BOOKS IN THE WILDERNESS
The Winthrop Collection at The New York Society Library

On his first voyage to the Colonies on the Lion in August 1631, the younger John Winthrop brought with him his new wife, several relations, the customary food and needs for subsistence, and cattle, of course. Even though the ship was overloaded, Winthrop insisted it carry "a barrell of bookes." The good fortune of the New York Society Library is that the books first brought to the Colonies in the overladen vessel and others collected by Winthrop and his descendants were given to the Library by Francis Winthrop in 1812. They have formed its valuable, much-prized Winthrop Collection ever since.

The fascination of the Winthrop Collection is that it brings together many facets of the life of John Winthrop, the younger (1606-76)*, colonial governor, scientist, alchemical "pyrotechnist", medical practitioner, passionate book collector and prime mover of the Winthrop Collection. A hallowed icon in the history of colonial America, he becomes very much alive as we see him through his books.

Even in a brief summary John Winthrop, Jr. is an object of wonder. He came to the Colonies a year after his father, the elder John Winthrop (1588-1649), the famous governor of Massachusetts and became in turn founder and governor of Connecticut.

Governor for a succession of terms, some of which he served unwillingly, the younger John Winthrop was remarkably farseeing and effective beyond the immediate concerns of the colony. He realized that industry was essential for the colony's survival and tried to move its focus beyond agriculture. His attempt to establish an ironworks failed for lack of capital, resources, and technical knowledge; saltworks (for curing pelts) were also unsuccessful. These and other ventures were vastly expensive and kept him in financial difficulties for the rest of his life.

Amazingly, and quite apart from these widespread endeavors, Winthrop became highly proficient in science, studied from his earliest years. Alchemy, then a respected discipline, was a primary and continuing interest; he himself performed alchemical experiments in an attempt to find the philosopher's stone with which to create gold. It was still a believing age: Winthrop wrote one of his correspondents, Samuel Hartlib (a famous educator and John Milton's friend) that Emperor Rudolph had successfully "transmuted nine pounds of quicksilver into pure gold with so little of the powder taken upon the point of his knife with his owne the Emperours hand out of a paper opened by Sir Edward Kelly at the further end of the roome, he the said Kelly not coming neere the place where the fire was".

A member of the Royal Society from the beginning (1662), he became its first representative in the Colonies and corresponded with the Society's greatest minds -- Newton, Hooke, and Boyle, among others. One has the impression that Winthrop, Jr. bombarded the society with his own findings and with requests for theirs. He imported the first telescope to the Colonies and reported to the society on the possibility of a fifth satellite of Jupiter that was later identified as a star. After giving the telescope to Harvard, he inquired frequently about what was to be seen up in Massachusetts.

There are many instances of Winthrop's passionate interest in books. After the voyage of the Lion in 1631, other ships brought Winthrop's own books, including a copy of Archimedes, a catalogue of the latest Frankfurt Book Fair, a grammar, and an almanac. This was not all. In addition to Samuel Hartlib, four booksellers in London sent him books, and, in spite of the horrors of the voyage, Winthrop himself made trips to England to represent the Colonies -- trips that were fruitful for books as well as for business.

It stretches the imagination to realize that Winthrop also became a well-known and successful physician. He treated any number of patients, settlers and others who came to him unasked and clamored for his attention. In his medical practice he was a modern. With Paracelsus as his authority, he discarded old (Galenic) ideas of the humors and instead used chemicals and herbs in his treatments. "Rubila," a mixture of nitre and antimony, was a favorite that he prescribed for many and their ailments: for Roger Williams, for John Davenport, for William Leete, and for Leete's "poore little daughter, Graciana." Accounts of his kindness and charm were legendary, and are still convincing as one reads about them. It was said of him as Cotton Mather said also of Winthrop's son Wait, who followed in his father's footsteps, "Wherever he came, the Diseased flocked about him, as if the Healing Angel of Bethesda had appeared in the place."

