First edition. This landmark work on Elias Ashmole, the antiquary and founder of Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, combines an extensive biographical introduction by C.H. Josten with ‘an annotated edition of his autobiographical notes (including the previously unread cipher notes), of his correspondence, and of other relevant sources’ (dustwrapper blurb). It was published to much critical acclaim in 1966, and Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) has remained the cornerstone of Ashmole scholarship to this day: for instance, the digital edition of Ashmole’s correspondence at the University of Oxford takes this work as its ‘key bibliographic source’ as well as the basis for the edition (Howard Hotson and Miranda Lewis, eds, Early Modern Letters Online, http://emlo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk, created 2009-2015). ¶¶

The editor and author of the biographical introduction, the historian of science C.H. Josten (1912-1994), had discovered Ashmole’s diary in cipher while working at the Bodleian Library in 1949. He ‘was a German by birth, an Englishman by adoption, choice, and taste’, and had – following years of opposing Nazism and then being involved with the denazification process – started working at Duke Humfrey’s Library at the Bodleian Library in June 1948, ‘Apart from decoding Ashmole’s diaries, Josten was adept at astronomy, in the history of early chemistry (alchemy), and, pre-eminently, in early astronomical instruments’, and was therefore ‘appointed Curator of the Museum of the History of Science in the old Ashmolean building in Broad Street, Oxford, in 1950 [...]. In the old Ashmolean, his achievements will be recalled for the great contribution which he made to the collections and as Ashmole’s remembrancer’ (Ian Lowe, ‘Obituary: Kurt Josten’, The Independent, 11 July 1994). ¶¶

Charles Webster reviewed Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) in the British Journal for the History of Science, stating that this ‘monumental edition of materials relating to Elias Ashmole is a fitting climax to [Josten’s] earlier studies [on John Dee and Robert Fludd]. The large and intractable collection of materials relating to Ashmole at Oxford has hitherto proved too formidable for historians and biographers, who have been content to reiterate ill-digested versions of Campbell’s Biographia Britannica article of 1747. Josten has amply repaired this neglect and has compiled documents relating to Ashmole into a fully annotated text [...], to produce a work which will be a valuable complement to E. S. de Beer’s edition of John Evelyn’s Diary’ (BJHS 4.1 (June 1968), pp. 72-73, at p. 72). ¶¶

Although not marked as such, this set of Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) is from the library of Raymond Emil Maddison, the son of the historian of science and bibliophile Robert Edwin Witton Maddison (1901-1993), from whom he may have inherited the work. R.E.W. Maddison had worked as an industrial chemist and a schoolmaster at Wellington College before devoting his professional energies to the history of science. He was appointed Librarian of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1965, holding the position until his retirement ten years later, while ‘[h]is major work as a historian was The Life of the Honourable Robert Boyle, published by Taylor & Francis in 1969’ (‘Obituary R. E. W. Maddison (1901-93)’, Annals of Science, vol. 52 (1995), p. 306). R.E.W. Maddison’s eldest son, Francis Romeril Maddison (1927-2006), had started his assistant curatorship at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford under Josten and was subsequently its head curator of for three decades, and Josten records his gratitude to both R.E.W. Maddison and Francis Maddison in the ‘Acknowledgements’ (I, p. [viii]). ¶¶

J.B. Blake, Bibliography of the History of Medicine 1964-1969, p. 17; A. Pritchard, Alchemy: A Bibliography of English-Language Writings, 958. ¶¶

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