Theodoricus Gravius (fl. 1600-1661): some biographical notes on a German chymist and scribe working in seventeenth-century England.

ABSTRACT

This article establishes the career of Theodoricus Gravius (fl. 1600-1661), a German refugee who worked in Great Linford as a laboratory assistant and scribe to the cleric and practitioner of astrological medicine, Richard Napier (1559-1634). Gravius was the first transmitter to England of the texts of the mystic Jacob Böhme, and although he settled in England, he undertook subsequent foreign visits to attempt the recovery of his property and to learn more about chymical matters. He also visited the Oxonian George Hakewill (1578-1649), and is responsible for scribing one of the manuscripts of the revisions to Hakewill's celebrated Apologie or Declaration Concerning the Power and Providence of God (1635).