The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650) Part 1

The Reformed Librarie-Keeper (1650).

by John Dury.

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 a.s.sociates, Samuel Hartlib and Johann Amos Comenius, to reform the intellectual inst.i.tutions 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 princ.i.p.ally 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.

In 1640, as the Puritan Revolution began, Hartlib, Comenius, and Dury saw the developments in England as the opportunity to put their scientific-religious plans into effect. They joined together in London in 1641 and, with strong support, offered proposals to prepare England for the millennium. They proposed setting up a new university in London for developing universal knowledge. In spite of the strong backing they had from leaders of the State and Church, Parliament was unable to fund the project because of the turmoil of the time. Comenius left for the Continent, while Hartlib and Dury advanced other projects and involved themselves in the Westminster conference to reform the Church.[2]

Hugh Trevor-Roper has called Hartlib, Dury, and Comenius "the real philosophers, the only philosophers, of the English Revolution."[3] They combined a long list of practical plans with an overall vision of how these fitted into the needed antecedent events to the millennium. They made proposals for improving and reforming many aspects of human activities and human inst.i.tutions. The advancement of knowledge, the improvement of human life, and the purification of religion, which included bringing the Jews and Christians together, would prepare England for its role when G.o.d chose to transform human history. In a long series of pamphlets and tracts, Hartlib and Dury turned Comenius's theory into practical applications to the situation then prevailing in England.[4]

Dury outlined this program in a sermon he gave before Parliament on 26 November 1645 ent.i.tled _Israels Call to March Out of Babylon unto Jerusalem_. He pointed out that England, the new Israel, had a special role in history, "for the Nations of great _Britain_ have made a new thing in the world; a thing which hath not been done by any Nation in the world, since the preaching of the Gospel in it, a thing which since the Jewish Nation, in the daies of _Nehemiah_, was never heard of in any Nation, that not only the Rulers, but the whole mult.i.tude of the people should enter into a Covenant with their G.o.d, ... to walk in the waies of his Word, to maintain the Cause of Religion, and to reform themselves according to his will" (pp. 23-24).

Since England was to be G.o.d's agent in history, Dury proclaimed at the end of his sermon that "The Schooles of the Prophets, the Universities[,] must be setled, purged and reformed with wholsom const.i.tutions, for the education of the sonnes of the Prophets, and the government of their lives and with the soundnes and purity of spirituall learning, that they may speak the true language of _Canaan_, and that the gibberidge of Scholastical Divinity may be banished out of their society" (p. 48).

In the same year that he delivered this sermon, Dury married an aunt of Lady Catherine Ranelagh and was brought in closer contact with Lady Catherine's brother, Robert Boyle, and the young scientists of the so-called Invisible College. Dury and Hartlib pressed for reforms that would promote a better, more useful education from the lowest grades upward. Convinced by the pa.s.sage in Daniel 12:4 that knowledge shall increase before the end of history, Dury and Hartlib sought various opportunities to bring about this increase in knowledge through better schools, better religious training, and better organization of knowledge. Such organization would necessarily affect libraries since they were an all-important component of the premillennial preparation.

Between 1645 and 1650, Dury wrote a great many tracts on improving the Church and society. These include an as yet unpublished one, dated 16 August 1646, giving his views on the post of library keeper at Oxford.

The poor state of Oxford's library led Dury to observe that the librarian is to be "a factor and trader for helpes to learning, a treasurer to keep them and a dispenser to apply them to use, or to see them well used, or at least not abused."[5] During his travels on the Continent, Dury had visited Duke Augustus of Brunswick and was obviously very impressed by the great library the Duke was a.s.sembling at Wolfenb.u.t.tel. In his important _Seasonable Discourse_ of 1649 on reforming religion and learning, Dury had proposed establishing in London the first college for Jewish studies in the modern world. In this proposal, he saw as a basic need the procurement of a collection of Oriental books. Such a library was not just to store materials, but to make them available and thereby increase knowledge. Hartlib, in a pamphlet ent.i.tled _Considerations tending to the Happy Accomplishment of England's Reformation in Church and State_, written in 1647 and published in 1649, had proposed a central "Office of Addresse," an information service dispensing spiritual and "bodily" information to all who wished it. The holder of this office should, he said, correspond with "Chiefe Library-Keepers of all places, whose proper employments should bee to trade for the Advantages of Learning and Learned Men in Books and MS[S] to whom he may apply himselfe to become beneficiall, that such as Mind The End of their employment may reciprocate with him in the way of Communication" (p. 49).

