The Tessera of Antilia

A study of the Protestant utopian movement that began in Germany, inspired in large measure by the writings of Johann Valentin Adreae, and came to England through the efforts of the émigré Samuel Hartlib.
The first chapters examine Andreae's utopian writings, including the Rosicrucian manifestos, as part of his lifelong commitment to found a Societas Christiana, a spiritual élite that would improve religious and intellectual life. His writings sparked a transnational movement in early modern Europe. The most significant of the German learned societies are discussed: The Societas Ereunetica, Unio Christiana, and Antilia. The latter chapters consider Hartlib's English circles and various utopian and learned societies in the 1650s.
This study contributes to our understanding of the role that "secret" societies and epistolary networks had in the republic of letters.

Donald R. Dickson, Ph.D. (1981) in English, University of Illinois, is Professor of English at the Texas A & M University. He has published extensively on seventeenth-century literature, including The Fountain of Living Waters: The Typology of the Waters of Life in Herbert (Vaughan and Traherne, 1987).

"Dickson's book should immediately take its place beside some of the classic by Yates, Walker and Debus as a stellar example of good scholarship devoted to a very difficult subject, that of secret societies, their origins and influences...The last, generous chapter on utopian societies in England presents almost uniquely available information."
Pratum Book Company.

"This is an impressive study of the idea of establishing learned and pious fraternities, academies and colleges as it spread in the seventeenth century from Italy, through Germany to the Baltic and on to England and eventually the New World."
J.C. Davis, Journal of the Society for Utopian Studies, 2000.