Going Dutch: The Intellectual Geography of the Restoration Diaspora

Intellectual Geography / Monday 5 September, 2011

Exploring ‘The Intellectual Geography of the Restoration Diaspora’, this paper examines the intellectual cross-fertilization between the universities of Aberdeen, Edinburgh, Cambridge, Harvard, Leiden, Oxford, Paris, Padua, and Trinity College, Dublin, during the seventeenth century. After presenting a prosopographical portrait of a community of British dissenters in Dutch exile, this paper will focus on the intellectual geography of Dr Henry Sampson (1632-1700), who at the Restoration had been ejected from his rectorship in Suffolk and fellowship at Cambridge. Turning to medicine, Sampson entered the Faculty of Medicine and Pharmacy at the University of Padua in 1666 but then transferred to Leiden, where he graduated M.D. on 12 July 1668. Following his movements across time and space, this paper surveys Sampson’s intellectual networks, at Leiden—and beyond—during the 1660s. Of particular interest is the exchange of ideas between Sampson and Dr Johann Jakob Wepfer, town physician of Schaffhausen, a small city on the bank of the river Rhine about 50 miles north of Zurich, with whom he had collaborated during the course of his travels across Europe.