I read this book while researching and writing an exhibit on “Science in the Time of Shakespeare” for my university’s commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. It’s a fascinating account of scientific activity and thinking in Elizabethan England centered on the burgeoning City of London, and makes the case that not all science was practiced by the luminaries of the age. In fact, Harkness warns the reader right in the introduction that if you’ve come to read about Francis Bacon and the like, you will be disappointed. A pivotal time in English intellectual history, the Age of Shakespeare saw the revival of classical learning that had begun in Italy in the 15th century; large numbers of classical texts were being translated into English for the first time and made more widely accessible. As important as the increased access to traditional scholarship was however, the greatest intellectual advances in Elizabethan England occurred in new fields of learning spurred on by an emphasis on the practical application of knowledge and a passion for tinkering (aka experimentation). At the epicenter of the new learning was the City of London. The high degree of specialization in the city and the growing rate of literacy gave rise to a kind of grass-roots science practiced by glassmakers, distillers, instrument makers, alchemists, apothecaries, metallurgists, midwives, and herbalists, who made medicines, planted botanical gardens, conducted experiments, and exchanged news, information, and ideas. It is these communities, which were a hot-bed of science, which Harkness meticulously and vividly chronicles in her book.