The Traces of Thomas Hariot

A lyrical biography by a celebrated poet that tracks the life of Thomas Hariot, an unjustly obscure genius of Renaissance Europe—a polymath who mapped the Moon before Galileo and taught Sir Walter Raleigh how to navigate the open seas.

Thomas Hariot was one of the greatest minds of the Elizabethan era, a pioneer of the Scientific Revolution who met every current of his time headlong and yet whose name is all but forgotten, relegated to the footnotes of history. What was it about Hariot, who mapped the moon before Galileo, invented binary notation before Leibniz, and taught Sir Walter Raleigh’s New World expedition how to navigate the oceans, that led to his obscurity? And what is it about history that preserves the lives of some, but leaves only traces of the lives of others?

Such are the questions guiding Muriel Rukeyser’s inimitable biography of the Renaissance polymath, which offers an account “not of Hariot’s life, but of his traces, as we known them now. How he reaches us.” In it we see Hariot as translator and geographer on Raleigh’s 1585 expedition to Roanoke; as a friend to Christopher Marlowe, a fellow member of the School of Night, with whom he was accused of heresy; as a scientist under the patronage of the Earl of Northumberland, who later was embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot, and to whom he reported his experiments on optics, algebra, crystallography, and astronomy.

With the eye of a historian and the pen of a poet, Rukeyser brings together the traces to form a detailed and infinitely sensitive portrait of a man who was indeed great, not only for his time, but for all time.