The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (review)

Deborah Harkness’s new book contributes to the social and cultural context of early modern science by uncovering the “vernacular science” of ordinary people of the City of London during the Elizabethan period. Using the model of “multisited ethnography,” Harkness casts a wide net over printed and manuscript sources, government records, parish registers, and more to identify hundreds of residents, both professional and amateur, who were interested in natural knowledge. From this rich data emerges an idea of what science and scientists were in Elizabethan London. They actively studied the natural world and how natural knowledge could benefit human life and society; and they were empirical, critical, experimental. Beyond the individual practitioners, the City itself, with its numerous venues of cultural and intellectual exchange, becomes a character. It provided the social and organizational settings in which practitioners interacted, shared, competed, and collaborated, and through which knowledge claims and disputes over methods were mediated. These features, along with the demands of business and everyday life through which theoretical learning was always tested against practical experience, constituted an “urban sensibility” that was conducive to an active pursuit of natural knowledge. For Harkness, the relation of this science to the Scientific Revolution is that “there would have been no Scientific Revolution in England without the intellectual vitality present in Elizabethan London, for she provided later scientists with its foundations: the skilled labor, tools, techniques, and empirical insights that were necessary to shift the study of nature out of the library and into the laboratory” (2).

Harkness presents six “emblematic” cases that illustrate three components of Elizabethan science in London: “forging communities, establishing literacies, and engaging in hands-on practices,” through which we also glimpse even the humble practitioners who did not leave records (11). There was the community of naturalists in Lime Street, who collected and shared specimens. There was the complex dispute over medical authority and disciplinary boundaries between the Barber-Surgeons, the College of Physicians, and an array of other medical practitioners. There was the growth in mathematical literacy, instruments, and education that linked mathematics to practical problem solving. William Cecil’s role in vetting applications for letters patent is the vehicle for following exploration, economic development, metallurgical, alchemical, and other projects, in which London was central in bringing together sources of capital, management, skilled labor, and the technical expertise of practitioners. The two final cases focus on Clement Draper and Hugh Plat, collectors of natural knowledge through reading, interviews with practitioners, their own experiments.

London science was vibrant but not organized, so it could be messy and chaotic with ambivalences and cross-currents. The new print culture coexisted, and conflicted, with a still rich manuscript culture. While print was important to the dissemination of mathematical literacy, it was a weapon in the conflict the Barber-Surgeons waged against unlicensed medical practitioners in the interest of their status vis-à-vis the College of Physicians. Publication of Gerard’s herbal eclipsed the gentlemanly exchange of the Lime Street naturalists. And while the notebooks of Draper and Plat reveal the rich social world of their sources, when Plat publishes his collections of natural knowledge, these sources are disguised. Francis Bacon’s appropriation of many dimensions of this science in “Solomon’s House” under elite, patriarchal direction, further consigned to oblivion the world of London science and its humble practitioners.

For Harkness’s thesis, the connection of Elizabethan vernacular science with the English Scientific Revolution is most problematic. Besides the question of whether such urban vernacular science might also be typical of other European cities, there is the chronological gap between Plat and Boyle, Hooke, Halley, and Newton that renders connections tenuous. Harkness admits that London science was a type of “normal” science that preceded revolutionary breakthroughs. It was empirical and experimental in testing particular instances, but there is no clear sense of experimental testing addressing fundamental theoretical or conceptual issues in understanding nature. Despite the...