Events surrounding the overthrow and execution of Charles I led Dury to become more personally involved in library matters. After the king fled from London, the royal goods were subject to various proposals, including selling or burning. These schemes of disposal extended to his books and ma.n.u.scripts, which were stored in St. James's Palace. John Selden is credited with preventing the sale of the royal library.

Bulstrode Whitelocke was appointed keeper of the king's medals and library, and on 28 October 1650 Dury was appointed his deputy. According to Anthony a Wood, Dury "did the drudgery of the place."[6] The books and ma.n.u.scripts were in terrible disorder and disarray, and Dury carefully reorganized them. As soon as he took over, Dury stopped any efforts to sell the books and ordered that the new chapel, built originally for the wedding of King Charles I, be turned into a library.

He immediately ordered the printing of the Septuagint copy of the Bible in the royal collection.

In the same year that he became deputy keeper, Dury wrote the following tract, one of a dozen he composed in 1650 on topics ranging from the educational to the ecclesiastical. Among the latter was his introduction to Thomas Thorowgood's book contending that the American Indians are descended from the Israelites, a work that also served as promotional material for New England colonization.

That Dury's _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is part of his reform program preparatory to the onset of the millennium is apparent both from its setting and its content. It was published in 1650 along with two other tracts (not reprinted here)[7] and Dury's supplement to his _Reformed School_, which itself had appeared a few months earlier. _The Reformed School_ was a basic presentation of the ideas of Comenius, Hartlib, and Dury for transforming the nature of education in such a way that from infancy people would be directed in their striving toward universal knowledge and spiritual betterment. The _Supplement to the Reformed School_ deals with the role that universities should take in preparing for the Kingdom of G.o.d, a role making them more actively part of the world.

Having placed educational inst.i.tutions in the scheme of things preparatory to the millennium, Dury then proceeds to place library keeping and libraries in this scheme as well. Unfortunately, according to Dury, library keepers had traditionally regarded their positions as opportunities for profit and gain, not for "the service, which is to bee don by them unto the Common-wealth of Israel, for the advancement of Pietie and Learning" (p. 15). Library keepers "ought to becom Agents for the advancement of universal Learning" and not just mercenary people (p.

17). Their role ought not to be just to guard the books but to make them available to those seeking universal knowledge and understanding of the Kingdom of G.o.d.

The library and the library keeper can play important roles in making knowledge available. As Dury points out, Oxford and Heidelberg have failed to do so. Dury's work enumerates very practical problems that need to be solved and integrates them into an overall picture of the library keeper, the library, the school, and the church--all fundamental components of a better world, if properly reformed. Reforming involves practical changes directed by the spiritual goal of preparing for the millennium. And it should be noticed that while Dury had time to worry about how much librarians should be paid and how books should be cla.s.sified, and while he was occupied in getting the king's books in their proper place on the shelf, he was also convinced that the penultimate events before the onset of the millennium were about to take place. A month after his official appointment as deputy library keeper, Dury wrote the preface, dated 28 November 1650, to Abraham von Franckenberg's _Clavis Apocalyptica_. This work in Dury's translation of 1651 states on the t.i.tle page that it offers a key to the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation and "that the Prophetical Numbers com to an end with the year of our Lord 1655." The work, which Dury strongly endorses, lists as events "which are shortly to com to pa.s.s, collected out of the XI and XVI Chapters of the REVELATION," the destruction of the city of Rome, the end of the Turkish Empire, the conversion of the Jews, and the ruin of the whole papacy. Thereupon, the Devil will be cast out and shut up in the bottomless pit, and the Son of G.o.d will take "possession of the Kingdom" and reign for the millennium (pp. [164-65]).

As is all too evident, Dury's reform projects did not lead to the millennium. He was active in England until sent abroad in 1654 as Cromwell's unofficial agent. Again he traveled all over Protestant Europe negotiating to reunite the churches. After the Restoration he was unable to return to England and lived out his life on the Continent trying to bring about Christian reunion. One of his last works, which has not been located, was a shady _Touchant l'intelligence de l'Apocalypse par l'Apocalypse meme_ of 1674. His daughter married Henry Oldenburg, who became a secretary of the Royal Society of England and who helped bring about some of the scientific reforms Dury had advocated.

