John Worthington (academic)

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John Worthington (1618–1671) was an English academic. He was closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists.[1][2] He did not in fact publish in the field of philosophy, and is now known mainly as a well-connected diarist.

Life[edit]

He was born in Manchester, and educated at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.[3] At Emmanuel he was taught by Joseph Mead; he described Mead's teaching methods, and later edited his works.[4] Another teacher was Benjamin Whichcote.[5]

He was Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1650 to 1660, and Vice-Chancellor in 1657.[6] At the English Restoration he was replaced by Richard Sterne, apparently willingly.[7] Subsequently he held various church positions, being lecturer at St Benet Fink in London until burnt out in the Great Fire of London in 1666. He then was given a living at Ingoldsby. At the end of his life he was a lecturer in Hackney.[8]

He died in London in 1671 and he left his books on Jakob Boehme and Hendrik Niclaes to the philosopher Elizabeth Foxcroft and to her son the alchemist Ezechial Foxcroft.[9]

Family[edit]

He married Mary Whichcote, in 1657. She was niece to both Benjamin Whichcote[10][11][12] and Elizabeth Foxcroft (née Whichcote), mother of Ezechiel Foxcroft.[13]: 197 

Hartlib correspondence[edit]

Worthington was an active correspondent of Samuel Hartlib, the "intelligencer", in the period 1655 to 1662.[5] At Worthington's request, Hartlib's close collaborator John Dury searched in the Netherlands for the lost papers of Henry Ainsworth.[14] He shared with Hartlib and Dury (and both Henry More and John Covel) an interest in the Karaites.[15] He was also involved in the connections between Hartlib and Dury with Adam Boreel in Amsterdam, including the Boreel project to translate the Hebrew Mishnah into Latin and Spanish.[16]

After Hartlib's death, Worthington took on the task of organising his archive of correspondence, which had been bought by William Brereton, 2nd Baron Brereton.[17] After a period of nearly 300 years, the bundles into which he sorted it were rediscovered, and his system for the archive persists.[18]

Works[edit]

  • The Christian's Pattern: a translation of the De Imitatione of Thomas à Kempis (1654)
  • John Smith, Selected Discourses (London, 1660) editor
  • Life of Joseph Mede with third edition of Mede's Works (1672)
  • The Great Duty of Self-Resignation to the Divine Will (1675)
  • The Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, 2 vols. (1847–86, Chetham Society), editor James Crossley

Notes[edit]

  1. ^ Hutton, Sarah (1 August 2013). Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University – via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
  2. ^ http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/94/94274-content.html [dead link]
  3. ^ "Worthington, John (WRTN632J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. ^ "The University of Cambridge: The early Stuarts and Civil War | British History Online". www.british-history.ac.uk.
  5. ^ a b Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers (2000), pp. 914-5.
  6. ^ "Vice-Chancellor's Office: Cambridge Vice-Chancellors". Archived from the original on 21 February 2008. Retrieved 8 June 2016.
  7. ^ "The University of Cambridge: The age of Newton and Bentley (1660-1800) | British History Online". www.british-history.ac.uk.
  8. ^ "Hackney | British History Online". www.british-history.ac.uk.
  9. ^ Matthew, H. C. G.; Harrison, B., eds. (23 September 2004), "Elizabeth Foxcroft", The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/53695, retrieved 21 August 2023
  10. ^ Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs.The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: Or "The Hunting of the Greene Lyon" (1983), p. 112.
  11. ^ Robert Crocker, Henry More, 1614-1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (2003), note p. 260.
  12. ^ "Masters of Jesus College". www.jesus.cam.ac.uk. Archived from the original on 5 July 2009.
  13. ^ Crocker, R. (2003). Henry More, 1614-1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9781402015021. Retrieved 20 January 2018.
  14. ^ "Biblical Criticism Catalogue Number 70". www.mhs.ox.ac.uk.
  15. ^ Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton: International Archives of the History of Ideas (1998), p. 23.
  16. ^ see Popkin, Richard H., “Hartlib, Dury and the Jews,” in M. Greengrass, M. Leslie, and T. Raylor, eds., Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation: Studies in Intellectual Communication, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 118-136; cf. pp. 122-123.
  17. ^ Michael Hunter, Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-century Europe (1998), p. 40.
  18. ^ Sheffield, University of (10 January 2018). "Hartlib Papers - Special Collections - The University Library - The University of Sheffield". www.sheffield.ac.uk.

References[edit]

Attribution

External links[edit]

Academic offices
Preceded by Master of Jesus College, Cambridge
1650–1660 		Succeeded by
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