The Correspondence of John Pell

Primary Contributors:

Cultures of Knowledge, with Sir Noel Malcolm


John Pell (1611–1685)

The first generation of Fellows of the Royal Society contained a galaxy of talent: Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Christopher Wren, Henry Oldenburg, John Aubrey… Many of these left large bodies of writing, published and unpublished, and all of them have been subjected to detailed study. John Pell, whom they all knew and respected, was also hugely talented, and he too left a great volume of manuscript material. Yet he has seemed, until recently, a mysterious and marginal figure, largely neglected by modern scholarship. Although he was known to be one of the most brilliant mathematicians in Europe in the generation preceding Leibniz and Newton, he published very little; some of the most important discoveries he made seem to have gone with him to the grave. Nevertheless, he was an active presence in 17th century intellectual life; and much of the evidence of that is preserved in his correspondence.

In 1630, soon after he graduated at Cambridge, Pell began working as a teacher at a school in Sussex set up by the intelligencer and reformer Samuel Hartlib. He quickly became a key member of Hartlib’s intellectual circle, absorbing many of his ideals. Having moved to London, he supported himself by giving tuition in mathematics; by 1640 he was teaching Sir Charles Cavendish (brother of the Earl of Newcastle), who had wide interests in natural philosophy and would become not just a patron but a friend. Pell spent most of the Civil War in the Netherlands, as a professor of mathematics, first at Amsterdam and then at Breda. He returned to London in 1652; two years later he was sent by Cromwell as a special envoy to the Protestant cantons of Switzerland, and he would remain in Zurich until 1658. Pell was back in London when the Royal Society was formed, and in 1661, having taken holy orders, he was given a parish which supplied just enough income to live on. With the exception of the period 1665 – 1669, when he stayed with his patron and former pupil William Brereton in Cheshire, he spent the rest of his life in London. Pell took an active interest in many aspects of the Royal Society’s work, and Henry Oldenburg came to rely on him when conducting his correspondence with foreign mathematicians. The mathematical intelligencer John Collins also befriended Pell, and for some time had him as a lodger in his London house. It was Collins who helped to organise the printing of the one substantial work that set out some of Pell’s mathematical methods: J. H. Rahn and John Pell, An Introduction to Algebra (London, 1668).

Pell’s correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish, which runs from 1641 to 1651, is an unusually rich resource, not least because both sides of the correspondence have been preserved. As Pell had a voracious interest in mathematical publications and advances of all kinds, his letters offer news and comments about the mathematical republic of letters in Europe, with references to Descartes, Roberval, Cavalieri, Mydorge, Hobbes, and many others. Optics is another special interest; and there are also references to Pell’s projected edition of the Conics of Apollonius, for which he translated three of its books from Arabic. But beyond this correspondence, Pell’s voluminous but disorganised manuscripts (mostly in the BL) include many other letters: not only his diplomatic reports from Switzerland, but also more general correspondence with a range of friends from Hartlib to Collins. A substantial selection from the diplomatic letters was published by Robert Vaughan in 1838, together with a small amount of other correspondence from that period of Pell’s life; and a sample of the correspondence with Collins was printed (from manuscripts in the Macclesfield collection, now in the Cambridge University Library) by Stephen Jordan Rigaud in 1841. The Cavendish correspondence was printed in full in 2005, in a volume which also includes a detailed life of Pell by Noel Malcolm and an essay on his mathematical ideas by the late Jacqueline Stedall.


Partners and Additional Contributors

Metadata contained within this ‘work-in-progress’ catalogue have been drawn together by the Cultures of Knowledge project from a number of correspondence catalogues in the course of its work with the following scholars, projects, libraries, and publications: Rhodri Lewis, William Poole, and Kelsey Jackson Williams (John Aubrey catalogue); Philip Beeley (John Collins and John Wallis catalogues); Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson, and The Hartlib Papers at the Humanities Research Institute, University of Sheffield (Samuel Hartlib catalogue). The project has benefitted also from the published work of Martin Rothkegel and Bernd Elsner (Joachim Jungius catalogue); the work of Cornelis De Waard and Noel Malcolm (Marin Mersenne catalogue); the work of G. A. C. van der Lem and C. S. M. Rademaker (G. J. Vossius catalogue).

To these letters, metadata for the correspondence between John Pell and Charles Cavendish have been added; this correspondence was published by Noel Malcolm and Jacqueline Stedall in their 2005 edition (for further details please see below). A sub-inventory has been collated also from the two volumes of letters brought out in 1838 by Robert Vaughan, the vast majority of which date from the 1650s. Thanks are due to EMLO volunteer Conrad Flanagan for his help to collate and prepare this metadata for upload to the union catalogue.


Key Bibliographic Source(s)

Noel Malcolm and † Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and his correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the State of Europe during the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. Illustrated in a Series of Letters between Dr. John Pell . . . and Other Distinguished Men of the Time, ed. Robert Vaughan, 2 vols (London, 1838; 2nd impr. 1839).


Further resources

Bibliography

Noel Malcolm and † Jacqueline Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and his correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

S. J. Rigaud, ed., Correspondence of Scientific Men of the Seventeenth Century, 2 vols (Oxford, 1841).

‘The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the State of Europe during the early part of the reign of Louis XIV. Illustrated in a Series of Letters between Dr. John Pell . . . and Other Distinguished Men of the Time’, ed. Robert Vaughan, 2 vols (London, 1838; 2nd impr. 1839).

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