This is the first modern biography to place Henry More’s (1614-1687) religious and philosophical preoccupations centre-stage, and to provide a coherent interpretation of his work from a consideration of his own writings, their contexts and aims. It is also the first study of More to exploit the full range of his prolific writings and a number of unknown manuscripts relating to his life. It contains an annotated handlist of his extant correspondence.

This creative-critical piece reflects on the practices of recording, communicating, and caring that took place on social media and in digital spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using my own experience of contracting COVID-19 as a starting point, the piece looks at the ways in which epidemics have often been recorded in collaborative ways, with the personal, professional, and familial converging in historical texts that could be used as sources of medical authority. COVID-19 has similarly been immortalized across a variety of (...) forms and by different communities. The piece particularly explores the ways in which collective epidemic experience has been represented online through autopathographical Tweets, TikTok cures, and group chat messages and the future purposes that such collaborative patient narratives can serve. (shrink)

Of all the Cambridge Platonists, Henry More has attracted the most scholar ly interest in recent years, as the nature and significance of his contribution to the history of thought has come to be better understood. This revival of interest is in marked contrast to the neglect of More's writings lamented even by his first biographer, Richard Ward, a regret echoed two centuries after his 1 death. Since then such attention as there has been to More has not always served (...) him well. He has been dismissed as credulous on account of his belief in witchcraft while his reputation as the most mystical of the Cambridge 2 school has undermined his reputation as a philosopher. Much of the interest in More in the present century has tended to focus on one particular aspect of his writing. There has been considerable interest in his poems. And he has come to the attention of philosophers thanks to his having corresponded with Descartes. Latterly, however, interest in More has been rekindled by renewed interest in the intellectual history of the seventeenth century and Renaissance. And More has been studied in the context of seventeenth-cen tury science and the wider context of seventeenth-century philosophy. Since More is a figure who belongs to the Renaissance tradition of unified sapientia he is not easily compartmentalised in the categories of modern disciplines. Inevitably discussion of anyone aspect of his thought involves other aspects. (shrink)