Lisa Jardine

British historian

Lisa Anne Jardine (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. the eldest of four daughters of mathematician and polymath, Jacob Bronowski, and the sculptor, Rita Coblentz. Bronowski, who died in 1974 and is best remembered 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. 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 the couple's divorce in 1979. The couple had a son and a daughter. "Until 1999, the name Bronowski never occurred in cuttings about me, and it was broadly unknown that I was his daughter", she later stated. In 1982, she married architect John Hare, with whom she had one son. Jardine had been raised in a secular Jewish household, 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 described as going back "all the way back to whenever – Abraham", and her reluctance to clash with the Catholic Church on embryology.

Jardine was professor of Renaissance studies at Queen Mary University of 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 a Fellow and Honorary Fellow of King's College and 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 2007–2008 she was seconded to the Royal Society in London as Expert Advisor to its Collections. She was a Trustee of the Chelsea Physic Garden. Jardine published more than 50 scholarly articles in peer reviewed 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 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 biographies of Robert Hooke, and Sir Christopher Wren (On a Grander Scale: the Outstanding Career of Sir Christopher Wren). Her 2008 book Going Dutch, on Anglo Dutch reciprocal influence in the 17th century, won the 2009 Cundill International Prize in History, the world's premier history book prize worth $75,000. 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 Novel category of the 1996 Whitbread Book Awards, the 1999 Guardian First Book Award, the 2000 Orwell Prize and was Chair of Judges for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction and the 2002 Man Booker Prize. During the first semester of the 2008–2009 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. In 2009–2010, 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 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. 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 known for her cross disciplinary approach to intellectual history and has been called "the pre eminent historian of the scientific method."

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 2012 she received the British Academy President's Medal. In 2013–2014 she served as President of the British Science Association, which in 2012 made her an Honorary Fellow.

Jardine died of cancer on 25 October 2015, aged 71, and her ashes were buried next to those of her parents, in the west side of Highgate Cemetery in north London. In the tributes which followed, she was remembered for her commitment to her students, and "her deep empathy for outsiders of all kinds—rebels, misfits and migrants." In 2017, she featured in a conference, London's Women Historians, held at the Institute of Historical Research.