A Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria is a work of utopian fiction, published in England in 1641. It carried the name of Samuel Hartlib, who published it, but is now attributed to Gabriel Plattes. A short text of fifteen pages, it reads, according to Amy Boesky, like a political address, and it was explicitly framed as an address to Parliament. [1]
It is written as a dialogue, and is in the tradition of the Utopia of Thomas More — Macaria is an island mentioned in Utopia — and the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon. [2] Hugh Trevor-Roper takes it to be an important formulation of the ultimate political ambitions of Hartlib and his followers (and in particular John Dury), in the form of a reformed Christian society and welfare state. It covers the issues of economic development, taxation and education. [3] Much of the content drew on Henry Robinson's Englands Safety from earlier in the same year. [4]
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Hugh Redwald Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton, was an English historian. He was Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford.
Joseph Hall was an English bishop, satirist and moralist. His contemporaries knew him as a devotional writer, and a high-profile controversialist of the early 1640s. In church politics, he tended in fact to a middle way.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1641.
Baron Teynham, of Teynham in the County of Kent, is a title in the Peerage of England and the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created in 1616 for Sir John Roper. His great-great-grandson, the fifth Baron, served as Lord Lieutenant of Kent. The latter's third son, the eighth Baron, married, as his second wife, Anne Barrett-Lennard, 16th Baroness Dacre. His eldest son from this marriage, Charles Roper, was the father of Trevor Charles Roper, 18th Baron Dacre, and Gertrude Trevor Roper, 19th Baroness Dacre. His youngest son from this marriage, Reverend Richard Henry Roper, was the great-great-great-grandfather of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, Baron Dacre of Glanton.
Samuel Hartlib or Hartlieb was a Royal Prussian born, English educational and agricultural reformer of German-Polish origin who settled, married and died in England. He was a son of George Hartlib, a Pole, and Elizabeth Langthon, a daughter of a rich English merchant. Hartlib was a noted promoter and writer in fields that included science, medicine, agriculture, politics and education. He was a contemporary of Robert Boyle, whom he knew well, and a neighbour of Samuel Pepys in Axe Yard, London, in the early 1660s. He studied briefly at the University of Cambridge upon arriving in England.
New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published posthumously in 1626. It appeared unheralded and tucked into the back of a longer work of natural history, Sylva Sylvarum. In New Atlantis, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where "generosity and enlightenment, dignity and splendour, piety and public spirit" are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the mythical Bensalem. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, Salomon's House, envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure sciences.
The Isle of Pines is a book by Henry Neville published in 1668. It has been cited as the first robinsonade before Defoe's work. It is also one of the early Utopian narratives, along with Thomas More's Utopia and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. An example of arcadian fiction, the book presents its story through an epistolary frame: a "Letter to a friend in London, declaring the truth of his Voyage to the East Indies" written by a fictional Dutchman "Henry Cornelius Van Sloetten," concerning the discovery of an island in the southern hemisphere, populated with the descendants of a small group of castaways.
John Dury was a Scottish Calvinist minister and an intellectual of the English Civil War period. He made efforts to re-unite the Calvinist and Lutheran wings of Protestantism, hoping to succeed when he moved to Kassel in 1661, but he did not accomplish this. He was also a preacher, pamphleteer, and writer.
Henry Robinson was an English merchant and writer. He is best known for a work on religious toleration, Liberty of Conscience from 1644.
Thomas Blundeville was an English humanist writer and mathematician. He is known for work on logic, astronomy, education and horsemanship, as well as for translations from the Italian. His interests were both wide-ranging and directed towards practical ends, and he adapted freely a number of the works he translated.
Nicholas Hill was an English natural philosopher, considered a disciple of Giordano Bruno. He is known for his 1601 book Philosophia epicurea.
Salomon's House is a fictional institution in Sir Francis Bacon's utopian work New Atlantis, published in English in 1777, years after Bacon's death. In this work, Bacon portrays a vision of the future of human discovery and knowledge. Salomon's House is credited with being the standard upon which 17th century scientific academies, including the French Académie des Sciences and the English Royal Society, are based.
The Hartlib Circle was the correspondence network set up in Western and Central Europe by Samuel Hartlib, an intelligencer based in London, and his associates, in the period 1630 to 1660. Hartlib worked closely with John Dury, an itinerant figure who worked to bring Protestants together.
Gabriel Plattes (c.1600–1644) was an English writer on agriculture and science, and also now recognised as the author of the utopian work Description of the Famous Kingdome of Macaria, often attributed to Samuel Hartlib under whose name it was published.
Amy Boesky is an American author and a professor of English at Boston College.
Mundus alter et idem is a satirical dystopian novel written by Joseph Hall c. 1605. The title has been translated into English as An Old World and a New, The Discovery of a New World, and Another World and Yet the Same. Although the text credits "Mercurius Britannicus" as the author, Thomas Hyde ascribed it to Hall in 1674.
Macaria is the name of two figures from ancient Greek religion and mythology.
The Advice to Hartlib was a treatise on education, written by Sir William Petty (1623–1687) in 1647 as a letter to Samuel Hartlib. and published in 1647/8. It was the first printed work by Petty and covers a total of 31 pages.
The Ministry for the Future is a climate fiction ("cli-fi") novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to act as an advocate for the world's future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation's. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential. The plot primarily follows Mary Murphy, the head of the titular Ministry for the Future, and Frank May, an American aid worker traumatized by experiencing a deadly heat wave in India. Many chapters are devoted to other characters' accounts of future events, as well as their ideas about ecology, economics, and other subjects.