 From heyday to crisis - 1642-1710: astrology in the interregnum - halcyon days, William Lilly and democratic astrology, Elias Ashmole and elite astrology, the astrologers Feasts astrology in crisis - after the restoration a scientific reform, a Ptolemaic reform, the strange death of John Partridge. Part 3 Life after death - 1710-1800: popular astrology - survival, astrology in popular culture, attacks from popular to plebeian judicial astrology - decline, the constituency, judicial astrologers, middling astrology and the middle classes, Worsdale and Sibly - judicial astrology reborn high astrology - disappearance, astrology and the natural philosophers, Newton, the occult and astrology, authorized prophets the reform of prophecy - patricians, plebeians and the middling sort, mentalities and ideologies, hegemony.

Essay Review: “A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut”: Elias Ashmole 1617–1692: The Founder of the Ashmolean Museum and His World, Tradescant's Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683 with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, the Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1683–1983

Essay Review: “A World of Wonders in One Closet Shut”: Elias Ashmole 1617–1692: The Founder of the Ashmolean Museum and His World, Tradescant's Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683 with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections, the Ashmolean Museum and Oxford Science 1683–1983

Exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the collection of Elias Ashmole

Exhibition of medieval manuscripts from the collection of Elias Ashmole