Lisa Jardine

"In The Awful End of Prince William the Silent, Lisa Jardine explores the historical ramifications of the first assassination of a head of state with a hand-gun. The shooting of Prince William of Orange in the hallway of his Delft residence in July 1584 by a French Catholic - the second attempt on his life - had immediate political consequences: it was a serious setback for the Protestant cause in the Netherlands, as its forces fought for independence from the Catholic rule of the Habsburg empire. But, as Jardine illustrates, its implications for those in positions of power were even more far-reaching, as the assassination brutally and irrevocably heralded the arrival of a lethal new threat to the security of nations: a weapon that could be concealed and used to deadly effect at point-blank range." "Queen Elizabeth I, William's close Protestant ally, was devastated by his death and, being the subject of assassination plots herself, thrown into panic; in the aftermath of William's murder, legislation was enacted in the English Parliament making it an offence to bring a pistol anywhere near a royal palace. Elizabeth's terror was not misplaced - as Jardine observes, this assassination was the first in a long and bloody line that would take in those of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and Archduke Ferdinand in 1914, and is all too relevant even today."--BOOK JACKET.

"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."--BOOK JACKET.

The figure of Sir Christopher Wren looms large in English national consciousness. In this biography, Lisa Jardine explores the unique, exacting nature of Wren's mind and the emerging new world of late-17th-century science and ideas.

"Lisa Jardine and Jerry Brotton raise questions about the formation of cultural identity in Western Europe. Through an analysis of the circulation of art and luxury objects, the authors challenge the view that Renaissance culture defined itself in large part against an exotic, dangerous, always marginal East. Featuring more than seventy illustrations, including many in color and some published for the first time, their book provides fascinating insights into the works of Leonardo da Vinci, Durer, Holbein, Pisanello, and Titian."--BOOK JACKET.

Today the two cultures of "art" and "science" have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed, their aims incompatible. In this remarkable book, Lisa Jardine makes clear that this distinction is both artificial and historically inaccurate. Ingenious Pursuits focuses on a series of virtuoso advancements -- among them the discovery of the circulation of blood, the perfection of the mechanical clock, enhanced astronomical observation, fundamental developments in mathematics, selective animal and plant breeding, and the development of chemical substance analysis -- that transformed the thinking of the early modern world and inaugurated forces for change that laid the very foundations for modern thought. - Jacket flap.

The flowering of civilization, the rebirth of classical scholarship, and the emergence of some of the greatest artists and thinkers the world has known: this is the traditional view of the Renaissance. In this lively, provocative, and wholly absorbing new book, Lisa Jardine offers a radical new interpretation, arguing that the creation of culture during the Renaissance was inextricably tied to the creation of wealth - that the expansion of commerce spurred the expansion of thought. While Europe's crowned heads and merchant entrepreneurs competed with each other to acquire works of art from the leading artists of the day, vicious commercial battles were being fought over silks and spices, and over who should control the centers for international trade around the globe. The rapidly growing market for printed books - a new commodity seized upon with equal enthusiasm by investors and consumers - disseminated the "new learning" via publishing houses and printing presses across Europe, stimulating the evolution of the European intellectual tradition as much by accident as by design. Bringing this opulent epoch to life in all its material splendor and competitive acquisitiveness, Lisa Jardine examines Renaissance culture from its western borders in Christendom to its eastern reaches in the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

Overview: 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."

Bacon (1909-92) was raised in large country houses in rural Ireland by a family whose conventional expectations he rebelled against early on. As a young man he was introduced to the seamy side of life in London and Paris; but only after seeing a Picasso retrospective in 1928 did he become an artist. He sprang into prominence in 1944 with a triptych which shocked the art world with its sheer ferocity, and he soon emerged, with his friend Lucian Freud, as a leader of an informal "School of London," which favored figurative painting in an age dominated by abstraction. As retrospectives of Bacon's work in Paris, London, and New York made his reputation soar, his nighttime exploits grew wilder and wilder; charming and confident, with a strong sadomasochistic streak, he was drawn to "rough trade" in London clubs and pushed all situations to the edge. At the same time, he was a deeply cultivated and thoughtful artist who was obsessively guarded about the sources of his inspiration. Michael Peppiatt has unlocked many of the enigmas of Bacon's life and work. Bacon talked openly to Peppiatt about his early life, his sexuality, his fantasies, and his ambitions, aware that all was being recorded for publication. At the suggestion that some of his remarks would sound indiscreet, Bacon replied: "The more indiscreet, the more interesting it will be." Together with many new facts, unpublished documents, and penetrating analyses of key paintings, these conversations have been integrated into what is the most complete and riveting account of one of the greatest artists of our time.

Temptation in the Archives is a collection of essays by Lisa Jardine, that takes readers on a journey through the Dutch Golden Age. Through the study of such key figures as Sir Constantjin Huygens, a Dutch polymath and diplomat, we begin to see the Anglo-Dutch cultural connections that formed during this period against the backdrop of unfolding political events in England. Temptation in the Archives paints a picture of a unique relationship between the Netherlands and England in the 17th century forged through a shared experience – and reveals the lessons we can learn from it today.

"This volume contains a selection from among the papers delivered at a conference held to mark the centenary of a watershed event in early modern studies: the appearance of Volume I of P.S. Allen's edition of Erasmus's letters. Erasmus scholarship has been a growing field since the late twentieth century, owing to the enormous volume and vast intellectual range of his œuvre and to the reprinting of his works from the 1960s onwards, while Allen's edition has proved the basis for research for scholars of almost every aspect of Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. The conference aimed to investigate as many aspects as possible of Erasmus's literary, educational, rhetorical, and theological activities and of their influence on the emerging Europe of the early modern era. The essays collected here present a wide-ranging overview of the current state of Erasmus scholarship."--Back cover.

In this 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 of Orange and his English wife arrived to rule in London. This is the remarkable story of the relationship between two of Europe's most important colonial powers at the dawn of the modern age. Jardine demonstrates how individuals such as Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton and successive generations of the remarkable Huygens family, usually represented as isolated geniuses working in the enclosed environment of the country of their birth, in fact developed their ideas within a context of easy Anglo-Dutch relations that laid the vital groundwork for the European Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution.--From publisher description.