The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650)

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THE REFORMED LIBRARIE-KEEPER ***

Produced by David Starner, Linda Cantoni, and the PG Online Distributed Proofreading Team.

THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

THE REFORMED LIBRARIE-KEEPER

(1650)

JOHN DURY

_Introduction by_

RICHARD H. POPKIN

_and_

THOMAS F. WRIGHT

Publication Number 220

WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

University of California, Los Angeles

1983

GENERAL EDITOR DAVID STUART RODES, _University of California, Los Angeles_

EDITORS CHARLES L. BATTEN, _University of California, Los Angeles_ GEORGE ROBERT GUFFEY, _University of California, Los Angeles_ MAXIMILLIAN E. NOVAK, _University of California, Los Angeles_ NANCY M. SHEA, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ THOMAS WRIGHT, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

ADVISORY EDITORS RALPH COHEN, _University of Virginia_ WILLIAM E. CONWAY, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ VINTON A. DEARING, _University of California, Los Angeles_ PHILLIP HARTH, _University of Wisconsin, Madison_ LOUIS A. LANDA, _Princeton University_ EARL MINER, _Princeton University_ JAMES SUTHERLAND, _University College, London_ NORMAN J.W. THROWER, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ ROBERT VOSPER, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_ JOHN M. WALLACE, _University of Chicago_

PUBLICATIONS MANAGER NANCY M. SHEA, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

CORRESPONDING SECRETARY BEVERLY J. ONLEY, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

EDITORIAL ASSISTANT FRANCES MIRIAM REED, _University of California, Los Angeles_

INTRODUCTION

This work, with its quaint sentiments and its grim picture of what librarians were like in the mid-seventeenth century, is more than a curiosity. John Dury was a very important figure in the Puritan Revolution, offering proposal after proposal to prepare England for its role in the millennium. _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is an integral part of that preparation. To appreciate it one must look at it in terms of the plans of Dury and his associates, Samuel Hartlib and Johann Amos Comenius, to reform the intellectual institutions of England so that the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation could be fulfilled there.

John Dury (1596-1680), the son of a Scottish Puritan, was raised in Holland.[1] He studied at the University of Leiden, then at the French Reformed seminaries at Sedan and Leiden, and later at Oxford. He was ordained a Protestant minister and served first at Cologne and then at the English church in the West Prussian city of Elbing. There he came in contact with Samuel Hartlib (?-1662), a merchant, who was to devote himself to many religious and scientific projects in England, and with Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the leader of the Moravian Brethren, as well as with other great educational reformers of the Continent. The three of them shared a common vision--that the advancement of knowledge, the purification of the Christian churches, and the impending conversion of the Jews were all antecedent steps to the commencement in the foreseeable future of the millennium, the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. They saw the struggles of the Thirty Years' War and the religious conflict in England as part of their development of providential history.

In terms of their common vision, each of them strove during the decade 1630-40 to help the world prepare for the great events to come. Comenius started redoing the educational system through his textbooks and set forth plans for attaining universal knowledge. Hartlib moved from Germany to England, where he became a central organizing figure in both the nascent scientific world and the theological world. He was in contact with a wide variety of intellectuals and brought their ideas together. (For instance, he apprised Dury of the millenarian theory of Joseph Mede, which was to be so influential in the Puritan Revolution, and he spread Comenius's ideas in England.) Dury devoted himself principally to trying to unite all of the Protestant churches in Europe and to this end began his peregrinations from Sweden and Germany to Holland, Switzerland, France, and England. These travels were to continue throughout the rest of his life, as he tried to negotiate an agreement on the essentials of Christianity in preparation for Jesus' return.

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