John Worthington (academic)

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

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

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

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
  • 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
  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
  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. 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
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