Lisa Jardine
Historian and broadcaster whose intellectual curiosity straddled the arts and sciences from the Renaissance to human fertilisation
LISA JARDINE, the historian, who has died of cancer aged 71, was the daughter of Jacob Bronowski, one of the 20th century’s greatest public intellectuals, and a woman for whom no more perfect title could be invented than the one she possessed: Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College, London.
Lisa Jardine effortlessly straddled CP Snow’s “Two Cultures”; she studied both Mathematics and English at university, was fluent in eight languages including Ancient Greek and Latin, and wrote on everything from Shakespeare and Francis Bacon to feminist theory and the history of science. Her book Going Dutch: How
England Plundered Holland’s Glory, about how the influence of Dutch thinkers and scientists reshaped England’s intellectual landscape in the 17th century, won the $75,000 Cundill International Prize in History in 2009.
Lisa Jardine championed science to such an extent that she was made a council member of the Royal Institution (she resigned in protest when its director Susan Greenfield was made redundant in 2009) and served as head of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority from 2008 to 2014. She held an honorary fellowship of the Royal Society, winning an RS medal for popularising science, and was a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. In 2012-13 she served as president of the British Science Association – a rare honour for a historian.
Lisa Jardine’s limitless intellectual curiosity combined with a love of gossip and an easy familiarity with teenage slang made her a lecture-room star. With her raucous laugh and earthy sense of humour she was as comfortable addressing a general as an academic audience and forged a prolific career as a cultural commentator, able to stump up interesting or witty sound bites on almost any subject.
She wrote and reviewed widely for the press, and for many years it was difficult to avoid her on the airwaves. She regularly hosted Night Waves, the Radio 3 evening arts programme, while on Radio 4 she often presented A Point of View, opining elegantly on everything from climate science to diary writing and the reputation of American presidents, and complemented Jeremy Paxman on Start the Week (“I’m the good cop, he’s the bad cop”). In 2013 she presented the station’s
Seven Ages of Science series. She was also a
regular guest on Question Time, Any Questions and Kaleidoscope and was ubiquitous on book prize judging panels.
Lisa Anne Bronowski was born in Oxford on April 12 1944, the eldest of four daughters of the mathematician and scientist Jacob Bronowski and the sculptor Rita Coblentz. Her father’s family were Polish Jews who had fled the pogroms, and ended up in the East End in 1918. Her grandfather was a furrier.
Jacob Bronowski would become best known
for his BBC series The Ascent of Man (1973), and Lisa recalled being brought up with “a complete fearlessness about knowledge” which refused to recognise any disciplinary boundaries. “My father raised me to believe there was no subject that was too difficult to communicate to an ordinary well-educated person,” she recalled. “They would follow your argument as long as they were never told it was too difficult.”
Her relationship with her father was an unusual one as he treated her more as an adult companion and confidante than a child. Aged six, she was sharing her parents’ dinner table with the likes of Aldous Huxley and Yehudi Menuhin. But Bronowski was attractive to women and not always faithful. “He told me things he shouldn’t have told me,” she recalled. “I knew everything about his private life, in which he was not very well-behaved, which is a funny thing to do with a daughter. He worked on the assumption that I would feel as he did.”
One thing he did not tell her was that during the Second World War he had used his mathematical genius to maximise the destructive force of RAF bombing raids on German cities, by calculating the most effective way to destroy buildings, smash railway networks and spread firestorms. Her discovery in 2010 of his secret wartime papers prompted Lisa Jardine to make My Father, The
Bomb and Me (2011, BBC Four) a journey into family history and an exploration of the ethics of science in wartime. She also discovered that, in 1945, he was among the first British scientists to visit Japan in the aftermath of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima nuclear bombs. The experience coloured the rest of his life. He turned to biology to better understand the nature of violence and became a prominent humanist.
When Lisa was five the family moved to Cleeve Hill, near Cheltenham, where Bronowski had taken up a research post with the National Coal Board (he was the driving force behind the invention of smokeless fuel). She recalled that, aged nine, she spent a
birthday book token on the thickest book she could find in Boots – “an incredibly racy historical novel about the court of Louis XIV, which I absolutely loved. That was when I learnt that ladies at the court rouged their nipples.”
She loved reading and history, but won a Mathematics scholarship to Cheltenham Ladies’ College. She was always top of her class but spent Saturdays with her friends in a coffee bar on the town’s promenade, recalling that “we did absolutely nothing except pinch our skirts in tight and hope that someone would pick us up”. While local youths sometimes offered other girls lifts on the back of their Vespas, however, “the limit of my badness was probably wearing my ponytail too high”.
