Towards a prosopography of Cambridge Platonism

The very existence of Cambridge Platonism has recently been dismissed, partially on the basis of a perceived lack of unanimity in the supposed circle’s writings on the history of philosophy.^[5] This approach misunderstands the nature of a group which gains coherence through the sharing of ideas among friends and family members in correspondence and conversation as much as through published texts. Sarah Hutton has argued that Konstellationsforschung (research on a constellation of figures), which ‘focuses group rather than an individual and on interconnections, be these textual, social, intellectual or cultural’ is an appropriate method of studying the intellectual history of the Cambridge Platonists. She has focused on the overlapping circles of John Worthington and Anne Conway, as seen in their respective collections of correspondence.^[6] I would suggest that prosopographical research on the Cambridge Platonists looks for a web of responses to theological and political circumstances, tutorial influence, patronage, intermarriage and kinship, friendships, personal enmities, and temperamental preferences.^[7] Of course, the texts written by the group are essential to evaluating their enduring value; without their writings their personal relationships would not merit special attention. However, rather than looking for the tenets of a ‘school’, it is fruitful to think of the Cambridge Platonists as a circle, a network or a constellation of living persons rather than merely as a body of ideas or texts. We need to become comfortable with the porous borders and lack of uniformity which we encounter when enumerating the group, rather than sharply distinguishing those who are ‘in’ from those who lie without.

Nevertheless, some sense of whom we are encountering is necessary at the outset. As Lewis Pyenson said, when discussing the prosopography of early modern science, it is useful to know ‘who the guys were’.^[8] The core group of Cambridge Platonists is usually understood to comprise Benjamin Whichcote, Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, John Smith, and Anne Conway,^[9] but near-contemporary evidence and commentaries suggest a larger network of friends and sympathizers which new research is beginning to investigate. As I have argued elsewhere, Cudworth’s and More’s enemy Ralph Widdrington and his high church friends in Restoration Cambridge first identified the group in the early 1660s, calling More and Cudworth ‘Latitude-men’.^[10] About 1675, Joseph Glanvill (an admirer of More from Oxford) compiled a manuscript listing members of the group he called ‘Cupri-Cosmits’, naming Cudworth, Whichcote, Smith, and More as well as Symon Patrick, George Rust, William Owtram, Nathaniel Ingelo, John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Samuel Jacombe, and Samuel Cradock.^[11] Gilbert Burnet, the bishop of Salisbury following the Glorious Revolution, compiled a list of ‘Latitudinarians’ whom he saw as heroes of the Restoration Church of England. Written probably between 1683 and 1685 but not achieving its final form until 1724, this was the first published enumeration of the group. He mentioned Whichcote, Cudworth, More, and Worthington as well as John Wilkins, John Tillotson, Edward Stillingfleet, Symon Patrick, John Lloyd, and Thomas Tenison.^[12] It was not until the nineteenth century that the group began to be called ‘Cambridge Platonists’. Samuel Taylor Coleridge referred to ‘the Latitudinarian party in Cambridge’ as ‘Plotinists’, but F. D. Maurice, J. B. Mullinger, and John Hunt all called the group ‘Cambridge Platonists’ before the appearance of John Tulloch’s classic volume bearing that title.^[13]

The main difficulty in deciding how closely a person should be placed to the core group of Cambridge Platonists lies in discovering the degree to which they expressed some form of Platonism in their writings. David Leech’s fine article in this introduction provides a much fuller philosophical definition of Cambridge Platonism, so only a brief note is offered here. My own understanding of the Cambridge Platonist constellation has been largely concerned with how they expressed the impact of Platonism on Christian theology. It includes those who agreed on a basically Platonic understanding of God and human salvation. For them, God is ‘senior to the world’,^[14] that is, the divine intelligence precedes all material creation. God’s essential attributes are goodness, wisdom, and power, but goodness is his preeminent attribute, controlling his omniscience and omnipotence. As Henry Hallywell (whom we shall meet below) succinctly put it, God’s ‘Goodness is of a universal latitude and extent’, ruling his power and wisdom, because unfettered power would be no more than ‘a furious and Gygantick self-will’, while ‘Wisdome which is devoid of Goodness, is nothing but a higher degree of craft’.^[15] The salvation of fallen humanity is made possible by the incarnation, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ, but the Cambridge Platonists departed from Lutheran and Reformed soteriology in rejecting both solifidianism and predestination. Rather, Christ has made it possible for human beings, by the exercise of free will, to cooperate with God’s grace in restoring his image in them through deiformity: becoming like God in order to know and participate in God. Much of the Cambridge group’s theological Platonism was filtered through their reading of Origen, with More and some of his students accepting the pre-existence of the soul, the cyclic conflagration of the earth, and universal salvation, although Cudworth could be critical of the Alexandrian father.^[16]

