This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry.

And I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

So the heartlib circle came up in research recently, and I put it right on my list

because it is this very unique nexus of scientific and philosophical thought in the 17th century.

Right out of the gate, we've got to make a note on name pronunciation because...

We're having a lot of these lately.

I know. This person, Samuel Hartlib, who we'll talk about some more, a whole lot today,

um, originally was born in Prussia. His name is from the German side of his family,

his father's side of the family, which would lead one to say Hartlebe, and it's spelled

a million different ways, if you look at various historical documents. But because he did most

of his work in Britain, and most of the writing about him has been in Britain, most scholars

about him pronounce it Hartlib. And so we're just going to roll

with that, recognizing that he, too, I don't know where he landed if he had a preference or not.

I suspect probably his contemporaries also pronounced it that way once he was living in London.

The name Samuel Hartlib probably does not exactly spring to mind when people are thinking

about influential figures of the 17th century.

But he was very connected to a lot of the names you would think of, and he served as this sort

of conduit of information to many of them and made connections among them as he sought to promote his own ideas regarding

theology and education, which he saw as being very closely tied to government and successful

...