Thomas Barlow’s Europe: Universities and Early Enlightenment Culture (All Souls and The Queen’s College, 23–24 April 2026) devoted eleven papers and a keynote to Thomas Barlow, the Keeper of the Bodleian Library, the Provost of Queen’s College, Oxford, and a neglected but significant figure in European intellectual history. Anthony Milton’s keynote, ‘Thomas Barlow and Publication’, asked why Barlow published so sparingly when he wrote so much, setting his manuscripts, annotated books and print in a landscape where scribal circulation retained real advantages. Other papers assessed Barlow’s use of Roman Catholic indices of prohibited books; his reaction to Hobbes’s treatise on heresy; the publication of his posthumous works; his reading of anti-Calvinist and Catholic authors; his use of ‘if’ for casuistical purposes; the diversity of episcopalianism in 1650s Oxford; his Hebraic learning; his indebtedness to Scholasticism; and the rise of anti-Calvinism amongst the younger fellows of Queen’s College in the seventeenth century. An exhibition at Queen’s presented his books, manuscripts and administrative papers. The conference recovered Barlow as a well-connected figure whose writings reveal much about seventeenth-century religious and intellectual culture.
Conference report by the organiser, Dr Jacob Chatterjee