There is also a difficulty in distinguishing those whom we designate as Cambridge Platonists from the later Latitudinarians. As we have seen above, this confusion considerably pre-dates the term ‘Cambridge Platonists’, and there is necessarily an overlap in modern attempts to define the two groups, if, in fact, they differ significantly. In 1662, just at the time when Ralph Widdrington was calling More and Cudworth ‘Latitude-men’, ‘S. P. of Cambridge’ (probably Symon Patrick) set out the basic Latitudinarian programme in A Brief Account of the new Sect of Latitude-Men. He defined ‘Latitude-Men’ as Anglican clergy who were young enough to have been educated during the Interregnum but had conformed willingly to the Restoration settlement. They were Arminians, rejecting Calvinist predestination and believing in the freedom of the will, the ‘universal intent of Christ’s death’, the sufficiency of God’s grace, and the conditions of both faith and a holy life for justification. They were inclined to reject Aristotelian physics and to take an active interest in the discoveries of the new experimental natural philosophy.^[17] Works by Gilbert Burnet and Edward Fowler followed, stressing the value placed by Latitudinarians on reason, holiness of life, and the moderation of the established Church of England.^[18]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, attempts were made to arrive at greater precision concerning who might be designated Latitudinarians and what their theological and political beliefs were. A lively historiographical debate involving contributions from John Spurr, John Gascoigne, Martin I. J. Griffin, Jr, W. M. Spellman, Isabel Rivers, and Richard Ashcraft discussed the particular culture of piety they attempted to create within the Restoration Church of England, their attitudes towards Dissent, their interest (or lack of it) in experimental science, and their possible influence on Socinianism, Deism, and atheism.^[19] In a highly perceptive review essay in 1994, James Bradley suggested that ‘[f]urther work in the area will need to draw out these connections and clarify the precise meaning of the Latitudinarians’ philosophy and theology in the social and political context of these rapidly changing decades’.^[20] More recently, Nicholas Tyacke has charted the shifting of the ecclesiastical balance from Laudians to Latitudinarians in the period between 1660 and 1714.^[21] My own view is that the difference between Cambridge Platonism and Latitudinarianism cannot be understood as a fixed border; indeed, it can be difficult to define either group precisely. I prefer to look at the biographies and writings of individuals within the context of both groups – loosely defined – to discover their place within overlapping networks, first in Cambridge and then, after the Restoration, in London as well. I would tentatively distinguish the original Cambridge group, who clearly articulated their Platonic and Origenian beliefs, from a later, younger London group, who were less inclined to stress deiformity and participation in God as the goals of their moral preaching, but who shared the undogmatic, tolerant stance of their Cambridge theological forbears. We shall see that some individuals inhabited the space where the two circles seem to overlap. Although their ideas are not discussed in this article, I would suggest that they did bear a family resemblance arising from the social and intellectual milieux of those overlapping circles.

This introductory article makes no pretence to be a complete description of Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian prosopography, but it does introduce a number of individuals who inhabited several overlapping circles. Neither does it discuss the ideas of the persons enumerated, a task which the other articles in this introduction and, indeed, the sourcebook itself address. What follows is merely a setting out of the dramatis personae with some small indication of their place within circles around which they probably did not draw fixed circumferences. The focus of my own research on tutor-student relationships and the character of the fellowship at Christ’s College means that I inevitably approach the task mainly from the perspective of More and Cudworth.^[22] I have, perhaps, disproportionately referred the reader to my own published work, but I hope that at least some of it will be consulted in order to view a more detailed and complete picture of my attempt to reconstruct a circle of living individuals. It must be stressed that my list is necessarily incomplete because new research is constantly discovering new writers, especially on the fringes of both Cambridge Platonist and Latitudinarian circles, who reveal new connections with better known figures. In this article, we shall focus on the two main centres of the development of Christian Platonism in Cambridge: Emmanuel and Christ’s Colleges, but we shall also see how vectors can be drawn from those centres to other colleges – King’s, Queens’, Jesus, Trinity, St Catharine’s, and Peterhouse. We shall then move briefly to London, especially the church of St Lawrence Jewry during the Restoration period.

