Welcome to the Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook

The digital Cambridge Platonism Sourcebook consists of over 1,100,000 words of texts selected from across the oeuvre of the core group of Cambridge Platonists Anne Conway (1631-1679), Ralph Cudworth (1617-1688), Henry More (1614-1687), John Smith (1618-1652) and Benjamin Whichcote (1609-1683), making available both important printed and manuscript sources illustrating the range of their thinking. It also makes available a significant quantity of recondite texts and manuscript material never seen outside the British Library. It constitutes a groundbreaking collection of texts, several of which are translated from Latin with extensive explanatory notes and made easily available for the first time. 

As well as containing sizable excerpts from the printed works of Cudworth and More, the Sourcebook contains the full text of Conway’s Principia (1690) and its 1692 English translation, as well as extensive excerpts from the British Library Cudworth manuscripts, including a draft version of the introduction to the unpublished second part of Cudworth’s True Intellectual System of the Universe (a draft probably written c. 1671). It contains the Latin texts and first complete English translation of Henry More’s letter correspondence with Descartes, together with other important but previously untranslated works by More, including More’s critique of Jacob Boehme in his Philosophiae Teutonicae censura (1679). The Sourcebook also contains John Smith’s complete Select Discourses (1660) and the complete text of an influential set of letters between Whichcote and Antony Tuckney (written 1651; published 1753). 

The texts are accompanied by extensive critical introductory materials and network diagrams which situate them in their historical and intellectual contexts. The texts are fully browsable and searchable. The site also contains a full bibliography of Cambridge Platonism, as well as a blog which carries updates on developments in Cambridge Platonism scholarship and offers a forum for scholars to contribute their input and ideas.