Lisa Jardine

The author of the critically acclaimed Worldly Goods presents a thoughtful reassessment of the Renaissance in terms of its influence on the history of science, relating the era's imaginative, artistic endeavors to the creative inspiration behind the scientific discoveries of the period. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Building the Scientific Revolution

Ingenious Pursuits

how England plundered Holland's glory

Going Dutch

Explores significant business dealings between artists and patrons in a historical tour through the Renaissance that posits that the period's fabulous advances in culture were tied to the creation of wealth

A New History of the Renaissance

Worldly Goods

The brilliant, largely forgotten maverick Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect, and inventor who worked tirelessly with his intimate friend Christopher Wren to rebuild London after the Great Fire of 1666.He was the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and his engravings of natural phenomena seen under the new microscope appeared in his masterpiece, the acclaimed Micrographia, one of the most influential volumes of the day. But Hooke's irascible temper and his passionate idealism provedfatal for his relationships with important political figures, most notably Sir Isaac Newton: their quarrel is legendary. As a result, historical greatness eluded Robert Hooke. Now, eminent historian Lisa Jardine does this original thinker of indefatigable curiosity and imagination justice and allows him to take his place as a major figure in the seventeenth century intellectual and scientific revolution.

The Man Who Measured London

The Curious Life of Robert Hooke

A biography of a brilliant, largely forgotten maverick -- a major figure in the seventeenth century cultural and scientific revolutions. The brilliant, largely forgotten maverick Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect and inventor who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire of 1666. Throughout the 1670s he worked tirelessly with his intimate friend Christopher Wren to rebuild London, personally designing many notable public and private buildings, including the Monument to the fire. He was the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and author and illustrator of Micrographia, a lavishly illustrated volume of fascinating engravings of natural phenomena as seen under the new microscope. He designed an early-balance spring watch, was a virtuoso performer of public anatomical dissections of animals, and kept himself going with liberal doses of cannabis and poppy water (laudanum).

The Man who Measured London

'I want to use the moment as a springboard for some big ideas. I want to use the past and present to stimulate and challenge the listener and seduce them into thinking differently.' Lisa Jardine Provocative and inspirational, Lisa Jardine is one of our pre-eminent thinkers. A leading academic, she is a polymath who embraces both the arts and the sciences with equal passion and has that rare gift of being able to make her subject and her thinking accessible to a mainstream audience. Lisa presents 'A Point of View' on Radio 4 on Sunday mornings, replacing Alistair Cooke's 'Letter From America'. Another Point of View is a collection of twenty-two of the hugely popular and critically-acclaimed talks from the programme, on subjects as wide-ranging and topical as commuting, national identity, Christmas, Latin, knife crime, the mortgage crisis and the credit crunch. The book contains drawings by Nick Wadley.

Another Point of View

On November 5, 1688, William of Orange, Protestant ruler of the Dutch Republic, landed at Torbay in Devon with a force of twenty thousand men. The Glorious Revolution that followed forced James II to abdicate, and William and his wife, Mary, were jointly crowned king and queen on April 11, 1689. How was it that this almost bloodless coup took place with such apparent ease yet was not recognized as the full-blooded invasion and conquest it undoubtedly was? In this wide-ranging book, Lisa Jardine assembles new research in political and social history, together with the histories of art, music, gardening, and science, to show how Dutch tolerance, resourcefulness, and commercial acumen had effectively conquered Britain long before William and his English wife arrived in London. Going Dutch is the remarkable story of the relationship between two of Europe's most important colonial powers at the dawn of the modern age. Throughout the seventeenth century, Holland and England were engaged in an energetic commercial and cultural exchange that survived three Anglo-Dutch wars. Dutch influence also permanently reshaped England's cultural landscape. Whether through scientific discoveries, the design of royal palaces and gardens, or the introduction of works by the greatest painters of the age—Rubens, Rembrandt, and Van Dyck among them—the England we know today owes an extraordinary amount to its fierce competitor across the "narrow sea." Going Dutch demonstrates how individuals, such as Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, and successive generations of the remarkable Huygens family, who were usually represented as isolated geniuses working in the enclosed environment of their native country in fact developed their ideas within a context of the easy Anglo-Dutch relations that laid the vital groundwork for the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution. Above all, Lisa Jardine tests the traditional view that the rise of England as a world power took place at the expense of the Dutch. She finds that it was a "handing off" of the baton of cultural and intellectual supremacy to a Britain expanding in international power and influence. Going Dutch not only challenges conventional interpretations of England's role in Enlightenment-era Europe but raises questions about the position in which post-empire Britain finds itself today.

