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Newsletter #2, April 2004

"The Authorship of An Impartial History of Michael Servetus"

By Sill, Geoffrey M.
The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Vol. LXXXVII, pp. 303-318, September 1993

AMONG the many old chestnuts of anonymous authorship in eight-tenth-century literature, one of the most perplexing, and yet most interesting, is a work of biography called An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, first published in 1723. The book has resisted the efforts of bibliographers Leonard L. Mackall and Antonius van der Linde, of the noted physician Sir William Osler, and of biographers Roland H. Bainton and Donald Stauffer to uncover its origins.(1) In this poststructuralist, canon-busting age, in which the search for the author-ship of a minor work seems quixotic at best, one might be well advised to pass by silently a problem which has proven incapable of resolution.

But in another sense, the Impartial History of Michael Servetus allows us to raise the question of authorship in a way that responds to the new historicism of our time. As I will endeavor to show, the Impartial History is a composite work, more like an edited book than an authored one; it is the work of many hands, representing diverse interests and intentions, whose texts have been stitched together like a crazy quilt; and while it may lack the formal qualities that would earn it a place in a canon of required texts, its own history composes a narrative of the way in which marginal voices in both medicine and religion managed to make themselves heard in the first quarter of the eighteenth century.

Before we get too deeply into the question of authorship, we might ask why this particular martyr, who was burned at the stake in 1553, should have become the subject for a biography in English a full century and three-quarters after his death. Born in Spain in 1509, Michael Servetus led a peripatetic life travelling among the great centers of learning in Europe. A brash and headstrong youth, he was convinced that the Refor-mation movement then sweeping the Christian faith had not gone far enough, particularly in not challenging the dogma of the Trinity that the Church had adopted in the Council of Nicaea. After failing to con-vince leading reformers that they should no longer maintain that Jesus Christ had the same divine and eternal nature as that of God the Father, and incidentally that they should abandon the practice of infant baptism, Servetus at the age of twenty-two published his views in a book called De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem (1531). The result was a firestorm of protest, in which such reformers as Martin Bucer called for Servetus to "have the guts torn out of his living body."(2)

Somewhat chastened, Servetus published a retraction the following year, but initiated a correspondence with John Calvin in which he at-tempted to push the Geneva churchman on the question of the Trinity, among other theological matters. He even went so far as to annotate Calvin's book, the Institutio Religionis Christianae, detailing its errors in the margins, and sent the book to Calvin with a request for Calvin's re-sponse. After several years of such correspondence, Calvin wrote to Farel that if Servetus should come to Geneva, "I would see to it, in so far as I have authority in this city, that he should not leave it alive" (Zweig, p. 263).

During the time that the protest against his religious works prevented Servetus from pursuing a career in the church, he studied medicine in Paris where he became acquaintcd with Andreas Vesalius, who is generally credited with renewing the ancient practice of studying anatomy by dissecting human cadavers. Vesalius was, as were most physicians, a disciple of Galen; but in his insistence on verifying file description of organs by reference to actual cadavers, he began the breakdown of the stranglehold of Galenic orthodoxy over medical theory. Once again, however, the attack on orthodoxy did not go far enough to suit Michael Servetus. After publishing a book in 1537 whose modern short title is The Syrups, which was a defense of the Galenic theory of the four humours of the body against the "Arabists," Servetus began to rethink the Galenic notion of the function of the blood as a vehicle for disseminating the humours through the body.(3) He did not immediately publish his new theories on the circulation of the blood, but they did become a prominent part of his next book--the one that brought about his death, and for which he was remembered at the dawn of the eighteenth century.This next book, Christianismi Restitutio, took as its theme the restitution of tile church to its original principles--a direct affront to Calvin's Institutes. It was Servetus's novel approach to begin exploring the "mysteries of the Divine Triad"--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit--not with the Father, but with the Son. "I have held that one should begin with the Man," wrote Servetus, "for I see that many, having not the foundation of Christ, in their flight of speculation on the Word ascribe little or nothing to the Man, and even give the true Christ completely over to oblivion.''(4) On the fundamental question of the genesis of Christ, Servetus held that Christ was born a man, into whom God "breathed" divinity at the time of his birth: "That God breathing, breathed into Christ, as into us, the holy spirit coming upon him…" (5) The body of Christ was a human body, created by "the celestial dew over-shadowing the virgin, and mingling itself with her semen and blood, transform[ing] the human matter into God.''(6) Christ was in all respects a man, "sin excepted, and also that his [body] is partaker of the deity.''(7) These reflections on the divinity of Christ were sufficient to give John Calvin a pretext for condemning Michael Servetus, though some authorities have said that Calvin's actions were intended not to punish heresy, but to eliminate a rival and consoli-date his authority as the head of the reformed church. (8)

