ABSTRACT
Samuel Hartlib’s network functioned quite literally as an information factory, creating what he deemed useful knowledge – not just knowledge for its own sake, but knowledge that might be useful in constructing a new world. Hartlib was “the Marin Mersenne of Protestant England,” an intelligencer and intellectual broker who was described by his lifelong friend John Dury as “the hub of the axletree of knowledge” – thus the perfect person to function as the hub of an early modern information network. Hartlib would have many temporary collaborators over the course of his career, as dictated by particular projects, political changes, and the vicissitudes of war, but John Dury and Jan Amos Comenius were perhaps his closest and most enduring allies. Yet throughout his career, Hartlib had been an active and important part of that design, and those who saw “ex bibliotheca S. H.” on a publication had trusted to his judgment.
