Recreating a Long-Gone Community
Phillip Barron
Deborah Harkness (John E. Sawyer Fellow 2004–05) spent more than a year immersed in the dark basements of London archives before she arrived at the National Humanities Center last fall. She came with plastic tubs filled with files and notes. She needed a place to sit, organize the contents of the bins, and write without distraction.
She now says that her fellowship at the Center is just what she needed. She thinks “the NHC is the perfect place to write, because you have library access without being in a library.” “You’re not tempted to procrastinate in the stacks,” she jokes.
The extensive library resources are just one of the offerings of the NHC she took advantage of during her 2004-2005 Fellowship. The biggest surprise to her was the assistance she received from her fellow Fellows.
At the NHC, “someone else has assembled this great cast of characters. You’re free to think, to ask questions, to learn from scholars outside your field.” For example, “I had no idea what a southeast Asian anthropologist would have to contribute to my research.”
Harkness, an historian of science and medicine, spent last year trying to get a sense of what daily life was like in the scientific community that produced Sir Francis Bacon. Her London-based archival research focused on the scientific community of Elizabethan London – from roughly 1560 until 1620. So, how do scholars from other fields help her research?
“At a specialized research institution or back home, you’re surrounded by people who either know your work or have a similar perspective as you. Their feedback is invaluable, but an interdisciplinary setting like the NHC adds a different dimension to think about your work with a bigger perspective,” Harkness explains.
She began her current research project by asking, “what was it like to do science in Elizabethan London?” She quickly realized that the answer to this question would come in the form of answers to several smaller, more specific questions and problems.
What would it be like to walk down the streets of Elizabethan London if you were someone interested in science? What would you worry about? What would you see in shop windows? And perhaps the most substantial problem for her: how do you “hang out” in a lab or a community that existed four hundred years ago?
Trying to come up with a method for getting in touch with communities long gone, Harkness borrowed some techniques from sociologists and anthropologists. She’s compiling an ethnographic look at how the various scientific communities of London functioned by “deep hanging out” — an “anthropologist’s term,” she says, “for gathering as much information as possible from archival sources like trade guild records and public records and then letting that information create a scene for you.”
To make use of all these documents, she created what she calls a “tracking database” — a database of nearly two thousand men and women engaged in scientific or medical lines of work. By indexing the archival documents in a database, Harkness is able to discover patterns in people’s lives, patterns that were not visible before. And thus, she’s able to reconstruct a bit of history.
The dataset is “much larger” than she expected it would be when she started. In fact, it’s the largest database of early modern scientific/medical/technological figures of which she’s aware. Harkness knew at the outset that she would find the scientific community of London to be composed of more than white-jacketed lab workers and wealthy financiers, but her research quickly led her to include people not previously thought of as scientists.
Apothecaries were early pharmaceutical chemists. Midwives employed an extensive knowledge of biology, physiology, and medicine. Aqua-vitae distillers were expert lab technicians who knew how to keep the chemicals they were working with from igniting. Gun and cannon designers had to be fluent in physics as well as chemistry. Yet none of these professions were then thought of as “scientific.”
“Of course,” says Harkness, “I’ll spend time in the book defending my ethnographic approach, the street-level-up approach. But the image of the scientific community that is emerging is so surprising.” For instance, she’s learning that the the scientific community of Elizabethan London was composed of “men and women of all social classes.”
All the data she has collected has confirmed that “to live in Elizabethan London was to live in the center of a real scientific community.”
Oddly enough, the Humanities Center’s physical setting helped Harkness understand her own research a little better. At the beginning of the time period in which Harkness is interested, Elizabethan London was a walled community with a small population that occupied little more than a square mile in size. The population grew dramatically during that time, but by contemporary metropolitan standards, the London of the early 17th century is a small city. All this makes it more likely that members of the various scientific communities were aware of and interacted with each other on a daily basis.
“The NHC too is a walled community,” says Harkness. “Being here helped me understand the intellectual dynamics of Elizabethan London even more.” Given “the ways interacting with people can help shape directly and indirectly the work you do,” she postulates that the National Humanities Center “may just be the ideal place to write a book on how intellectual communities function.”
This piece originally appeared in the Autumn 2005 issue of the News of the National Humanities Center.