The heretical nature of Servetus's thought, however, caused him to insert a passage in the Restitutio that guaranteed the survival of his name. Contrary to the Galenic training he had received as a physician, Servetus alleged that there were only two, rather than three, kinds of spirits in the human body. Instead of the vital, natural, and animal spirits, Servetus proposed that the arteries communicate the vital spirit to the veins by a process that he called anastomosis, so that the vital and the natural spirits of Galenic orthodoxy were really two parts of the same process. He theorized that this communication took place during the passage of blood from the heart to the lungs, where, during its exposure to "inspired air," the "substantial generation of the vital spirit itself" takes place, after which the blood "flies upward, where it is further re-fined, especially in the plexus retiformis, under file basis of the cerebrum, where the vital spirit begins to be changed into the animal one, drawing nearer to the true nature of a rational soul." (9) Servetus probably intended in this passage only to demonstrate the means by which God breathes divinity into all mankind, but his words were taken as a suggestion that the soul had material origins. Perhaps even more important, they pro-vided the first good shaking that the Galenic doctrine of spirits had had for centuries, a shock comparable to the demonstration of the inadequa-cies of Galenic physiology in the Fabrica of Vesalius in 1543.

Because almost all of the printed copies of Servetus's books were de-stroyed by Calvin--and also because of the dangers of becoming associ-ated with heretical doctrines--Servetus's ideas did not have an immediate impact, though they circulated in letters and manuscripts among early reformers and rationalist philosophers. The copy of the Restitutio that was used at his trial found protection in the library of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, where it was consulted by the philosopher Leibnitz as late as 1706, but when the book's owner went to look for it in 1720, he dis-covered that it was missing. (10) Before it disappeared, however, a number of manuscript copies of it were made, and a transcription of that portion that described the circulation of the blood through the lungs came into the possession of the antiquarian Abraham Hill, who showed it to a fellow member of the Royal Society, Dr. Charles Bernard, a surgeon at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. (11) Dr. Bernard, in turn, brought it to the attention of William Wotton, who was then at work on his book, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning (1694). Wotton published the Latin text of this passage by Servetus, the first time that it had been printed in an English book, to support his thesis that improve-ments upon ancient learning were still being made. (12) While preparing the second edition of his Reflections, Wotton was shown one of the com-plete manuscript copies of the Restitutio by Dr. John Moore, Bishop of Norwich, whose library, said Wotton, "contains every thing that is rare and excellent."(13) Balancing English national pride in William Harvey's 1628 description of the circulation of the blood against Servetus's prior claim to the discovery, Wotton declared that Servetus "had imperfect Glimmerings of that Light which afterwards Dr. Harvey communicated with so bright a Lustre to the learned World" (p. xxxiii).

The passage on tile circulation was next printed in Latin by Dr. James Douglas in his Bibliographiae Anatomicae Specimen, a biographical dic-tionary of the science of anatomy published in 1715. Like Wotton, Doug-las had little interest in Servetus's religious theories, but was intrigued by the connection that Servetus made between the circulation and the gen-eration of the spirits of the body. It was Douglas who first noticed that Servetus's major contribution was not the description of circulation, but of the process through which "the vital spirit begins to be changed into the animal one, drawing nearer to the true nature of a rational soul." (14)

This account of the origins of consciousness is essentially the one em-ployed by Dr. Richard Mead in his Medical Precepts and Cautions (1751), a work generally credited with establishing the basis for a neuro-logical approach to treating diseases of the mind. (15) Mead did not men-tion Servetus by name in that work, but it is known that he owned several of Servetus's books, including the copy that had disappeared from the library of the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, which Mead sent as a gift to the King of France sometime between 1733 and 1745. (16)

The above account traces the circuitous route through which Servetus's ideas reached and influenced the world of eighteenth-century medi-cine. But an equally important line of descent is to be found in the reli-gious community, beginning with Calvin's several defenses among his letters and theological tracts of his part in the trial of Michael Servetus, and the accusations against him written by Sebastian Castellio. (17) These and other texts became the materials for a running controversy over two major questions in reformed Protestantism: the degree to which faith ought to be based on reason, rather than miracles, and the degree of in-dividual liberty of conscience that was to be tolerated. The figure of Servetus hung like a shadow over both of these questions. The antitrini-tarians, led at first by Laelius Socinus, found in Servetus the figurehead for a humanist and rationalist interpretation of scripture, while freethinkers and deists saw in his persecution proof that the Reformation had not gone far enough in the pursuit of human liberty.

