Francis Daniel Pastorius wrote the Beehive manuscript to collect and express the vast knowledge that he attained from his travels around Europe, his migration to Philadelphia, and his (almost) unrivaled book collection. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, people did not have access to many centralized resources for knowledge acquisition and production, especially in the Americas, which inspired Pastorius’s innovative methods of cataloguing and organizing information. Following thinkers like Virgil and Erasmus, Pastorius saw bees as a model for humanist intellectuals. Noting the ways that bees cross boundaries and property lines to collect sap and to form it into something greater, Pastorius saw them as an exemplar in his effort to collect and synthesize knowledge from numerous, varied sources. In turn, he produced the Beehive manuscript, a compendium and digest of knowledge including inscriptions; epitaphs; proverbs; poetry; Biblical citations; theological citations; quotations; a list of books he read or knew; copies of letters; and notes on science, useful herbs, and other plants.
Within the pages of the Beehive, Pastorius participates in the tradition of commonplacing, collecting and excerpting passages on a vast range of topics from ancient as well as contemporary authorities to serve learning and scholarship. Commonplace books are most often associated with the European humanist tradition of the Renaissance, when figures ranging from Erasmus to John Locke to John Milton produced commonplace books of their own. Pastorius is notable as an intellectual who carried this tradition into early America and into the early eighteenth century. Commonplace books are also characterized by their modes of ordering and organizing knowledge. In fact, the commonplace tradition produced precedents for many of the ways in which data are organized in bibliography and computation today.
Born in 1651 in Sommerhausen, Germany, Francis Daniel Pastorius was a humanist intellectual who moved from Germany to Philadelphia in 1696. Raised in an elite Lutheran family, Pastorius grew wary of Lutheran dogma, eventually joining a movement of dissidents in Frankfurt called the Pietists. During his youth and young adulthood, Pastorius received an advanced education in the German Gymnasium system, and eventually he became an attorney. When he arrived in Pennsylvania, Pastorius provided legal representation to a group of German migrants who sought to purchase land in Philadelphia. In turn, he is a key figure in the founding of Philadelphia’s Germantown neighborhood.
In Philadelphia, Pastorius had many political, literary, and personal achievements. He married Ennecke Klostermanns, with whom he had two sons. He became an admirer of the Quaker faith and was an early anti-slavery advocate. Aside from the Beehive, his writings include poetry as well as legal, medical, and agricultural treatises. In 1702, Pastorius founded one of the first coeducational schools in America.
Pastorius died around 1720 in Germantown, Philadelphia.
Pastorius’s Beehive manuscript is particularly innovative in its organizational protocols. Like many earlier commonplace books, the Beehive manuscript often organizes its lists and notes alphabetically. However, in his massive scope and lengthy writing process, Pastorius soon realized that additions to his lists could not fit on his alphabetically organized pages. For this reason, he developed numerical systems for organizing information, creating vast addenda to his earlier lists.
All these protocols for listing and indexing information demonstrate Pastorius’s proto-computational logic of organizing and displaying data. This numerical approach makes a huge, messy, and handwritten data set legible and orderly. In turn, Pastorius’s own methods of organizing and indexing data grants us the tools to realize his manuscript as an interactive, user-friendly website.
In addition to appreciating this manuscript for its innovations in bibliography and data organization, students and scholars will have the opportunity to access an underexplored manuscript from a lesser-known but vastly important figure in early American history. Pastorius reminds us of the centrality of German culture and radical Protestantism in early America, as well as early traditions of book collecting, exegesis, and humanism in Pennsylvania.
Pastorius was clear that his manuscript should not leave Philadelphia. That said, the Digital Beehive makes the entire manuscript free and easy to use online, from anywhere.
In addition to providing digital facsimiles of every page of the manuscript, we have provided an interactive table of contents, which allows readers to click through the unique sections of the manuscript to explore the vast scope of Pastorius’s knowledge and interests.
The section of the manuscript that the Digital Beehive project has most comprehensively digitized is called the Alvearium. Although Pastorius wrote many comprehensive, detailed lists and catalogues, the Alvearium is the part of the manuscript in which the author provided his most in-depth accounts of various ideas, people, places, belief systems, historical events, and more. The Alvearium begins with a far-reaching catalogue of alphabetically-organized entries. After that, Pastorius wrote almost 5,000 more entries, which were organized numerically. The Alvearium seems encyclopedic at first, as each entry covers a far-reaching topic—ranging from death, to slavery, to salamanders, to the Bible. However, these entries are more meditative, poetic, and exegetical, offering syntheses of knowledge and quotations from Biblical as well as contemporary scholarly texts, amid Pastorius’s own musings and polemics.
The Alvearium contains numerous cross-references, some of which represent a chain of related entries that advance a single narrative across the Alvearium. Other cross-references refer to information from other pages and sections of the manuscript, such as books from Pastorius’s many lists of books in the Beehive. Also, in a separate octavo manuscript, Pastorius produced an index that lists nearly all of the alphabetical and numerical entries together. Our work of annotating the Alvearium has involved realizing all the cross-references and index entries as hyperlinks, allowing users to quickly visualize the connections that Pastorius aimed to create across this vast manuscript and to click between relevant entries and pages.
Users can also access our code and data sets.
Although the Digital Beehive divides the manuscript into three volumes, it is worth remembering that all of the sections of the Beehive (other than the Octavo Index) were once joined together. The manuscript, Ms. Codex 726 in the University of Pennsylvania’s Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts, arrived at Penn in 1948 bound as one massive folio with a smaller Octavo Index. The folio then underwent restoration and was newly bound into two volumes. The Octavo Index remains in its original binding.
Pastorius did number many of his pages, and his original page numbers appear in the top corners of many pages. Our page references follow Pastorius’s original numbering system. A later reader added a different page numbering system, where a separate set of page numbers appear in the bottom center of most pages. This numbering system is not attributed to Pastorius and is not reflected in our data.
While we have the majority of the manuscript, some pages are missing. In the Alvearium, missing pages have caused multiple ranges of entries in the numerical section to be skipped: entries 726—865, 1836—1890, 2446—4445, 4496—4790, and 4932—4950 are missing.
Much like Pastorius’s own Beehive manuscript, the Digital Beehive is a work in progress. Our work will continue to grow and expand.
Support for this project has been provided by the Price Lab for Digital Humanities, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, and the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books, and Manuscripts.
The Digital Beehive Team recommends citing information found through the Digital Beehive by volume and image number, in addition to any page or entry number from the original manuscript.