As a result of his multifarious activities and his enormous intellectual curiosity, it is no wonder that John Winthrop's library became perhaps the largest in the Colonies. One of the few contemporary records of the library comes from the elder John Winthrop's historical masterpiece, Journal of the History of New England (reissued in 1996 as The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649):

About this time there fell out a thing worthy of observation. Mr. Winthrop the younger, one of the magistrates, having many books in a chamber where there was corn of divers sorts, had among them one wherein the Greek testament, the psalms and the common prayer were bound together. He found the common prayer eaten with mice, every leaf of it, and not any of the other two touched, nor any other of his books, though there were well above "a thousand."

The Winthrop books in the New York Society Library are only part of the library of "well above a thousand" books that John Winthrop, Jr. collected and that came down to his descendants. After the deaths of Wait and John Still Winthrop, sons of the younger John Winthrop, his library, with the books he inherited and that were added to by his descendants, was divided and distributed at various times to New York Hospital (later the Academy of Medicine), to Harvard, and to Yale, among other learned institutions. The collection in the New York Society Library of approximately 280 volumes, which had always been kept together, came to the Library in 1812.

In keeping with John Winthrop's passionate book collecting, the Library's Winthrop books are a varied and extensive collection of books in Latin, French, Italian, English, German, and Dutch. It is startling for us to realize that Winthrop collected these books because he could read these languages. He was educated in Latin, the universal language of medicine, law, and business. His career afforded him plenty of time to absorb other languages. While still a law student, he volunteered as secretary to Captain Best of the Due Repulse, one of the English ships that were sent to relieve the Huguenot garrison at La Rochelle. With his usual good luck he came out unscathed from the bloody engagement of the Due Repulse as front-runner. A year later, unwilling to buckle down to the law, he took ship for Turkey at his father's expense as a "cruise passenger" -- was he one of the first? On the return trip his ship was quarantined in Venice. There Winthrop benefited from a four-week association in close confinement with a great Dutch scholar, Jacobus Golius. Later, in 1641, on a trip to organize and find workers for a proposed iron works, Winthrop arrived to find England in the throes of the Revolution; all negotiations for the Colonies were at a standstill. Characteristically, Winthrop took advantage of the opportunity and took off for the Continent where he stayed for at least a year in the Netherlands and Hamburg. There he associated with many of the great scholars and thinkers who had fled from Germany in the Thirty Years War, among them J.A. Comenius, the Czechoslovakian theologian and educator. (It is interesting to compare this situation to a similar diaspora following Hitler's ascent to power.)

As a result of these experiences Winthrop became sophisticated in languages and learning, far more so than most of his peers in the Colonies. There is amusing proof of this in a letter he wrote to one of this agents when questioned as to whether he wanted books in High Dutch! He made "dayly use," he answered, "of divers in that language."

Another instance of this sophistication is Winthrop's letter to a "kinsman" informally pasted into one of his books. He mentions with amusement Samuel Butler's anti-Puritan satire, Hudibras, popular in the 1660s. Surprising for the son of the profoundly Puritan John Winthrop the elder!

He knew or corresponded with many of the men whose books he collected. He probably knew personally, for example, J.A. Comenius, author of Janua linguarum, the Gate of Languages Unlocked (London, 1652) and suggested Comenius, displaced from his native Czechoslovakia by the Thirty Years War, as a professor or president for the infant Harvard College! In actual fact Winthrop corresponded with many more than his surviving letters indicate. But he was far too generous; a grandson returning to England asked whether he could borrow letters to his grandfather from Hooke, Cromwell, Charles II, and Milton. Winthrop willingly assented. The letters have never been seen since.

Some of Winthrop's books offer a brilliant and remarkable record of the early years of astronomy and of the scientific revolution that meant the gradual acceptance of a Copernican universe. They enrich the Library in themselves and are evidence of Winthrop's scientific and intellectual curiosity and expanding interests. Famous as a last stand for the ancient earth-centered Ptolemaic system is Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet atque minoris (1617), an imaginative, mystical compendium of all knowledge by Robert Fludd (1574-1637), cosmologist and physician. Fludd's map of the world of man and of the universe beyond is a beautifully detailed Ptolemaic system with our earth and man at its center.

