Imatge de l'autor

Lisa Jardine (1944–2015)

Autor/a de Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance

22+ obres 3,040 Membres 40 Ressenyes 4 preferits

Sobre l'autor

Lisa Jardine was born in Oxford, England on April 12, 1944. She studied mathematics and English at university receiving a MA in the literary theory of translation from the University of Essex and a PhD from the University of Cambridge with a thesis on the scientific genius of Francis Bacon. She mostra'n més taught English at Warburg Institute, the University of Essex, Cornell University, Cambridge University, and Queen Mary and Westfield College. She wrote several books during her lifetime including Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse, Ingenious Pursuits, Worldly Goods, Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West, and Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture. Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory won the $75,000 Cundill International Prize in History in 2009. She received a Royal Society medal for popularizing science and was appointed CBE in 2005 for her contribution and commitment to state education. She died of cancer on October 25, 2015 at the age of 71. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra'n menys

Inclou aquests noms: Lisa Jardin, Lisa Jardine

Crèdit de la imatge: Lisa Jardine [credit: The Royal Society]

Sèrie

Obres de Lisa Jardine

Erasmus, Man of Letters (1993) 96 exemplars
From Humanism to the Humanities (1600) 25 exemplars
Another Point of View (2009) 15 exemplars

Obres associades

Staging the Renaissance (1991) — Col·laborador — 75 exemplars
Books and the Sciences in History (2000) — Col·laborador — 36 exemplars
The Skeptical Tradition (Major thinkers series) (1983) — Col·laborador — 19 exemplars
Across boundaries : the book in culture & commerce (2000) — Col·laborador — 8 exemplars

Etiquetat

Coneixement comú

Nom normalitzat
Jardine, Lisa
Nom oficial
Jardine, Lisa Anne
Altres noms
Bronowski, Lisa Anne (birth name)
Jardine, Lisa Anne
Data de naixement
1944-04-12
Data de defunció
2015-10-25
Lloc d'enterrament
Highgate Cemetery, London, England, UK
Gènere
female
Nacionalitat
UK
Lloc de naixement
Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, UK
Lloc de defunció
London, England, UK
Causa de la mort
cancer
Educació
Cheltenham Ladies College
University of Cambridge (Newnham College)
University of Essex
Professions
historian
university professor
public intellectual
Relacions
Bronowski, Jacob (father)
Jardine, Nicholas (former spouse)
Hare, John (husband)
Organitzacions
University of London (Queen Mary)
Victoria & Albert Museum
British Science Association
University College London
Antiquarian Horological Society
British Science Association
Premis i honors
Fellow, Royal Historical Society (2015)
Commander, Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (2005)
Norton Medlicott Medal (2006)
Francis Bacon Award (2012)
British Academy President's Medal (2012)
Cundill International Prize (2009)
Biografia breu
Lisa Jardine, née Bronowski, is the eldest child of the late scientist Jacob Bronowski and sculptor Rita Coblentz. Although divorced from her first husband, Nicholas Jardine, she continues to use his surname professionally. She's married to architect John Hare. She is the long-standing Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies at Queen Mary, University of London. She has been Head of the School of English and Drama, and Dean of Arts, and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Cambridge. She is a Trustee of the Victoria & Albert Museum and also sits on the Michael Faraday Prize Committee of the Royal Society. Professor Jardine writes and reviews for all the major UK national newspapers and magazines as well as for the Washington Post, and has appeared regularly on arts, history, and current affairs programs on TV and radio. She judged the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize, and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize. She's published more than 50 scholarly articles in peer-reviewed journals and written numerous books, many of them best-sellers. Her book Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, won the 2009 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University, the most valuable history book prize in the world. In 2008, she was appointed chair of the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA). In December 2011 she was appointed a Director of The National Archives and an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. In 2013-14 she will serve as President of the British Science Association.

