Lisa Jardine

Education and personal life

Jardine was born on 12 April 1944 in Oxford, the eldest of four daughters of mathematician and polymath Jacob Bronowski and the sculptor Rita Coblentz. Bronowski, who died in 1974 and had been famous for his 13-part television series, "The Ascent of Man" (1973), was the subject of Jardine's Conway Memorial Lecture, "Things I Never Knew About My Father", delivered at the Conway Hall Ethical Society on 26 June 2014.

An avid reader with an interest in history from a very young age, Jardine won a mathematics scholarship to Cheltenham Ladies' College and later attended 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. Fluent in eight languages (including Greek and Latin), 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 dissertation on Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse (subsequently published by Cambridge University Press).

In striking out on her own career path Jardine recalled that she initially found her father's celebrity something of a burden, noting that she was “very, very conscious” of being his daughter. When in 1969 she married Cambridge historian and philosopher of science, Nicholas Jardine, she was relieved to assume her husband's surname, which she continued to use after they divorced in 1979 “Until 1999, the name Bronowski never occurred in cuttings about me, and it was broadly unknown that I was his daughter,” she later stated. The couple had a son and a daughter. In 1982, she married the architect John Hare, with whom she had one son. She was reported to have said that her greatest achievement was her three “well-balanced children”. Jardine was the cousin of television director Laurence Moody and actress Clare Lawrence Moody. Jardine had been raised as a secular Jew, but when appointed new chair of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Britain’s fertility regulator, she expressed her loyalty to her observant grandparents' Orthodox faith, which she describes as going back "all the way back to whenever - Abraham", and her reluctance to clash with the Catholic Church on embryology.

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.

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.

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. 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 Ghent University in Belgium. She sat for several years on the prestigious Apeldoorn British Dutch Conference Steering Board, and was 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.

In June 2015 she was the guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Her musical choices included "Why" by Annie Lennox, "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" by Bob Dylan and "Once in a Lifetime" by Talking Heads. Her book choice was the full 12 volumes of P.S. Allen’s Latin Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam.

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.

She was noted for her cross-disciplinary approach to intellectual history and has been called "the pre-eminent historian of the scientific method." On her death in October 2015, she was celebrated for her commitment to her students, and "her deep empathy for outsiders of all kinds—rebels, misfits and migrants."

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.

In 2012, she was awarded the President's Medal by the British Academy.

She was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2015. Her certificate of election reads:

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. 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.

Death

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