Lisa Jardine

Lisa Jardine
Lisa Jardine in 2014, portrait via the Royal Society
Born	Lisa Anne Bronowski (1944-04-12)12 April 1944 Oxford
Died	25 October 2015(2015-10-25) (aged 71)
Cause of death	Cancer
Nationality	British
Occupation	Historian
Spouse	John Hare
Parents	Jacob Bronowski (father) Rita Coblentz (mother)

Lisa Anne Jardine, CBE FRS FRHistS (née Bronowski; 12 April 1944 – 25 October 2015) was a British historian of the early modern period. From 1990 to 2011 she was Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters at Queen Mary, University of London. From 2008 to January 2014 she was Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA).

Jardine was a Member of Council of the Royal Institution, until 2009. On 1 September 2012, she relocated with her research centre and staff to University College London (UCL) to become founding director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities.

Education and early life

Jardine was the eldest child of Jacob Bronowski and the sculptor Rita Coblentz. Her father was the subject of her Conway Memorial Lecture, "Things I Never Knew About My Father", delivered at the Conway Hall Ethical Society on 26 June 2014.

Jardine was educated at Cheltenham Ladies' College, Newnham College, Cambridge, and the University of Essex. For two years she took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos before, in her final year and under the influence of Raymond Williams, she read English. She studied for an MA in the Literary Theory of Translation with Professor Donald Davie at the University of Essex. She was awarded a PhD from the University of Cambridge with a thesis on Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (subsequently published by Cambridge University Press).

Career and research

Jardine was Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, London, where she was Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities and Director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters. She was a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Fellow of King's College, and of Jesus College, Cambridge.

She was a Trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum for eight years, and was for five years a member of the Council of the Royal Institution in London. She was Patron of the Archives and Records Association and the Orange Prize. For the academic year 2007–08 she was seconded to the Royal Society in London as Expert Advisor to its Collections. She was a Trustee of the Chelsea Physic Garden.

From 2008 to Jan 2014 Jardine served as Chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – the UK government regulator for assisted reproduction. In December 2011 she was appointed a Director of The National Archives. In November 2011 she was made an Honorary Bencher of the Honourable Society of the Middle Temple. She was awarded the Francis Bacon Award in the History of Science by the California Institute of Technology in 2012, and collected the Bacon Medal for this award at the annual History of Science Society meeting in San Diego in September 2012. In November 2012 she received the British Academy President's Medal. In 2013–14 she served as President of the British Science Association, which in 2012 made her an Honorary Fellow.

Jardine published more than 50 scholarly articles in refereed journals and books, and 17 full-length books, both for an academic and for a general readership, a number of them in co-authorship with others (including Professor Anthony Grafton, Professor Alan Stewart and Professor Julia Swindells). She is the author of several best-selling general books, including Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution, and biographies of Sir Christopher Wren and Robert Hooke. Her book on Anglo-Dutch reciprocal influence in the 17th century, entitled Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory, published by HarperCollins UK in 2008 and HarperCollins USA in 2009, won the prestigious Cundill International Prize in History.

Jardine wrote and reviewed widely for the media, and presented and appeared regularly on arts, history and current affairs programmes for TV and radio. She was a regular writer and presenter of A Point of View, on BBC Radio 4: a book of the first two series of her talks was published by Preface Publishing in March 2008 and a second in 2009. She judged the 1996 Whitbread Prize for fiction, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize and the 2002 Man Booker Prize. In June 2015 she was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Her book choice was the full 12 volumes of P.S. Allen’s Latin Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

During the first semester of the 2008/9 academic year Jardine was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, jointly sponsored by NIAS and the Royal Library in The Hague (the KB). From 2009 to 2010 she was a Scaliger Visiting Fellow at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and held the Sarton Chair and received the Sarton Medal at the University of Ghent in Belgium. She sat for several years on the prestigious Apeldoorn British Dutch Conference Steering Board, and is a member of the Recommendation Committee Stichting Huygens Tentoonstelling Foundation, set up to oversee the Constantijn and Christian Huygens Exhibition in the Grote Kerk in The Hague in 2013.

