¹ T. Hobbes, The correspondence, ed. N. Malcolm (2 vols., Oxford, 1994) (=vols. vi and vii of the Clarendon edition of the works of Thomas Hobbes).

² Ibid., i, p. li.

³ This text, which survives in a copy sent by Payne to Gilbert Sheldon (British Library (BL), MS Harl. 6,942, no. 153), was discovered and published by Jeffrey Collins; see his ‘Christian ecclesiology and the composition of Leviathan: a newly discovered letter to Thomas Hobbes’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), pp. 217–31. See also J. R. Collins, The allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), pp. 140–2. We say ‘in effect’ here, because Payne was unaware of the preparation of Leviathan at that time.

⁴ Lambeth Palace Library, MS 2,872, fos. 32–3. See E. G. W. Bill, A catalogue of manuscripts in Lambeth Palace Library, MSS 2341-3119 (London, 1983), p. 97. We are very grateful to the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library for permission to publish the text of this item, and to Dr Rachel Cosgrave, the Deputy Archivist, for her help. We are also extremely grateful to Dr Arnold Hunt, who not only informed us of this item, but also provided a transcription; in addition, he supplied some of the further information given here about its provenance.

⁵ Sotheby's, Catalogue of a valuable and interesting assemblage of autograph letters … including the collection of the late Edward Skegg (London, 1842) (Sotheby's catalogues, University Microfilms edn (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973–6), part 1, reel 56), lot 186. The error here in the date – which should be ‘August 30th’ – is hard to explain. It is clear, from the contents of the letter and from other evidence, that Barlow was not in frequent correspondence with Hobbes, so it is extremely unlikely that two different letters are involved.

⁶ Sotheby's, Catalogue of the collection of manuscripts formed by the late Mr. William Pickering (London, 1854), lot 83. The sale was on 12 December 1854.

⁷ T. Rodd, Catalogue of manuscripts & ancient deeds (London, 1845), item 461.

⁸ Henry Stubbe (1632–76), scholar, controversialist, and (later) physician. Between 1657 and 1660 he served as Deputy Keeper of the Bodleian Library, under Barlow. He had made Hobbes's acquaintance in 1655 or early 1656; the surviving letters from Stubbe to Hobbes date from the period April 1656–October 1659.

⁹ Hobbes's De homine: see below, n. 14.

¹⁰ The bulk of the book (chapters 2–9, out of a total of 15) is on optics.

¹¹ Italics here are used for underlining in the MS. This tag comes from a discussion of envy and reputation in Horace, Epistulae, ii.1, lines 13–14: ‘urit enim fulgore suo, qui praegravat artis / infra se positas; exstinctus amabitur idem’ (‘For the person who outweighs the talents of others inferior to his own burns us with his radiance; once he is extinguished, he too will be loved’).

¹² James Wheldon, the third earl of Devonshire's baker at Chatsworth, worked as Hobbes's amanuensis in the final decades of Hobbes's life, and appears to have put Hobbes's papers in order after his death; similar endorsements by him are found on many of Hobbes's letters.

¹³ Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 420–1. See also Collins, Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes, p. 239.

¹⁴ The Queen's College, Oxford, pressmark FF.g.518: T. Hobbes, Elementorum philosophiae sectio secunda de homine (London, 1658). The title page is inscribed, in Barlow's hand, ‘Lib: T. Barlow ex dono Authoris’. We are very grateful to Ms Tessa Shaw, the Reader Services Librarian, for her help in making this available.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 77 (‘si religio sit cultus externus, quî fit vt fides sit eius p[ar]s’).

¹⁶ Ibid., pp. 77 (‘fides Opinio’), 78 (‘In supernaturalibus, nulli sine miraculis credendum’).

¹⁷ Ibid., p. 78 (the passages, with Barlow's underlined phrases in italics, are as follows: ‘Religio itaque Philosophia non est, sed in omni civitate Lex; & propterea non disputanda est, sed implenda’; ‘Disputantur ea sola quibus unus homo ab alio dissentit; quae propterea de Fide in Deum non sunt’).

¹⁸ Ibid., p. 79 (‘Mors Chr[ist]i non era paena peccatorum nostrorum’). Hobbes's argument was that it was, rather, a sacrifice for our sins.

