John Owen, Renaissance Man? The Evidence Of Edward Millington’s Bibliotheca Oweniana (1684)

By Crawford Gribben

[Crawford Gribben is Long Room Hub Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Print Culture at Trinity College Dublin. Ireland.]

The recent surge of interest in John Owen (1616-1683)—high Calvinist theologian, Parliamentary preacher, chaplain to Oliver Cromwell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, and vice-chancellor of Oxford University—has done much to situate its subject within the theological world of the early modern period.[1] This scholarship has emphasized Owen’s importance as a receptor of the medieval Catholic tradition, and the extent to which he interacted with and was celebrated by the European Protestant intelligentsia. These discussions of the breadth of Owen’s intellectual interests and the strength of his international reputation have encouraged a number of scholars to move away from identifying in him the stereotypical attributes of “Puritans.” The new John Owen is a much more cosmopolitan figure, who has been described by Sebastian Rehnman as “a typical Renaissance man,” a description which was repeated in the subtitle and throughout the contents of Carl R. Trueman’s book John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man.2 But these scholars have simultaneously avoided theorizing the “Renaissance man” concept, or discussing its wider implications for the historiography of Puritanism. While their work has concentrated on Owen’s interaction with Medieval and Reformation theological traditions, it has often failed to take into account the evidence of the extent of his engagements with wider aspects of early modern culture. As the reported contents of his library suggest, Owen may have been much more of a “Renaissance man” than many of his students have been prepared to admit.

I. The Form And Content Of Bibliotheca Oweniana

The significance and extent of Owen’s engagement with Renaissance culture is perhaps best illustrated by Bibliotheca Oweniana (1684), an auction catalogue of the contents of Owen’s library which was prepared by the self-styled “Biblio-polam,” Edward Millington (c. 1636-1703).3 Millington—an “auction impresario” who, throughout the 1680s, was becoming “the most energetic and renowned art auctioneer of his day”—had developed his techniques in book sales from the Dutch pioneers of the trade.4 His techniques appear to have been unusually well polished. Almost twenty years after the sale of Owen’s books, the poet and satirist Thomas Brown wrote An Elegy upon the Lamented Death of Edward Millington, the Famous Auctioner (1703). The poem included vivid descriptions of its subject at work:

Methinks I see him still, with smiling Look,
Amidst the Crowd, and in his Hand a Book:
Then in a fine factious pleasing way,
The Author’s Genius, and his Wit display.
Come, Gentlemen, - come bid me what you please:
Upon my Word, it is a curious Piece.
Done by a Learned Hand, - and neatly bound:
What say you? - come - Pie put it up, - One Pound:
One Pound, - once, twice; fifteen: Who bids; - a Crown:
Then shakes his Head, with an affected Frown,
And says, for Shame, consider, Gentlemen,
The Book is sold in Shops, for more than ten.
Good lack a day! - ‘tis strange, then strikes the Blow,
And in a feigned Passion bids it go.[5]

The book auction catalogue developed as a literary genre in the late 1670s.[6] Bibliotheca Oweniana was therefore one of its first examples. The catalogue’s credibility is enhanced by its advertised associations, for the list of approved distributors of Bibliotheca Oweniana, listed on the pamphlet’s tide page, suggests that Millington intended to promote the Owen sale in exactly those circles in which Owen’s writings would find their most loyal readers. Bibliotheca Oweniana’s advertised distributors included Nathaniel Ponder, the notable London nonconformist printer, who had entered business with Owen’s Exercitations on the Epistle to the Hebrews. . . with an Exposition on the Two First Chapters (1668) as his first publication (there were three other London distributors and one distributor each in Oxford and Cambridge).[7] It may appear unlikely, therefore, that Bibliotheca Oweniana could include materials that contemporary readers of Owen within the nonconformist networks of the 1680s would have believed unsuitable for the man described by such a hostile witness as the secretary of state Sir Leoline Jenkins as “the Bell-weather of Independents.”[8] As a salesman, of course, Millington was keen to maximize his market, to move beyond the restrictions of the enduring Puritan underworld, and his preface “To the reader” reiterated the social elevation of his “Gentlemen the Buyers,” evidence of the habitual rhetorical inflation of customers that Brown’s elegy would later satirize: “Come, Gentlemen . . . consider, Gentlemen” (lines 20, 26).[9] Furthermore, as Bibliotheca Oweniana should be situated within the context of Milling-ton’s undoubted genius for sales, and therefore read as a coercive literary production, its structure and contents should be approached with some degree of caution. Bibliotheca Oweniana was not the catalogue of a library, but the catalogue of a purported library sale; and Millington, its compiler, was represented by Brown as nothing less than the consummate salesman: “How many prety Stories would he tell, / To inhaunce the Price.”[10] And in Bibliotheca Oweniana. “being generally fair, and well-bound, sufficiently inviting, both as to their Editions and Binding,” as Millington put it, the books of the leading Independent theologian of the day were being advertised as eminently worthy of the custom of London’s book-buying public.[11]

