FRANCES MIRIAM REED, _University of California, Los Angeles_




INTRODUCTION


This work, with its quaint sentiments and its grim picture of what
librarians were like in the mid-seventeenth century, is more than a
curiosity. John Dury was a very important figure in the Puritan
Revolution, offering proposal after proposal to prepare England for its
role in the millennium. _The Reformed Librarie-Keeper_ is an integral
part of that preparation. To appreciate it one must look at it in terms
of the plans of Dury and his associates, Samuel Hartlib and Johann Amos
Comenius, to reform the intellectual institutions of England so that the
prophecies in the books of Daniel and Revelation could be fulfilled
there.

John Dury (1596-1680), the son of a Scottish Puritan, was raised in
Holland.[1] He studied at the University of Leiden, then at the French
Reformed seminaries at Sedan and Leiden, and later at Oxford. He was
ordained a Protestant minister and served first at Cologne and then at
the English church in the West Prussian city of Elbing. There he came in
contact with Samuel Hartlib (?-1662), a merchant, who was to devote
himself to many religious and scientific projects in England, and with
Johann Amos Comenius (1592-1670), the leader of the Moravian Brethren,
as well as with other great educational reformers of the Continent. The
three of them shared a common vision--that the advancement of knowledge,
the purification of the Christian churches, and the impending conversion