Membres

Ressenyes

Jardine's book is meticulously researched, throwing interesting light on the development of science in the 17th and 18th centuries. It shows that science is not some abstract pursuit, divorced from real concerns, but tied up with military ambitions, commerce, colonialism. The first authors of guides to aspects of the natural world - fishes, plants, insects - were as concerned with turning a profit from selling specimens and drugs as they were in furthering knowledge. Also, the first pioneer scientists are an eccentric bunch. Isaac Newton and Robert Boyle shared an interest in alchemy. Robert Hooke, the Royal Society's foremost inventor and experimenter, was a talented artist, who supplied the engravings for his own Micrographia, one of the first collections of everyday objects (fleas, plant seeds) as seen through the microscope. He was also a keen self-medicator, dosing himself with everything from opium to mercury and lead (a practice also maintained by many of his contemporaries). We also learn interesting facts: St Paul's Cathedral was originally designed with a view to providing means to conduct scientific experiments; scientific collaboration continued between scientists of different nationalities, even when their countries were at war. Lisa Jardine writes well, and succeeds in giving fresh life to this early stage of the scientific revolution, and the book is a worthy read for anyone interested in the history of science. However, I do feel that it lacks commentary, to an extent. Whilst tracing the complicated web of influences upon the development of science, she rarely stands back and draws any explicit lessons or contribute her own observations. Some may applaud this lack of editorialising. Personally, however, I think such a survey as this would have benefited from more of this type of commentary, without which the book tends to degenerate at times into a mass of data - a sea of names, projects, publications, incidents, dates. And the history of science, like science itself, is more than just data collection.

Gareth Southwell is a philosopher, writer and illustrator.
… (més)
 
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Gareth.Southwell | Hi ha 8 ressenyes més | May 23, 2020 |
I became interested in the life of Robert Hooke because of the way he’s portrayed in Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle; he’s made to be a very important figure in the scientific renaissance. Lisa Jardine would probably agree with that, but her book is frustrating. Her introduction presents it as a companion volume to her life of Christopher Wren and it shares the virtues and vices of the earlier book.


On the plus side, Hooke did have an interesting character and it’s well documented. He was an obsessive diarist and a compulsive self-medicator, leading to written records of almost every time he purged, vomited, blew his nose or had an orgasm. (For this last, he often used the astrological character for Pisces; I’m a Pisces myself, but I don’t brag about it). He also notes the effect of a curious Indian herb, ganga, brought back from Ceylon by a sea captain acquaintance, as taking away memory, making the user laugh a lot, leading to a good sleep, and causing excessive hunger. The sacrifices people made for science back then! Ms. Jardine also makes a reasonably good case that a portrait long assumed to of a contemporary botanist is actually Hooke, which, if correct, would be an exciting bit of historical detective work - especially since no other picture of Hooke exists.


On the minus side, there’s a lot of the same problems that the Wren book had. Ms. Jardine desperately needs the services of a sadistic editor; somebody who will ruthlessly make her put her work in some sort of accessible order. It bounces around from Hooke’s feud with Newton over priority of the inverse square law to Hooke’s childhood on the Isle of Wight to the clock-driven equatorial quadrant. And the second minus is the almost complete lack of scientific and technical background information. The book’s title refers to Hooke’s role in surveying the area devastated by The Great Fire of London, but there’s no discussion of the actual mechanics of surveying in 1667. We learn that Hooke built a zenith telescope in his rooms, but we’re never told what a zenith telescope is or what it’s used for. There’s several comments that Hooke was the only person who could get Robert Boyle’s vacuum pump to work reliably, but nothing about why the vacuum pump was anything other than a curiosity or even a mention of Boyle’s Law. As for the Wren volume, perhaps Ms. Jardine assumes all her readers are scientifically literate and therefore don’t need the background, but if so she’s cutting herself off from a lot of potential readers.