How England Plundered Holland's Glory

Julia Swindells

First published in 1990. What had been left out of Left thought? What had allowed the Left to substitute nostalgia for programme and action, and to continue to address itself exclusively to labouring men, despite insistent demands for inclusion from others – notably women – who recognised themselves as belonging to the Left? What’s Left?, a feminist challenge to the male-dominated ideology of the Labour Party, took shape under the pressure of two crucial events: the third successive election defeat of Labour by the Conservative Party, and the death of Raymond Williams. Swindells and Jardine analyse the difficulties the Left had including women in its account of class, to clarify general problems in British Left thought. They conclude that there was a serious and widely-perceived discrepancy between the Labour Party’s model of working-class consciousness and the experiences of the contemporary workforce as a whole. An important exploration of the intellectual history of the Labour Movement, What’s Left? looks critically at the Left from within the Left. It will be fascinating reading for students of cultural studies, history, politics and women’s studies.

Women in Culture and the Labour Movement

What's Left?

Jerry Brotton

Looking outward for confirmation of who they were and what defined them as "civilized," Europeans encountered the returning gaze of what we now call the East, in particular the attention of the powerful Ottoman Empire. Global Interests explores the historical interactions that arose from these encounters as it considers three less-examined art objects—portrait medals, tapestries, and equestrian art—from a fresh and stimulating perspective. As portable artifacts, these objects are particularly potent tools for exploring the cultural currents flowing between the Orient and Occident. Global Interests offers a timely reconsideration of the development of European imperialism, focusing on the Habsburg Empire of Charles V. Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton analyze the impact this history continues to have on contemporary perceptions of European culture and ethnic identity. They also investigate the ways in which European culture came to define itself culturally and aesthetically during the century-long span of 1450 to 1550. Ultimately, their study offers a radical and wide-ranging reassessment of Renaissance art.

Renaissance Art Between East and West

Global Interests

Professor of Renaissance Studies Lisa Jardine

A historical tour through the Renaissance states that the creation of culture during the period was tied to the creation of wealth, identifying the significant business dealings between artist and patron. Tour.

The brilliant, largely forgotten maverick Robert Hooke was an engineer, surveyor, architect and inventor who was appointed London's Chief Surveyor after the Great Fire of 1666. Throughout the 1670s he worked tirelessly with his intimate friend Christopher Wren to rebuild London, personally designing many notable public and private buildings, including the Monument to the Fire. He was the first Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, and the author and illustrator of Micrographia, a lavishly illustrated volume of fascinating engravings of natural phenomena as seen under the new microscope. He designed an early balance spring watch, was a virtuoso performer of public anatomical dissections of animals, and kept himself going with liberal doses of cannabis and "poppy water"(laudanum). Hooke's personal diaries -- cryptically confessional as anything Pepys wrote -- record a life rich with melodrama. He came to London as a fatherless boy of thirteen to seek his fortune as a painter, rising by his wits to become an intellectual celebrity. He never married but formed a long-running illicit liaison with his niece. A dandy, boaster, workaholic, insomniac and inveterate socializer in London's most fashionable circles, Hooke had an irascible temper, and his passionate idealism proved fatal for his relationships with men of influence -- most notably Sir Isaac Newton, who, after one violent argument, wiped Hooke's name from the Royal Society records and destroyed his portrait. In this lively and absorbing biography, Lisa Jardine at last does Hooke and his achievements justice. Illuminating London's critical role in the emergence of modern science, she rediscovers and decodes a great original thinker of indefatigable curiosity and imagination, a major figure in the seventeenth-century intellectual and scientific revolution.

