As a prelude to writing this book, Deborah Harkness, who is a professor of
history at the University of Southern California, compiled a database of
1,800 Elizabethan Londoners, all of whom had an interest, however
unofficial, in some aspect of science or technology. They were midwives,
gardeners, clockmakers, barber-surgeons, alchemists, apothecaries, engineers
and naturalists, and Harkness tracks them through the city’s back alleys,
workshops and taverns. Some of them remain shadowy figures, such as the
Smithfield alewife who administered pregnancy tests, or the mountebank known
as Dutch Hans who used to astonish the clientele in a crowded pub near the
Globe playhouse by stirring a pot of molten lead with his finger. But,
wherever possible, Harkness finds out where they lived and who they
associated with, and in this way she constructs a map of the swarming,
fractious, competitive, largely unregulated and almost wholly unexplored
underworld of Elizabethan science.
Many of her most fascinating discoveries were immigrants. In 1573, a German
called Valentine Russwurin set up a stall outside the Royal Exchange. He
said he had a degree from the university of Frankfurt, and displayed a
banner showing the bladder stones that he had extracted from satisfied
patients. He soon gained a reputation for the skilful surgical removal of
cataracts, and the Queen’s minister William Cecil was among his clients. But
he attracted the jealous attention of the London barber-surgeons because he
used the newfangled chemical medicines of Paracelsus, such as mercury for
curing syphilis, as opposed to the traditional botanical remedies, and they
seem to have hounded him out of town. Anyway, he disappeared. Equally
unfortunate was the Polish alchemist Cornelius de Lannoy whom Elizabeth
employed to turn base metals into gold, and who was subsequently confined to
the Tower for taking advantage of her Majesty’s gullibility.
People of similar interests tended, Harkness finds, to group. In Lime Street,
near the present Lloyd’s building, there lived a thriving community of
botanists, entomologists and plant-hunters with widespread European
connections. One resident, the silk merchant James Cole, was the nephew of
the great Antwerp map-maker Abraham Ortelius, and the son-in-law of the
Flemish naturalist Mathias L’Obel who gave his name to the lobelia. A
neighbour was the naturalist Thomas Moffett whose interest in spiders is
commemorated in the nursery rhyme about his stepdaughter Little Miss Muffet.
The Flemish apothecary and tulip fanatic James Garret was another member of
this coterie, and his shop seems to have served as a post office for fellow
enthusiasts. Specimens poured in from all over the globe – a Neapolitan
tarantula, a grasshopper from Guinea, African marigold seeds and plants from
the East and West Indies that Garret cultivated in his garden plot along the
city’s crumbling wall in Aldgate. The barber-surgeon John Gerard, the author
of the most famous English botanical treatise, The Herbal, was, it turns
out, a hanger-on of the Lime Street fraternity, but aroused their resentment
by filching their ideas and making such a mess of it that the printers had
to call in L’Obel to correct Gerard’s blunders while the book was going
through the press.
A scientific researcher of extraordinary pathos whose work Harkness unearths
is Clement Draper, a member of the Ironmongers’ Company, of good
Leicestershire family, who was imprisoned for debt in the King’s Bench from
the early 1580s to 1593. Although deprived of freedom, he kept his mind
active by reading and talking to other prisoners and filling his notebooks
with the practical information about medicine, mining and chemistry that he
learnt from them. Some of his informants sound even more interesting than
Draper himself. Joachim Gans, who taught him chemistry, was a Jewish
metallurgist from Prague, who sailed with Raleigh as a mineral expert on his
1585 Roanoke voyage, and was arrested in a Bristol tavern in 1589 while
engaging in a heated debate with a local cleric about the divinity of Christ.
But Harkness’s prize exhibit is Hugh Plat, the Cambridge-educated son of a
wealthy London brewer. Almost nothing has been written about Plat, but he
was a figure of boundless intellectual vitality, with a wide network of
consultants in London and the provinces. Soap-boilers, tallow-chandlers,
midwives, carpenters and wine-coopers told him their trade secrets. The
great William Gilbert showed him how to magnetise needles and float them in
a bowl of water so that they pointed north, an Irish salt-maker taught him
to grow thin-shelled walnuts, a celebrated London preacher instructed him in
the manufacture of green ink from iris flowers. His notebooks are a treasury
of practical tips on everything from food preservation to making artificial
coral. Besides his city house, he had a country property in Bethnal Green
where he carried out horticultural experiments. He published a popular
cookbook, Delights for Ladies, and his macaroni recipe for feeding sailors
on long voyages was adopted by Sir Francis Drake. His famous plague cakes
were widely believed to cure bubonic plague. Concocted Available at the
Sunday Times Books First price of £17.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst from chemicals, herbs and the gallstones of
Peruvian goats, they won the approval of the highest in the land.
Elizabeth’s privy council ordered 66 of them. He was knighted by James I in
1605.
Harkness’s enthusiasm for her subject sometimes outruns her evidence. She
believes that Elizabethan London had a keen interest in mathematics and
witnessed rising rates of “mathematical literacy”. This seems doubtful. The
standard Elizabethan grammar-school curriculum did not include even simple
arithmetic, and superstitious citizens, as she notes, opposed their sons
learning maths because it was associated with sorcery and the black arts.
The fact that a Londoner called Humfrey Baker published an introduction to
mathematics in 1590, in which he undertakes to teach his adult readers how
to make elementary calculations, is not, as Harkness seems to imply,
evidence of widespread numeracy, but of the contrary. Also questionable is
her judgment that “London’s medical market functioned well”. She means by
this that practitioners with sufficient persistence and guile could make a
living. But that is a curious criterion for a health-care system, and it
omits to note that Elizabethan medical knowledge was largely an amalgam of
ignorance and superstition. Physicians were powerless to cure even the
commonest diseases or mitigate suffering, and young Englishmen wishing for a
medical training in touch with modern advances had to travel to universities
abroad such as Padua, Montpelier or Leyden.
Harkness winds up with an ill-advised attack on the reputation of Sir Francis
Bacon. Because he was upper-class he has, she suggests, received the credit
for inaugurating the scientific revolution that should by rights go to
humbler folk such as Plat. Everything that Bacon describes in his futurist
science-fiction novel The New Atlantis was, she claims, already taking place
in Elizabethan London. This is not true. The New Atlantis has, for example,
submarines, telephones and flying machines, and Harkness cites no instances
of these among her Elizabethans. Besides, Bacon was a profound thinker, and
Plat was not. Still, sticking up for one’s own side of an argument is no
crime, and Harkness has written a truly wonderful book, deeply researched,
full of original material, and exhilarating to read. Its grown-up realism
puts to shame the glamorised pap currently spooned out on film and
television as a depiction of 16th-century England.
The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution by
Deborah E Harkness
Yale £19.99 pp370
Buy the book at the offer price of £19.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585