Worth it if you can get it from the remainder table or the library, but I’d get a second book or read an encyclopedia article (or the Baroque Cycle) to get a little better handle on why Hooke was important scientifically.
… (més)
½
 
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setnahkt | Hi ha 10 ressenyes més | Dec 26, 2017 |
Another remainder table special. I learned quite a bit about Christopher Wren; in addition to be the architect of St. Paul’s and 50-odd other London churches, he was also a accomplished instrument maker, astronomer, medical experimenter, physicist and general scientific Renaissance Man. I was surprised and delighted to find that one of the towers at St. Paul’s was designed to be usable as an observatory, and that the Fire Monument had a central coaxial opening allowing it to function as a zenith telescope and a laboratory for testing pendulums and barometers. There’s a amusing little anecdote illustrating how the times were on the cusp between old and new ways of thinking; at a dinner with Robert Hooke, Wren discusses Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion but also boasts that he’s cured his wife’s thrush (I assume the disease, and not a pet bird, but you never know) by hanging a bag of live woodlice around her neck.


Nevertheless the book was not very satisfying. The author’s focus jumps around too much; every time an acquaintance or contemporary of Wren appears, there’s a detour to discuss that person’s life, politics, antecedents, and so on. The attention of the book repeatedly shifts from the reign of Charles I to the Civil War to the Commonwealth to the Restoration to William and Mary as various new subjects comes up; the literary equivalent of ADHD. Wren’s own life frequently get lost in this mass of peripheral detail.


Next the author has a penchant for quoting long excerpts from period documents in the original language. Thus We get Variant Spelings, Ye Obsolete Usages, Crptk Abrviatns, and Excessive Capitalization. A few of these are OK; it gives immediacy to letters between Flamsteed and Newton, for example, but I see no reason for page-long exact quotes of contract specifications, royal proclamations, and so on.


There’s also a strange fascination with the Order Of The Garter. Wren and his family had various associations with it, but I see no particular reason to give it the attention the book does. I get the vague feeling that the author originally planned to use this material to support some argument for a particular aspect of Wren’s life, eventually abandoned the argument, but left all the supporting material in anyway.


I also find the lack of scientific background information puzzling. The author brings up various scientific issues - the need to use extremely long telescopes and the Longitude problem, for example - but never explains to the reader why the things are the way they are (no solution for chromatic aberration except long focal length and Sir Cloudsley Shovel’s unplanned tour of the Scilly Islands). Perhaps she assumes her intended reader will already know these things; she’s written several other books on history of science.


I have to give this one three stars.
… (més)
 
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setnahkt | Dec 16, 2017 |
The fashionable thing to do these days would probably be to write a graphic novel based on the epistolary contacts of the Huygens family. Heck, I'd read it. But Lisa Jardine shows that just plain good writing is more than enough to keep you glued to the pages in this page-turner essay collection about archival science. Yes, you read that right, and no, there's no irony hidden between the lines. Download the open-access book right now (rel="nofollow" target="_top">clickety-click) and read chapter 3: “Never Trust a Pirate: Christiaan Huygens’s Longitude Clocks.” You can thank me later.

The first and titular essay is perhaps the worst of the collection, which is not nearly as bad a thing as you might think. Consider, after all, that it was the first essay on which I based my decision to read the rest of the book. A bigger thematic outlier is the final essay, which essentially offers a theoretical framework. This book is a paragon of intimate yet in-depth, meticulously sourced writing. As a bonus you're given all of the relevant transcriptions in appendices at the end. The only thing which I felt was somewhat lacking, if only in a footnote, was a discussion of the deeper intricacies of the languages used in letter writing. Obviously (courtly) French was in vogue at the time, and I know that you could show off your language skills and appropriate register, but I was still somewhat surprised to see that every quoted intra-familial letter seemed to be in French. To experts I suppose this is so self-evident that it's not the least bit remarkable. One thing is clear after reading this volume: the North Sea was referred to as the Narrow Sea with reason. England and the Netherlands were closely linked indeed.



Cross-posted from my blog.… (més)
½
 
Marcat
Frenzie | Hi ha 1 ressenya més | Jan 21, 2017 |

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Estadístiques

Obres
22
També de
6
Membres
3,040
Popularitat
#8,399
Valoració
½ 3.6
Ressenyes
40
ISBN
77
Llengües
3
Preferit
4

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