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This book is a welcome addition to the recent historiography of the scientific revolution that has highlighted the role played by artisans and commercial interests. Such studies have shifted attention away from the classic theoretical texts of early modern physics and mathematics, and from individuals of genius, and brought into focus studies of the whole range of nature as conducted by a very varied cast of characters. Far from being the novel concern of a pioneering new group of gentlemen scientists in the mid-seventeenth century, a fascination with nature, and its potential for human use and understanding, is now revealed as deep-seated throughout early modern society (or at least in its towns and middling and upper sorts). Indeed, the classic “scientific revolution” of the Royal Society and kindred bodies can be seen as an attempt to control and redirect a passion for science that was all too pervasive, and to bring it into the trustworthy hands of an elite. Deborah E. Harkness's study picks up this very theme but moves its setting back into what she calls Elizabethan London (actually more “Jacobethan,” as it runs into the 1610s). She highlights the new approach by choosing as her title not the “Solomon's House” of Francis Bacon's New Atlantis, but the “Jewel House,” which was the title of a collection by one of her heroes, Sir Hugh Plat. The book's final chapter compares Plat and Bacon and argues that the latter's account of Solomon's House, far from being a vision of a new science, is actually an attempt to institutionalize in elite hands the multifarious scientific activities of Bacon's London contemporaries, as epitomized by Plat's publication. Bacon thus provided the ideal role model for the Restoration (and later) scientists who wished to forget the roots of science in the streets of London (and other trading and artisanal centers), and re-establish it as a “natural philosophy” fit for academies and learned societies.
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