Here are some excerpts from the first printed book in Philadelphia, The Temple of Wisdom for the Little World: “The Masculine and Feminine property might be quite changed into one Image again, as Adam was before his Eve, when he was neither Man nor Woman, but a Masculine Virgin. Therefore Christ took his Soul from a Woman”; “I am no Italian lover,…But thy Beauty I discover,/ English-like, without a vail”; “Read not to contradict, nor to believe, but to weigh and consider.” They are taken from the mystic Jakob Böhme, the Anglican George Wither, and the philosopher Francis Bacon. “In this promiscuous Generation of men, this little Book might appear as a promiscuous Composition of Authors” wrote Daniel Leeds, who published the book in 1688. As a treasury of a colonial almanack-maker’s reading, and a financial risk in its own right, The Temple sheds light on the social make-up of Philadelphia at the time, its mix of English and Continental influences. Böhme had influenced the earliest Quakers of the 1650s but also German mystics who had settled in the colony; Wither tolerated Quakers exactly as they hoped Anglicans would; and Bacon featured on the enlightened reading list promoted by the founder of the colony, William Penn, among others. But Leeds’ “promiscuous composition” is equally misleading: Böhme had been censored out of Quaker writings for two decades, friction between Quakers and Anglicans only worsened in Philadelphia, and William Penn’s proprietorship was unpopular. After the book’s publication, Leeds was either ejected from the Quaker community, or left it in a rage. Throughout the 1690s he published attacks against them, and their attempts at censoring the publication of books, a common fate for many Quakers.
The purpose of this presentation is twofold, for as McKenzie Wark writes in Excommunication, a “text may be read backward into its mediatic status, just as it may be read forward into its hermeneutic status. Each approach may find gold in the cracks between the letters.” Looking backward, within the esoteric tradition, or indeed within the tradition of compiling libraries, and keeping commonplace books, The Temple of Wisdom is a very late mimic of a particular ethos of knowledge gathering made strange by a wilderness that had only imported books until that point. Reading forward, the strangest book in Philadelphia is also one which sheds insight into how extent networks of authors, publishers, and readers exacted their influence in the fledgling book market of the Middle Colonies. And finally, the work reads as a printed abridgement of its author’s own promiscuous tastes, combining a long-standing humanist tradition with a nonconformist style that could hardly keep itself from causing trouble.