The provenance and genre of Bibliotheca Owemana therefore calls attention to the question of its reliability as a record of the contents of Owen’s library. It is impossible to demonstrate that the pamphlet had a direct and uncomplicated relationship to the books in Owen’s possession at the moment of his death.[12] But even if the pamphlet’s reliability could be confirmed, it would remain extremely difficult to assess the significance of its listed titles. Bibliotheca Oweniana cannot be a record of all the books that Owen purchased. Furthermore it does not tell us how Owen bought books—whether individually or in lots—so even if the sale catalogue could be equated with the contents of his library we could not assume that he selected each item for a particular reason of interest.[13] Neither do we know how or whether Owen read these books, or the extent to which his reading of books involved the production of marginalia, or the interaction with the existing marginalia of earlier readers—in other words, whether his experience of reading these books was impacted by textual matter that could not be found in any editions other than those in his own possession.[14] Neither can Bibliotheca Oweniana be regarded as an exhaustive record of the books in Owen’s library at the moment of his death. The advertised titles were described in the catalogue as being “sufficiently inviting, both as to their Editions and Binding”;[15] it is impossible to know what became of those volumes in Owen’s possession that could not have been thus described.

Some scholars have attempted to use Bibliotheca Oweniana as a source from which to extrapolate evidence of Owen’s life-long habits of reading. Rehnman has provided a significant account of Owen’s scholarly engagements based on the evidence of the catalogue and the citations in his published work. Yet even those citations are an unreliable guide to the sources of and influences upon Owen’s mental world. Bibliotheca Oweniana contained “hundreds of volumes of Reformed works,” Rehnman has reported; but, he has calculated, a surprisingly small number of its authors were cited by Owen on any more than five occasions: William Ames, Theodore Beza, John Calvin, Franciscus Junius, Johannes Piscator, Gisbertus Voetius, and Hieronymous Zanchius.[16] In any case, the relatively frequent citations of these authors does not prove, as Rehnman seems to suggest that it does, that they “had most influence” on Owen’s thinking—for influence, in intellectual history, is notoriously difficult to calculate, and frequency of citation no more demonstrated authorial approval in the scholarship of the seventeenth century than it does in that of the twenty-first (as this paragraph’s footnoting suggests).[17] By contrast, Owen identified Calvin as one of his principal influences, but referred to Calvin’s Institutes on only four occasions, and listed as his other principal influences Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Theodore Beza, though he did not cite any of their names on any more than five occasions in his published work.[18] Even this list of principal influences may be less significant than it first appears. It is noteworthy, for example, that the list of principal influences did not include the name of John Cotton, whose study of The Keyes of the Kingdom of Heaven (1644) proved elemental in Owen’s rapid movement from the Presbyterian to the Independent form of church government, with all of its political, social, and career implications; nor does it include the names of any of the medieval scholastic theologians whose works did so much to shape the method of Owen’s doctrinal polemic. And, of course, the list of influences might not mean anything anyway: it is always possible that an individual’s explanation of their intellectual evolution may simply be mistaken.[19]

Bibliotheca Oweniana therefore provides no clues as to how, when, or why its listed contents were included in Owen’s library. Some books may have been collected for the purposes of scholarly interaction; some were likely for edification; others were standard reference materials; some may have been purchased for reasons of pleasure; others may have been retained for sentimental reasons, or merely by reasons of trivial circumstance. Nor does the catalogue explain the means by which Owen’s library had appeared for public sale. It does not document, for example, how many of Owen’s books were distributed privately by his executors in the days after his death in August 1683: his will had not provided for such a distribution, but it did require executors to pass small sums to a range of godly preachers, and it is possible that books disappeared during this period for reasons of loyal sentiment, ambitious covetousness, or political expediency.[20] Great claims cannot therefore be made for the contents of Bibliotheca Oweniana.[21] Perhaps the only thing that can be said with any degree of certainty about the titles listed in the catalogue is that they included works that Owen regarded as worth owning at the time of his death.

