The Abraham Cowley Text and Image Archive

Outside links
(Other outside links bearing on particular topics are now found scattered throughout the website)
Most of the notables cited in Cowley's Plantarum * besides Stuart kings James I, Charles I, and Charles II and such mythical figures as Orpheus appear in a spectacular gallery of Renaissance portrait-engravings in Jean-Jacques Boissard / Theodor de Bry, Bibliotheca chalcographica (Frankfurt-Heidelberg, 1652-1669), part of University of Mannheim's Mateo site.
* Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Andrea Alciati, William Camden, Girolamo Cardano, Rembert Dodoens, Jean Fernel, Marsilio Ficino, Girolamo Fracastoro, Leonhart Fuchs, Theodorus Gaza, John Gerard, Johan van Heurne, Charles de L'Ecluse, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Paracelsus, Julius Caesar Scaliger, Daniel Sennert and Andreas Vesalius.

Click the links for Ovid Illustrated, Sidney's Defence of Poesie, Jonson's Timber or Discoveries, Donne's Devotions, Traherne's Centuries, Bacon's Essays (cf. Francis Bacon Online), Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (a page-scanned 1850 edition), Sir Thomas Browne's Vulgar Errors and other works, Agrippa's Of Occult Philosophy, Croll's Of Signatures, and other hermetic texts including Della Porta's Natural Magick. The enigmatic Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499) has been digitized with full English captions at an MIT site; Alciati's Emblemata and related texts are available at http://www.mun.ca/alciato; and other major emblematists are included in Penn State's English Emblem Book Project. Also see the rich archive of Mannerist artistic schemas at Bochum Museum (http://etext.virginia.edu/latin/ovid/notes.html#RipaArchiveFourAges) and the Silva Rhetoricae, a well-organized Web-introduction to both classical and Renaissance rhetoric.

The Biblioteca Digital Dioscorides and the Biblotheca Antiqua of Aboca Museum include many botanical texts on which Cowley's own builds. The first edition of John Evelyn's Sylva, in which Cowley's Plantarum quite clearly played a generative role, if we judge from Evelyn's tributes to Cowley in later editions, is online at the British Trees website; there are also web-pages devoted to Evelyn's remarkable archive (British Library) and selections from his Diary and other works.

For a rich online verse corpus hailing the Stuart Restoration see Gerald MacLean's The Return of the King, and for Cowley's contemporaries Milton and Marvell see http://www.richmond.edu/~creamer/milton/, http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/marvbib.htm and http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/marvell.html.

Cowley's Works on the Web // Sprat's life of Cowley (English version) // Samuel Johnson's life of Cowley // additional Luminarium links, with a gathering of Cowley's lyrics set to music by noted composers from Purcell to Schubert at http://www.recmusic.org/lieder/get_author_texts.html?PoetId=601.

Dana F. Sutton's online editions of Cowley's Latin writings are available at Philological Museum. (Also see her immense catalogue, Neo-Latin Online--major texts by Erasmus and others--supplemented by texts and brief bio-bibliographies at the useful Scholasticon website).

And the Chadwick-Healey English poetry subscription database includes all Cowley's verses in English, while two other subscription databases, Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online, comprise most early Cowley editions in digitized form.

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