A biography of Sir Christopher Wren from one of Britain's best writers and historians

The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren

On a Grander Scale

Trough the prism of the tumultuous life and brilliant intellect of Sir Christopher Wren, the multitalented architect of Saint Paul's Cathedral in London, historian Lisa Jardine unfolds the vibrant, extraordinary emerging new world of late-seventeenth-century science and ideas. The man behind the bold, imposing beauty of Saint Paul's was as remarkable as the monuments he has left us. Wren was a versatile genius who could have pursued a number of brilliant careers with equal virtuosity. A mathematical prodigy, an accomplished astronomer, a skillful anatomist, and a founder of the Royal Society, he eventually made a career in what he described disparagingly in later life as "Rubbish " -- architecture, and the design and construction of public buildings. Wren was a major figure at a turning point in English history. He mapped moons and the trajectories of comets for kings; lived and worked under six monarchs; pursued astronomy and medicine during two civil wars; exercised his creativity through the English Commonwealth, the Great Fire, the Restoration. His royal employment out lasted abdication, Dutch invasion, and the eventual extinction of the Stuart dynasty. Beyond the public achievements, Jardine explores Wren's personal motivations and passions. He was a sincere, intensely moral man with a remarkable capacity for friendship. His career was shaped by lasting associations forged during a turbulent boyhood and a lifelong loyalty to the memory of his father's master and benefactor, the "martyred king," Charles I. Everything Wren undertook, he envisaged on a grander scale -- bigger, better, more enduring than anything that had gone before.

The Outstanding Life of Sir Christopher Wren

The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning could command public admiration without the need for authorial self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself—the historical as opposed to the figural individual—was a brilliant, maverick innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the existence of something that could be designated "European thought."

The Construction of Charisma in Print - Updated Edition

Erasmus, Man of Letters

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period.

Reading Shakespeare Historically

In this re-assessment of Renaissance art, Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton examine the ways in which European civilization defined itself between 1450 and 1550.

A New York socialite who wasn't interested in fortune or fame? That was Judy Lovin who valued friendship, integrity and her career as a preschool teacher. Then her father's business collapsed, and his most powerful enemy offered to help, but under the condition that Judy would accompany him to a remote Caribbean island as his companion - nothing more. Since it meant so much to her family, Judy agreed. She suspected that he was probably a harmless lonely man. But she was so wrong. She didn't expect to meet a powerful, attractive loner who would stun her senses and capture her heart.

Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse

A fascinating exploration of the relationship of competition and assimilation between the Netherlands and England during the 17th century, revealing the ways in which Dutch tolerance, resilience and commercial acumen effectively conquered Britain by reshaping its intellectual landscape, long before Dutch monarchs sat on the English throne.

Grayson Perry

Every inch of Grayson's childhood bedroom was covered with pictures of aeroplanes, and every surface with models. In 2003, an acclaimed ceramic artist, he accepted the Turner Prize as his alter-ego Clare, wearing his best dress, with a bow in his hair. In this book, he tells his story.

Reading Shakespeare Historically is a passionate, provocative book by one of the most renowned and popular Renaissance scholars writing today. Charting ten years of critical development, these challenging, witty essays shed new light on Renaissance studies. It also raises intriguing questions about how the culture and history of the past illuminates the key social and political issues of today. Lisa Jardine re-reads Renaissance drama in its historical and cultural context, from laws of defamation in Othello to the competing loyalties of companionate marriage and male friendship in The Changeling. In doing so she reveals a wealth of new insights, sometimes surprising but always original and engrossing. At the same time, these essays also provide a fascinating account of the rise of feminist scholarship since the 1980s and the diversifying of `new historicist' approaches over the same period. Reading Shakespeare Historically will fascinate and provoke students of shakespeare and his historical age, and general readers with an urge to understand how the culture and history of our past illuminates the key scoial and political issues of today.

Lisa Jardine

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