Author: DINGLEY (Robert):
Title: Vox Caeli; or, Philosophical, Historicall, and Theological Observations, of Thunder. With a more General view of Gods wonderful Works. First grounded on Job 26. 14. but now enlarged into this Treatise. By Robert Dingley, M.A. once Fellow of Magdalen Colledge in Oxford; now Minister of Gods Word at Brixton in the Isle of Wight, and County of Sovthampton.
Description: London, Printed by M. S. for Henry Cripps, and are to be sold at his Shop in Popes-head Alley, 1658. FIRST EDITION. Small 8vo, 140 x 93 mms., pp. [xl], 144, 143 - 174 [175 - 178 list of authors], title within typographic border, b3 and 4 misbound at end, blank leaf b4 present, recent half calf, marbled boards, red leather label; lacks portrait, fore-margin a bit frayed, occasional soiling, and at the top of the title-page, an early ownership inscription, possibly "Joshua Roud", with his note on the price he paid for the book, "pr. 4d". Wikipedia describes this as "A very early meteorologically-themed work by the Oxonian writer and puritan divine Robert Dingley (1618/19-1660), who supported the Parliamentary cause in the English Civil War." Dingley's book is also valuable for chronicling habits and folk-views of early Britons as to the weather. Dingley records, for instance, an old and pervasive arboreo-meteorological practise in England relating to Bay trees: "Our Countrey people do generally plant the Bay-tree in their Gardens, as thinking it may preserve their Houses, Fruit, and Flowers, from being injured by Lightning" (p. 134). That section from Dingley is discussed by Owen Davies and Ceri Houlbrook in their study Building Magic: Ritual and Re-enchantment in Post-Medieval Structures (2021), where they trace the likely source of the belief to Pliny the Elder, who "noted the bay tree as never being struck" by lightning (p. 98). Davies and Houlbrook find this English belief to have faded by the nineteenth century, with the "houseleek", in fact, then becoming "the plant most widely associated with protection from lightning" (p. 98). Dingley is not merely amateur meteorologist and dedicated folk-lore scholar; he is also using the trope of thunder to express dissent, as a puritan. The scholar Richard C. Rath explains: "During the seventeenth century, English and American religious dissenters and separatists crafted new ways of expressing these beliefs [associated with thunder], particularly during and after the English Civil War. They began to emphatically regard thunder as the 'loud-speaking voice of God.' They also intensified the idea of sound as a powerful physical force". Rath finds Dingley, with his book Vox Caeli, to be "perhaps the best example of the Protestant emphasis on thunder as the effective voice of God" (Richard C. Rath, How Early America Sounded [Cornell University Press, 2003], pp. 18-19). See also Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650-1820 (2000), p. 191; Conal Condren, Argument and Authority in Early Modern England (2006), p. 9; Joseph Smith, Bibliotheca Anti-Quakeriana (1873), p. 149; John Rouse Bloxam, A Register of the Presidents, Fellows, Demies, Instructors in Grammar and in Music, Chaplains, Clerks, Choristers, and Other Members of Saint Mary Magdalen College in the University of Oxford (1876), p. 133. Wing D1502. ESTC R209723, where the "M. S." of the imprint is identified as the extremely early woman printer Mary Simmons (fl. 1655-1672), whom the online British Book Trade Index locates at Aldersgate Street, London.

Keywords: weather meteorologY prose


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