Lisa went up to Newnham College, Cambridge, as one of nine women undergraduates out of an intake of 180 on the Mathematics course. After two years she switched to English, because she was told that only boys got Firsts in Maths and because she had fallen under the spell of Raymond Williams, the English don, whom she had got to know through her membership of Labour Party groups.
She went on to study 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 the scientific genius of Francis Bacon, published as Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of
Discourse, in 1974 by Cambridge University Press.
Although she was “very, very conscious” of being her father’s daughter, she found his fame a burden. When she married – for the first time, in 1969 – Nick Jardine, a Cambridge historian and philosopher of science, it was with some relief that she adopted her husband’s name, which she kept after their divorce 10 years later. “Until 1999, the name Bronowski never occurred in cuttings about me, and it was broadly unknown that I was his daughter,” she recalled later.
Embarking on an academic career, Lisa Jardine taught English at the Warburg Institute, the University of Essex and Cornell University, and then for 12 years at Cambridge, where she became the first woman fellow at her father’s old college, Jesus, and was appointed Reader in English in 1989.
The same year she moved to Queen Mary & Westfield College (now Queen Mary, University of London) as Centenary Professor of Renaissance Studies and director of the Centre for Editing Lives and Letters.
It was only with the publication of her lively major study of the scientific revolution,
Ingenious Pursuits in 1999, that Lisa Jardine felt confident enough to dedicate it “to my father Jacob Bronowski, who showed me the way”. By this time she had a string of influential academic books to her credit, including works on Erasmus, women in the time of Shakespeare, women in the Labour movement and humanism. It was Worldly
Goods, however, a history of the Renaissance published in 1996, that brought her to wider attention.
In it she argued that “the seeds of our own exuberant multiculturalism and bravura consumerism were planted in the European Renaissance”, driven by rich, flamboyant merchants trying to outdo one another as traders and patrons of art. Men like Cosimo de Medici she likened to today’s business tycoons
with their gold bath taps and collections of contemporary art.
Her later books included Global Interests: Renaissance Art Between East and West (2000, with Jerry Brotton), and studies of Sir Christopher Wren, Robert Hooke and even Grayson Perry. Her last book, Temptation in the Archives: Essays in Golden Age Dutch
Culture, was published this year. At the time of her death she was working on a biography of her father.
From the late 1990s Lisa Jardine served as a judge on numerous book prize committees, chairing the 2002 Booker jury when it controversially awarded the prize to the almost unknown Yann Martel’s Life of Pi. When she judged the 1997 Orange Prize, she asked her panel not to think about their personal favourites but to write down the title they thought everyone might agree on. They all came up with the same book (Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces) and spent the rest of the time eating cream cakes. When she came to deliver the traditional homilies about how difficult a decision it had been, she was, uncharacteristically, less than convincing.
In 2004 Lisa Jardine was diagnosed with breast cancer, which required surgery, followed by gruelling courses of radio and chemotherapy – an experience which she felt had given her a good grounding in the complex ethical dilemmas faced by scientists, and equipped her for the job of steering the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, Britain’s fertility regulator, as it grappled with the complex implications of the new Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act. During her time as chairman, from 2008 to 2014, she led the HFEA through bruising legal battles with some of the IVF clinics it licensed and through highly emotional debates about embryo research, confirming its existence as an independent, quasi-autonomous body.
Lisa Jardine was a famously good cook and confessed to being a “cautious fashion victim” (at Cambridge in the 1980s she and Mary Archer shared the accolade of Cambridge’s best-dressed woman). Among numerous appointments, she served, for eight years, as a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum and as chairman of Chelsea Physic Garden. In 2012, she was appointed as Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College London and founding director of its Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in the Humanities.
When she was appointed CBE in 2005 it was for her contribution and commitment to state education (her three children all attended state schools), including her governorship of two inner-London schools.
In June this year Lisa Jardine appeared on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, choosing music ranging from Once in a Lifetime by Talking Heads to Mozart’s Dove Sono from The Marriage of Figaro. Her book choice was the full 12 volumes of PS Allen’s Latin Letters of Erasmus of Rotterdam.
In 1982 she married, secondly, the architect John Hare, who survives her with their son, and a son and daughter from her first marriage. She once claimed that her greatest achievement was her three “well-balanced children”.
Lisa Jardine, born April 12 1944, died October 25 2015