First, however, a word about the sources from which a Cambridge Platonist prosopography can be constructed is necessary. Like the rest of the three kingdoms of England, Scotland, and Ireland during the seventeenth century, the University of Cambridge experienced repeated political and ecclesiastical upheavals. John Twigg has described in detail the impact of more than six decades of revolutionary events on the University of Cambridge.^[23] Victor Morgan and Christopher Brooke have examined other aspects of seventeenth-century Cambridge University life, including religious and political pressures, the curriculum, tutor-student relationships, and the beginnings of the scientific revolution.^[24] The best general index of Cambridge men in the seventeenth century remains Venn’s Alumni Cantabrigienses.^[25] Printed sources for individual colleges include both college histories and biographical registers of admissions, of which far and away the most useful is Peile’s Biographical Register of Christ’s College.^[26] The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is, of course, indispensable.^[27] The English Short Title Catalogue is the best resource for finding seventeenth-century publications, and J. J. Hall has provided a wealth of material concerning students taking higher degrees.^[28] We have already noticed the collections of letters from the Conway and Worthington circles.^[29] Beyond these resources, other databases and indexes too numerous to identify individually here,^[30] as well as local histories (especially those pre-dating the Victoria County History), and histories of grammar schools, can usually take a writer’s biography forward. I like the analogy of pulling a piece of string: one begins with a name or some form of brief reference and is led with a growing sense of anticipation to a variety of manuscripts, reference works, books old and new, and databases, while becoming acquainted with what can be reassembled of a person’s life and thought. To establish the larger circle, network or constellation of the people whom we might call Cambridge Platonists, we need to discover a series of mini-biographies and then see how they interlock with each other to form the social and intellectual web in which they related to each other and developed their ideas.

Cambridge and London: people and links

Emmanuel College, and beyond

Benjamin Whichcote (1609-83) is known as the father of Cambridge Platonism, and the roots of the movement in his teaching at Emmanuel College have chronological priority over later Cambridge Platonist writings, even though he published nothing in his lifetime. His tutor at Emmanuel was the Calvinist Anthony Tuckney, but, when Whichcote began to teach his own pupils between 1633 and 1645, he moved to a more generous soteriology informed by Platonism and Origenism.^[31] Among his pupils were several men whom we must include in the Cambridge Platonist circle: John Smith (1609-1652), Ralph Cudworth (1615-1688), John Worthington (1618-1671), Peter Sterry (1613-1672), and Nathaniel Culverwell (1619-1651). Except for Smith, these young men all became fellows of Emmanuel. Some accounts of Cambridge Platonism exclude Sterry because of his Calvinism and Culverwell because of his denial of free will,^[32] but Smith, Cudworth, and Worthington were central to the Cambridge Platonist circle. Cudworth went on to become master first of Clare Hall in 1645 and then of Christ’s College in 1654. He and his close friend Henry More were the most prolific writers of the movement, but their story belongs to the following section of this article. Whichcote became rector of St Lawrence Jewry in 1668, and we shall take up his further networking in the final section.

Smith, who became a fellow of Queens’ College in 1645 but died in young in 1652, is often considered the finest writer of the group. His deeply Platonic writings have recently been discussed by Derek Michaud with great insight.^[33] The discourses preached by Smith in Queens’ chapel were bequeathed to Samuel Cradock (1620/21-1706), a fellow of Emmanuel and a relation by marriage of both Whichcote and Cudworth, who passed them to Worthington for editing and publication.^[34] At Queens’, Smith was influential on Symon Patrick (1626-1707), whom we have seen named by both Glanvill and Burnet; Patrick is usually classed as a Latitudinarian,^[35] and we shall see him again as a member of Whichcote’s London circle in the final section of this article. Elsewhere, I have noted his connection with George Rust (whom we shall meet below) in the Cambridge University Annual Commencement of 1658, over which Worthington presided as vice-chancellor. Nathaniel Ingelo (1620/21-1683), the author of an Origenian romance and a close friend of Worthington, became a fellow of Queens’ in 1652, alongside Smith. Ingelo, too, would play a major role in the 1658 Commencement, commending the writings of Origen a few weeks before the publication of William Spencer’s edition of Contra Celsum.^[36] Worthington became master of Jesus College in 1645. We have already seen him as Whichcote’s nephew by marriage.^[37] An editor rather than an original writer, he was a consummate networker whose links not only to the other Cambridge Platonists but also to the circle surrounding Samuel Hartlib in London make him an indispensable source for understanding overlapping intellectual circles in mid-seventeenth-century England.^[38] Worthington’s ability to help people connect was demonstrated by the tactful way in which he resolved a quarrel between Cudworth and More in January 1665 over the publication of More’s Enchiridion Ethicum.^[39]

