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).