Tycho Brahe (1546-1601), who shares the honors with Johannes Kepler as the greatest astronomer before Galileo, is represented by two works, Astronomiae Instauratae Mechanica (Noribergae, 1602) and Epistolarum Astronomicarum Libri (Frankfort, 1610), which tell of his life's work in studying and mapping the stars. His observations were so accurate that they were essential to Kepler, his immediate follower and to Galileo. The magnitude of his achievement by what is called "naked eye" observation (observation without a telescope) has been somewhat obscured by the romantic tales of his life. A wealthy nobleman, he was supported by the king of Denmark who built an astronomical retreat for him on the island of Hveen where he continued his obsessive calculations of the stars and their positions assisted by Johannes Kepler, his devoted student. An historical fact that remains when all else is forgotten is his artificial golden nose (probably copper) that he carefully kept cemented in place to disguise its loss in a youthful duel over who, he or his friend, was a better mathematician.

De Stella Nova in Pede Serpentarii (Prague, 1606) is Johannes Kepler's report on the new star that appeared in 1604 and that opened the way for Galileo's explorations. A major addition to Winthrop's library, side by side with Brahe's works, it enables the reader to watch, in its frail old presence, another important step in the establishment of Copernicus's sun-centered universe.

At Brahe's death Kepler simply preempted Brahe's beautiful equipment and findings by right of his then being the best astronomer living! A wandering astronomer, always a Copernican, he moved from one German principality to another, teaching and publishing. His greatest contributions to astronomy, Kepler's laws, asserted that the planets moved in elliptical orbits -- not in the perfect circles of accepted belief-- and, secondly, that as they neared the sun, their speed increased. His mystical conception of a universe regulated by a divine being has kept its appeal for the imagination rather than as a contribution to science. There was, Kepler believed, a music of the spheres -- each planet in its orbit created a note; taken together these notes created a sphere music. If music is defined as a matter of mathematics and repetition, who is to say that there is not a harmonice mundi (an harmony of the spheres)?

These books were precursors of what was to come, as Winthrop would well know as a member of the Royal Society, but they were none the less treasured as his inscriptions in them indicate. Another book, among the New York Society Library's rare and valuable possessions, completes the story of these early books.

Dissertatio cum nuncio sidereo a Galilaeo mathematico patavino (Prague, 1610) is Kepler's edition of The Starry Messenger, Galileo's magnificent letter to the world, that in one fell swoop explained away many of the uncertainties of the old Ptolemaic universe. It records his discovery in 1610, using his handmade telescope, of the Medicaean "stars," the satellites of Jupiter, and notes, as a consequence, that Copernicus was right: the earth was not central but was only one of nine planets circling the sun. A further inference was that ours was only one system and that countless others were possible in a region of stars incalculable distances away from the little world of man. That Kepler's dissertation was published in the same year, 1610, as Galileo's first sighting of the Medicaean satellites, shows a rapid acceptance of Galileo's discoveries. Kepler acknowledged in his dissertation a totally new scheme that he and his predecessors had barely dreamed of and that destroyed so many of their laborious Ptolemaic constructs of cycles and epicycles, epicycles upon epicycles.

Almost every "scientist" -- "natural philosophers" they were called in Winthrop's time -- worth his salt was an alchemist, primarily interested in transmutation, or the combining of metals and mineral salts into gold. For Winthrop alchemy was a lifelong occupation and preoccupation; he never seems entirely to have given up his belief that its processes could be effective. There are manuscript copies of alchemical writings in his own hand in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. (In a eulogy at his death in 1676 he was characterized as "the most Charitable Christian, Unbiased Politician, and unimitable Pyrotechnist.").