But even when this series of qualifications is taken into account, the catalogue can still be understood as providing a great deal of useful information about the contents it describes. While it gives no hint as to the date of accession or the provenance of each title, it does include the basic bibliographical information that potential purchasers of the library would value—authors, titles, places and dates of publication, and these data offer some limitation on questions of dates of acquisition. Some items were also described as being “gilt and letter’d.”[22] (The copy available on Early English Books Online may also include proposed or achieved prices for some of this material.) For the convenience of readers, the catalogue was presented in two discrete parts, each with separate pagination, dealing in turn with titles in French and the classical languages, and then with texts in English and a single title in Welsh. The books were generally listed in alphabetical order. In some sections this arrangement is not complete; for example, in “Divinity in Folio,” the alphabetical order extends throughout the first ninety-eight items, but does not extend to the final forty-five items.[23] In other sections the alphabetical arrangement is continued by the author’s surname, or, where that is not available, by title. The policy of arrangement suggests that the compiler of the catalogue—whether Millington or an assistant— did not recognize some of Owen’s own writings. One item is listed in the “W” section as “Ways and means of understanding the mind of God” (1678), but its title is prefaced, apparently as an afterthought, as being “Dr Owen’s” (ii. 15). Owen’s other material had appeared earlier in the section, listed under its author’s name.

But the books in Bibliotheca Oweniana are also arranged according to size.[24] The first part lists “Libri Theologici” in folio (45 items, i. 1-4), in quarto (273 items, i. 4-10), in octavo and duodecimo (423 items, i. 10-19); then “Libri Miscellanei, viz. Philolgici, Historici, Geographici, &c,” in folio (135 items, i. 19-22), quarto (147 items, i. 23-26), octavo and duodecimo (295 items, i. 26-32). These lists are followed by another list of Greek and Latin manuscripts (32 items, i. 32). The second part—comprised of English-language texts—includes items of “Divinity” in folio (143 items, ii. 1-3), quarto (317 items, ii. 4-10), octavo (380 items, ii. 10-18), “twelves, &c.” (290 items, ii. 18-24); and “Miscellanies, viz. History, Philology, Geography, &c.” in folio (95 items, ii. 25-27), quarto (51 items, ii. 27-28), and in “Octavo, Twelves” (185 items, ii. 28-30). A final section lists bound volumes of tracts (13 items, ii. 30). Of course, it is significant that Owen’s library was being organized according to its items’ size, content, and language—and particularly significant that the separation of English and non-English language materials was being reinforced by the non-continuous pagination within the booklet, suggesting the possibility that each part could have been designed for discrete publication. The format of Bibliotheca Oweniana therefore suggests that Millington was advertising the sale to those “Gentlemen the Buyers” who had no ability to read Owen’s classical or foreign-language material, and who might want rapid access to his English-language texts. It is significant that the theological material preceded the “miscellaneous.” Those who were interested in perusing the contents of Owen’s library would likely have been most aware of his theological interests. It was therefore hardly surprising that Millington chose to advertise Owen’s “Greek and Latin Fathers, his different Editions of the Councils, his Church Histories, and Rabbinical Authors, together with great variety of the Bibles in the Oriental Languages” as the “Volumes preserved, and esteemed by him as the Choice and Curious to his Death.” But, Millington continued, this list of the “Choice and Curious” also included an “almost compleat Collection of the Historians, Poets, Geographers, Philosophers, and Lexicographers, in Greek, Latin, &c.”[25] He might have also added that the library’s owner had been something of a “Renaissance man,” for there is evidence to suggest that the contents of Owen’s library showed him engaged with his contemporary culture in much broader terms than merely those of the theological.