Among this latter group was the journalist Michael de la Roche. He was a member of that "republic of letters" that flourished at the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth, men who showed more loyalty to the international circulation of ideas than to one particular linguistic or national culture. His commonplace books, one of which may be seen at Dr. Williams's Library in London, show that he was as much at home in Greek and Latin as in the modern languages. (18) Skeptical in his attitude toward Servetus, he was even more critical of Calvin, and he appears to have been motivated by a desire to, as he put it, "clear the record" of the distortions in their history. (19) His first writings on Servetus began in 1709 with a review in his English-language journal, the Memoirs of Literature, of a series of articles published at Paris in the Bibliothèque Critique. The articles, which la Roche called a "very short and imperfect Account" of the life of Servetus, had been written in 1708 by Richard Simon, who had been censured by the Bishop of Meaux for publishing an image of the Holy Ghost coming over the Virgin Mary and creating the Son of God, an image drawn from the writings of Servetus. (20) In his review, la Roche is strongly critical of the errors both of Simon and Servetus, noting that the former omits to give the place of publication of De Trinitatis Erroribus, "but I know that it came out of Haguenaw in Alsace," and that when the latter "comes to explain his Notions concerning the Person of our Saviour, he is hardly intelligible" (p. 246). "One would think," complains la Roche of Servetus, "that a Man who rejects the Doctrine of the Trinity as being Incomprehensible should not substitute in the room of it a Notion so obscure and unin-telligible.'' These appearances of critical distance from his subject, together with claims to have "had in my Hands for some time" both printed and manuscript copies of Servetus's writings, remain hallmarks of la Roche's articles through the decade, and are picked up by the author of the Impartial History in 1723.

Another book reviewed by la Roche that contained information on Servetus was The Lives and Characters of the most Eminent Writers of the Scots Nation, published in two volumes in 1708 and 1711 by George MacKenzie, M.D., a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in Edin-burgh. Among the Scots writers surveyed by MacKenzie was James Laing, a Doctor of the Sorbonne who included accounts of the quarrel between Servetus and Calvin in his books published in the 1580s. It is from MacKenzie that la Roche draws the observation, repeated fre-quently thereafter, that Calvin "was so much respected by the Magistracy and People of Geneva, that he was as absolute a Master there, as the Pope was at Rome," and that his persecution of Servetus was the product of his "too fiery Zeal." (21) While not a major source of new information, MacKenzie is important as proof that the history of Servetus was known to the founders of the new medical college at Edinburgh, which was to train generations of British physicians.

La Roche returns to the subject of Servetus and Calvin several times in this first run of the Memoirs of Literature, in each case building sympathy for Servetus as a harmless zealot whose mania robbed him of both his common sense and his sexual potency, while creating antipathy for Cal-vin as a tyrant. (22) As the narrative proceeds, la Roche gradually shifts the ground from the personal drama of the two antagonists to the struggle between conscience and doctrine, which framed the significance of the story in virtually every subsequent version.

Nothing more was heard from la Roche on the subject of Servetus until 1717, when he assumed the editorship of a journal called the Bibliothèque Angloise, whose purpose was to inform French-language readers of literary, scientific, and religious events in England. One of the first books he reviewed was James Douglas's Bibliographiae Anatomicae Specimen, which he praised particularly for its reprinting of the passage from Servetus on the circulation of blood that Douglas had borrowed from Wotton. (23) Douglas's book provided la Roche with an opportunity to re-open the whole history of Servetus, which he did in the next num-ber of the Bibliothèque Angloise, drawing on original sources and em-phasizing the cruelty of Calvin's persecution of Servetus. (24) As it hap-pened, la Roche's work appeared at the time that a controversy over the Trinity was raging in England, in which the future Bishop of London, Edmund Gibson, took part on the conservative side. (25) La Roche joined in on the rationalist side, updating his earlier articles on Servetus with mate-rial from the Bibliothbque Angloise to form a new history composed of seven letters supposedly addressed by la Roche to an unnamed corre-spondent, all of which were published in Volume 4 of the Memoirs of Literature for 1722. Though the narrative, which had now grown to ninety-five total pages, may be considered the first complete life of Servetus published in English, its division into seven letters that are inter-spersed with other articles means that a single-volume biography still remained to be written; and its intensive focus on the religious issues that separated Servetus and Calvin, almost to the exclusion of any mention of Servetus's claim to have contributed to the discovery of the circulation of blood, means that it is not yet a biography in the modern sense.

