The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution

This book explores the streets, shops, back alleys, and gardens of Elizabethan London, where a boisterous and diverse group of men and women shared a keen interest in the study of nature. These assorted merchants, gardeners, Barber-Surgeons, midwives, instrument makers, mathematics teachers, engineers, alchemists, and other experimenters, Deborah Harkness contends, formed a patchwork scientific community whose practices set the stage for the Scientific Revolution. While Francis Bacon has been widely regarded as the father of modern science, scores of his London contemporaries also deserve a share in this distinction. It was their collaborative, yet often contentious, ethos that helped to develop the ideals of modern scientific research.