Christ’s College, and beyond

Henry More (1614-1687) had rejected Calvinist double predestination as a schoolboy at Eton College, but his conversion to Platonism came in 1636, during something of a breakdown which he termed his ‘deep retirement’ after graduating BA. He was elected to a Christ’s fellowship in 1641 and retained it until his death.^[40] His Platonicall Song of the Soul, published in 1642 – the same year as Cudworth’s first two published sermons – marked the beginning of published works by the Cambridge Platonist circle.^[41] I have written elsewhere of how More began to build up a congenial fellowship, which allowed intellectual space for Platonism and Origenism to be explored, by attracting young fellows to Christ’s from other colleges during the late 1640s and then supporting Christ’s graduates for fellowships prior to Cudworth’s arrival in 1654.^[42] Notably joining the fellowship during this period were William Outram (1626-1679) of Trinity College and George Rust (c.1628-1670) of St Catharine’s. Outram, while not overtly a Platonist, became a life-long friend of both More and Cudworth; as we have seen, Glanvill included him in his list of ‘Cupri-Cosmits’.^[43] Rust was perhaps the foremost proponent of Origen to emerge from the college, arguing for an Origenian understanding of the Resurrection body in his BD disputation and most likely authoring A Letter of Resolution concerning Origen of 1661.^[44] Rust’s pupil Henry Hallywell (1641-1703) took upon himself the role of a populariser of the Cambridge Platonists basic teachings as applied to pastoral advice, writing a series of books in his parsonage houses in a succession of Sussex parishes.^[45]

Other fellows who had been educated at Christ’s included Thomas Wadsworth (1630-1676), a pupil of Outram whom I have described as a ‘Platonic Dissenter’,^[46] Thomas Standish (1631-1714), who translated More’s The Immortality of the Soul into Latin,^[47] and William Leigh (1633-1662), who became a trusted administrative aid to Cudworth and provides a link to the important feeder school at Bishop’s Stortford.^[48] The school, under the mastership of William Leigh’s father Thomas, sent not only William Leigh and his two brothers, Thomas and James, to Christ’s but also educated Henry Maurice (1650-1699), Richard Ward (1658/9-1726), and Cudworth’s stepson John Andrewes (1649-1675). Maurice was a tutorial descendent of George Rust and an advocate of More’s critique of enthusiasm.^[49] Ward, a pupil of James Leigh (1645-1676), was More’s first biographer, and Andrewes was a key player in his stepfather’s defeat of the machinations of his college rival Ralph Widdrington.^[50] While only some of these men can be definitely described as Platonists, they were all significant members of More’s network at Christ’s.

When Cudworth arrived as master in 1654, he was soon followed from Clare Hall, where he had been master since 1645, by Abraham Brooksbank (d. 1711), whom we have met as the minister who baptised Damaris Worthington.^[51] Thomas Burnet (c.1635-1715) also came from Clare Hall, succeeding his tutor Outram in his Christ’s fellowship in 1657. He lectured in college on Cartesian natural philosophy and would later publish his controversial Telluris Theoria Sacra or The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681) and Arcaeologiae Philosophicae (1692), which provide an interesting link between the Platonist and Cartesian teaching at Christ's and the Socinianism, deism and atheism which some writers have suggested were the results of Latitudinarianism.^[52]

More’s network at Christ’s also points us towards other Cambridge Colleges. He was friendly with Charles and Durant Hotham and their friend Luke Rugeley at Christ’s, some of the earliest proponents of the works of the German Lutheran mystic Jacob Böhme in England. Charles Hotham became a fellow of Peterhouse; when he lost his fellowship as a result of a quarrel in 1651 with the master, Lazarus Seaman, a testimonial to his scholarship, morals, piety and support for Parliament was signed by thirty-three members of the University Senate, including Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, George Rust, William Outram, John Smith of Queens’, and Samuel Cradock of Emmanuel. Charles Hotham also provides a link between More and Trinity College, in the translator of his MA thesis, Daniel Foote, who would later translate a text of Christian Knorr von Rosenroth which contains a good deal of material written by More.^[53] Hallywell provides another link with Trinity. His first book, A Private Letter of Satisfaction to a Friend of 1667 quoted briefly from Origen’s Treatise on Prayer, a text which was as yet unpublished. The earliest extant complete manuscript of this text was in the possession of Herbert Thorndike, a fellow of Trinity, so it seems highly likely that Hallywell had seen it at Trinity. Thorndike was working on an edition of the extant Greek manuscripts of Origen (which was never completed or published), working alongside two other fellows of Trinity: William Spencer, whose edition of Contra Celsum had been published in 1658; and Thomas Gale, who would assist with the publication of On Prayer in 1686.^[54]

