Events surrounding the overthrow and execution of Charles I led Dury to become more personally involved in library matters. After the king fled from London, the royal goods were subject to various proposals, including selling or burning. These schemes of disposal extended to his books and manuscripts, which were stored in St. James's Palace. John Selden is credited with preventing the sale of the royal library. Bulstrode Whitelocke was appointed keeper of the king's medals and library, and on 28 October 1650 Dury was appointed his deputy. According to Anthony à Wood, Dury "did the drudgery of the place."[6] The books and manuscripts were in terrible disorder and disarray, and Dury carefully reorganized them. As soon as he took over, Dury stopped any efforts to sell the books and ordered that the new chapel, built originally for the wedding of King Charles I, be turned into a library. He immediately ordered the printing of the Septuagint copy of the Bible in the royal collection.
In the same year that he became deputy keeper, Dury wrote the following tract, one of a dozen he composed in 1650 on topics ranging from the educational to the ecclesiastical. Among the latter was his introduction to Thomas Thorowgood's book contending that the American Indians are descended from the Israelites, a work that also served as promotional material for New England colonization.
That Dury's The Reformed Librarie-Keeper is part of his reform program preparatory to the onset of the millennium is apparent both from its setting and its content. It was published in 1650 along with two other tracts (not reprinted here)[7] and Dury's supplement to his Reformed School, which itself had appeared a few months earlier. The Reformed School was a basic presentation of the ideas of Comenius, Hartlib, and Dury for transforming the nature of education in such a way that from infancy people would be directed in their striving toward universal knowledge and spiritual betterment. The Supplement to the Reformed School deals with the role that universities should take in preparing for the Kingdom of God, a role making them more actively part of the world.
Having placed educational institutions in the scheme of things preparatory to the millennium, Dury then proceeds to place library keeping and libraries in this scheme as well. Unfortunately, according to Dury, library keepers had traditionally regarded their positions as opportunities for profit and gain, not for "the service, which is to bee don by them unto the Common-wealth of Israel, for the advancement of Pietie and Learning" (p. 15). Library keepers "ought to becom Agents for the advancement of universal Learning" and not just mercenary people (p. 17). Their role ought not to be just to guard the books but to make them available to those seeking universal knowledge and understanding of the Kingdom of God.
The library and the library keeper can play important roles in making knowledge available. As Dury points out, Oxford and Heidelberg have failed to do so. Dury's work enumerates very practical problems that need to be solved and integrates them into an overall picture of the library keeper, the library, the school, and the church—all fundamental components of a better world, if properly reformed. Reforming involves practical changes directed by the spiritual goal of preparing for the millennium. And it should be noticed that while Dury had time to worry about how much librarians should be paid and how books should be classified, and while he was occupied in getting the king's books in their proper place on the shelf, he was also convinced that the penultimate events before the onset of the millennium were about to take place. A month after his official appointment as deputy library keeper, Dury wrote the preface, dated 28 November 1650, to Abraham von Franckenberg's Clavis Apocalyptica. This work in Dury's translation of 1651 states on the title page that it offers a key to the prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation and "that the Prophetical Numbers com to an end with the year of our Lord 1655." The work, which Dury strongly endorses, lists as events "which are shortly to com to pass, collected out of the XI and XVI Chapters of the REVELATION," the destruction of the city of Rome, the end of the Turkish Empire, the conversion of the Jews, and the ruin of the whole papacy. Thereupon, the Devil will be cast out and shut up in the bottomless pit, and the Son of God will take "possession of the Kingdom" and reign for the millennium (pp. [164-65]).
As is all too evident, Dury's reform projects did not lead to the millennium. He was active in England until sent abroad in 1654 as Cromwell's unofficial agent. Again he traveled all over Protestant Europe negotiating to reunite the churches. After the Restoration he was unable to return to England and lived out his life on the Continent trying to bring about Christian reunion. One of his last works, which has not been located, was a shady Touchant l'intelligence de l'Apocalypse par l'Apocalypse même of 1674. His daughter married Henry Oldenburg, who became a secretary of the Royal Society of England and who helped bring about some of the scientific reforms Dury had advocated.
Richard H. Popkin Washington University
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John Dury's place in the intellectual and religious life of seventeenth-century England and Europe is amply demonstrated in the preceding part of the introduction. This section focuses on The Reformed Librarie-Keeper itself, which was printed in 1650 with the subheading Two copies of Letters concerning the Place and Office of a Librarie-Keeper (p. 15). The first letter concentrates on practical questions of the organization and administration of the library, the second relates the librarian's function to educational goals and, above all else, to the mission of the Christian religion. The work's two-part structure is a clue to a proper understanding of the genesis of The Reformed Librarie-Keeper and to its meaning and puts in ironic perspective its usefulness for later academic librarianship.
Because The Reformed Librarie-Keeper appeared in the same year that Dury became deputy librarian of the King's Library in St. James's Palace, it has been assumed that he probably wrote the pamphlet as a form of self-promotion to secure the job. An anonymous article in The Library in 1892, for instance, speculates that the pamphlet may have been "composed for the special purpose of the Author's advancement" and that Milton and Samuel Hartlib urged its production "to forward his claims" while the Council of State was debating what to do with Charles I's books.[8] Certainly the final sentence of the tract, with its references to "the Hous" and "the Counsels of leading men in this Common-wealth" (p. 31), suggests a connection with the debate, but the tone of religious zeal that permeates the work, and especially the second letter, seems to transcend any specific occasion. Moreover, Hartlib, Dury's longtime friend and associate in millenarian causes and the recipient and editor of these letters, claims that they and the other, disparate works he selected for the volume are all "fruits of som of my Solicitations and Negotiations for the advancement of Learning" and as such "are but preparatives towards that perfection which wee may exspect by the advancement of the Kingdom of Christ, wherein the Communion of Saints, by the graces of the Spirit, will swallow up all these poor Rudiments of knowledg, which wee now grope after by so manie helps" (sig. A2r-v).