Book Review Elizabethan London and Scientific Practice

The jewel house is a nuanced analysis of the community of gardeners, instrument makers, engineers, alchemists and mathematics teachers in Elizabethan London whose empirical practices, Harkness argues, ‘set the stage for the Scientific Revolution’ via the practice of what she terms vernacular ‘science’. Although her employment of the term ‘science’ may seem an anachronism, she demonstrates that the word was in use by authors of the time and is more accurate than the alternative vocabulary of historians. The work of these vernacular ‘scientists’ was not the theoretical and elite natural philosophy confined to those with a university education, but instead artisanal, empirical, practical. Harkness convincingly asserts that this ‘patchwork scientific community’, made of practitioners such as the virtuoso Sir Hugh Plat, the entomologist Thomas Moffett, and the alchemist and prisoner Clement Draper, anticipated many of the methods of Francis Bacon, particularly his inductivism and data gathering. Although Bacon had the power and the influence to help make this vernacular science bear fruit in the organized enterprise of the Royal Society, it seems that hundreds of London practitioners were already engaged in this work well before Bacon prescribed it.