¹⁹ Ibid., p. 79 (with Barlow's underlining in italics: ‘Siquidem enim peccata essent, quanto quis caeteris hominibus sanctior esset, tanto illi minus credi deberet, ut minus justo’). The phrase ‘splendida peccata’, referring to the virtues of the heathen, was commonly attributed to Augustine, but appears to have been coined by Peter Martyr Vermigli: see the ‘Query’ on this by E. Marshall in Notes and Queries, ser. 5, vol. 6 (1876), p. 87.

²⁰ Details of these, and of the catalogues examined, will be presented in a future article by Mikko Tolonen. He would like to thank Dr Richard Serjeantson for valuable advice and encouragement when he undertook this research.

²¹ Sotheby's, The Bateman heirlooms: catalogue of the collections of engravings & autograph letters formed by the late W. Bateman, esq. & T. Bateman, esq. of Lomberdale House, Youlgrave, Co. Derby (London, 1893) (Sotheby's catalogues, University Microfilms edn (Ann Arbor, MI, 1973–6), part 2, reel 125), lot 143. The ‘portrait’ was presumably a separate item, probably an engraving, added by the Batemans.

²² See M. O'Sullivan, ‘Thomas Bateman’, in The Oxford dictionary of national biography (60 vols., Oxford, 2004), iv, p. 309.

²³ A manuscript of Hobbes's poem (De mirabilibus pecci), now at Chatsworth (MS Hobbes A 1), was formerly in the Batemans' collection, and bears their bookplate.

²⁴ Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 120–1. It may now be added that that letter was sold at Sotheby's on 9 May 1840 (lot 95), for £1 17s, to Thorpe.

²⁵ T. Thorpe, Catalogue of choice autograph letters (London, c. 1834), item 726; Upward of one thousand choice autograph letters (London, 1836), item 451; A catalogue of an extraordinarily interesting collection of autograph letters (London, 1838), item 971; Catalogue for 1840 … autograph letters (London, 1840), item 799; Autograph letters (London, 1843), item 1,841. Copies of these catalogues are held in the Cambridge University Library (CUL): respectively, pressmarks Munby c. 204; Munby c. 209; Munby c. 214; Munby c. 230; Munby c. 235.

²⁶ The mis-match between the nominative ‘Theodorus’ and the genitive ‘Studiosi’ might be explained by supposing that Thorpe had changed the former from the genitive, and had forgotten to change the latter; the text may have ended with some such construction as ‘accept the best wishes of … ’ or ‘if you reply you will gladden the heart of … ’.

²⁷ The entry on Thomas Johnson in H. R. Plomer, A dictionary of the booksellers and printers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London, 1907), pp. 107–8, gives his address as the Key or the Golden Key, St Paul's Churchyard, from 1661 to 1664, but also notes a list of books printed and sold by him in 1658. Presumably Mustert had become a customer at his shop, and was permitted to use it for poste restante.

²⁸ Historisch Genootschap te Groningen, ed., Album studiosorum Academiae Groninganae (Groningen, 1915), p. 66.

²⁹ The professors at Groningen included two well-known critics of Descartes, Samuel Desmarets (Maresius) and Martin Schoock; but an official statement by the university authorities in 1651 about the permissibility of teaching Cartesianism was surprisingly tolerant. See J. Bohatec, Die cartesianische Scholastik in der Philosophie und reformierten Dogmatik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1912), pp. 47–9, 151–3.

³⁰ This information about the family was kindly supplied by Dr Rolf Uphoff, Director of the Stadtarchiv, Emden.

³¹ Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 501–3. As his letter shows, however, Guisony did have some contacts with people who knew Hobbes: Abraham du Prat in Paris, and Henry Stubbe in Oxford.

³² For the evidence of Hobbes's reply to Guisony see ibid., i, p. 505.

³³ T. Thorpe, Autographs of illustrious personages (London, 1833) (CUL, pressmark Munby c. 201), item 306. The orthography here is characteristic of Newcastle: see W. Cavendish, Dramatic works, ed. L. Hulse (Oxford, 1996), e.g. pp. 56 (‘ther’), 71 (‘Whoe’), 102 (‘att’), 115 (‘Exselente’). Welbeck Abbey, Notts., was the principal seat of the marquess of Newcastle; the word ‘tuns’ here may perhaps be a misreading of ‘tubes’ (see below); on Sir Paul Neile see below, n. 42; ‘Powell’ was John Powell, a servant of Newcastle's son Henry Cavendish, Viscount Mansfield, the future second duke of Newcastle (1630–91): for a letter of 2 [/12] November 1661 from John Powell in London to Newcastle's steward at Welbeck, see Nottingham University Library (NUL), MS Pw 1/485.