_Richard H. Popkin Washington University_

John Dury's place in the intellectual and religious life of seventeenth-century England and Europe is amply demonstrated in the preceding part of the introduction. This section focuses on _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ itself, which was printed in 1650 with the subheading _Two copies of Letters concerning the Place and Office of a Librarie-Keeper_ (p. 15). The first letter concentrates on practical questions of the organization and administration of the library, the second relates the librarian's function to educational goals and, above all else, to the mission of the Christian religion. The work's two-part structure is a clue to a proper understanding of the genesis of _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ and to its meaning and puts in ironic perspective its usefulness for later academic librarianship.

Because _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ appeared in the same year that Dury became deputy librarian of the King's Library in St. James's Palace, it has been a.s.sumed that he probably wrote the pamphlet as a form of self-promotion to secure the job. An anonymous article in _The Library_ in 1892, for instance, speculates that the pamphlet may have been "composed for the special purpose of the Author's advancement" and that Milton and Samuel Hartlib urged its production "to forward his claims" while the Council of State was debating what to do with Charles I's books.[8] Certainly the final sentence of the tract, with its references to "the Hous" and "the Counsels of leading men in this Common-wealth" (p. 31), suggests a connection with the debate, but the tone of religious zeal that permeates the work, and especially the second letter, seems to transcend any specific occasion. Moreover, Hartlib, Dury's longtime friend and a.s.sociate in millenarian causes and the recipient and editor of these letters, claims that they and the other, disparate works he selected for the volume are all "_fruits of som of my Solicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of Learning_" and as such "_are but preparatives towards that perfection which wee may exspect by the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, wherein the Communion of Saints, by the graces of the Spirit, will swallow up all these poor Rudiments of knowledg, which wee now grope after by so manie helps_" (sig. A2r-v).

There is, in fact, no way of knowing with certainty if Dury's motives were "impure," especially since the exact date of the tract cannot be determined, no entry existing for it in the Stationers' Register.

According to one of Dury's biographers, but with no reference to source, the pamphlet was printed by William Dugard "shortly after" the latter's release from prison in the early spring of 1650.[9] The Calendar of State Papers and the records of Bulstrode Whitelocke indicate that Dury was not officially considered for the library post before late summer and not appointed until 28 October.[10]

The contents of the letters themselves reveal Dury far ahead of his time in his conception of the Complete Librarian, but later commentators have generally not understood that the administrative reforms he advocated were inseparable from his idea of the sacramental nature of the librarian's office--and so have tended to dismiss the second letter because it "merely repeats the ideas of the first with less practical suggestion and in a more declamatory style."[11] Such a comment ill.u.s.trates how far we are from Dury's (and the age's) purposes and hopes, and it shows a great misunderstanding of the religious and moral context within which, for Dury, all human activity took place. As Professor Popkin has shown, Dury considered libraries fundamental to the preparation for the millennium: they housed the texts indispensable to the spread of learning, which in turn was prerequisite to religious unity and peace on earth and ultimately to the millennium itself; for with enough of the right books, the Christian world could convert the Jews, that final step which was to herald the reign of Christ on earth.

When, in the second letter, Dury refers to the "stewardship" of the librarian he is speaking literally, not metaphorically.

But if libraries were to serve their purpose in the grand scheme--that is, to make texts easily available--extensive reforms were necessary, and that is the burden of the first letter. Dury's cardinal principle is that libraries should be _useful_ to people: "It is true that a fair Librarie, is ... an ornament and credit to the place where it is [the 'jewel box' concept]; ... yet in effect it is no more then a dead Bodie as now it is const.i.tuted, in comparison of what it might bee, if it were animated with a publick Spirit to keep and use it, and _ordered as it might bee for publick service_" (p. 17, my emphasis). The public that Dury refers to is an academic faculty and not the general public. To insure fullest use he goes on to advocate the necessity of a _printed_ catalogue with yearly ma.n.u.script supplements to be issued as a c.u.mulative printed supplement every three years. He does not reach the point of proposing a call-number system but stresses the importance of shelf-location guides in the catalogue. He believes in aggressive acquisition policies and the necessity of good faculty-librarian relations, with the former advising the latter of the important books in their fields of specialization. He urges what might now be called "interlibrary loan" and other forms of sharing. To keep the librarian on the straight and narrow, apparently a recurrent problem in Dury's day, he recommends an annual meeting of a faculty board of governors where the librarian will give his annual report and put on an exhibition of the books he has acquired. To allay the temptation to make a little money on the side by "trading" (Dury's obsessive term) in the library's books for his personal profit, the librarian is to receive administrative support for his various expenses during the year and, as a scholar working with other scholars within his university instead of as a mere factotum, the librarian is to receive an adequate salary (perhaps the only one of Dury's reforms that must wait until the millennium).

