The Correspondence of Theodor Haak

Primary Contributors:

Cultures of Knowledge


Theodore Haak, by Sylvester Harding. Between 1760 and 1809, water-colour and body-colour, 15.1 by 12.2 cm. (British Museum, London; image available on Wikimedia Commons)

Theodor Haak (1605–1690)

Theodor Haak was born on 25 July 1605 at Neuhausen, near Worms, the son of Theodor Haak, an administrative official, and Maria Tussanus, daughter of a Huguenot refugee. After his studies at the University of Heidelberg were interrupted by the Thirty Years’ War, he travelled to England in 1625 and spent a year first at Oxford and then at Cambridge. Subsequently he went back to Germany for two years, before returning to Oxford in 1628. For three years he studied at Gloucester Hall, where one of his tutors was the mathematician Thomas Allen. It is likely that during this second sojourn in England Haak became acquainted with his fellow-countrymen Samuel Hartlib and Georg Rudolf Weckherlin. Having been ordained deacon by John Hall, bishop of Exeter, he became involved with efforts to collect money for clergymen in Germany who had been impoverished by the war. In 1633, he moved back to the continent, travelling widely through Protestant areas following the invasion of the Palatinate, and matriculating eventually at the University of Leiden in April 1638. Later that same year he returned to England, where he settled for the rest of his life.

During the period before his return, Haak published the first of a number of popular English theological tracts in German translation, adopting for this purpose the acronym ‘D. H. P.’ (Dominus Haak Palatinatus). By this point he was in contact with the English mathematician John Pell and the reformed Scottish minister John Dury, with whom he engaged in discussions on the writings of Comenius. Probably on the initiative of Hartlib, in October 1639 Haak wrote to Mersenne in Paris, sending him copies of Pell’s Idea matheseos and Comenius’s Conatuum Comenianorum Praeludio, knowing that the Minim priest was already at the heart of a network of scholars interested in recent developments in natural philosophy. (The letter and Idea matheseos, a short tract addressed to Hartlib were published in Hooke’s Philosophical Collections in 1682.) It was probably Haak’s awareness of the fruitfulness of the circle Mersenne had built up that led him to propose setting up a more formal grouping in London in 1645, as reported by John Wallis. However, within a few years he was preoccupied with a new scholarly endeavour combining his theological and linguistic skills, when parliament entrusted him, on 30 March 1649, with the translation of the Dutch Annotations on the Bible for the Westminster Assembly, this work being the confession of faith that had resulted from the Synod of Dort (1618). The certificate attesting the desire of the kingdoms of England and Scotland for a translation of the Annotations, signed by leading ministers and theologians such as Twisse, Palmer, Tuckney, and Dury, notes that Haak was ‘in every way fitted for such a Task, he being by Birth and Breeding a German, about twenty years [Anno 1645] conversant in England, where not only his faithfulness is known in divers publick Employments, but his Dexterity also in Translating divers English Books of Practical Divinity into the German Tongue’. In 1656, Haak married Elizabeth Genue, who possibly originated from the Netherlands.

After the Restoration, Haak was one of the founder members of the Royal Society, often contributing items from his scientific correspondence at meetings. Prominent alongside him in the Society was his cousin Frederick Schloer, who worked for a time as Boyle’s laboratory assistant. Haak was a noted friend of Hooke’s, with whom he often played chess at coffee houses such as Garraways. In the late 1660s, he began a German translation of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the author having succeeded Weckherlin as secretary for foreign tongues; the first three books survive in manuscript. Haak died on 5 May 1690 in Schloer’s house off Fetter Lane, London, and he was buried three days later at St Andrew’s Holborn. The sermon at his funeral was preached by the theologian Anthony Horneck, himself an émigré from the Palatinate.