II. Bibliotheca Oweniana And Renaissance Literary Culture

What Millington did explain was that Owen had been “a Generous Buyer and great Collector of the best Books. . . tis needless further to intimate to the World the great Opportunities he had, his constant Readiness to buy what at any time presented it self that was rare and useful.”[26] Far from emphasizing Owen’s wide-ranging cultural engagements, however, Millington’s rhetoric identified its subject with the mental seriousness that functioned as an elemental part of the self-fashioning of late seventeenth-century Dissent. Millington’s “useful” is a key term in the developing Puritan myth. In its classic expression, the myth exaggerates the dull, dour mendacity of the “Puritans” of whom Owen is believed to be typical; “increasingly narrow-minded, sectarian and dull,” as Neil Keeble has aptly put it.[27] It downplays Owen’s controversial penchant for long hair and fashionable clothing, his cocked hat and Spanish leather boots; and overlooks his claim not to be “remote from the highways of culture” and his facility in Latin verse.[28] This utilitarianism has been cited to explain the terms of Owen’s engagement with the non-theological cultures of the Renaissance. It seizes upon, but refuses to move beyond, Owen’s own admission that literature and the “other branches of learning” should be “ready handmaids” to theology.[29] Rehnman, for example, has explained that Owen’s reading of non-theological literature was intended to provide “a resource ... in defending and establishing Reformed thought,” and his Divine Discourse provides extensive and impressive evidence to sustain the veracity of this claim.[30] There are, he continues, “several instances where non-Christian authors are used by Owen for a more doctrinal purpose. Throughout Theologoumena classical philosophers witness to the universal access to and degeneration of the natural knowledge of God, and in The Death of Death references to classical literature abound on the subject of the origin of human sacrifices.”[31] Rehnman further argues that “it is clear that Owen owned books covering the entire catholic tradition, indicating an interest in [a] great many currents of thought, and that not only had he mastered these literary resources but that he exploited them in the service of the Reformed faith.”[32] Elsewhere, Steve Griffiths agrees: Owen was “willing to draw on, or allude to, sayings and thoughts from the philosophers and poets when they accorded with scriptural teaching.”[33] These claims are valid, insofar as they go, but the contents of Bibliotheca Oweniana suggests that Owen’s engagement with the imaginative literature of his contemporary culture went much further than merely the utilitarian and the pragmatic. Owen’s library appears to have been superbly stocked with classical texts, and his knowledge of that literature was evident in his own ability to comment on the poetry of the Augustan age. But the form of this observation is equally important: it was made in a Latin poem attributed to Owen and published on the first page of Musarum Oxoniensum (1654), a collection of verse in the classical and biblical languages celebrating the Lord Protector. This is evidence (at least) that Owen’s classical knowledge was not always reduced to supporting his theological cause. As Keeble has put it, Owen’s commitment to the promotion of godliness was “not at all at odds” with his “continuing commitment to academic and bookish values.”[34] Some of the godly literature he appears to have collected would go on to attain classic status. The catalogue did not contain an edition of Andrew Marvell’s poetry in either manuscript or print (though his collected poetic works had appeared in 1681), but it did include three copies of his Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672), the proofs of which Owen is believed to have read. One copy was described as “filleted and gilt” (ii. 13), and another was described as having a “gilt Back” (ii. 14)—and each of these copies was catalogued as “divinity.” (The catalogue also contained Transproser rehears’d [Oxford, 1673; Wing/L1020; ii. 14], Richard Leigh’s anonymous prose attack on Catholic sedition and Marvell’s sexuality, though its title is misspelled in the catalogue as “Transposer rehears’d.”) Similarly, the catalogue included John Bunyan’s A Defence of the Doctrine of Justification by Faith (London, 1672; Wing/B5507; ii. 4); his Light for them that Sit in Darkness (London, 1675; Wing/B5554; ii. 11), listed in the catalogue under its subtitle, “Discourse of Jesus Christ”; and, of course, a copy of Pilgrim’s Progress (London, 1678; Wing/B5557; ii. 14), which Owen is known to have recommended to his own publisher, Nathaniel Ponder. (Again, the catalogue also included one item of anti-Bunyan polemic, T. P’s Serious Reflections on Mr Bunyan’s Confession of Faith [1672], which is not listed in the STG.) Other significant volumes were included in the lists of miscellaneous texts, including Milton’s Defensio (London, 1651; Wing/M2168B; i. 23), his Epistolarum familiarium liber unus (London, 1674; Wing/ M2117; i. 31), and his History of Britain (London, 1677; Wing/M2121; ii. 30). Owen’s interest in Susanna’s Apologie against the Elders. Or A Vindication of Susanna Parr; One of those two Women lately Excommunicated by Mr Lewis Stycley, and his Church in Exeter (Oxford, 1659; Wing [2d ed.]/P551; ii. 16) was almost certainly more closely related to its ecclesiological value than to the aesthetic and gender-theoretical features that have become the basis of its modern popularity, and the same may be said of John Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr (the catalogue’s 1602 edition is not listed in the STG). But it is entirely possible—though the myth could never countenance it—that Owen engaged with contemporary literary culture for no purpose other than his own entertainment.

