Intellectual Ambitions and Interests

Highly educated seventeenth-century noblemen and gentlemen frequently studied theology, history, and philosophy privately for pleasure; wrote verse; and acquired libraries, but rarely wrote books and treatises. Chapter 9 builds upon the literary, philosophical, and theological interests identified in earlier chapters and provides the intellectual context for Herbert’s emergence as a respected gentleman scholar and published academic writer. It introduces the scholarly circles with which he was associated in London and Paris, his membership of the European Republic of Letters, and his links with scholarly irenicism. It establishes his scholarly connections with John Selden, William Camden, Sir Robert Cotton, Hugo Grotius, Marin Mersenne, René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, Thomas Hobbes, Tommaso Campanella, Fortunio Liceti, Gerard Vossius, John Comenius, and others. It examines Herbert’s scholarly practices and rebuffs claims that he was a dilettante. It browses the collection of books he accumulated in his substantial libraries in London and Montgomery, which ranged across the academic spectrum from theology, history, politics, literature, and philology through the various philosophical and mathematical disciplines to the natural and physical sciences, jurisprudence, and medicine, but also included works on architecture, warfare, manners, music, and sorcery and anthologies of poetry and books of romance literature. It suggests that Herbert’s scholarship was motivated as much by intellectual curiosity and the need to reduce religious conflict as by a desire to secure personal recognition and approval.