³⁴ T. Thorpe, Catalogue of royal, noble, and literary autograph letters (London, 1837) (CUL, pressmark Munby c. 213), item 1035.

³⁵ See Hobbes, Correspondence, ii, pp. 524, 801–5, 811–15. That Newcastle continued to take an interest in Hobbes's work is, however, suggested by the catalogue of the collection which included Newcastle's library: this contains Humane nature (1650), Leviathan in English (1651) and Latin (1670), De corpore in Latin (1655) and English (1656), the translation of the Odyssey (1675), De mirabilibus pecci (1678), and Decameron physiologicum (1678): N. Noel, Bibliotheca nobilissimi principis Johannis ducis de Novo-Castro (London, 1719), 1st pagination, pp. 15, 18; 2nd pagination, pp. 41, 42, 58, 63.

³⁶ NUL, MS Pw 1/484; we are very grateful to Manuscripts and Special Collections, the University of Nottingham, for permission to publish this, and to Mrs Linda Shaw for her help. The reference to Saturn here may perhaps reflect Hobbes's interest in the discoveries of Christiaan Huygens concerning Saturn's moon Titan (announced in 1655 in De saturni luna observatio, of which Hobbes received a manuscript copy in 1656: see Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 275–6), and concerning Saturn's ring (announced in 1659 in Systema saturnium). The reference to Jupiter, similarly, may indicate a desire to repeat Galileo's famous observations of the moons of Jupiter or ‘Medicean stars’.

³⁷ NUL, MS Pw 1/668. Most of these telescopes had probably been acquired in Italy by Sir Kenelm Digby: see N. Malcolm and J. A. Stedall, John Pell (1611–1685) and his correspondence with Sir Charles Cavendish: the mental world of an early modern mathematician (Oxford, 2005), p. 503n.

³⁸ NUL, MS Pw 1/406.

³⁹ Chatsworth, MS Hardwick 34, entries for 11 May 1658, 12 and 24 February 1658 [/1659].

⁴⁰ Chatsworth, MS Hobbes E 3. The ones lacking tubes were the three longest, described here as follows: one by Divini (‘for a Tube of 37 Palmes’), the one by Fontana (‘for a Tube of 22 Palmes’), and one by Torricelli (‘for a Tube of 21 palmes’). We are very grateful to Andrew Peppitt, Archivist at Chatsworth, for his help in supplying a copy of this document.

⁴¹ Chatsworth, MS Hardwick 33, entry for 16 April 1658 [/1659]: ‘To M^r Hobbes for Prospective glasses £80’.

⁴² See Ronan, C. A. and Hartley, H., ‘Sir Paul Neile, F.R.S. (1613–1686)’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, 15 (1960), pp. 159–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; A. D. C. Simpson, ‘Sir Paul Neile’, in Oxford dictionary of national biography, xl, pp. 356–7.

⁴³ The catalogue consulted here, entitled ‘E. G. Jacoby research papers’, is held with the Ferdinand Tönnies papers in the Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Kiel. Jacoby, a pupil of Tönnies, edited a collection of Tönnies's writings on Hobbes and Spinoza (Studien zur Philosophie und Gesellschaft im 17. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1975)), and appended to it a detailed listing of Hobbes's known correspondence (pp. 361–75: ‘Epistolarium hobbesianum’).

⁴⁴ For the first two see F. Micanzio, Lettere a William Cavendish, ed. R. Ferrini (Rome, 1987), pp. 251–3, 255–7; the third is NUL, MS Clifton C 559 (of which Jacoby's MS 5/230 is a transcript). We are very grateful to Nicola Frean, of the J. C. Beaglehole Room, Victoria University of Wellington Central Library, for her help in providing copies of Jacoby items.

⁴⁵ The R. B. Adam library relating to Dr. Samuel Johnson and his era (4 vols., London, New York, and Buffalo, NY, 1929–30), iii, pp. 128–9.

⁴⁶ P. Kristeller, ed., Iter italicum (7 vols., London, Leiden, 1962–97), v, p. 401.