"The sister art," as alchemy was called, is well represented in the Collection. (Whether its practitioners believed in it or not, their efforts persisted into the nineteenth century.) Two of Winthrop's books, among many, were George Thor's Cheiragogia Heliana: a Manduction to the Philosopher's Magical Gold (London, 1659) and Martin Ruland's Lexicon Alchemiae (Frankfort, 1612).

Astrology was not, however, forgotten. Winthrop kept in his collection Astrologica aphoristica Ptolemaei Hermetica (Ulm, 1641) and A Table of the 12 Astrological Houses of Heaven (London, 1654), "by one V.B., a well-willer to the mathematicks."

Along with the revolution in astronomy that occurred in Winthrop's years was another in the world of man (in the minor world, "cosmi minoris" as it was called, as opposed to the major world, "cosmi maioris"), his physical being and his health. Of this too Winthrop seems to have been fully aware. Treasures of the collection are books by Paracelsus (1494-1541), or to give him his full name, Theophrastus Philippus Aureolus Bombastus Von Hohenhein, scion of the Bombast family and one of the great medical innovators of the sixteenth century.

Paracelsus wholly rejected Galen's beliefs, still current, that unbalance in humans of any of the four elements (humors) -- air, water, fire, earth -- was the cause of ills and disease. He repudiated, therefore, the whole collection of existing medical treatments, including blood-letting, based on the humor theory. Instead he sought alternative causes of illness and prescribed new remedies that were preponderantly practical, chemical or surgical. As a result he spent most of his life in flight from the old believers, doctors and especially apothecaries; his theories, however, gradually gained limited, if unwilling, acceptance.

The Library's Paracelsus books fully exemplify his empirical, direct approach. One, Baderbüchlin (Mulhausen, 1562), on water baths, prescribed bathing for health; another, Das Buch Meteorum (Cologne, 1566), described the relation of weather to health. Paracelsus's third book in the collection, Chemiae Congeries de Transmutationibus Metallorum (Frankfort, 1581), shows that Paracelsus, too, clung to the old alchemical belief in the transmutation of metal into gold.

Baderbüchlin and Das Buch Meteorum, and a number of other books in the Winthrop Collection, are especially treasured not only because Paracelsus was their author but because they had been previously owned by the "celebrated philosopher and chimist" John Dee (1527-1608). Dee, physician, alchemist, and cartographer, to name a few of his roles, was also an advisor to Queen Elizabeth. Obscured in his own time by accusations of witchcraft -- a large part of his library at Mortlake was burned as punishment -- Dee has recently come to greater prominence for his many professions and achievements.

Heavily annotated in Latin and sometimes in English, in Dee's fine hand, Paracelsus' book on health baths is charmingly illustrated with woodcuts showing the baths themselves (moderately-sized swimming pools) in which men and women, unclothed, seem to be either playing a game of ball or throwing sponges at each other. To avoid misinterpretation John Dee has noted on the title page: "These are not vulgar but are most spiritual and philosophical warmed baths ("non de vulgaribus...sed de spiritissimi etian philosophorum Thermis").

Winthrop himself has added more about Baderbüchlin's special value in a note pasted in to its front cover:

"...the severall notes in the margent through the whole booke, [were] written by that famous philosopher and chimist John Dee with his owne hand. This John Dee was he that wrote the philosophicall treatise called Monas Hieroglifica also Propaidemata Aphoristica also the learned preface before Euclides elements ... I have divers books that were his wherein he hath written his name and many notes for which they are worthylly the more esteemed.

John Winthrop
Juli 25, 1640"

Das Buch Meteorum, the book on weather, is also signed and inscribed by Winthrop. It is similarly beautifully annotated and signed by Dee as its first owner, as is an edition of Euclid with a provenance of medieval complexity.

These books are outstanding, but there are many others that show the extraordinary range of Winthrop's interests. Some are on religion -- not as many as you would expect for the mid-seventeenth century -- Puritan probings and anti-papal tracts. Thomas Becon's The Displaying of the Popish Masse: Wherein thou shalt see what a wicked Idoll the Masse is (London, 1605), serves as an example.

