"The skylfullest men": Patronage, authority, and the negotiation of expertise in Elizabethan England.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

Throughout Western Europe, the growth of the early modern nation-state involved a marked expansion in the areas of competence claimed by central administrators, who as a result were frequently faced with managerial challenges to which they were unaccustomed. Tudor England provides a case in point: the growing power and jurisdiction of the English Privy Council under Queen Elizabeth forced them to develop new administrative techniques to facilitate tighter central control over greater distances.
As England became wealthier and more powerful, the demand for new technologies in navigation, warfare, and manufacturing increased, among royal officers and corporate investors alike. The proliferation of large-scale, technically complex, corporate and state-sponsored projects required central administrators to locate and manage individuals who possessed the skills, knowledge, and experience necessary to get the job done successfully and economically. Although the administrators nominally controlled the projects in question, they lacked the kind of expert knowledge they were attempting to find and manage, giving the technical experts a greater degree of power than other clients possessed. After gaining the personal and professional trust of their patrons, expert clients were responsible not only for overseeing their projects, but for keeping patrons well apprised of the projects' progress and difficulties as well. Such “expert mediators” became a cornerstone of centralized management in Elizabethan England.
This dissertation consists of a series of case studies, which focus on the redesign and reconstruction of Dover harbor (1576–1585), deep-shaft copper mining in northwestern England (1560–1575), and the adoption and development of mathematical methods of navigation (1550–1600). From one case to the next, the expert mediators gradually succeeded in winning the trust and support of powerful courtly patrons and corporate investors, while at the same time distancing themselves intellectually and socially from the more common sort of practitioner through their rare possession of theoretical, reform program of Francis Bacon, and suggests that Bacon drew inspiration for his plan from the English culture of expertise in which he sought patronage himself as a young man.