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." (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)