John Wilkins (1614–1672): New Essays is a superb collection of essays that comprise volume 20 in the series “Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions”. The ten contributors present engaging and well documented essays and persuasively argue that Wilkins’ career and writings, not only his celebrated An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668), are particularly relevant to an informed understanding of the interrelationships of religion, science, politics, and higher education in 17th-century England.

References

Cressey, David

2006 “Early Modern Space Travel and the English Man in the Moon”. The American Historical Review III.961–982.

Hüllen, Werner

1986 “The Paradigm of John Wilkins’ Thesaurus ”. The History of Lexicography ed. by Reinhard R. K. Hartman, 115–123. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Koerner, Konrad

1990 “On ‘Unrewriting the History of Linguistics’”. History and Historiography of Linguistics: Papers from the Fourth International Conference on the History of Language Sciences (ICHoLS IV) Trier, 24–28 August 1987 ed. by Hans-Josef Niederehe & Konrad Koerner, 63–78. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lewis, Rhodri

2007 Language, Mind, and Nature: Artificial languages in England from Bacon to Locke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Pres.

Shagan, Ethan

2011 The Rule of Moderation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro, Barbara

1968 “Latitudinarianism and Science in Seventeenth-Century England”. Past and Present 40.16–41.

Shapiro, Barbara

1969 John Wilkins (1614–1672): An Intellectual Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wilkins, John

1638 The Discovery of a World in the Moone Or, A Discourse Tending to Prove that ’tis probable there may be another habitable World In the Planet. London: Michael Sparkes & Edward Fox.