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.
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 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. For two years, she took the Cambridge Mathematical Tripos before, in her final year and under the influence of Raymond Williams, she read English. She graduated with upper second-class honours. 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. She was reported to have said that her greatest achievement was her three "well-balanced children". 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 Jewish 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.
Career and research
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