Petrus Serrarius
Dutch theologian
Petrus Serrarius (Peter Serrarius, Pieter Serrurier, Pierre Serrurier, Pieter Serrarius, Petro Serario, Petrus Serarius; 1600, London – buried October 1, 1669, Amsterdam) was a millenarian theologian, writer, and also a wealthy merchant, who established himself in Amsterdam in 1630, and was active there until his death. He was born "into a well-to-do Walloon merchant family by name of Serrurier in London." He has been called "the dean of the dissident Millenarian theologians in Amsterdam".
He studied at Christ Church, Oxford from 1617 to 1619, and at the Walloon College in Leiden from 1620 to 1623. The French speaking college was then a part of the new Leiden University, where Serrarius met John Dury, and they remained closely associated, right up to Serrarius' own death in 1669.
Circle
In Amsterdam he associated, on the one hand, with the Collegiants Adam Boreel, and Galenus Abrahamsz, and their sect; and, on the other hand, also with the Portuguese Jews settling there at the time, among them Menasseh ben Israel and Benedictus de Spinoza. He was a correspondent of Samuel Hartlib. His involvement with Jews and Judaism led him to the study of Kabbalah and Gematria, and later to a belief in Sabbatai Zevi's messianic claims.
Views and contacts
He published works on the millennium. He was one of the first followers of the Silesian mystic and millenarian Jacob Boehme in Amsterdam.
As well as being a philo-semite, interested greatly in the issue of the Lost Tribes, he was on good terms with the Amsterdam Quakers, and had been in contact with William Ames.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Petrus Serrarius” is dutch theologian. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Petrus, Serrarius and Dutch, not as a finished interpretation.
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This entry incorporates text from “Petrus Serrarius” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.