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

Deborah E. Harkness has produced a wonderful book that develops and deepens various trends in recent history of science, medicine, and technology; it adds significantly to and alters our understanding of the development of early modern "science." She sticks, with justification, to this anachronistic term because her huge cast of characters is engaged in all kinds of nitty-gritty practical inquiries, which are most definitely not learned "natural philosophy" nor the later "experimental, mechanical philosophy," but include all kinds of work in medical and other areas of healing. The book is therefore of great interest to historians of medicine and is full of recondite research and well-crafted anecdotes about the networks of midwives, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, physicians, gardeners, naturalists, alchemists, instrument makers, and many others who both collaborated and competed for private profit and public recognition.

The conclusion (and perhaps premise) of Harkness's study is that science was already being forged by communities of largely forgotten minor figures and artisans that expanded along with the fortunes of Elizabethan England in general and London in particular. She claims that some of Francis Bacon's celebrated plan for a reformation or instauration of science such that it should become empirical, collaborative, utilitarian, and integrated with affairs of state was an emergent reality in the streets of London. If so, and it is a well-supported claim, then our understanding of "the scientific revolution" and England's large part in it needs to move even further away from great men like Bacon and Boyle, from canonical texts like Bacon's dreamy New Atlantis, and from cerebral retheorizing about the nature of substance to forgotten virtuosi like Clement Draper and the groups of naturalists, native and foreign, living on and around Lime Street and trading specimens, to neglected records of the vibrant invention and projection that was common among Elizabethan Londoners such as Hugh Plat (whose book of 1594, The Jewel House, gives Harkness her title), and to the very practical businesses of making medicines and designing mathematical instruments.

Harkness's long period of research has led to a work of phenomenal thoroughness. She has identified more than one thousand practitioners of and contributors to London's hive of activity, some of whom were previously unknown even to experts in the field. She has moved beyond printed texts to forgotten diaries and the parish, guild, and city records. She shows, for example, how John Gerard exploited the work and common knowledge of unpublished naturalists to forge his famous Herball of 1597. She has tramped the streets she writes about and is able to evoke Elizabethan London with extraordinary empathy.

Readers of the Bulletin will be captivated by the first chapter, "Living on Lime Street: 'English' Natural History and the Republic of Letters," but will be most interested in the second chapter, "The Contest over Medical Authority: Valentine Russwurin and the Barber-Surgeons." Here Harkness transforms our understanding of the well-known (because published) efforts of leading surgeons like William Clowes and George Baker to raise the status of their profession. That they largely failed, Harkness argues, is because medical authority was incapable of controlling "the teeming and vital 'underside'" (p. 96) of the network of healers—empirics, midwives, and other unlicensed practitioners like Russwurin.

It is almost impossible to criticize such a well-conceived, well-researched, and well-written book. Some might find that the ethnographic style of thick description sometimes crosses from the evocative to the overly empirical. It is perhaps this methodological approach that renders her larger conclusions a little vulnerable. Harkness has shown that a lot of "science" of some kind went on in London unmemorialized in print. London was not moving teleologically toward Bacon's Bensalem in embryo or even The Royal Society, but the precise relation between this chaotic activity and its more recognizably modern forms needs more exploration. The Jewel House provides us with gems and with the tools with...