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)