It was at about this time--in May of 1723--that someone attempted to reprint an edition of the Christianismi Restitutio in London. The iden-tity of that person and his reasons for wanting to publish the book are not entirely clear. Among modern biographers, Robert Willis and Dr. Osler were convinced that this "someone" was Dr. Richard Mead. (26) Willis de-scribed Mead as "liberal in politics and presumably in religion also," and as motivated to disseminate the Restitutio because of the "free spirit of inquiry it breathed." (27) The interest of the medical community had cer-tainly been aroused by the passage reprinted by Wotton and Douglas, although it was not necessary to reprint the whole book to satisfy that curiosity. Perhaps Mead and some of his colleagues agreed with la Roche that the time had come to challenge the limitations to freedom of thought that were still exercised by the established church, universities, and scientific academies by resurrecting the history of Michael Servetus and the texts in which his ideas were preserved. Whatever the publisher's motives, the Restitutio was seized by Edmund Gibson, the new Bishop of London, on 23 May 1723, before it was fully printed, and almost all of the sheets were destroyed. (28)

All of which brings us--at last--to the publication of An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, burnt Alive at Geneva for Heresie. The first edition of the book, dated 1723, is rather rare, only two copies being listed in the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue; but the second edi-tion, dated 1724, evidently sold well, since sixty-one copies are listed at various locations in Great Britain and America in the ESTC. The two editions, which may be compared at Dr. Williams's Library, are identical except for the title-pages, which differ only in the date and in a comma which follows the word "Servetus" in 1724, but not 1723. Even the "Ad-vertisement'' on the last page of the text is the same--"By Reason of the Author's Distance from the Press, divers literal Faults have escaped Cor-rection, which 'tis hoped the Reader will excuse"--which seems suspi-cious. Granted, an author who lived outside of London might have trou-ble correcting the proofs for the first edition, but the year that passed between editions should have given him time to make corrections for the second--unless the advertisement is a blind, meant to hide the author's identity.

The authorship of the book has traditionally been given to a Sir Ben-jamin Hodges. A diligent search for information about Sir Benjamin Hodges, however, has turned up only the fact that no one by that name accomplished anything worth memorializing in the standard reference works of the eighteenth century. (29) No Sir Benjamin Hodges appears in John Le Neve's Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae, 1541-1857, nor in the Surman Collection at Dr. Williams's Library, a card index of 30,000 dissent-ing clergymen up to the year 1730. He is not in the biographical index of Evans's List of Dissenting Churches, nor in A Descriptive Catalogue of Friends' Books, or Books written by Members of the Society of Friends. No Sir Benjamin Hodges appears in Shaw's The Knights of England, nor in the indexes to the manuscript collections at the British Library and the Bodleian Library. Apart from the entries listing him as the au-thor of the Impartial History in numerous indexes, there does not appear to be any other record of the existence of Sir Benjamin Hodges.

Where then did the attribution come from? The answer to that ques-tion begins with the entry for John Lewis, the Vicar of Minster and the Minister of Margate, in the Dictionary of National Biography. The DNB says that Lewis (1675-1747), a minister of 'Whiggish and low-church views," left in manuscript a life of Servetus, "written in answer to Sir Benjamin Hodges's biography, Lond. 1724, and formerly in Sir Peter Thompson's possession." (30) Upon this statement seem to rest all subse-quent attributions of the Impartial History to Hodges, including the key ones in Halkett and Laing's Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudony-mous English Literature and the catalogue for the sale of the book col-lection of the noted antiquary Richard Gough in 1810. (31) Where, then, did John Lewis derive his information that the book to which his life of Servetus was a response had been written by a Sir Benjamin Hodges?
The manuscript of Lewis's life of Servetus, which might well provide his reasons for attributing the Impartial History to Hodges, was sold with Lewis's other books and papers on his death in December 1749. A cata-logue of the sale, which appears at the end of an unpublished autobiog-raphy by Lewis, confirms that the purchaser of the life of Servetus was indeed Lewis's close friend and fallow antiquarian, Sir Peter Thomp-son. (32) A manuscript note at the end of this catalogue, apparently written by Thompson, declares, "A Life of Servetus--was submitted to my consideration--I prevented its being printed, as some contracted notions--appeared in defense of John Calvin's cruelty to Dr. Servetus.--I don't take nor did not take into my consideration whether the Principles of one or the other was right--I ever did & I hope I ever shall, abhor all cruel prosecuting principles for Notions entirely speculative." One might suppose that the good Sir Peter--a landowning merchant, member of Parliament, Sheriff of Surrey, and successful man of the world--had pur-chased Lewis's manuscript on Servetus in order to destroy it, hoping thereby to save his friend's reputation from being associated with the "prosecuting principles" of Calvinism. But in fact the manuscript sur-vived, and was listed in the catalogue of the sale of the papers of Sir Peter Thompson that was held in 1815. (33)