It is probably fair to say that Owen’s preferences in entertainment have not been a key theme in recent scholarship on Puritan studies. Very little research has been published on, for example, Owen’s use of poetry. The assumptions that lie behind this neglect overlook two kinds of evidence. Firstly, they assume a necessary disjunction between exhortatory and imaginative literature, and imagine that “Puritans” must always have opted for the former. Here the myth ignores the long tradition of Puritan poetry, which worked to reinforce the values and ambitions of the reforming pulpit. And it seems that Owen was an owner of this kind of godly writing. The Bibliotheca Oweniana included such exhortatory material, as the full title of its work by George Wither suggests: Britain’s Remembrancer containing a Narration of the Plague lately past; A Declaration of the Mischiefs Present; and a Prediction of Judgments to Come; (if Repentance Prevent Not) (London, 1628; STG [2d ed.]/ 25899; ii. 30). Secondly, this scholarly neglect downplays the possibility that Puritans like Owen may have read contemporary literature simply for its own sake— perhaps, even, to relax. Bibliotheca Oweniana contains a wide range of early modern material—many editions of Hobbes, several volumes of Gomenius, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (Amsterdam, 1671; p. 64), an edition of the Sybilline Oracles (Oxford, 1680; Wing/V701; i. 28), lots of Machiavelli, and even some Petrarch (1601; i. 29). It also includes such evidently non-utilitarian titles as F. W’s A Treatise of Warm Beer (Cambridge, 1641; Wing/W26; ii. 30) and John Playford’s A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick (3d ed., London, 1660; Wing [2d ed.]/P2449; ii. 30). But it also suggests that Owen was engaging with a range of contemporary imaginative literature in English. Of course, there was some restriction in genre. There was not much drama in Bibliotheca Oweniana. A rare included example is Thomas Tonkis’s Lingua, or the Combate of the Tongue and Five Senses, which was published in several editions throughout the seventeenth century, and which the Bibliotheca Oweniana described only as a “comedy” (London, 1657; Wing/T1842; ii. 30)—but the catalogue did include such anti-theatrical polemic as John Rainold’s The Overthrow of Stage-Playes (Oxford, 1629; STG [2d ed.]/20618; ii. 9). The catalogue did, however, list plenty of English Renaissance poetry, none of which, as far as I can tell, is cited in Owen’s publications. These titles would include a volume of works by Edmund Spenser, which included The Faerie Queene and The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1613; STC [2d ed.]/23083.7; ii. 26); the “Learned and Elegant Works” of Fulke Greville, the Lord Brooke (London, 1633; STG [2d ed.]/12361; ii. 26), an edition which omitted the politically and ecclesiastically radical poems that would appear in 1670; George Herbert’s The Temple (Cambridge, 1633; STG [2d ed.]/13183; ii. 29), as well as Herbert’s Remains, or, Sundry Pieces of that Sweet Singer of the Temple, Mr George Herbert (Oxford, 1652; Thomason/E.1279[l]; ii. 21); poems by Edmund Waller (London, 1645; Wing/W511; ii. 30), a celebrant of life at the Caroline court; Fragmenta aurea, a “Collection of . . . Incomparable pieces” by Sir John Suckling, posthumously published but nevertheless appearing only five or so years after his attempt to bring the army to the aid of Charles I (London, 1646; Wing/S6126; ii. 30); Henry More’s Philosophical Poems of the Soul, which reflected its author’s developing latitudinarianism in its interest in Platonic theory and the Copernican and Descartian revolutions in knowledge (Cambridge, 1647; Wing/ M2670; ii. 30); the unfinished epic, Gondibert an Hheroick Poem, by Sir William D’Avenant, a writer of Caroline court masques and a courtier of Henrietta Maria during the civil wars (London, 1651; Wing/D326; ii. 30); John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667’; Wing/M2137; ii. 28); the works of Abraham Cowley (3d ed., 1672; Wing/C6651; ii. 26), another of Henrietta Maria’s courtiers, and the author of a celebrated attack on the godly The Puritan and the Papist (1643), as well as the celebration of Royalist military successes, The Civil War (1656); Poems by the most Deservedly Admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda (London, 1678; Wing/P2035; ii. 26); and the Poems and Songs by the well-known painter of miniatures, Thomas Flatman (3d ed., 1682; Wing/F1153; ii. 29). It was, with the exception of works by Cowley, Flatman, and Philips, an impressive list of first editions of contemporary poets; and, with the exception of Flatman, an impressive list of some of those seventeenth-century poetry publications that would warrant ongoing literary appreciation. Not only was Owen a collector of first editions of contemporary poets, he was also extremely discerning in identifying those poets whose reputations would best endure. But the collections of English-language poetry in Bibliotheca Oweniana were strikingly unorthodox for a senior Cromwellian. Owen might have been forgiven for his library’s including a stray volume with Royalist inclinations. But D’Avenant, Cowley, Waller, and Suckling were all vocally opposed to the values of the Cromwellian administration, and Milton, forty years earlier, had been exposed as a notorious heretic. Bibliotheca Oweniana may have constituted a remarkable disclosure of Owen’s broad cultural engagements; but it may also have demonstrated that Owen possessed a significant collection of inexpedient poetry and prose, the political and religious inclinations of which must have staggered the unwary.

