Thomas Harriot (c. 1560–1621) remains a fascinating and elusive figure. The “English Galileo,” whose unpublished discoveries with a telescope he had made and improved himself paralleled and, in some cases, anticipated those of the Florentine natural philosopher. The experimentalist and atomist whose ideas about optics, in particular, intrigued correspondents as learned and original as Kepler. The mathematician whose understanding of algebra rivalled that of his most able continental contemporaries and remained a major influence throughout the seventeenth century, despite the intellectual vicissitudes caused by the fact that his work was published in fragmented form only after his death. The learned adventurer, whose account of the indigenous American communities and languages that he encountered at first hand in the short-lived English settlement at Roanoke achieved European fame. The Svengali whose supposed skill as a conjuror added to political and religious suspicions about the loyalty of his two great patrons, Sir Walter Ralegh and Henry Percy, the “Wizard Earl” of Northumberland. The early proponent of the virtues of smoking tobacco who succumbed to a disease of the nose and upper lip that was initially diagnosed by a royal physician as cancer.

All of these visions of Harriot may be found in Robyn Arianrhod's readable and well-presented new biography, Thomas Harriot: A Life in Science. Arianrhod brings to her subject both a clear narrative style and the ability to make sense, rather than heavy weather, of scholarly judgments of what remains difficult material. She has consulted Harriot's difficult, disordered, and often semi-legible manuscripts, although in reality her interpretations are almost all retellings of those reached by other writers and do not venture far beyond the material now digitized by Matthias Schemmel and others. In this respect, Arianrhod is the beneficiary of the renaissance in Harriot studies that was led by the late John Shirley, whose 1983 biography remains the most authoritative single work on Harriot. Arianrhod has also read with care the published fruit of more than twenty years of the annual Harriot lecture at Oriel College, Oxford. She has gratefully plundered the editorial scholarship that has brought to the printed page some of Harriot's most significant mathematical work, especially the remarkable achievements of the late Jacqui Stedall. Arianrhod's book is primarily a work of synthesis, and it is in this respect and in terms of readability that it represents a rival to (although not a replacement for) Shirley's. Arianrhod takes pains to situate Harriot in the time and place where he lived: she gives lively accounts of Durham House, Ralegh's London home when he was on the rise at Elizabeth's court, and of Roanoke itself. She is alert to what it might have been like to travel by ship to North Carolina. She describes in detail how Ralegh and Percy might have lived as prisoners in the Tower of London, and she is thoughtful about Harriot's relationships with the mariners, mathematical practitioners, and doctors with whom he worked, lived, or consulted. In this respect, Arianrhod does a superb job of bringing to life someone who has left relatively little correspondence and who figured quite infrequently in the correspondence of others. There are, to be sure, slips produced by Arianrhod's lack of real familiarity with the period she is discussing. These range from relatively trivial miscalculations of the age of Queen Elizabeth or incorrect dates for the royal supremacy over the English church, through the promotion of the young lawyer Francis Bacon to the judiciary in the trial of the Earl of Essex, to something of an obsession with the supposed warfare between science and religion.

The main difficulty is not what Arianrhod says or considers but what she does not say and has not considered. She concludes her story with an account of what she calls “resurrecting” Thomas Harriot, which I would prefer to dub the creation of the myth of Thomas Harriot. The key tenets of this myth, which began as a story of national pride, are that Harriot was unique and that his unpublished papers show that an Englishman came first to territories of knowledge otherwise colonized by Italians, Germans, or even the French, just as Ralegh and Harriot were the first to bring English civilization to the Americas. Arianrhod is too sensitive to ignore the importance of native informers in Harriot's understanding of the New World. She has not, however, paid similar attention to the revolution that has taken place in our understanding of English universities or of the intellectual life of skilled tradesmen and mathematical practitioners in late sixteenth-century London. Harriot's Oxford receives almost no discussion; others in London with similar skills to his are mentioned only to be disparaged by comparison (with the partial exception of John Dee, whom Arianrhod discusses more for his conversations with angels than as a promotor of Euclid or indeed of trans-Atlantic expansion). Neither Henry Savile, Harriot's contemporary as a student of Ptolemy or Euclid, nor Hugh Platt, whose publications appealed to improving consumers of natural knowledge in Harriot's London, merit any attention. Arianrhod has read widely in the modern literature devoted directly to Harriot, but she is as happy to gather her account of early modern mathematics more broadly from Carl Boyer as she is to use A. L. Rowse as her guide to the Elizabethan court. In this respect, Arianrhod's life of Harriot is a missed opportunity: a new and engaging synthesis written from an increasingly old-fashioned perspective.