Primary Contributors:
Cultures of Knowledge
Henry More, by William Faithorne. 1675. Etching and line engraving. (© National Portrait Gallery, London; NPG D22865)
Henry More (1614–1687)
The youngest of seven boys, Henry More was born on 12 October 1614 in Grantham, Lincolnshire, where his father, Alexander, was elected mayor in 1617. More attended Grantham Grammar School, followed by Eton College. At the age of seventeen he entered Christ’s College, Cambridge, where his uncle was a fellow and where three of his brothers had matriculated previously. In Cambridge, under his tutor Robert Gell (1595–1665), he is likely to have known Joseph Mede (1586–1639). More graduated BA in 1636, proceded MA in 1639, and was offered a fellowship in 1641, the same year as his ordination.
More became known as a philosopher and a theologian, emerging as the leading member of the group of philosophical divines known to us today as the ‘Cambridge Platonists’. Indeed, his earliest publications were philosophical poems. He was one of the first in England to be interested in Cartesianism and, in 1648, with encouragement from Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–1662), he began a correspondence with Descartes. Within two years of this, having met her brother John Finch (1626–1682), a student at Christ’s College, More began to instruct Finch’s sister Anne Conway (née Finch) (1631–1679) in philosophy. The resulting friendship that ensued between the two philosophers lasted until Anne Conway’s death in 1679. More dedicated his An Antidote Against Atheisme (1653) to Anne and, Sarah Hutton writes in her biographical entry for More in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, this was ‘the first of his serious apologetic works, and shows clearly the philosophical turn of his theology, and his opposition to the materialist philosophy of Thomas Hobbes.’ Further publications followed: The Immortality of the Soul (1659); An Explanation of the Grand Mystery of Godliness (1660); a collected edition of his philosophical writings, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (1662); The Apology of Henry More (1664), a response to a number of his opponents; Enchiridion ethicum (1667); Divine Dialogues (1668); Enchiridion metaphysicum (1671); Kabbala denudata (1677–84). In 1664, More was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In his later years, following the death of Anne Conway, he edited Joseph Glanvill’s Sadducismus triumphatus (1681), and he is known to have discussed the book of Revelation with a young student at Cambridge, Isaac Newton.
Having supported Anne Conway throughout her protracted illness, and bestowing his own living in Grantham on John Worthington (1618–1671) when the scholar and translator was in need, More died in Cambridge on 1 September 1687 and was buried in the chapel of Christ’s College.
Partners and Additional Contributors
Thanks to a grant awarded to the Cultures of Knowledge research project from the University of Oxford’s John Fell Fund, at the suggestion of Sarah Hutton, editor of catalogue of the correspondence of Anne Conway, EMLO staff worked through the letters already in EMLO and added to these a listing of correspondence published in 2003 as an appendix by Robert Crocker in his biography of Henry More.
Thanks are due to Sarah Hutton for her advice regarding these letters, and to EMLO volunteer Conrad Flanagan for his help with the preparation of the metadata for the catalogue.
Key Bibliographic Source(s)
Robert Crocker, Henry More, 1614–1687. A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), ‘Appendix: The Correspondence of Henry More’.
N. H. Keeble and Geoffrey F. Nuttall, eds, Calendar of the Correspondence of Richard Baxter, vol. 2: 1660–1696 (Oxford, 1991).
The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends 1642–1684. Revised edition, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
The Hartlib Papers (Sheffield University Library, 1996 and 2002).
Contents
The letters described in this inventory have been drawn from a number of different curated collections in EMLO, including those of the correspondences of Richard Baxter, Robert Boyle, Anne Conway, and Samuel Hartlib. Descriptions of 105 additional letters are based on the listing published by Robert Crocker.
Further resources
Bibliography
Robert Crocker, Henry More, 1614–1687. A Biography of the Cambridge Platonist (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003), ‘Appendix: The Correspondence of Henry More’,
A. R. Hall, Henry More: Magic, Religion, and Experiment I(Oxford: 1990); reissued as A. R. Hall, Henry More and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1996).
The Conway Letters: The Correspondence of Anne, Viscountess Conway, Henry More, and their Friends 1642–1684. Revised edition, ed. Marjorie Hope Nicolson and Sarah Hutton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Richard Ward, The Life of Henry More (Parts 1 and 2), ed. Sarah Hutton, Cecil Courney, Michelle Courtney, Robert Crocker, and A. Rupert Hall (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2000).
Charles Webster, ‘Henry More and Descartes: Some New sources’, British Journal for the History of Science, 4 (1969), pp. 359–77.