Philosophicall Poems

Item author: Henry More
Item date: Cambridge, 1647
Grant Value: £650 from FNL's B. H. Breslauer Fund
Item cost: £650
Item date acquired: 2013
Item institution: Thomas Plume's Library
Town/City: Maldon
County: Essex

A copy of this book is listed in the first catalogue of the Plume Library, 1704, but it subsequently went missing. Early in 2013 an opportunity arose to replace it, and with the generous support of The Friends of the National Libraries this has now been done. 

In building up his collection, which he intended for the use of ‘gentlemen and scholars’, and which covered all the main subjects studied in his day, Plume had to balance the books relating to science, religion, magic, and philosophy. He did not always acquire the works which later came to be seen as crucial to a good understanding of the world; in particular he failed to include Isaac Newton’s (1642-1727) famous Principia Mathematica, 1687, but he had, for example, a wide selection of the works of Robert Boyle (1627-91), and other notable early scientists.

Thomas Plume and Henry More were both educated at Christ’s College, Cambridge. More was senior by sixteen years and by the time Plume entered the college at the age of fifteen was a senior Fellow. In his library of some 8,200 books (described in the on-line catalogue of the Thomas Plume Library), Plume included no less than twenty-two books by More, including the above-mentioned Philosophicall Poems, one of his earlier works. It seems that Plume was particularly interested in the boundaries between religion, magic, philosophy, and science, as was More.

Philosophicall Poems was published when Plume had been in Christ’s College for only two years. We do not yet know if Plume heard More lecture or preach but the thinking behind these poems may have influenced his earliest formation as a scholar, and the beliefs on which his long career as a minister and archdeacon of the Church of England were founded.

This grant was awarded from FNL's B. H. Breslauer Fund, thanks to the generosity of the President and Officers of the B. H. Breslauer Foundation.