ABSTRACT
Peter Sterry was born into a London merchant family prosperous enough to give him an education at the 'Puritan seminary' of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. His contemporaries there in the 1630s included the mathematician John Wallis, later an authority on the science of music, as well as the Platonist theologians and philosophers Benjamin Whichcote, Ralph Cudworth, Nathaniel Culverwel and John Smith. Sterry himself owned copies of Marsilio Ficino's works, often citing or paraphrasing him, and the West Sheen community's ethos of spiritual healing owed much to the 'music therapy of the soul' offered by the Florentine philosopher. In its physical dimension, Sterry's image of the strains of music carried over the night air recalls the interest of some of his more Baconian contemporaries in the measurable properties of sound, even if his own concern is with the mystical or aesthetic aspects of the phenomenon.