Perhaps if this lost manuscript ever comes to light we may discover who "Sir Benjamin Hodges" was. But some additional light on the ques-tion is shed by the surviving letters between Lewis and Thompson. On l0 January 1744/45, Lewis wrote to Thompson to ask why the latter had not returned the manuscript of his life of Servetus, which the author had presumably loaned to his friend for advice and criticism. "You don't tell me what you have done with Servetus's Life," complained Lewis. "I hope you han't condemned it to the same execution which the Dr. was sentenced to." (34) In his characteristically Shandean style, Thompson re-plied on 25 January, "as to your Life of Servetus it was never shelved in my house--but lockt in my Escritoire--to entertain a thot that I had sent it into flaming atoms--as Calvin did Servetus--would savor something of that Barbarous principle with which Calvin was full fraught .... " (35)

On 14 February, Lewis acknowledges receiving the manuscript, appar-ently returned with Thompson's letter, and responds to the latter's re-flections on Calvin's principles:

I'm sorry to see you so much set against Mr. Calvin. You seem to have forgot, that Mr. C-- was not the author of the predestinarian Scheme, & was not singu-lar in asserting, that the Civil Magistrate has the power of the Sword & is the Keeper of both Tables of the Law, & ought to punish Blasphemy, profaneness, and contempt of God's Holy word & Commandment as well as theft and murder. La Roche and his Translator are plainly partial to Servetus; witness their attributing to him the first discovery of the circulation of the blood. Quite ignorant! But I am so ill, that I can't enlarge. (36)
Lewis's use of the phrase "La Roche and his Translator" reveals that he knew that the Impartial History was in large measure an English trans-lation of the life of Servetus that had appeared in La Roche's Bibliothèque ,Angloise for 1717. If Lewis had been certain that the translator's name was Hodges, it is strange that he did not use the name in this in-stance. The certainty of the Lewis/Thompson attribution is further eroded by Thompson's reply, in which he apologizes for past errors, in-cluding "one mistake [that] occurs to me regarding Mr. Hodges who I find was a dissenting minister many years." (37)
This correspondence seems to prove several important points. It dates the composition of Lewis's life of Servetus in the mid-1740s, a full twenty years after the Impartial History had been published. It contains what appears to be uncertainty on Lewis's part about the identity of his ad-versary, and an admission on Thompson's part that he was mistaken about either the profession or the religion of the person they suspected of the authorship. In light of these uncertainties, it seems clear that they had no personal knowledge of the author, and their testimony cannot be used as a basis on which to make the attribution.

There is, of course, no shortage of real persons who could plausibly have been the author of the book. For example, there was at least one other author named Hodges who was active at the time, Sir Nathanael Hodges (d. 1727), who published a number of sermons between 1706 and 1713. But these sermons are pietistic in nature, and they have nothing in common with the Impartial History. Donald Stauffer, in his The Art of Biography tn Eighteenth Century England, speculates that the author was "possibly" Michael de la Roche, "who mentions working on a tr[anslation]" of a history of the life of Servetus in an advertisement in the Memoirs of Literature (1712). (38) But this translation is evidently the biography by Richard Simon upon which la Roche drew for his own life of Servetus. La Roche's articles are quoted extensively in the Impartial History, but he does not appear to be the author of that book. His account of Servetus contains many intricate points of doctrine that are obscured or simply ignored by the author of the Impartial History. Further, la Roche ends his narrative with an appeal for a reconciliation between the Churches of Geneva and of England, and there is no such conciliatory motive behind the Impartial History, which is determined to blacken Calvin's reputation as much as possible. For example, in his account of the execution, la Roche mentions having "read in a printed Book, that when Servetus was carried to the Place of Execution, Calvin stood at a Window, and smiled when he saw him go by; but I am fully persuaded that it is a horrible Calumny." (39) La Roche gives virtually the same ac-count in French in the Bibliothèque Angloise. The author of the Impar-tial History then translates it back again, in the process cancelling la Roche's efforts at evenhandedness:

The author of the Bibliothèque says, that he was fully persuaded (que c'est une calomnie execrable) that this was an execrable calumny. But I think it may be said, without breach of charity, from a great many incidents already passed, and some few that remain, that that reformer was far from being much dis-pleased at the spectacle. (49)
The phrase "some few that remain" appears to refer to the allegation by the author of the Impartial History that Calvinism continues to revile the memory of Servetus, even to the extent of requiring candidates for the ministry in Geneva to condemn Servetus and his errors as a condition for ordination, a circumstance which la Roche does not mention.