More also had links with Oxford in Joseph Glanvill (1636-1680) of Exeter College, Edmund Elys (1636x5-1708) of Balliol, and John Norris (1657-1712) of All Souls. Glanvill was an early advocate of the Royal Society, but his association with More was mainly concerned with More’s doctrines of the pre-existence of souls and of spirits as an essential defence against atheism. Glanvill’s Lux Orientalis of 1662 argued for pre-existence in even more explicit terms than had yet been employed by More and Rust, and More brought out a new annotated edition in 1682.^[55] More also expanded Glanvill’s Blow at Modern Sadducism of 1668 in two editions of Saducismus Triumphatus of 1681 and 1682, attempting to prove the reality of witchcraft and apparitions.^[56] Edmund Elys was an admirer and correspondent of More, who published a collection of his letters in 1694. Hallywell also collaborated with Elys by contributing to the preface of Elys’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.^[57] John Norris, who became the leading English proponent of Malebranche, conducted a correspondence with More on the nature of divine love, which was published as an appendix to Norris’s The Theory and Regulation of Love in the year after More’s death.^[58]

Through Sir John Finch (1626-1682), a student at Christ’s with whom More maintained a life-long friendship,^[59] More made the acquaintance of his half-sister, Lady Anne Conway (1631-1679). After taking her through a course on Cartesian philosophy by correspondence, More became her close friend, referring to her as his ‘Heroine Pupil’.^[60] Anne Conway became a philosopher in her own right, composing The Principles of the most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, which was published in a Latin translation of her original English version (now lost) and then re-translated into English.^[61] In the 1660s, Anne Conway accompanied her husband, Lord Conway, to Ireland, where they maintained a friendship with Jeremy Taylor and George Rust, successive bishops of Dromore.^[62] After her return to England, More spent many summers at her home, Ragley Hall in Warwickshire, where he met another circle of friends. Anne Conway’s companion and librarian at Ragley was Elizabeth Foxcroft, a sister of Benjamin Whichcote and a devotee of the writings of Jacob Böhme. She was the mother of Ezekiel Foxcroft, a mathematician, alchemist, and fellow of King’s College.^[63] Also at Ragley was Francis Mercury van Helmont, the Kabbalist, in residence as Anne Conway’s personal physician and intellectual companion. He introduced More by correspondence to Christian Knorr von Rosenroth, the author of the Kabbala Denudata.^[64] George Keith, who shared Anne Conway’s interest in the Quakers, was also part of the Ragley circle.^[65] It was also through John Finch that More received a bequest from John Cockshute to translate his principle philosophical works into Latin for a continental readership and to publish them, which resulted in the three volumes of More’s Opera Omnia. Cockshute’s story opens up yet another circle of friends around John Finch.^[66]

Cudworth, too, took his place among the extended Cambridge Platonist friendship circle. He was life-long friends with Whichcote, More, and Worthington, and he figures in Anne Conway’s correspondence.^[67] Whichcote died at Cudworth’s Cambridge home while visiting his friend in 1683.^[68] Cudworth’s daughter Damaris, Lady Masham(1658-1708), was a philosopher and theological writer. Her Discourse concerning the Love of God of 1696 and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to a Vertuous or Christian Life of 1705 reflect the ‘rare atmosphere of free enquiry and intellectual independence’ of her upbringing. Her Cudworth upbringing was later augmented by the friendship of John Locke, whom she first met at the age of twenty-three. Acting as her intellectual mentor, much as More had been to Anne Conway, Locke encouraged her to bring up her only son Francis Cudworth Masham according to his educational principles. Locke would spend the last thirteen years of his life prior to his death in 1704 as a guest in her home at Oates.^[69]

