Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution - Tapa dura

Lisa Jardine has the knack of making science easy to understand. Her book brilliantly recaptures the excitement felt by seventeenth century scientists at the new world of objects they were finding and theorising. (Roy Porter)

A fascinating book, the best introduction to date for the first scientists; for this is history written not backwards, in the quest of the origins of modern science, but with a blind eye to the future... (David Wooton)

Lisa Jardine is a new star on England's literary and historical scene. (LITERARY REVIEW)

INGENIOUS PURSUITS is an eminently readable history of the intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that through it's author's spirited style well convey the excitement of those who were party to it. (TLS)

Today the 'two cultures' - art and science - have come to be treated as fundamentally opposed. Scientific research is castigated for its inhumane methods and lack of moral responsibility, while art is treated as an enduring source of essential guidance to society's spiritual well-being. As Lisa Jardine makes clear in this remarkable book, this is a distinction which is both artificial and historically inaccurate. The intellectual revolution of the seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries was the single most formative event in Western history, bringing together the humanities and natural sciences in an unprecedented ferment of conceptual and practical creativity. Lisa Jardine documents the forces for change which brought the human and natural sciences together and gave them shape. Each of her series of key components - among them, precise time measurement, enhanced astronomical observation, selective animal and plant breeding, and technological advances in navigation - lays a crucial part of the foundations for modern thought. She brilliantly illuminates the practice of science, its impact on the emerging modern world, and its continuing relevance to society.