- First name
- Adam
- Last name
- Boreel
- Date of Birth
- 1603
- Date of Death
- 1665
- Born in
- Middelburg
- Died in
- Amsterdam
Adam Boreel came from Middelburg. He was the founder of a ‘college’ of Arminian freethinkers in Amsterdam (mid 1640s),and had a keen interest in alchemy and optics. He kept a large correspondence with the universalist ‘circle’ in England around Samuel Hartlib as well as with other correspondents, like Isaac Beeckman, Mersenne and Robert Boyle. A skilled Hebraist, Boreel studied the Mishnah (a massive non-biblical Jewish document) with the aim to translate a Spanish rendering into Latin. See: NNBW, vol. 6, cols 164–6; Van der Wall, 1989.
It is possible that Boreel introduced Henry Oldenburg to Spinoza. Oldenburg had the highest expectations of him and he was hoping that the former would compose a major work in defence of true religion against atheistic calumny. In the 1660s, Boreel composed ‘Jezus Nazarenus legislator’ (a project proving the divine origin of the New Testament and defending the certainty of Christianity and revelation against atheism and impiety), a work Oldenburg and Robert Boyle were determined to read.