ABSTRACT
Historians of astronomy seem often to be disappointed by Thomas Harriot. He can plausibly be approached with such promise as the English Galileo, the English Kepler, and perhaps the English Tycho, rolled into one enigmatic package that the vagaries of historical fortune have left unopened until now. To such hopes can be added the prospect that Harriot might prove a better mathematician than any of them. He had the largest astronomical measuring instrument in England, built on a Tychonic scale and probably fitted with Tycho's design of sights. Harriot's biography will then cast him as a challenging and pioneering figure - a traveller and an interloper on the map of learning, just as he once was on the map of the world. Disappointment and apology are quite misplaced in such an account of Harriot negotiating a new relationship between mathematical science and natural philosophy, but just as misplaced is the image of Harriot the mathematical physicist born before his time.
