{"id":8488,"date":"2017-05-23T17:53:45","date_gmt":"2017-05-23T17:53:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=8488"},"modified":"2017-05-24T17:52:45","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T17:52:45","slug":"happy-birthday-elias-ashmole","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/?p=8488","title":{"rendered":"Happy birthday, Elias Ashmole!"},"content":{"rendered":"

‘I Elias Ashmole, was the son (& only Child) of Simon Ashmole of Lichfeild Sadler eldest son to Mr. Thomas Ashmole of the said Citty Sadler, twice cheife Bayliff of that Corporation, and of Anne one of the daughters of Anthony Bowyer of the Citty of Coventry draper, & Bridget his wife only daughter to Mr:\u00a0Fitch of Ansley in the County of Warwick gent. I was borne the 23rd of May 1617 (& as my deare & good Mother hath often told me) neere halfe an houre after 3 a’clock in the Morning.\u2019 Thus, at the beginning of a set of autobiographical notes, Elias Ashmole wrote of his birth four hundred years ago today. In celebration of this event, EMLO is delighted to announce the publication of a new catalogue containing a\u00a0calendar of his correspondence<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Cover (page A1r) of ‘Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum’, by Elias Ashmole. 1652. (Source of image: Wikimedia Commons, from http:\/\/dewey.library.upenn.edu\/)<\/p><\/div>\n

Ashmole\u00a0is\u00a0a complex character known best as a collector, an antiquary, and the founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum<\/a>. But he was also a freemason, an inaugural Fellow of the Royal Society, an astrologer (with a particular interest in alchemy, publishing Fasciculus chemicus<\/em> in 1650, Theatrum chemicum Britannicum<\/em> two years later, and The Way to Bliss<\/em>\u00a0in 1658), as well as an officer-of-arms and herald, and the Comptroller, and later Accountant-General, of the Excise. He\u00a0began his working life as a lawyer. Many of the events that befell him we know only from his own account in a document preserved among his papers in the Bodleian Libraries (MS. Ashm. 1136, fols 2\u201398). For one-hundred-and-thirty years after his death, this manuscript was considered to be a diary. It took the eighteenth-century antiquary and diarist Thomas Hearne (whose own correspondence plays such a crucial role in the early years of the Bodleian’s\u00a0analogue Index of Literary Correspondence<\/a>) to observe: ‘It is most wretched Stuff, and put down by Mr Ashmole only as private Memorandums’.[1. See C. H. Josten, ed., Elias Ashmole: His Autobiographical and Historical Notes, his Correspondence, and Other Contemporary Sources Relating to his Life and Work<\/em>, 5 vols (Oxford: OUP, 1967), vol. 1, p. 4.] And Hearne was right:\u00a0it is a predominently chronological listing of autobiographical notes compiled in the years from 1678 when Ashmole was sixty-one. The register continues until 1687, five years before his death, and must have been\u00a0intended as the outline of an ultimately unwritten autobiography. It is from these jottings that Helen Watt \u2014 who worked from 2009\u201312\u00a0on the correspondence of the Ashmolean’s second keeper, Edward Lhwyd<\/a> \u2014 has teased out this calendar of correspondence. Far from straightforward work, it is the first time that the metadata for Ashmole’s letters have been set out\u00a0in this way.<\/p>\n

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Portrait of Elias Ashmole, by John Riley; frame made by Grinling Gibbons. 1681\u20132. (Image \u00a9 Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford; WA1898.36)<\/p><\/div>\n

Working in partnership with Oxford University Press<\/a>\u00a0\u2014\u00a0the publisher of C. H. Josten’s 1966 ‘monumental edition of materials relating to Elias Ashmole’ (as described by Charles Webster)[2. See Charles Webster’s review in The British Journal for the History of Science<\/em>, vol. 4, no. 1 (June 1968), pp. 72\u20133.] \u2014\u00a0and with its digital resource\u00a0Oxford Scholarly Editions Online [OSEO]<\/a>, Helen has linked the records of letters in EMLO to the online edition and has supplemented the body of letters to be found in Ashmole’s listings with\u00a0detailed calendaring of a set of prognostications on the weather\u00a0(Bodleian Libraries<\/a>, MS. Ashm. 368). These forecasts were sent monthly to Ashmole for twelve years from 1677 by John Goad, the headmaster of the Merchant Taylors\u2019 School in London.\u00a0What has been drawn together in EMLO is in the main a subjective calendar; we have been able to record only what Ashmole wished to remember. Correspondence that relates to his dealings with the Tradescants is\u00a0missing, for example, as is that concerned with a number of law suits in which he was involved, but this calendar is a start and as additional letters are brought to our attention, we will augment\u00a0the catalogue. For EMLO’s users who are interested in alchemy, in heraldry, in the history of collecting, or in early medical practices (Ashmole was a meticulous note-taker when it came to his own health), it’s well worth sinking into a chair in\u00a0a OSEO-subscribing library and following the links from each letter record to Josten’s edition online. For it is here you will find a myriad of choice snippets. Consider, for example, the following remedy Ashmole availed\u00a0himself\u00a0of on 11 April 1681: \u00a0‘I<\/a> tooke early in the Morning [a] good dose of Elixer, \u2026 hung 3 Spiders about my Neck \u2026 they drove my Ague away, Deo gratias.'[3. Josten, vol. 4, p. 1680.] If only more conditions were cured this easily!<\/p>\n

I’m extremely glad, Mr Ashmole, that you survived such self-medication to live another eleven years. Happy four-hundredth birthday!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘I Elias Ashmole, was the son (& only Child) of Simon Ashmole of Lichfeild Sadler eldest son to Mr. Thomas Ashmole of the said Citty Sadler, twice cheife Bayliff of that Corporation, and of Anne one of the daughters of Anthony Bowyer of the Citty of Coventry draper, & Bridget his wife only daughter to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8488\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.culturesofknowledge.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}