Unlike Michael de la Roche, the author of the Impartial History seems to have been more interested in resurrecting Servetus as an emblem of the abuses of ecclesiastical power than in promoting religious harmony or in arriving at an impartial evaluation of the historical merits of the case against Servetus. Despite the title of the book, it is neither impartial nor a history, but a compendium of various texts by Wotton, Simon, Mac-Kenzie, Douglas, la Roche, Calvin, and Servetus himself, with a few passages from Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Richard Hooker added for ballast. In a very real sense, the authorship of the book may be said to be shared among these men, with a very small contribution coming from the compiler, who acts as a narrator of the texts. If the compiler has any claim to literary recognition, it is for having brought these texts for the first time into a single English volume, and for popularizing a story that had previously been known only to a few.

Indeed, the crudity of the compiler's method of narrating his texts should not distract us from the impact that this book had on the receiv-ing culture, which is perhaps a more significant measure of its impor-tance than its adherence to literary forms. One year after the second edition of the Impartial History, John Freind published the first volume of his History of Physick, subtitled as a "discourse written to Dr. Mead," in which Freind acknowledges Servetus's claim to at least partial credit for the discovery of circulation. (41) In 1743, George Benson published a "brief account" of the burning of Servetus in the Old Whig, or consistent Protestant, which grew into a treatise on Servetus and Calvin that was in its fourth edition by 1753. (42) Jacques Georges de Chaufepié's biography of Servetus, "being an article of his historical dictionary, vol. iv" (1756), was translated into English by James Yair in 1771, after which at least six more books on Servetus by different authors appeared in rapid succes-sion. (43) The historian Edward Gibbon is supposed to have been "scandalized [by Servetus's death] more profoundly than all the human heca-tombs of Spain or Portugal," (44) and a history of the Unitarian Church declares that the life of Servetus "marks a very critical point in the move-ment'' which led to the founding of that church in the eighteenth century. (45) How many of these events may be due in part to the influence of the Impartial History is impossible to say, but that book appears to mark the inception of a Michael Servetus boomlet in the English-speaking world.

It seems surprising that an old story of a sixteenth-century heretic could still require such secrecy and anonymity in the eighteenth cen-tury, but the right to question the uniform divinity of the three persons of the Trinity was very far from being established in the 1720s, and the word "empirical" when applied to a physician still meant someone whose knowledge was anecdotal, experiential, devoid of proper training in Galenic theory, and a quack. (46) For almost two centuries, the writings of Michael Servetus had survived only as manuscript copies that were passed furtively among rationalist and humanist philosophers, but in the second decade of eighteenth-century England, due in part to the efforts of the anonymous author of the Impartial History of Michael Servetus, these marginal voices began once again to assume the form and power of a text.

Notes

  1. Leonard L. Mackall, "Servetus Notes," in Contributions to Medical and Biological Research, dedicated to Sir William Osler, 2 vols. (New York: Paul B. Hoeber, 1919), 2: 767-77. See also Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic: The Life and Death of Michael Servetus (Boston: Beacon Press, 1953), and John F. Fulton, Michael Servetus, Humanist and Martyr (New York: Herbert Reichner, 1953). For Donald Stauffer, see note 37 below.

  2. This account of Servetus's life is drawn primarily from Stefan Zweig, The Right to Heresy, trans. Eden and Cedar Paul (London: Souvenir Press, 1979), 258-63; from R. Willis, Servetus and Calvin (London: C. Kegan Paul & Co., 1877), 1:535-39; and from the Impartial History itself.

  3. Donald O'Malley, Michael Servetus, A Translation of His Writings (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1953), 69-75, 202-08.

  4. Joseph Henry Allen, An Historical Sketch of the Unitarian Movement since the Reformation (New York: The Christian Literature Co., 1894), 32.

  5. An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, Burnt Alive at Geneva for Heresie (Lon-don: Aaron Ward, 1724), 142.

  6. Impartial History, 139.

  7. Impartial History, xix.

  8. Zweig, 277-80.

  9. Impartial History, 68-69.

  10. Fulton, 85.

  11. L. L. Mackall, "Servetus Notes," 767-77.

  12. William Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning (London: 1694), 211-13.

  13. William Wotton, Reflections Upon Ancient and Modern Learning, 2d ed. (Lon-don: 1697), xxv. John Moore, who like Wotton had an early connection with Heneage Finch, first Earl of Nottingham, was consecrated Bishop of Norwich in 1691 and remained in that office until 1701, the period of time in which Wotton says he saw the manuscript of CR while preparing the second edition of his Reflections. Moore was famous for his ex-tensive library of books and manuscripts, which "were liberally placed at tile disposal of the chief divines in England . . . and he aided the principal scholars abroad" (DNB, 13:807). At his death in 1714, his books and manuscripts were given to the library at Cambridge University, where the manuscript copy of CR is currently located (Fulton, 85).

