Theodore Haak

Haak's language skills were used in translation and interpretation and his personal correspondence with the natural philosophers and theologians of the day, including Marin Mersenne and Johann Amos Comenius; he facilitated introductions and further collaborations.

[2][3][4] Haak began the first German translation of John Milton's Paradise Lost until the beginning of Book IV (not published).

Maria's father was the pastor Daniel Toussaint, a French Huguenot exile from Orléans in Heidelberg, who had left France after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572.

He brought back from England a copy of Daniel Dyke's Mystery of Self-Deceiving, which he shared with his Protestant spiritual circle.

This volume was also Haak's first work in English to German translation, completed in 1638 under the title Nosce Teipsum: Das Grosse Geheimnis dess Selbs-betrugs.

His plans, however, were interrupted when he received a letter from the exiled ministers of the Lower Palatinate seeking his assistance with raising funds and influencing English Protestant clergymen in their cause.

France, however, was an obvious gap in his European network and Haak's French language abilities drew him to Hartlib, who knew that an informal philosophical group existed in Paris.

Its intelligencer was Marin Mersenne, a French theologian, mathematician, philosopher, and friend of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes, and Blaise Pascal.

Mersenne replied almost immediately and although he briefly commented on Pell and Comenius, it was his request to Haak to send further scientific information that sustained their corresponding relationship.

[8] The correspondence between Haak and Mersenne covered current scientific and mechanical subjects such as tides, the making of telescopes, spherical glasses, new planetary discoveries, magnets, cycloids, mills, and other machines.

[13] His life is "a study of the seventeenth century world in all its complexities of politics, new scientific discoveries, and intellectual strivings" both in England and abroad.

[14] His networks evidence the "formal and informal institutional arrangements, and social relationships" that were key to developing "the new philosophy" during the Scientific Revolution.