She was the author of many books, both scholarly and general, including The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution and On a Grander Scale: the Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren. Her 2008 book Going Dutch won the 2009 Cundill Prize in History at McGill University, the world's premier history book prize worth $75,000. On 26 January 2011, Jardine appeared in a BBC documentary investigating her father's life and the history of science in the 20th century.

Books

• Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (1974)
• Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare (1983)
• From Humanism to the Humanities (1986), with Anthony Grafton
• What's Left?: Women in Culture and the Labour Movement (1989), with Julia Swindells
• Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print (1993)
• Reading Shakespeare Historically (1996)
• Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance (1996)
• Erasmus: The Education of a Christian prince with the Panegyric for Archduke Philip of Austria (1997), editor
• Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (1998), with Alan Stewart
• Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (1999)
• Francis Bacon: The New Organon (2000) editor with Michael Silverthorne
• Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (2000), with Jerry Brotton
• On a Grander Scale: The Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren (2002)
• For the Sake of Argument (2003)
• The Curious Life of Robert Hooke: The Man Who Measured London (2003)
• London's Leonardo: The Life and Work of Robert Hooke (2003), with Jim Bennett, Michael Cooper and Michael Hunter
• Grayson Perry (2004)
• The Awful End of Prince William the Silent: The First Assassination of a Head of State with a Hand-Gun (2005)
• Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory (2008)
• Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch Culture (2015), available as a free Open Access download from UCL Press)

Broadcasting and lectures

• A Point of View. BBC Radio 4 series (2008, 2010, 2011, 2014)
• My Father, the Bomb and Me. BBC Four (26 January 2011)
• Seven Ages Of Science, BBC Radio 4 series (2013)
• Things I Never Knew About My Father. Conway Memorial Lecture, Conway Hall Ethical Society (26 June 2014)

Awards and honours

Jardine was President of the Antiquarian Horological Society, a learned society focused on matters relating to the art and history of time measurement.

Jardine was a former chairman of the governing body at Westminster City School for Boys in London (which her younger son attended), and a former Chair of the Curriculum Committee on the governing body of St Marylebone Church of England School for Girls also in London. She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. Her certificate of election reads:

Lisa Jardine, CBE is Director of the Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities at UCL. Previously she spent 23 years at Queen Mary, University of London, serving as Head of the English Department, Dean of the Faculty of Arts, and as Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies. In her earlier career, after a degree in mathematics and English and a PhD on Francis Bacon, she taught at the Warburg Institute, Cornell University and then for 12 years at Cambridge.

She was a prolific and distinguished historian, with a special interest in the history of science, and had a wide impact on public life through her broadcasts and general writings, and her service on many public bodies. Among her 20 books, several of which have won major awards, are works on Bacon, Erasmus, Wren and Hooke. She advised the Society on its archives, and, during a period of formal secondment to the Society, she edited the on-line 'Hooke Folio', published in 2007; she gave the Wilkins Lecture in 2003. She was in great demand as a lecturer, and gave Tanner Lectures in both Cambridge and Yale. She received numerous honorary doctorates and fellowships; in 2012 she received the British Academy President's Medal.

She served on the Arts and Humanities Research Council and as Trustee of the V and A Museum. In 2008 she was appointed chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HEFA). She is the 2012/13 President of the British Science Association - a signal honour for a historian - and continues as a frequent broadcaster, noted for her 'Points of View' on Radio 4 and most recently for her 'Seven ages of science' series.

For nearly four decades, Lisa Jardine has combined high-level scholarship with extensive outreach, and has been extraordinarily energetic and effective in spanning the 'two cultures'. She has, in particular, been an enthusiastic advocate of the Society; election as an Honorary Fellow is recognition that she richly deserves and would deeply appreciate.}}

Jardine held honorary doctorates of Letters from the University of St Andrews, Sheffield Hallam University and the Open University, and an honorary doctorate of Science from the University of Aberdeen.

Personal life

Jardine was married to the architect John Hare and had two sons and a daughter. Her professional name derived from the surname of her first husband, Nicholas Jardine, to whom she was married for nine years. She was the cousin of television director Laurence Moody and actress Clare Lawrence Moody.

Lisa Jardine died of cancer on 25 October 2015, aged 71.