Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum

From SOCINIANISM IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND, 1951 by John McLachlan

The high-water mark of foreign Socinian publication . . . was reached in the years following 1665. Then and in 1668 the exiled Socinians in Holland brought to fruition the plan they had long cherished of printing the works of their greatest scholars in a collected edition.¹ This handsome folio edition in eight volumes² containing the writings of Faustus Socinus, Crell, Schlichting, Wollzogen, Stegmann, and Wiszowaty . . . was also intended as an armoury for further Socinian propaganda both within Holland and outside. Sufficient copies were printed to keep the price low³ and numbers were exported to England where they were sold at a reasonable profit. As we have already observed, they quickly found their way into theological libraries, and men of different schools of thought made their acquaintance. Writing some time in January 1669, Dr. John Worthington referred to them in a letter to his friend Henry More of Christ's College, Cambridge : 'The Socinian Treatises are (they say) printed in 6 of 7 Folios'.⁴ More had evidently heard of their publication but not yet set eyes on them. A few months later, Worthington was informed by his friend John Tillotson, the latitudinarian dean and future archbishop of Canterbury, of whom he had made inquiries as to how he might obtain a set of the Bibliotheca, that they were being 'sold by Bee for 8 lib. but I am told they may be had for 6 lib. in Holland, or under.'*

      ¹ The idea of publishing a collection of leading Socinian authors is said to have been first mooted in 1628. The Bibliotheca does not, however, contain the writings of Smalcius, Völkel, Ostorodt, and Moskorzowski, and only a selection of the works of others. The date is given on the title page as 'post annum 1656' (a purposely vague addition). The printer was probably Jacob Aertz Colom (see W. J. Kühler, Het Socinianisme in Nederland (1912), p. 140) and Étienne Courcelles, professor in the Remonstrant college at Amsterdam, assisted in the task of preparing the work for the press.
      ² The works of S. Przipcovius, published in 1692 in a single folio, are usually regarded as making up the set of nine.
      ³ Cf. J. B. Stouppe, La religion des Hollandois, représenté en plusieurs letters (1673)   [..]   The Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum was prohibited from sale in Holland the following year (1674) along with Hobbes's Leviathan and Spinoza's Tractatus, but continued to be sold surreptitiously after that date.
      ⁴ Diary and Correspondence of Dr. John Worthington, Chetham Soc. (1886), ii, part 2, 303.
      * [ Some of the notes omitted, the numbering changed.   (WPT) ]

Oxford 1951, pp. 138-39.