The brilliant mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is represented only by The Mysteries of Jesuitisme Discovered (London, 1657); he may have been associated with Winthrop before Winthrop's later years in the Royal Society. None of Pascal's important works are included in the collection.

There are a few books on witchcraft, one by John Cotta, "Doctor in Physicke," The Triall of Witch-craft, Shewing the True and Right Methode of the Discovery (London, 1616) inherited from Adam Winthrop (1548-1623), grandfather of John Winthrop, Jr.. It is understandable that there are not more. The younger Winthrop was not the devoutly religious Puritan his father was. He stayed aloof as much as he could during the witchcraft trials of the 1640's. As a magistrate he was involved, but there is record that he postponed one trial to another date, and then again, so that it was finally allowed to fade away.

Many of the books are practical. One can understand why. As a constant experimenter for crafts and industries for the Connecticut Colony, Winthrop included a work by Bernard Palissy (c.1510-c.1589), Discours Admirables, de la Nature des Eaux et Fontaines ... des Metaux et Alchemie des Sels ... des Pierres, &c. (Paris, 1580). Would this work have for Winthrop some hints to explain Palissy's genius in enameling household ware for which he was famous? Would some of Palissy's ideas be applicable to manufactures in Connecticut?

There are books on human diseases and their cure; Pieter Carel's General Method of Chirurgie and Method of Curing Contagious Sickness (Dordrecht, 1605); Duncan Liddel's Ars Medica Succinte et Perspicue Explicata (Hamburg, 1628); Christoph Scheiner's Oculus hoc est: Fundamentum Opticum (Oeniponti, 1619); and his General and Particular Cure of Ulcers (n.p.,n.d.); Thomas Blundeville's book on horses, their training and maintenance, The Breeding of Horses, the Art of Riding and the Order of Dieting and Curing Horses Diseases (London, 1580), inherited from Adam Winthrop, was of almost equal importance for the settlers whose communication, travel, and defense depended on the horses they owned.

History, politics, and belles lettres are prominent in the collection, as are books on languages and philosophy. Of these one can only single out Machiavelli's Princeps ... et Vindiciae contra Tyrannos (Frankfort, 1622), very likely inherited from Adam Winthrop. During the stormy time of the founding, "planting" of Colonies as Winthrop called the process, this must have given the governor much food for thought and action. More immediately useful would be Sir Humphrey Davenport's Synopsis or an Exact Abridgement ... of the Lord Coke's Commentaries upon ... the Grounds of Common Law (London, 1650).

For a scholar of the future, however, it is not always certain which of these books were acquired by John Winthrop, Jr., himself. Fortunately, at some time in his collecting career he adopted the bookplate shown at the beginning of this study. Created earlier by John Dee for his own book, Monas Hieroglyphica, it is a fascinating and mystical design of long-forgotten hermetic philosophy that would take years of study to interpret. It is valuable as an indication of John Winthrop, Jr.'s ownership and also a further light on his continued interest in alchemy and mystical abstruse learning.

John Winthrop (1681-1747) F.R.S. had the same love of books as his grandfather. He used the Dee/Winthrop bookplate but conveniently indicated which books were his acquisitions. Some of the older books in the collection were inherited from Adam Winthrop, Winthrop, Jr.'s grandfather, and from the elder John Winthrop, his father. On the basis of date, others must have been added by Winthrop, Jr.'s descendants. On the whole studies agree that the major collector of the Winthrop books in the New York Society Library was the younger John Winthrop in the years 1630 to 1676.

It is interesting to note that John Winthrop (1714-1779) F.R.S. of another branch of the family, J. Winthrop, Jr.'s grand-nephew, followed his grand-uncle's enthusiasms and became a distinguished mathematician and astronomer. A portrait by J.S. Copley gives lasting fame to this John Winthrop, and to his beautiful Short telescope.

