Samuel hartlib biography
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Dictionary of National Biography, /Hartlib, Samuel
&#;HARTLIB, SAMUEL (d. ?), friend of Milton, was born towards the close of the sixteenth century, probably in Elbing. In a letter which he wrote in to Dr. John Worthington, the master of Jesus College, Cambridge, he says that his father was a Polish merchant, of a family originally settled in Lithuania, who was a protestant and emigrated to Prussia to escape the persecution of the jesuits. The first and second wives of his father were ‘Polonian gentlewomen,’ but the third, the mother of Samuel, appears to have been the daughter of a wealthy English merchant of Dantzig. His own statements show that he came to this country about , and became nominally a merchant, ‘but in reality a man of various hobbies, and conducting a general news agency.’ Such was his life in , but even then he probably engaged in educational plans also. He introduced the writings of Comenius, and his charity to poor scholars was so profuse that it brought
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HARTLIB, SAMUEL [SSNE ]
- Surname
- HARTLIB
- First name
- SAMUEL
- Nationality
- GERMAN AND ENGLISH
- Region
- ELBING OXFORD
Text source
Samuel Hartlib (c) was born in Elbing in Prussia c the son of George Hartlib, a Pole, and Elizabeth Langthon. His maternal grandfather John Langthon was a wealthy English merchant working for the Eastland Company in Danzig while his father George was a banker. According to the DNB he arrived in England in as a merchant after studying in Konigsberg. In some sources, such as Hans Schick's 'Das Ältere Rosenkreutzertum' (Berlin, ), Hartlib is linked with the Freemasons and Rosecrucianism although neither of these connections has been firmly established. He was, however, associated with many similar societies and has been described han själv as the leader of one 'mystical philanthropic society'. He fryst vatten said to have maintained contact with Joachim Junge (), founder of 'Collegium Philosophicum' or 'Societas Ereunetica'
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Primary Contributors: Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson, The Hartlib Papers (Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield), and Cultures of Knowledge
Samuel Hartlib (c. –)
The intelligencer Samuel Hartlib, who according to John Dury deserved to ‘bee sette uppe as a conduit pipe of things communicable’,1 came from mercantile stock: his father was a German merchant, and his maternal grandfather was the head of the English trading company in Elbing on the southern shores of the Baltic. After the Swedish invasion undermined Elbing’s commercial position in the late s, Hartlib fled the city of his birth and war-torn central Europe to England, where eventually he settled in Westminster and lived until his death, becoming known as one of the most active reformers of the late s and the ensuing civil war and republican period.
Partners and Additional Contributors
The 4, Hartlib records featured initially in EMLO were refined and augmented by the first Cultures of Knowle