Harkness 2007

Harkness, Deborah E. The Jewel House: Elizabethn London and the Scientific Revolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007.

"This book is about these minor vernacular figures and their small successes, trial-and-error progress, and mundane aspirations. It is about the powerful partnership that existed in London between collaboration and competition, which often led to a heated but amiable discussion of ideas about nature in English rather than a publication of them in Latin. It provides an account of a relatively brief period in London's history and of the men and women who studied the natural world and tried to find better ways to harness its power and control its processes. They pursued this course by examining their own experiences as well as by repeatedly testing and verifying the experiences of their friends and rivals, thus taking steps toward experimentation. In Elizabethan London we can see how students of nature eagerly embraced the new print culture that was available to them but preserved the vibrant manuscript culture of the medieval period in their notebooks and recipe collections. By sketching out this vital world and exploring the ways in which the City of London functioned as a center for inquiry into and debates about nature, I am contributing to an ongoing historical project to situate the work of a small handful of acknowledged scientific geniuses within the densely social communities of practice that surrounded them." (6)

"It was not until the end of the seventeenth century, when the memories of the Elizabethan interest in nature had faded and the Royal Society had been established, that people began to look back on Bacon as a prophet of a newly empirical science." (7)

London's urban sensibility:

• citizens expected their work would be "publicly known even if it were not published" (through trade associations) (8)
• "fostered a belief that residents had specific types of expertise that could and should be exploited to benefit particular individuals and the City as a whole" (9)
• "confirmed that work done in collaboration with others was both necessary and desirable in a thriving city" (9)

"Their significance lies not in the elucidation of new formulas or the consetruction of new cosmological systems, but in the ways that they organized their communities and settled disputes; the value they placed on the acquisition of various literacies (including mathematical, technical, and instrumental literacies); and the practices they developed that led to an increasingly sophisticated hands-on exploration of the natural world." (10)

Living on Lime Street: "English" Natural History and the European Republic of Letters

story of Gerard and L'Obel -- now Gerard is seen as "Elizabethan England's premier naturalist", but "in his own time, however, his reputation was mixed, and the publication of The herball marked not the apotheosis of England's first great botanist but the development of a schism in London's natural history community" (18)

Lime Street community shows:

• "international character of Elizabethan science" (28)
• "economically self-sufficient" members (28)

"It was through the circulation and collection of these naturalia -- a packet of seeds, a drawing of a rhinoceros horn, a spider, a snippet of information about Virginia -- that the Lime Street community expressed its vitality at home and made its reputation abroad. Though it is easy to dismiss these objects as intellectual bric-a-brac, the fragmentary evidence of an unsystematic interest in he natural world, each item was part of an intricate web of exchange that stretched from Russia to the New World, from Denmark to Africa. Every time a dried plant specimen changed hands it became infused with new cultural and intellectual currency as its provenance became richer, its associations greater." (31)

"Within this circuit of exchanges natural objects led double lives; they were both subjects of study and inquiry, and artifacts cherished for their rarity and beauty. As subjects of study, natural objects provoked commentary and argument as their features and merits were debated and discussed within the community. As material objects, they were hoarded in cabinets, were swapped for other desired items on a naturalist's wish list of specimens, and provided cultural ornamentation that spoke to kings and queens interested in the rare and unusual, as well as to scholars and intellectuals." (31)

Lime Street naturalists "preferred receiving actual specimens of plants and animals, or even careful drawings, rather than verbal descriptions." (37)

Moffett instructed his readers how to modify and color the line drawings in his Theater of insects (38)

fossils (40-41)

friendship albums (alba amicorum) -- "froze these carefully cultivated cordial relationships on the page" (45); "fine line between modesty and self-promotion" (45)

Gerard's Herball -- reprinted throughout 17c "and used by everyone from apothecaries who made medicines to fine ladies who embroidered twirling tendrils of peas and fanciful on their bed hangings and petticoats" (49)

Gerard's ambivalence to foreigners and foreignness (52)

The Contest over Medical Authority: Valentine Russwurin and the Barber-Surgeons

foreigners, women and others who couldn't belong to trade guilds or companies "resorted to selling their goods and services directly to the crowd" (57)

struggle over medical authority -- "who could -- and who should -- be permitted to supply the chronically sick urban population with much-needed medical services" (59)

Russwurin (Paracelsian) vs. Barber-Surgeons -- Paracelsian therapies wildly popular among citizens, but not accepted in Barber-Surgeons guild (61)

"Clowes and his friends needed to distance themselves in the medical marketplace from popular Paracelsians like Russwurin -- many of whom were simply slapping a popular brand name on vaguely chemical concoctions -- while at the same time embracing a 'proper' form of Paracelsianism in their own practices and crafting a community identity that included dispensing the new medicines." (61)

"this seemingly confused palimpsest of guild regulations, City laws, networks of friends and enemies, and consumer pressures of London's medical market did work when it came to arbitrating, investigating, and resolving medical disputes" (62)

print culture as "a crucial weapon not only in the contest over medical authority but also in the pursuit of a coherent public identity" (62)

"London's medical market functioned because of the constant pressure placed on it by an enormous potential clientele of chronically sick people who were well-versed in their legal rights and not squeamish about taking their providers to law for malpractice." (64)

• corporate regulatory institutions, like the college, the Barber-Surgeons' Company, the church and the city
• practitioners
• patients

College of Physicians, founding during reign of Henry VIII with discretionary powers over medical practitioners within a 7-mile radius of the city

Barber-Surgeons' Co., consolidated in 1520, charged with examining and certifying all surgeons in London and within a 1-mile radius of the city

reliance on herbwives, etc.; no strong division between elite physicians and other medical practitioners

Henry VIII: "Quack's Charter," granting any citizen the right to perform certain medical practices (70)

street vendors and unlicensed practitioners, displaying wares on the streets; banners studded with bladder stones they'd extracted (71)

medicine as a family business (74)

"Russwurin's presence was the catalyst that polarized London's medical marketplace into camps marked with Paracelsian, anti-Paracelsian, and 'proper Paracelsian' signs." (76)

Barber-Surgeons used the printed book as their "weapon of choice" -- more effective long-term than manuscript transmission of medical formulas and cures" (86)

• "the printed page defined this surgical community, transforming a group of like-minded Barber-Surgeons into a visible intellectual group dedicated to ensuring the public health, promoting the worth of surgery and increasing the prestige of English surgeons" (86)

Educating Icarus and Displaying Daedalus: Mathematics and Instrumentation in Elizabethan London

"During the reign of Elizabeth, London was the center of vernacular mathematical education in England, as well as the center of mathematics publishing and instrument making." (98)