Learned Reading in the Atlantic Colonies: How Humanist Practices Crossed the Atlantic

James Logan (1674–1751) led many lives. The son of a schoolmaster, he arrived in Pennsylvania in 1699 as William Penn’s secretary. The fur trade made him rich. His political career included stints as mayor of Philadelphia, chief justice, and acting governor of Pennsylvania. Above all, he pursued books and learning, systematically building a collection of almost 4,000 books in fields from classical scholarship to Newtonian physics. His profuse and vivid annotations traced his progress in fields as diverse as Arabic philology and botany, recorded striking incidents in his life as collector and scholar, memorialized his creation of bibliophilic and scholarly networks, and provided the foundation for the learned essays that he published in both American and European periodicals – all characteristic ways of using books in the world of contemporary European scholarship. Drawing on the evidence of Logan’s books, papers, and his writings, and comparing Logan’s practices to those of the Mathers, the Winthrops, Francis Daniel Pastorius and other contemporaries, this essay offers a case study in the migration of Protestant late humanism to the English colonies in North America.