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Bestselling author Deborah Harkness (A Discovery of Witches, Shadow of Night) explores the streets, shops, back alleys, and gardens of Elizabethan London, where a boisterous and diverse group of men and women shared a keen interest in the study of nature. These assorted merchants, gardeners, barber-surgeons, midwives, instrument makers, mathematics teachers, engineers, alchemists, and other experimenters, she contends, formed a patchwork scientific community whose practices set the stage for the Scientific Revolution. While Francis Bacon has been widely regarded as the father of modern science, scores of his London contemporaries also deserve a share in this distinction. It was their collaborative, yet often contentious, ethos that helped to develop the ideals of modern scientific research.
The book examines six particularly fascinating episodes of scientific inquiry and dispute in sixteenth-century London, bringing to life the individuals involved and the challenges they faced. These men and women experimented and invented, argued and competed, waged wars in the press, and struggled to understand the complexities of the natural world. Together their stories illuminate the blind alleys and surprising twists and turns taken as medieval philosophy gave way to the empirical, experimental culture that became a hallmark of the Scientific Revolution.
- Sales Rank: #101154 in Books
- Published on: 2008-10-28
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.00" l, 1.20 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 384 pages
Review
"'This is the book on Elizabethan science everyone should read. Not only does it offer a convincing reinterpretation of the role of science in society, but it is written in an arresting style, jaunty, full of illuminating anecdotes, and widely accessible.' Ian Archer, Oxford University '... a significant contribution to the history of science, but also to that of London, and an exciting portrait of life in the swarming, spreading city during the reign of the first Elizabeth.' Ronald Hutton, Independent on Sunday"
About the Author
Deborah E. Harkness is professor of history, University of Southern California. She is the author of John Dee’s Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature and of the New York Times bestseller A Discovery of Witches.
Most helpful customer reviews
71 of 73 people found the following review helpful.
Ethnography of Early Modern Science
By E. N. Anderson
As an anthropologist, I was reading this book with delight, and thinking it was just like an ethnography--to find that at the end she describes it as "an ethnography of early modern science," and cites such ethnographic luminaries as George Marcus and Bruno Latour. Indeed, this is a look at the actual culture of scientific and technical discovery in London in Elizabeth I's time. It is a real eye-opener. London at the time was swarming with technologists, herbalists, medical investigators, and every sort of inventor--not to speak of quacks, con artists and mountebanks pretending to be all of the above. The search for knowledge was downright frantic. Those of us who knew only a little about the history of early modern science knew only a tiny thin thread of this--a bit of Bacon (she cuts him down to size!) and a few others.
It is striking to compare London with China at approximately the same time; Benjamin Elman, William Rowe, and others have shown a similar and equally little-known ferment there, but even their best efforts don't seem to show as much sheer originality, inventiveness, and wild-eyed experimentation in Chinese cities as London had. China never quite made the breakthrough to modern science until the 20th century. London--and, Ogilvie reminds us, the whole "republic of letters" all over Europe--had a culture of scientific advance rooted in trades, crafts, mining, brewing, fish trapping, bird snaring, everything. People were trying every new scheme to produce more.
Alchemy and astrology receive due respect here. In those days, everyone knew that metallurgy could make amazing transformations; no one knew that gold, silver, etc. were primary elements that simply could not be easily transformed into each other. (People were just beginning to realize that "earth, air, fire, water" wasn't a fully adequate list of elements.) Similarly, everyone knew the sun influenced every living thing, and the moon ruled the tides; logic and common sense brought everyone to the inescapable conclusion that the other heavenly bodies must be influencing us too. The failure of alchemy and astrology was not the failure of "pseudoscience" but the triumph of reality over logic and reason--a triumph we see today, every day, as the most reasonable economic and political predictions go down in flames, ruined by human cussedness. It would be decades before Boyle could be a successfully "skeptical chemist" building on experimental proof of alchemy's failure.
Early modern science was a wonderful, exciting world. I came to it after a lifetime of ethnographic research on traditional knowledge of plants and animals--in China, indigenous North America, and elsewhere. How wonderful to see an ethnography of Elizabethan London's science.
For the future, one recommendation to ethnographers of early science: Look at Charles Frake's LANGUAGE AND CULTURAL DESCRIPTION as well as Latour, Marcus, et al. Frake still does the best job of explaining how to study nonwestern and traditional scientific/technical knowledge.
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
The Republic of Letters
By Jim Schmidt
I'm giving this a 3.51 and rounding it up to a 4 :-)
I'll give the book a 3 for "readability/accessibility" and a 4+ for scholarship.
I read this book because it is a scholarly/nonfiction work by Deborah Harkness, whose novels "Discovery of Witches" and "Shadow of Night" I have enjoyed thoroughly. Indeed, its obvious that so much of the "smartness" and intelligence of her novels comes from hours and hours and hours of research in some of the world's oldest and most prestigious libraries and collections.
The Bibliography of the book is loaded with citations of hundreds of 17th century manuscripts and other primary sources and period books.
Interestingly, this book had some of the same characteristics of her novels - a GREAT beginning and a WONDERFUL ending sandwich a so-so middle.
