Civil War Discord and Cambridge Platonism

Descartes’ Compendium Musicae is one of many books originally from the collection of Queens’ member and ‘Cambridge Platonist’, John Smith (1618–52), that invoke music as a kind of philosophy through which to explore nature. As one of the earliest in Cambridge to have read the works of the great French philosopher Descartes, Smith was an early proponent of the new ways of thinking now associated with Descartes and the seventeenth-century ‘Scientific Revolution’. Smith’s understanding of divine musical harmony as a means to resolve inner and outer conflict in religion and society is reflected in his library’s preponderance of metaphysically ambitious works that adopt music as an organising principle. One such was Descartes’ Musicae compendium. Written in 1618 when Descartes was twenty-two the Compendium represents the young philosopher’s first attempts at articulating modes of thought that later came to great prominence in the form of his mechanistic philosophy.

Author: René Descartes
Title:Musicae compendium [Compendium of music] (Utrecht, 1650)
Shelfmark: D.20.52
Provenance: Bequeathed to Queens’ College by John Smith

D.20.52