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
- 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)
- Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington 2 vols. (1847–86, Chetham Society) editor James Crossley
Notes
- ↑ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cambridge-platonists/
- ↑ http://www.oxforddnb.com/public/themes/94/94274-content.html
- ↑ http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/CAL_CAR/CAMBRIDGE_PLATONISTS.html
- ↑ "Worthington, John (WRTN632J)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ↑ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66631
- 1 2 Andrew Pyle (editor), Dictionary of Twentieth-Century British Philosophers (2000), pp. 914-5.
- ↑ http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/offices/v-c/vicechancellors.html
- ↑ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=66632
- ↑ http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=45419
- ↑ Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs.The Foundations of Newton's Alchemy: Or "The Hunting of the Greene Lyon" (1983), p. 112.
- ↑ Robert Crocker, Henry More, 1614-1687: A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (2003), note p. 260.
- ↑ http://www.jesus.cam.ac.uk/college/history/masters.html#worthington
- ↑ http://www.mhs.ox.ac.uk/gatt/criticism/catalog.asp?CN=70
- ↑ Matt Goldish, Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton: International Archives of the History of Ideas (1998), p. 23.
- ↑ Michael Hunter, Archives of the Scientific Revolution: The Formation and Exchange of Ideas in Seventeenth-century Europe (1998), p. 40.
- ↑ http://www.shef.ac.uk/library/special/hartlib.html
References
- Attribution
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Mullinger, James Bass (1900). "Worthington, John". In Lee, Sidney. Dictionary of National Biography. 63. London: Smith, Elder & Co.
External links
| Academic offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by Thomas Young |
Master of Jesus College, Cambridge 1650-1660 |
Succeeded by Richard Sterne |