Harkness 2007: Difference between revisions

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

Revision as of 18:25, 16 January 2012

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 cucumbers 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