This book is about sixteenth-century Londoners and the Scientific Revolution. According to Deborah Harkness, sixteenth-century London had become a house of science and a laboratory of experiments—a Jewel House, to use Hugh Plat's (ca. 1552–1608) expression. Harkness argues that sixteenth-century Londoners “laid the social foundations for the Scientific Revolution in England” (10). Harkness takes her readers beyond notable figures of the Scientific Revolution into the corners, streets, homes, prisons, and workshops of London, to show us the social foundations of the early scientific revolution (in lowercase): the way people “organized their communities and settled disputes”; the way they acquired technical, mathematical, and instrumental literacies; and the way they developed empirical practices to deal with the natural world (10ff.).

Harkness did extensive research about London's neighborhoods and mapped out who was living where, next to whom, and when. She did extensive research on alchemists, patent letters, natural historians, Paracelsians, and experimentalists practicing in sixteenth-century London. She provides a coherent, rich, and thick description of how new scientific practices emerged from the activities of people facing each other on the streets of London. This, in itself, is a great accomplishment.

The first, fourth, and final chapters are particularly important in illuminating the creation of scientific communities, the role of the crown in scientific-technical ventures, and Bacon's relationship to London science. In her first chapter, she discusses a little-known group of natural historians who lived on Lime Street. Many residents on Lime Street were immigrants from France, Flanders, and Italy. The Lime Street residents became part of a Europe-wide network of students of nature. Harkness shows how this group of people created an intellectual community to study and debate ideas about natural objects. Yet the residents of the Lime Street community kept their interactions at a face-to-face level and did not publish their findings, and thus their contribution to the history of science has been muted till now.

In her fourth chapter, Harkness argues for the development of what she calls sixteenth-century “Big Science.” She uses this (twentieth-century) term to describe the crown's interest in scientific and technological ventures and the large human and financial resources invested in those ventures. She argues that Elizabethan Big Science was characterized by private funding (not state funding), economic profit (not the pursuit of natural knowledge), and discreet activities (not as part of a grand view of technological and scientific activities).

I find the analogy between modern Big Science and Elizabethan Big Science intriguing but distracting. Modern Big Science operates within modern scientific institutions that did not yet exist in the sixteenth century (and I do not mean to say that superconductors did not exist in the sixteenth century; I mean to say that there were no modern scientific institutions at all). Harkness places her story before the emergence of scientific institutions to discuss the social foundations of those institutions. The crown's interest in scientific and technical ventures belongs to the story of state formation that, as does the history of science, has a social foundation as well: merchants asked the crown for support in some ventures. Eventually the crown did incorporate in its bureaucracy some of those scientific-technical activities. Harkness's use of the Big Science analogy in her chapter obscures the social foundations of the state activities in scientific-technical ventures.

In this chapter, Harkness makes some passing references to the situation in other European countries, but Spain is strangely absent from her parallels (147, 150, 160). She does mention Philip II's direct style of patronage (147), but the Spanish crown's involvement in patents, navigation, mining, and metallurgy as well as the scientific expeditions of Dr. Francisco Hernández (1570) and the cosmographic expedition of Jaime Juan (1583) could have provided more much interesting parallels to her “Big Science” case study of London than the traditional references to Italy or German courts.

Her last chapter places Francis Bacon's scientific ideas and projects in the context of London. Harkness argues that Bacon's proposal for the study of nature was not new but different. According to Harkness, Bacon wanted, first, to put some order in the scientific practices already in place in London by placing those practices within the walls of a college setting: Salomon's House. Second, Bacon wanted to place those scientific practices under the supervision of well-educated and well-born gentlemen.

I find the grounding of Bacon's scientific ideas in London's scientific practices especially illuminating, but I wonder if Bacon does not represent a section of Londoners more interested in imperial designs than in commercial ones. If this was so, what was then the social foundation for the centralization of scientific practices advocated by Bacon? Did this group (represented by Bacon) live in the same neighborhoods? Did it establish a Republic of Letters, as did the community on Lime Street? I wonder if Richard Hakluyt, with his organization and collection of reports, provides an earlier model for the centralization of scientific-technical practices and gentlemanly control of practices advocated by Bacon. I wonder if the House of Trade in Seville, a city not unlike London, served as a model for the centralization of scientific-technical practices for both Hakluyt and Bacon.

Harkness's book adds to the growing number of studies arguing that science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries constituted a fluid set of ideas, practices, and debates. Her great contribution is the grounding of these ideas, practices, and debates in the urban environment of sixteenth-century London. The study of such cities as Lisbon, Seville, and Amsterdam, for instance, in the way Harkness studied London, could yield very important elements for our understanding of the scientific revolution and its relationship to the commercial and imperial expansion of Europe. Truly, this is a direction to follow, and this is a very important book.