London: St Lawrence Jewry, and beyond

At the Restoration, the philosophical/theological movement begun in Cambridge during the Civil War and Interregnum years continued there. Although threatened by the resurgent High Churchmen who undertook to restore loyalty to episcopacy and the Book of Common Prayer in Cambridge, Cudworth and More retained their positions at Christ’s.^[70] The movement also radiated out to the parochial Church of England. For example, Henry Hallywell, as we have seen, published all of his books while an incumbent in a succession of Sussex parishes, and Henry Maurice wrote his critique of the millenarian John Mason from Filgrave Rectory in Buckinghamshire.^[71] Dissenters, too, developed the Cambridge Platonists’ teaching, notably Thomas Wadsworth, as we have seen, and, in the eighteenth century, the philosopher and political radical Richard Price.^[72] The most concentrated centre of development, however, was indubitably London. Benjamin Whichcote was ejected from the Provostship of King’s College in 1660, but by 1668 he had become rector of St Lawrence Jewry,^[73] a London church which became the centre of several overlapping circles of Latitudinarian preaching. Not only did Whichcote himself preach very regularly, but the church had some endowed weekday lectureships. John Tillotson and John Sharp were the principle lecturers in Whichcote’s time (Whichcote died in 1683) and beyond, but there were also other lecturers: Robert Blaicklay, William Sherlock, Francis Lane, and William Hopkins.^[74] Whichcote himself was a member of a clerical circle of London incumbents who met regularly in each other’s homes to discuss topics of preaching and to prepare a series of cheap tracts explaining basic Anglican doctrine to the laity. Steven Pincus has noted that this group included John Sharp, John Tillotson, Symon Patrick, and Edward Stillingfleet, with the occasional participation of Robert Grove, Nicholas Stratford, Thomas Tenison, Richard Cumberland, Edward Fowler and Richard Kidder.^[75] Sharp’s son and biographer, Thomas Sharp, provided a slightly different list of participants: Sharp, Whichcote, Tillotson, Stillingfleet, and Patrick, as well as William Beveridge, Samuel Cradock, Benjamin Calamy, William Sherlock, William Wake, William Cave, and William Clagett. This list was quite similar to Bishop Burnet’s well-known list of ‘Latitudinarians’.^[76]

It would, of course, be erroneous to conflate these groups with the original Cambridge circle, nor should we lump them together uncritically as ‘Latitudinarians’. We may notice, however, that some of the men listed here had contacts with the original Cambridge group, as we have seen, and that some of them did become so-called Latitudinarian bishops following the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Toleration: Sharp, Tillotson, Patrick, Stillingfleet, Grove, Stratford, Tenison, Cumberland, Fowler, Kidder, Beveridge, and Wake. From Burnet’s list of ‘Latitudinarians’, we should add Burnet himself, John Wilkins, and William Lloyd to this cohort of bishops.^[77] Much more research is needed on these overlapping circles to discover more links between these men, the content of their preaching and writing, and the ways in which they adopted some aspects of Cambridge Platonist teaching and rejected others. I have already begun to use a method suggested to me by Sarah Hutton, which involves tracing the use of particular scriptural texts through sermons by a number of preachers to find their similarities and differences.^[78] My future research plans include work in this area, in an attempt to assess the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century influence of Cambridge Platonism on English divinity and the theological character of the Church of England. As mentioned earlier, I believe that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Cambridge Platonism, namely a soteriology of deiformity and participation in God, may be absent from the moral preaching and natural religion of the Latitudinarians, but the present state of research will not yet allow a firm conclusion on that point.

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Conclusion: circle, network, constellation

This article has presented the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians as a series of overlapping circles, networks, and constellations. Membership of any of the loose groupings mentioned above does not prove that an individual was a Platonist. Indeed, without a discussion of a person’s writings and ideas – which has been absent from this article – no such claim could be substantiated. Further, neither ‘Cambridge Platonist’ nor ‘Latitudinarian’ should be used to indicate a hard and fast category which fails to allow for significant individual differences. What is suggested is that when the ideas and attitudes of the persons mentioned in this article are examined with care – ideas such as the absolute goodness of God, the freedom of the will and personal moral responsibility, and an undogmatic attitude towards the Christian faith – it will be found that they took shape within overlapping circles which were also bound together by ties of family and friendship. The other articles in this introduction and the texts in the sourcebook will present those ideas much more fully. My hope is that those ideas can be found to have been shared and developed within a human context and that we might look with interest at more minor figures, who appear to be on the edges of one circle or another, to discover their particular responses to the mid-seventeenth-century Platonic revival in Cambridge.