But the credibility of the catalogue is called into question when one considers what appears to be missing. The catalogue lists surprisingly few Bibles. Bibliotheca Oweniana indicates that Owen owned one copy of Tyndale’s New Testament (no date or edition information was provided; ii. 14), and another (undated) edition of Tyndale’s Pentateuch (ii. 19). He also appears to have owned only one copy of the Authorised Version, “interleaved, ruled and gilt” (Cambridge, 1668; Wing [CD-ROM] /H2196; ii. 4); no copy of the Geneva Bible; and one “Welch” Bible, Y Bibl cyssegr-lan sef yr Hen Destament a’r Newydd (London, 1677; Wing/B2814; ii. 10)—and this despite Henry M. Knapp’s claim that Owen made careful use of translations by Erasmus and Beza.[35] Similarly, the catalogue contains almost no examples of Bible commentaries. This is a remarkable collection of texts for someone whose career was spent in the pulpit, and surely evidence that Bibliotheca Oweniana does not represent the totality of Owen’s book collection.

But the question of whether many of these books belonged to Owen at all is highlighted by the quantity and distribution of material recorded as being published—and therefore obtained—in the last few years of Owen’s life. The Young Man’s Guide to Preferment (London, 1682; Wing/Wl170; ii. 32) was only one of very many recent publications to be included within the lists of Owen’s books. (It seems uncertain why Owen was obtaining self-help career guides one year before his death at the tender age of 67.) But this was not a rare example: the catalogue included a notably large number of texts published in the years immediately before Owen’s death. Thus, for example, 185 titles were listed in “Miscellanies, Octavo, Twelves,” and forty-four (24 percent) of these titles were published in or after 1680. The distribution of these later publications is especially significant. Thirty-four of these later publications (77 percent of the total forty-four texts published in or after 1680) appeared in the last forty titles listed in the section. In other words, the overwhelming majority of later publications appeared at the end of this section of the catalogue, which does not appear to be organized in any discernable fashion. In the comparable section of English-language divinity, thirty- seven (13 percent) of its total 290 titles had been published (and therefore obtained) in or after 1680. Again, these later publications were overwhelmingly distributed at the end of the printed list. Some thirty-five of these titles appeared in the last seventy-five titles listed in the section (representing 47 percent of the total). In other words, if the catalogues are to be taken at face value, Owen was obtaining far more books on “miscellaneous” topics than on divinity during his last few years. Or, by contrast, the distribution of these later publications may suggest that, after cataloguing Owen’s actual books, with all of their variety in dates of publication, Millington decided to pack the catalogue with recently published material he hoped to sell on the back of Owen’s reputation. After all, as his elegist was later to observe, the auctioneer was the consummate salesman: “How many prety Stories would he tell, / To inhaunce the Price.”[36]

Perhaps, therefore, against the assumptions of most recent Owen scholarship, Bibliotheca Oweniana has no real relationship to Owen’s library holdings—perhaps it is no more than a gimmick designed to enhance the status of Millington’s latest sale—or perhaps its apparently incomplete state bears witness to the rapid disbursement of large parts of Owen’s collection.[37] Whatever the case, we would need to know much more about the compilation of Bibliotheca Oweniana before we could use it as a guide to Owen’s literary interests. Bibliotheca Oweniana does not tell us how, when, why, or perhaps even whether Owen ever purchased, possessed, or read the contents it describes.