  14. James Douglas, Bibliographiae/Anatomicae Specimen, as translated in the Impartial History, 69. Later commentators, such as Gweneth Whitteridge in William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood (London: Macdonald, 1971), 48-49, have restricted the question to whether it was Servetus, Realdus Columbus, or Harvey who first discovered the circulation and so ignored the point noticed by Douglas.

  15. Richard Mead, M.D., The Medical Works of Richard Mead, M.D. (Edinburgh: Donaldson and Elliot, 1775; New York: AMS Press, 1978), 342-43.

  16. [Matthew Maty], Authentic Memoirs of the Life of Richard Mead, M.D. (London: 1755), 55. Mead sent the book to M. de Boze, who was the Secretary of the Academy of Inscriptions and Belles Lettres at Paris. He kept up the "strictest correspondence" with Mead, and "frequently received from him some valuable piece for the cabinet of the King of France, and never failed of making him a return of the same kind. The scarce and perhaps the only copy of Servetus's last book, passed from the shelves of our English worthy to those of his friend abroad, in exchange for a thousand presents he had received from him" (56). For other books by and about Servetus owned by Mead, see Bibliotheca Mcadiana; sive Catalogus Librorum Richardi Mead, M.D. (1755), a catalogue of the sale of Mead's library, which includes the following relevant items: Servetus de Trinitate, Liber partita impressus, partita scriptus, 2 vols. 4to [the "partially printed, partially hand-written" copy that was part of the suppressed edition of 1723]; Servetus de Trinitatis Erroribus, C. T. F. I). [Corio Turcico, Foliis Deauratis], 1531; la Roche's Memoirs of Literature, 8 vols., 1722; La Roehe's New Memoirs ofLiterature, 6 vols., 1725; Simon's Bibliothèque Critique, Amsterdam, 1708; la Roche's Bibliothèque Angloise, 5 vols., 1717; La Roche's Memoires Literaires, 8 vols., Haye, 1720.

  17. Zweig, 298-300; 323-30.

  18. Commonplace book of Michael de la Roche, Mss. Cat. 12.4:2.

  19. Michael de la Roche, The New Memoirs of Literature, vol. I (January 1725), 36.

  20. Michael de la Roche, Memoirs of Literature. Containing a Weekly Account f the State of Learning, both at Home and Abroad, vol. I (London: J. Roberts, 1712), 246-47. This book is a reprint edition of the first numbers of the Memoirs of Literature, which began in 1709.

  21. Michael de la Roche, Memoirs of Literature, vol. 2, VI (II February 1712), 46.

  22. La Roche, Memoirs of Literature LXXIV (13 August 1711), 293; LXXXVIII (19 November 1711), 349-52; XC (3 December 1711), 357-360; XCIV (31 December 1711), 373-75.

  23. [Michael de la Roche], Bibliotheque Angloise, où, Histoire litteraire de la Grande Bretagne (Amsterdam: La Veuve de P. Marret, 1717-28), Tome premier, seconde partie (1717), 306--11. Available as a facsimile reprint by Skatkine Reprints (Genève, 1968), 86-87.

  24. Bibliotheque Angloise, Tome second, premier partie (1718), 76-198 (170-201 in reprint edition).

  25. Norman Sykes, Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London: A Study in Politics and Relligion in the Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 77.

  26. Fulton cites Mackall to the effect that proof of Mead's involvement is lacking. Fulton believes that an antiquary named Gysbert Dummer may have been involved in the reprinting (43, 88), but it is difficult to believe that such a person would have been any-thing more than an agent for the unknown principal(s). The fact that a half-printed, half handwritten copy of the 1723 edition of the Restitutio was catalogued among Mead's papers (see note 16) tends to favor his involvement.

  27. Willis, 535.

  28. Fulton, 88. The generally Whiggish biography of Gibson by Norman Sykes, Ed-mund Gibson, Bishop of London:A Study in Politics and Religion in the Eighteenth Cen-tury (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), does not mention this incident specifically, but it does acknowledge Gibson's campaign against both anti-trinitarians and deists in the period 1717-30, and admits that "[o] ccasionally, indeed, his zeal outran discretion and was gravely misdirected. Believing the suppression of deistic literature to be a valuable service to orthodoxy, he used his great influence to prevent infidel pamphlets from being issued to the public, and, happening to come into possession of an unpublished manuscript of Tindal after the author's death, 'thought the best way to answer it was to destroy it,' an offence for which posterity will hardly forgive him" (257).