⁴⁷ We are very grateful to Susan Halpert, of the Houghton Library, and Andrew Peppitt, Archivist at Chatsworth, for supplying photographs and measurements of these items. The handwriting matches exactly; there is a very small discrepancy in the page-sizes, but this could be explained by supposing that the leaf containing the dedicatory epistle was, after its removal, cut down slightly to fit an album. It seems likely that the Chatsworth MS was acquired in the nineteenth century, by which time the epistle may already have been removed.

⁴⁸ T. Cibber (et al.), The lives of the poets of Great Britain and Ireland (5 vols., London, 1753), II, p. 73.

⁴⁹ Sir William Davenant, Gondibert: an heroick poem (London, 1651), sig. Kkk1r–v.

⁵⁰ We are very grateful to Prof. Timothy Raylor for his comments on this matter.

⁵¹ Society of Antiquaries of London, MS 817/9 (Jackson Collection, File: Malmesbury-Purton), fo. 25. We are very grateful to Prof. John Milton for bringing these items to our attention.

⁵² We are very grateful to the Society of Antiquaries of London for permission to publish this, and to Adrian James, the Assistant Librarian, for his help.

⁵³ In 1675 Elias Ashmole had only just begun to negotiate with Oxford University about the transfer of his collections; work began on building the museum in 1679, and it was opened to the public in 1683.

⁵⁴ On a nearby page in Jackson's notes (MS 817/9, fo. 29v) is a small advertisement cut from a newspaper: ‘For sale, a beautiful, life-size oil painting of the celebrated Thomas Hobbs of Malmesbury. The picture is by one of the old masters, and has been painted several hundred years, and has been greatly admired by all who have seen it. It is at present the property of Mr. J. E. Wigmore, of Nailsworth, and is entrusted to the care of Mr. Bassett, of the George Hotel, Malmesbury, who will be pleased to show it upon application.’ This is annotated: ‘July 1879. Bought by J. E. Jackson from Mr Wigmore of Nailsworth, Aug. 2 1879. A good copy. But some error in the date on it?’ However, on the back of the advertisement, Jackson has written: ‘On the portrait I bought are the figures mdclxv w: fec aetatis suae lxxxv But Hobbes was born 5 April 1588 … so that in 1665 he was only 77 years old’; this matches neither the date ‘1675’, nor the reference to Hobbes's eightieth year.

⁵⁵ Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, Report on the literary, personal and official correspondence and papers of Sir William Petty (1623–1687) (2 vols., London, 1980), i, p. 289.

⁵⁶ This item is now BL MS Add. 72,898, fos. 89–105. It is printed in Sir William Petty, The Petty papers: some unpublished writings, ed. the marquis of Lansdowne (2 vols., London, 1927), ii, pp. 35–9; an English translation is given in Amati, F. and Aspromourgos, T., ‘Petty contra Hobbes: a previously untranslated manuscript’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 46 (1985), pp. 127–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The modern catalogue gives a more accurate description, and offers the dating ‘1660s?’: The British Library catalogue of additions to the manuscripts: the Petty papers [ed. F. Smith] (London, 2000), p. 112. We are very grateful to Dr Kinch Hoekstra for bringing this item to our attention.

⁵⁷ Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 148–50; Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Smith 27, pp. 13–14. This is the scholar, orientalist, and non-juror Thomas Smith (1638–1710); the source from which he obtained the text is not apparent. We are very grateful to Prof. Timothy Raylor for bringing this item to our attention.

⁵⁸ Hobbes, Correspondence, i, pp. 491–3. This manuscript, in Evelyn's hand, is printed in full in Anon., The Carl H. Pforzheimer library: English literature, 1475–1700 (3 vols., New York, 1940), iii, pp. 1205–8. It is now in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin (MS 35a–351). We are very grateful to Prof. Mordechai Feingold for bringing this item to our attention. Unfortunately, as the compiler of the Pforzheimer catalogue notes, there is no mention of the ‘Command’ to Evelyn, nor of his reading, in any of the records or early histories of the Royal Society. Prof. Feingold suggests that these events probably took place in May–June 1661, in connection with the report to the Royal Society by Samuel Tuke on his recent visit to the de Montmor academy (see T. Birch, The history of the Royal Society of London (4 vols., London, 1756–7), i, pp. 23, 26–8).