John Worthington (academic)

John Worthington (1618–1671) was an English academic. He was closely associated with the Cambridge Platonists.[1][2][3] 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.[4] At Emmanuel he was taught by Joseph Mead; he described Mead's teaching methods, and later edited his works.[5] Another teacher was Benjamin Whichcote.[6]

He was Master of Jesus College, Cambridge, from 1650 to 1660, and Vice-Chancellor in 1657.[7] At the English Restoration he was replaced by Richard Sterne, apparently willingly.[8] 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.[9]

Family

He married Mary Whichcote, in 1657. She was niece to Benjamin Whichcote.[10][11][12]

Hartlib correspondence

Worthington was an active correspondent of Samuel Hartlib, the "intelligencer", in the period 1655 to 1662.[6] At Worthington's request, Hartlib's close collaborator John Dury searched in the Netherlands for the lost papers of Henry Ainsworth.[13] He shared with Hartlib and Dury (and both Henry More and John Covel) an interest in the Karaites.[14]

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.[15] After a period of nearly 300 years, the bundles into which he sorted it were rediscovered, and his system for the archive persists.[16]

Works

Notes

  1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cambridge-platonists/
  2. http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/94/94274-content.html
  3. http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/CAL_CAR/CAMBRIDGE_PLATONISTS.html
  4. "Worthington, John (WRTN632J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  5. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66631
  6. 1 2 Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers (2000), pp. 914-5.
  7. http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/v-c/vicechancellors.html
  8. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66632
  9. http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45419
  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. http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/college/history/masters.html#worthington
  13. http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/criticism/catalog.asp?CN=70
  14. Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton: International Archives of the History of Ideas (1998), p. 23.
  15. Michael Hunter, Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-century Europe (1998), p. 40.
  16. http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/special/hartlib.html

References

Attribution

External links

Academic offices
Preceded by
Thomas Young
Master of Jesus College, Cambridge
1650-1660
Succeeded by
Richard Sterne
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