If we try to imagine the early years of the collection, it is somewhat of a miracle that the collection was created at all. Connecticut was an infant colony that Winthrop had "planted." When Winthrop first ventured into Connecticut, to Pequot (New London) he managed with a modest settlement -- at most a group of wooden houses erected by English workmen, laboring without the bricks and mortars they knew in England. These structures were frail protection from the hazards of the time. Wilderness living meant ever-present danger from Indians, incursions from other "foreign" settlers - physical limitations and shortages of pioneer settlement.

In spite of these difficulties and his demanding multiple functions, Winthrop persisted and built his library. He was not a journal keeper like his father, but he was a letter writer to his friends, to his associates in the Royal Society, to his book agents in London, Hamburg and the Netherlands -- the civilized world he had left behind. There are occasional glimpses of the difficulties he experienced: "We are heere as men dead to the world in this wilderness," he wrote his friend Hartlib.

In the near future there is to be a new and exciting focus on John Winthrop, Jr.'s medical practice. There were times in the governor's career when he was unable to find a physician for the Colony and had to act as community doctor, treating, he noted, as many as 700 patients himself. The Winthrop Papers Project under the auspices of the Massachusetts Historical Society and the general editorship of Dr. Francis Bremer is planning to publish Winthrop, Jr.'s medical notebooks. They will be, as the Society reports on the Web, "the largest single record of individual symptoms and their treatment in the colonial period and will be a major contribution to the social and medical history of America."

In addition Dr. Bremer has added significantly to the history of the Winthrop forebears in England. He has also made a finding list of Adam Winthrop's books, some of which, as noted, are with his grandson's collection in the New York Society Library.

Does this new publication and much that has been learned about John Winthrop, Jr., in the last thirty years suggest a need for a new study of this uniquely gifted founding father whose interests were so strongly divided between the new Colonies and his ties in England? The Royal Society's philosophical and scientific enterprises interested him as much as his governmental concerns and kept him abroad sometimes for two years at a time. There would certainly seem to be room for a new assessment of the many-sided genius of John Winthrop the younger -- he might well be called a man of the Renaissance in the Colonies. For such a study the Winthrop Collection of the New York Society Library could offer a varied primary resource of books so "worthylly esteemed" and treasured for three centuries.

CAPTIONS:

• 01: Monas Hieroglyphica. John Winthrop, Jr.'s mystical bookplate, adopted from John Dee.
• 02: John Winthrop, Jr., governor of Connecticut, colonial polymath, book collector.
• 03: John Winthrop, Jr., dispensing medicines; imaginary nineteenth-century scene.
• 04: John Winthrop, Jr.. Letter on the popular anti-Puritan satire Hudibras.
• 05: Robert Fludd. Utriusque cosmi maioris et minoris (Major and Minor Universes). Map of the old Ptolemaic earth-centered universe.
• 06: Robert Fludd. Man, center of the universe, from Fludd's Major and Minor Universes.
• 07: Cover of Fludd's book before treatment.
• 08: Cover of Fludd's book after treatment.
• 09: Johannes Kepler. Title page: On the New Star (1604); evidence toward a sun-centered Copernican universe.
• 10: Kepler. Dissertation On Sidereus Nuncius (Heavenly Messenger, 1610), Galileo's great revolutionary work.
• 11: John Dee, magus ("wise man"), scientist, geographer, alchemist, advisor to Queen Elizabeth.
• 12: Paracelsus. Baderbüchlin. Title page. Note by John Dee, "on the most spiritual and philosophical warm baths."
• 13: Bathing illustration from Baderbüchlin.
• 14: John Winthrop, Jr.. Note on Paracelsus's Baderbüchlin; its ownership and annotation by John Dee.
• 15: Blaise Pascal, scientist and philosopher. Page from Mysteries of Jesuitism.

*The younger John Winthrop, Governor of Connecticut, is also called John Winthrop, Jr., or John Winthrop the younger to distinguish him from his father the elder John Winthrop, Governor of Massachusetts.

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