Elias Ashmole

The Quartercentenary Biography of Elias Ashmole aims to complement previous scholarship about him both by eminent past historians and by myself, while telling an incredible rags-to-riches story. Having spent most of the last twenty years on Elias Ashmole's collection of manuscripts and books, I felt I owed it to Ashmole that I should write his Quartercentenary Biography. The year 2017 marks 400 years since Elias Ashmole's birth, in Lichfield. The son of a modest saddler, Ashmole died as the founder of the first public museum in the British Isles. His successful life against all the odds is a great tale. Tercentenary celebrations for the foundation of the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, focussed more on the worth of that institution than on the merits of its founder. It belongs to the very nature of celebrations the tendency to overemphasise some positive aspects over other, less positive ones. Historians, moreover, sometimes prefer winning arguments rhetorically rather than balancing facts, thereby coming up with a less powerful, far more nuanced argument. They fear appearing weak, as if historians were lawyers in imaginary academic courts. We are not. When historians feel the urge to win arguments by omitting crucial evidence, they behave like propagandists. Take the importance of book collecting for Ashmole and his Museum, for example. Ever since the magisterial studies of Robert Theodore Gunther, back in the 1930s, theoretically we should all have been aware of the extent, composition, and value of Ashmole's collection of printed works. Instead, Ashmole has received some bad publicity, his own collected books having often been omitted from the picture. He has been treated as almost a thief of Tradescant's collections, as if those curiosities were the only founding nucleus of Ashmole's Museum.