The Reformed Librarie Keeper (1650) by John Dury
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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.
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 institutions. 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 God 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 entitled _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 multitude of the people
should enter into a Covenant with their God, ... 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 God'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
constitutions, 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 passage 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 assembling at
Wolfenbuttel. 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 entitled _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 manuscripts, 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 manuscripts 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 God, a role making them more actively part of the
world.
Having placed educational institutions 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 God.
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
classified, 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 title 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 pass, 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 God 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 assumed 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 associate 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
illustrates 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 constituted, 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 manuscript supplements to be issued as a
cumulative 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
participating 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 manuscript 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 embarrassment 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
Wolfenbuttel 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.]