Advance Notice: Aaron Ward 1724
Date: 2004/01/06 Language: English
Discoveries as important as that of the ‘Impartial
History of Servetus’ don’t happen very often.
That the book was all-but forgotten in the first place is
something of a mystery in itself: scholars have without exception
overlooked it.
This is the more mysterious, since it actually delivers what
is promised in the title – an impartial account of the
life and death of Michael Servetus.
This takes the form of a not-uncritical assessment of both
his ideas and their legacy, and an evaluation of their originator
as a man. The work draws upon many sources, both contemporary
and later, and as such forms a compendium of world ideas on
Servetus written in the century and a half following his death.
Its importance as the first English work on Servetus is perhaps
less than its value as the first work in English: the national
perspective does intrude, with occasional references to the
impossibility of such miscarriages of justice occurring ‘...under
the happy raigne of her majestie, which now is…’.
But this was written in England, at the height of one of the
great genres of English writing: the irony of the Age of Reason.
A time when the face value of words has never meant less.
The result is that the occasionally intrusive compiler (thought
to be either Sir Benjamin or Nathaniel Hodges) can entertain
as well as inform.
Although conceptually, the book takes a firmly anti-Calvin
line, much attention is also given to some of the mysteries
of Servetus: the difficulty contemporary (and subsequent)
theologians have in understanding his ideas; the oddness of
some of his theories; his behaviour, not least the aggressive
stance he took at his trial.
It is hardly a rare book. The SIS has identified at least
one copy that is even for sale.
This, and the knowledge that although these words comprise
the closest we shall get to a balanced perspective, the work
is almost three hundred years old, should have commended it
to many.
Perhaps it is solely the early c.18th typeface. If so, the
new edition will solve the problem. All original orthography
has been retained with a single exception – a standard
‘s’ has been used throughout, making a surprising
improvement in legibility.
In today’s world, where the legacy of Servetus is claimed
to prop up so many causes, from anti-Calvinists in the US
to Muslims groups arguing that Christians have been aware
of the mortality of Jesus for half a millennia, perhaps ‘An
Impartial History’ is what we need.
I hope so.
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