1647 in literature

Events

• Summer – Thomas Hobbes gives up his work as mathematics tutor to the future Charles II of England because of a serious illness.
• unknown date – Plagiarist Robert Baron publishes his Deorum Dona, a masque, and Gripus and Hegio, a pastoral, which draws heavily on the poems of Edmund Waller and John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi. The masque claims to have been performed before "Flaminius and Clorinda, King and Queen of Cyprus, at their regal palace in Nicosia," a fantasy with no relation to the actual history of Cyprus.

  New books

Prose

• René Descartes – Les Principes de la philosophie
• Antonio Enríquez Gómez – El siglo pitagórico. La vida de don Gregorio Guadaña
• Baltasar Gracián – Oráculo manual y arte de prudencia
• Johannes Hevelius – Selenographia
• John Lilburne – Rash Oaths
• John Lilly – Christian Astrology
• Thomas May – The History of the Parliament of England
• Adam Olearius – Beschreibung der muscowitischen und persischen Reise
• María de Zayas y Sotomayor – Desengaños amorosos. Parte segunda del sarao y entretenimiento honesto

  Drama

• "Beaumont and Fletcher" – Comedies and Tragedies...
• Antony Brewer – The Country Girl
• Marchamont Nedham – The Levellers Levelled, or the Independents' Conspiracy to Root Out Monarchy
• Jean Rotrou
• *Don Bertrand de Cabrère
• *Venceslas
• Samuel Sheppard – The Committee-Man Curried
• Johann von Rist – Das friedewünschende Teutschland
• Lope de Vega – Parte XXV de comedias

  Poetry

• Abraham Cowley – The Mistress
• Henry More – Philosophical Poems
• Johan van Heemskerk – Batavische Arcadia

  Births

• April 1 – John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, English poet
• August 12 – Johann Heinrich Acker, German religious historian writing in Latin
• November 18 – Pierre Bayle French encyclopedist
• Unknown dates
• *Henry Aldrich, English theologian and philosopher
• *Petter Dass, Norwegian poet
• *Glückel of Hameln, German diarist

  Deaths

• January 29 – Francis Meres, English miscellanist and cleric
• April – Ephraim Pagit, English writer on comparative religion
• May 21 – Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft, Dutch historian, poet and dramatist
• June 12 – Thomas Farnaby, English classicist and cleric