My conclusion is, therefore, that Bibliotheca Oweniana is a less readily reliable or explainable text than scholars might expect. It is possible, as those scholars who see Owen as a “Renaissance man” have come to contend, that Bibliotheca Oweniana provides further proof that even the most eminent of the Cromwellian divines did not live in hermetically sealed environments.[38] And, advancing this claim, Bibliotheca Oweniana may provide evidence that Owen was engaging with contemporary literary culture in a much broader way than many of these scholars have contended; further proof that, as Carl Trueman has put it, “Owen can be better accessed when set in a wider context than the narrow Anglican world which the term Puritan connotes.”[39] But it is equally possible that Bibliotheca Oweniana is so unreliable a source that its evidence cannot be used to advance any but the most qualified claims concerning Owen’s intellectual interests. John Owen may well have been a “Renaissance man.” But the character and content of his engagement with Renaissance literary contexts cannot be easily confirmed. We need clearer evidence than that provided in Edward Millington’s sales catalogue, Bibliotheca Oweniana.[40]

Notes

1. The most recent biographical account of Owen’s life is Richard L. Greaves, “Owen, John (1616—1683),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.; Oxford University Press, May 2005), http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/21016?docPos=4 (accessed May 5. 2010). The most significant recent studies of Owen have tended to focus on his contribution to the intellectual world of European Protestantism. These studies have concentrated on explicating his theology proper, his soteriology and his theology of sanctification. Studies of Owen’s theology proper include Carl R. Trueman, The Claims of Truth: John Owen’s Trinitarian Theology (Carlisle, U.K.: Paternoster, 1998); Richard Daniels, The Christology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2004); Kelly M. Kapic, Communion with God: Relations Between the Divine and the Human in the Theology of John Owen (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); Carl R. Trueman, John Owen: Reformed Catholic, Renaissance Man (Alder shot: Ashgate, 2007); Brian Kay, Trinitarian Spirituality: John Owen and the Doctrine of God in Western Devotion (Studies in Christian History and Thought; Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007). Studies of Owen’s soteriology include A. C. Clifford, Atonement and Justification: English Evangelical Theology, 1640—1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Henry M. Knapp, “John Owen’s Interpretation of Hebrews 6:4-6: Eternal Perseverance of the Saints in Puritan Exegesis,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003): 29-52- Studies of Owen’s theology of sanctification include Randall C. Gleason, John Calvin and John Owen on Mortification (New York: Peter Lang, 1995); Jon D. Payne, John Owen on the Lord’s Supper (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2004). A general survey of the method and content of Owen’s theology is provided in Robert W. Oliver, ed., John Owen: The Man and His Theology (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian & Reformed, 2002); and Sebastian Rehnman, Divine Discourse: The Theological Methodology of John Owen (Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post- Reformation Thought; Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2002).
2. Rehnman, DivineDiscourse, 25; Trueman, JohnOwen, 12-17.
3. Millington identifies himself as “Bibliopolam” on the title page of Edward Millington, BibliothecaOweniana (London, 1684). On Millington, see Brian Cowan, “Millington, Edward,” in OxfordDictionaryofNationalBiography (online ed.), http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/52142 (accessed May 5, 2010); on his importance in the 1680s, see Jason McElligott, “Roger Morrice and the Reputation of Eikon Basilike in the 1680s,” TheLibrary, 7th series, 6 (2005): 119-32.
4. On sales of books in the early modern period, see John Lawler, BookAuctionsinEnglandintheSeventeenthCentury(1676-1700) (London: Elliot Stock, 1898); and Cynthia Wall, “The English Auction: Narratives of Dismantlings,” Eighteenth-CenturyStudies 31 (1997): 1-25. John Milton may have sold part of his library through Millington in 1670; Barbara K. Lewalski, TheLifeofJohnMilton:ACriticalBiography (Blackwell Critical Biographies; Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 490.
5. Thomas Brown, An Elegy upon the Lamented Death of Edward Millington, the Famous Auctioner (London: John Nutt, 1703), lines 9-12, 20-29.
6. Michael Hunter et al., eds., A Radical’s Books: The Library Catalogue of Samuel Jeake of Rye, 1623—90 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1999), xv. See also Giles Mandelbrote, “From the Warehouse to the Counting-House: Booksellers and Bookshops in Late Seventeenth-Century London,” in A Genius for Letters: Booksellers and Bookselling from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century (ed. Robin Myers and Michael Harris; Winchester: Oak Knoll, 1995), 49-84.