  29. Sources that were checked for a "Sir Benjamin Hodges," in addition to the DNB, include Biographia Britannica, ed. Andrew Kippis (London: Strahan, 1748-63); Anthony Wood, History and Antiquities of the Colleges and Halls in the University of Oxford, ed. J. Gutch (Oxford: the Clarendon Press, 1786-90); Joseph Foster, Alumni Oroniensis: The Members of the University of Oxford 1715-1886 (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1968); Biographia Britannica Literaria, ed. Thomas Wright (1810-77); Biographia Medica, ed. Benjamin Hutchinson (London: 1799); William A. Shaw, The Knights of England (London: Sherratt and Hughes, 1906); John Venn and J.A. Venn, Alumni Cantabrigiensis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922); John Le Neve, Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae,1541-1857 (London, 1969); the Eighteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue; the Catalogue of Manuscript Collections in the British Library; and the Biographical History of Medicine, 1970.

  30. Dictionary of National Biography (1968), 11;1066.

  31. Samuel Halkett and John Laing, Dictionary of Anonymous and Pseudonymous English Literature, new and enlarged ed. by James Kennedy, W. A. Smith and A. F. Johnson, vol. 9 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, I926), I5o. The Gough catalogue is A Catalogue o] the entire library . . . o] that eminent antiquary, Richard Gough, Esq., deceased (London: Nichols and Son, 1810). The book appears in that catalogue as "Hodges' (Sir B.) History of Michael Servetus, 1724," lot 2131, p. 95.

  32. The unpublished autobiography is Some Account o/the Life of the Reverend Mr. John Lewis, Rector of the desolate Church of East-bridge in Romney-Marsh, Vicar of Minster and Minister of/Margate in the lsle of Thaner and Master of East-bridge Hospital in Canterbury. Written in tile year 1738. British Museum, Add. MSS 28651, folios 46ff.

  33. A Catalogue of the Library of Sir Peter Thompson, Knt., F. R. S. and F. S. A., sold by auction by R. Evans (London, 1815), item 574.

  34. Add. MSS 18.988, f. 17.

  35. Add. MSS 18.988, f. 19.

  36. Add. MSS 18.988, f. 21.

  37. Add. MSS 18.988, f. 22.

  38. Donald A. Stauffer, The Art of Biography in Eighteenth Century England. Biblio-graphical Supplement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941), 224.

  39. La Roche, Memoirs of Literature, vol. 2, XL (17 March I712), 85.

  40. Impartial History, 211.

  41. John Freind, The History of Physick from the time of Galen to the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, vol. 1 (London: 1725-26), 231-33.

  42. George Benson, A Brief Account of Calvin's burning Servetus for a heretic, for-merly published in four of the papers, called the Old Whig, or consistent Protestant (Lon-don, 1743)- See also George Benson, .A Supplement to some tracts formerly published, viz. A defence of the brief account of Calvin's causing Servetus to be burned, at Geneva (London, 1748).

  43. Jacques Georges de Chaufepié, The Life of Servetus (Amsterdam, 1756, translated from the French by James Yair; London, 1771); [Patrick Blair, M.D.], Thoughts on Nature and Religion, or, an alpology for the Right of Private Judgement, Maintained. By Michael Servetus, M.D. In his answer to John Calvin (Cork, 1774); Walter Richards, Observations on a late book, entitled "Thoughts on Nature and Religion" (Cork, 1774); John Mills, al Confutation against Michael Servetus (Cork, 1775); Isaac Mann, Cursory Remarks, on a treatise entitled, Thoughts on Nature and Religion (Cork, 1775); The Quaker's letter; or, a friendly epistle from William Penn, in the shades of Elysium, to Michael Servetus (Cork, I775); James Poulson, Moral and Divine Observations, from remarkable occurrences during the author's travels in a tour through part of this king-dom. To which are prefixed, sundry remarks, on the late publications of Michael Servetus [i.e., Patrick Blair] (Cork, 1775); and The mystic's plea for universal redemption, att. to Elhanan Winchester (Philadelphia, 1781).

  44. William Osler, Michael Servetus (London: Oxford University Press, 1909), 20.

  45. Allen, 170.

  46. Francis Guybon, M.D., An Essay concerning the Growth of Empiricism, or the Encouragement of Quacks (London, 1712; rev. in Memoirs of Literature, vol. 4 [1722]), 426-33.

 

 

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