The question remains to what extent Dury's duties as the deputy librarian of the King's Library allowed him to implement the reforms he advocated on paper. The probable answer is, not very much. The librarian's duties and responsibilities described by Dury are those of an academic, university librarian, interacting with the faculty and partic.i.p.ating fully in the intellectual life of a scholarly community.

The role of the librarian of the King's Library would have been that of keeper of a static and isolated collection, and Dury is particularly critical of a merely custodial role: "... their emploiment," he writes of the typical librarian of his day, is "of little or no use further, then to look to the Books committed to their custodie, that they may not bee lost; or embezeled by those that use them: and this is all" (p. 16).

The King's Library was unquestionably magnificent; Charles's father and brother Henry had been particularly zealous in building it up, acquiring such collections as that of Isaac Casaubon. And Charles had been the recipient in 1628 of perhaps its greatest single treasure, the Codex Alexandrinus, a fifth-century ma.n.u.script of the Bible in Greek, certainly an item that would have interested Dury. The library had, in fact, great scholarly potential, but its continued existence was apparently an embarra.s.sment to the Commonwealth, and the Puritan government merely wanted an overseer. So, by the determination of others, the post of deputy keeper of the King's Library was little but a sinecure for Dury, leaving him free to pursue his many other interests but powerless to implement the reforms he advocated in his pamphlet within the only library over which he ever had direct control. Though he retained the post until the Restoration, he left the library itself early in 1654, never to return.

The _DNB_ notes that Dury's life was "an incessant round of journeyings, colloquies, correspondence, and publications." The account might also have added that, sadly, it was a life of many failures and frustrations, since his visionary scheme for the wholeness of life was so out of touch with the jealousies and rivalries of those he encountered. But if the larger vision that underlay _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is now merely a historical curiosity, the specific reforms that Dury advocated, as seemingly impractical in his own time as his other schemes, proved to be of lasting importance. Shorn of the millenarian vision that gave them their point in Dury's own day, his ideas have become the accepted standards of modern librarianship. Dury himself would not have been heartened by his secular acceptance: "... For except Sciences bee reformed in order to this Scope [of the Christian and millenarian vision], the increas of knowledg will increas nothing but strife, pride and confusion, from whence our sorrows will bee multiplied and propagated unto posteritie...." (p. 31).

_Thomas F. Wright William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[Footnote 1: For Dury's biography, see J. Minton Batten, _John Dury, Advocate of Christian Reunion_ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1944).]

[Footnote 2: On the relation of Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius, see G.H.

Turnbull, _Hartlib, Dury and Comenius_ (Liverpool: University Press of Liverpool, 1947).]

[Footnote 3: Hugh Trevor-Roper, "Three Foreigners: The Philosophers of the Puritan Revolution," in his _Religion, the Reformation, and Social Change, and Other Essays_, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1972), 240.]

[Footnote 4: On the philosophical and theological theories of Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius, see Richard H. Popkin, "The Third Force in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Scepticism, Science, and Biblical Prophecy," _Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres_ (Spring 1983), and Charles Webster, _The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine, and Reform, 1626-1660_ (London: Duckworth, 1975).]

[Footnote 5: Quoted in Turnbull, 257.]

[Footnote 6: _Athenae Oxonienses_, vol. 2 (London, 1692), col. 400.]

[Footnote 7: The omitted works are _An Idea of Mathematicks_ by John Pell (pp. 33-46) and _The description of one of the chiefest Libraries which is in Germanie_, attributed either to Julius Scheurl or J.

Schwartzkopf (pp. [47]-65, in Latin). This seems to be the first printing of _The description_, which was published separately at Wolfenb.u.t.tel in 1653. John Pell's essay was written around 1630-34 and was prepared for publication in 1634 by Hartlib, but was only actually published as an addition to _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_. It was of some importance in making mathematics better known at the time.]

[Footnote 8: "John Durie's _Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ and Its Author's Career as a Librarian," _The Library_, 1st ser. 4 (1892), 82.]

[Footnote 9: Ruth Shepard Granniss, "Biographical Sketch," _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1906), 31-32.]

[Footnote 10: See "John Durie's _Reformed Librarie-Keeper_," 83.]

[Footnote 11: Richard Garnett, "Librarianship in the Seventeenth Century," in his _Essays in Librarianship and Bibliography_ (New York: F.P. Harper, 1899), 187.]