- First name
- Thomas
- Last name
- Blount
- Date of Birth
- 1618
- Date of Death
- 1679
- Born in
- Bordesley
- Died in
- Orleton
Thomas Blount studied law at the London Inner Temple. His main interest was in legal history, historical research and literature. He clandestinely published A Catalogue of the Lords, Knights and Gentlemen, of the Catholick Religion …, (n. p. (London?), 1660), a work stressing the royalism of English Catholics in the time preceding the Restoration of Charles II of England. A productive writer, Blount also authored: Nomo-lexicon: a Law Dictionary …, n. p. (London), 1670. In 1671, he started a project for a chronological history of England which stayed unfinished. See: The Correspondence of Thomas Blount, 1978, pp. 1–96; ODNB.
In December 1671, Thomas Blount dispatched a short message to Anthony Wood. The occasion was to inform him on his forthcoming trip to Oxford and about the death of the Duke of Somerset. In the parcel, Blount encloses a copy of Tractatus theologico-politicus together with a pamphlet entitled Tuba stentoro-phonica. Blount obviously has still no notion as to the fact that Spinoza’s treatise was not printed in the city of Hamburg, but in Amsterdam. In the postscript to his letter to Wood, he makes a short, bitter comment on the treatise:
Here is a pestilent book com from Hamburg called “Tractatus Theologo-Politicus”, also extant Sir Samuel Morelands “Tuba Stentoro-phonica”.
Source: The Correspondence of Thomas Blount, 1978, p. 123.