7. Beth Lynch, “Ponder, Nathaniel (1640—1699),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.), http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/67702 (accessed May 5, 2010); Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana, title page.
8. The National Archives, Public Record Office, SP 63/341, 158.
9. Brown, Elegy, “To the reader,” n.p.
10. Brown, Elegy, lines 63-64.
11. Brown, Elegy, “To the reader,” n.p.
12. This kind of library analysis has been done by Hunter et al., A Radical’s Books.
13. On the purchase of books in the early modern period, see ibid., xxxii-xli.
14. Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), passim; and Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 21-62.
15. Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana, “Conditions of sale,” n.p.
16. Rehnman, Divine Discourse, 21-44.
17. Ibid., 21.
18. Ibid., 22; John Owen, The Works of John Owen (ed. William Goold; 24 vols.; London: Johnstone & Hunter, 1850-1853), 4:229.
19. For a recent discussion of the notion of influence in Owen’s milieu, see Beth Lynch, “Uses and Abuses: John Bunyan, Philip Stubbes, and the Ambiguity of Literary Influence,” Seventeenth Century 22 (2007): 283-304.
20. The Correspondence of John Owen (ed. Peter Toon; Cambridge: James Clarke & Co., 1970), 181-85.
21. Jeffrey R. Collins, The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 238, reads Bibliotheca Oweniana as a catalogue of books owned by Owen. This claim is repeated by Kelly M. Kapic, who states that the Bibliotheca Oweniana was “an exhaustive list of Owen’s books composed by the auctioneers who sold Owen’s library after his death” (Communion with God: 29 n. 47); and True-man, who states that Bibliotheca Oweniana was Owen’s “library catalogue” (John Owen, 7 n. 9). This approach is nuanced in Robert G. Clouse, “Johann Heinrich Alsted and English Millennialism,” HTR 62 (1969): 199 n. 26, though Bibliotheca Oweniana is described as a “library list.”
22. See the three examples in Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana, ii. 1.
23. Ibid., ii. 1-3.
24. As in the library catalogue of Samuel Jeake (Hunter et al., A Radical’s Books, xxx).
25. Millington, Bibliotheca Oweniana, “To the reader,” n.p.
26. Ibid.
27. N. H. Keeble, The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1987), vii.
28. Greaves, “Owen, John” (http://www.oxforddnb.com.elib.tcd.ie/view/article/21016PdocPos=4). This description of Owen was provided by Anthony Wood, Athenae Oxoniensis (ed. P. Bliss; 4 vols.; Oxford, 1813—1818), vol. 4, col. 98. The quotation comes from The Oxford Orations of Dr. John Owen (ed. Peter Toon; Callington, U.K.: Gospel Communications, 1971), 8. Owen’s Latin verse appears in Musarum Oxoniensum (1654), 1; for the context of this collection, see David Norbrook. Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627—1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 301.
29. The Oxford Orations of Dr. John Owen, 15. See also Richard L. Greaves, The Puritan Revolution and Educational Thought: Background to Reform (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1969). passim.
30. Rehnman, Divine Discourse, 27. Steve Griffiths makes the same point with regard to Owen’s clothing when he argues that “Owen chose to wear such outrageous clothes to make himself distinct from the various professors and theologians with whom he differed so much in theological and doctrinal outlook ... his sense of dress was a theological statement of sorts.” Griffiths offers no evidence to support this claim; Redeem the Time: Sin in the Writings of John Owen (Fearn, U.K.: Mentor. 2001), 162-63.
31. Rehnman, Divine Discourse, 27.
32. Ibid., 181.
33. Griffiths, Redeem the Time, 224.
34. Keeble, Literary Culture of Nonconformity, 165.
35. Knapp, “John Owen’s Interpretation of Hebrews 6:4-6,” 45.
36. Brown, Elegy, lines 63-64.
37. This assumption is held more generally than in Owen studies alone; see Nicholas McDowell. The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630—1660 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 94-95; and Hunter et al., A Radical’s Books, xv, where auction sales catalogues are assumed to be accurate in providing “a somewhat wider view of book ownership in the period, in terms both of the type of individuals whose collections are documented, and the size of collections recorded.”
38. For further illustration of this point, see Edward Holberton, ‘“Soe Honny from the Lyon came’: The 1657 Wedding-Masques for the Protector’s Daughters,” Seventeenth Century 20 (2005): 97-112.
39. Trueman, John Owen, 127.
40. I would like to thank Nigel Smith for an illuminating conversation on the subject of Owen’s reading Anna Ghahoud and Grainne McLoughlin for assistance with Owen’s Latin, and Mark Sweetnam for his comments on an earlier draft of this article.