Partners and Additional Contributors

The metadata in this ‘work-in-progress’ catalogue has been drawn together from letter records listed within the Elias Ashmole catalogue (compiled by Helen Watt and Cultures of Knowledge with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation and in partnership with Oxford University Press and on Oxford Scholarly Editions Online); the John Aubrey catalogue (compiled and contributed by Rhodri Lewis, William Poole, and Kelsey Jackson Williams with funding from the Cultures of Knowledge project); the Bodleian card catalogue (digitized and published in EMLO with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation in partnership with the Bodleian Libraries); the Early Letters of the Royal Society catalogue (with metadata contributed by The Royal Society, London, and prepared for publication in EMLO with funding from the John Fell Fund, University of Oxford); the Samuel Hartlib catalogue (contributed to EMLO thanks to Mark Greengrass, Howard Hotson, the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Sheffield, and Cultures of Knowledge with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon foundation, and with additional cataloguing by Leigh Penman); the Marin Mersenne catalogue (compiled by Cultures of Knowledge with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundatiaon, based on the Cornelis De Waard edition by kind permission of Éditions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique [CNRS], Paris, and on the work of Noel Malcolm), the Isaac Vossius catalogue (compiled and contributed by Robin Buning); and the John Wallis catalogue (compiled and contributed by Philip Beeley with funding from the Cultures of Knowledge project).

EMLO would like to extend thanks to Philip Beeley for his contribution of this introductory text.


Contents

Currently this catalogue contains basic descriptions of 65 letters from Theodor Haak’s correspondence of which he was the author or recipient, together with an additional 124 letters in which he has been tagged thus far as a person mentioned. These letters range in date between 1639 and 1688, and amongst the correspondents may be found a wide range of early modern individuals, including: Elias Ashmole, John Aubrey, Edward Bernard, Robert Boyle, William Brereton, William Curtius, René Descartes, Elizabeth of the Palatinate, Lucas Gernier, Jakob Gool, Johann Gronovius, Samuel Hartlib, Robert Hooke, G. W. Leibniz, Marin Mersenne, Henry More, Mary Mountford, Johann von Muralt, John Pell, Edward Pococke, Alphonse de Pollot, Thomas Streete, Johann Christoph Sturm, Isaac Vossius, John Wallis, G. R. Weckherlin, Christoph Wegleiter, and Vincent Wing.


Scope of Catalogue

What users will find in EMLO at present is no more than a ‘starter’ catalogue for the correspondence of Theodor Haak and, in the course of the next eighteen months, Dr Philip Beeley will catalogue additional letters and add these to the listing in EMLO. Should you be interested in volunteering to help Dr Beeley in this work, please contact EMLO’s editor, Miranda Lewis (miranda.lewis@history.ox.ac.uk).


Further resources

Bibliography

The Dutch Annotations upon the whole Bible: or, all the Holy Canonical Scriptures of the Old and new Testament, together with, and according to their own Translation of all the Text: As both the one and the other were ordered and appointed by the Synod of Dort, 1618. and published by Authority, 1637. Now faithfully communicated to the use of Great Britain, in English, ed. and tr. Theodore Haak (London: Henry Hills for John Rothwell, Joshua Kirton, and Richard Tomlins, 1657).

[Anon.], Baett-Kunst, oder einfältige und doch sehr lehr- und trostreiche Betrachtung und Erklärung des Gebätts des Herren, transl. by Theodore Haak (Basel: Martin Wagner for Ludwig König, 1639).

Daniel Dyke, Eine sehr nothwendige und oberaußnützliche Betrachtung and Beschreibung der wahren Busse als deß ersten und fürnembsten Grundwercks zu wahren Christenthumb, ed. and tr. Theodore Haak (Frankfurt am Main: Matthias Kempffer, 1643).

Daniel Dyke, Nosce teipsum: Das grosse Geheimnus deß Selb-betrugs oder reiche und in Gottes Wort gegründete Betrachtung und Entdeckung der grossen Betrüglichkeit unnd Tücke des Menschlichen Herzens, ed. and tr. Theodore Haak (Danzig: Andreas Hünefeld, 1643).

Henry Scudder, Eines wahren Christen tägliche Wallfahrt, tr. Theodore Haak (Frankfurt am Main: Johann Friedrich Weiss, 1635).

Robert Charles Winthrop, Correspondence of Hartlib, Haak, and others […] with Governor Winthrop of Connecticut, 1661–1672 (Boston, Mass., 1878).

Jan Hendrik Hessels, Ecclesiae Londino-Batavae Archivum, vol.III, parts 1 and 2 (London, 1897).

Dorothy Stimson, ‘Hartlib, Haak and Oldenburg, Intelligencers’, Isis, 31 (1940).

Pamela R. Barnett, Theodore Haak, F.R.S. (1605-1690). The first German translator of Paradise Lost (’S-Gravenhage: Mouton 1962).

Charles Webster, The Great Instauration. Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975).

Launch the ‘work-in-progress’ catalogue of letters for which Haak is author or recipient, or in which he is mentioned 

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