The book was a look at science in Elizabethan London which also satisfies my own professional and historical interests in science, invention, and chemistry, although not from anacademic perspective.
As with most things, it's amazing how little things change over time and how we never seem to learn important lessons - whether you are for or against government influence/sponsoring of emerging or "pet" industries/technologies - Solyndra and the military-industrial complex being recent and timeless examples - you will be astounded to learn how politics, power, and royalty - even as high as Queen Elizabeth I - influenced what scientific and industrial projects received financing in the 1600s. And if you think today's politicians are greedy/corrupt, they seem like saints against the men in high places who profited from these projects.
The discussion of the Republic of Letters and a thriving community of people who happily shared their discoveries, interests, questions, and collections was enthralling.
A middle chapter about mathematics education, though, was representative of the problem with the accessibility of this book: over and over again she stated how knowing math better would give an advantage to businessmen an families yet it wasn;t until late in the chapter that she gave a single actual example and a rather boring one at that.
The most interesting - and most depressing chapter - was the final one in which the collaborative, unselfish (in terms of sharing results and sharing credit), and progressive idea of scientific inquiry manifested in the life of Hugh Plat was contrasted with the life of Francis Bacon, who gets the lion's share of credit for ushering in the scientific and industrial revolutions, mostly by reserving the life of scientific inquiry to the privileged and without giving credit where it was due.
Look at how long the Wiki entry is for Hugh Plat and then look at Bacon's...Bacon's is several times longer but Plat's life and contributions were so much more interesting and generous...it's Bacon we here about but it's Plat our youngest citizens should be learning about...I see this difference all the time in my life as a scientist...I'm dedicated to be more of a Plat than a Bacon.
This book serves as a nice prequel to Holly Tucker's "Blood Work"...Holly is also an academic but her book is so much more readable and entertaining than this one, without skimping on the scholarship at all.
I do remain a huge fan of Deborah Harkness as a scholar and a writer.
87 of 89 people found the following review helpful.
Science Before the Scientific Revolution
By Rob Hardy
Everyone knows that the Scientific Revolution involved some great minds, like Edmond Halley and Sir Isaac Newton, and that it happened in the seventeenth century, and that one of its centers was London. But it was not the case that before the revolution people were unscientific and after it they were scientific. What was the infrastructure in place that allowed for the blossoming of scientific thinking that was to come, and has yet to abate? Deborah E. Harkness, a professor of history, has given an account of something we haven't thought much about: Elizabethan science. In _The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution_ (Yale University Press), Harkness has given an extensive history of how sixteenth century London took up scientific enquiry. She admits that other than Francis Bacon there will be few well known "scientists" here. To speak strictly, there wasn't anyone called a scientist until the word was invented in the nineteenth century. And the Elizabethans profiled here didn't come up with many scientific breakthroughs. On the other hand, they were energetic and curious Londoners, "naturalists, medical practitioners, mathematicians, teachers, inventors, and alchemists", who wanted to study the world and benefit people thereby, and Harkness has told a story that deserves telling.
The first case study Harkness undertakes is that of the naturalists centered in Lime Street, a cosmopolitan central London neighborhood, "the English outpost of a Europe-wide network of students of nature." The naturalists here corresponded with each other in a way that (at least sometimes) shows the ideal balance of cooperation and competitiveness that scientists ought to have, and they swapped specimens and did fieldwork. Harkness considers the medical arena chiefly through the conflicts of the different schools and specialists of the time. "London had a practitioner to suit every patient's purse and preferences", she writes, and perhaps because of that, medical professionals were very protective of their particular schools. There was a medical bustle of quacks, midwives, and other healers which spread on the streets and via word of mouth. Basic to science is mathematics; London was embracing mathematics at the time. A famous version of Euclid from 1570, with an introduction by the renowned occultist John Dee, helped emphasized that numbers were not wicked but profitable for citizens and the state. Science was good for business and for the state, and no one knew this better than William Cecil who was the favorite minister of Queen Elizabeth, both of whom sought projects with tangible outcomes, directing funds for the sixteenth century version of "big science" to such endeavors as mining or the refinement of ores. Harkness spends a chapter on the unfortunate merchant Clement Draper, who was in debtors' prison for thirteen years, but continued to experiment and fill notebooks with his observations and those from his fellow inmates, some of whom were as interested in such matters as he.
Harkness winds up this tour of sixteenth century London science with a description of the efforts of lawyer Hugh Plat and contrasting them with those of the far more famous Francis Bacon. One of Harkness's themes is how scientific efforts came from all levels of society, and Plat viewed the collective scientific enterprise in just this way. The son of a brewer, he consulted winemakers, candle-makers, midwives, gardeners, salt-makers, and more on such subjects as food preservation, firefighting, desalinization of water, and so on. Bacon called for a gentleman's ideal of orderly and academic investigation of nature by scholars, but Plat emphasized how commoners could contribute, and even when he interviewed experts like John Dee, he was much more interested in their practical and experimentally derived wisdom than in their theories. Harkness is clearly on Plat's side, and her summary chapter on his work in many fields nicely caps a fascinating and detailed overview of the scientific foundation London made for the upcoming revolution.
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