scholarly journals Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATALIE LAWRENCE
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
Abrupt Shifts

AbstractThis paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history.

Jona und der Hai Zu einem frühneuzeitlichen Hai-Präparat zwischen Exegese und Naturgeschichte

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 166-178
Author(s):  
Robert Bauernfeind
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representation ◽  
White Shark ◽  
Large Fish ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Great White Shark ◽  
Made In

Abstract A seventeenth-century dry preparation of a porbeagle which was combined with a wooden sculpture of the prophet Jonah is analyzed using pictorial theories that emphasize the paradox of preparations being both subject and material of a visual representation. It explains the combination of Jonah and the shark by referring to speculations of early-modern natural history that the large fish that devoured Jonah must have been a shark. The preparation’s characteristic posture appears to be an adaptation of the depiction of a great white shark in Konrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium (1558), which had itself been drawn after a deformed dry preparation. The preparation of the porbeagle – probably made in an ecclesiastical context – thus represents less itself than a large shark.

scholarly journals “Immoderatus fervor ad intra coërcendus”

Nuncius ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 464-504
Author(s):  
Luca Ciancio
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Symbolic Meaning ◽  
Didactic Literature ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Agent Of Change

Abstract To explain how the element of fire, after a prevailing association with antichristian attitudes such as atheism and heresy was gradually rehabilitated in early modern natural philosophy and began to be perceived as a providential agent of change, debates in medicine, natural history, chemistry and theory of matter have been called into consideration. Changes of perception toward fire and its meanings that took place in Jesuit natural philosophy and emblematics can provide additional explanations, especially if we focus on the reactions to Athanasius Kircher’s ideas and representations of the Earth’s central fire by authoritative confreres such as Pierre Gautruche, Honoré Fabri, Paolo Casati and Giovanni Battista Tolomei. At the edge of the natural philosophical domain, Franz Reinzer’s Meteorologia philosophico-politica (1697) suggests that a reappraisal of the symbolic meaning of fire as a positive fervor capable of driving man to beneficial enterprises took place in Jesuit moral and didactic literature elaborating on Kircher’s views and images propounded in his Mundus subterraneus. This notion of fire as a christianized agent, however, did not imply any concession to the innovative views on the matter of fire worked out by Seventeenth-century corpuscularists.

Knowledge and Power: Rumphius’Ambonese HerbalandAmbonese Curiosity Cabinetas Colonial Contact Zones

2018 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 461-470
Author(s):  
Esther Helena Arens ◽  
Charlotte Kießling
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Scientific Content ◽  
Contact Zones ◽  
Aesthetic Form ◽  
Colonial Contact

The early modern books on Ambonese natural history by G.E. Rumphius have mostly been analysed for their aesthetic form and scientific content. However, with the concept of contact zones as introduced by M.L. Pratt, these texts can also be read as historical sources about colonialism and slavery in the late seventeenth-century Moluccas. This article explores the traces of colonialism and slavery in Rumphius’Ambonese Herbal(1740ff.) and theAmbonese Curiosity Cabinet(1705).

Breeched and Unbridled: Bifurcated Equestrian Garments for Women in Early Modern Europe

Costume ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-185
Author(s):  
Valerio Zanetti
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Affective Meaning ◽  
Documentary Sources ◽  
Modern Europe

This article discusses the wearing of bifurcated equestrian garments for women in early modern Europe. Considering visual representations as well as documentary sources, the first section examines the fashion for red riding breeches between the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Worn for their comfort and functionality in the saddle, these garments were also invested with powerful symbolic and affective meaning. The second section provides new insights about female equestrian outfits in late seventeenth-century France. Through the close reading of two written accounts, the author sheds light on the use of breeches as undergarments in the saddle and discusses the appearance of a hybrid riding uniform that incorporated knee-length culottes. By presenting horsewomen who wore bifurcated garments in the pursuit of leisure rather than transgression, this study revises historical narratives that cast the breeched woman exclusively as a symbol of gender upheaval.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

SHARON MACDONALD, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Materializing Culture. Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002. Pp. xiii+293. ISBN 1-85973-571-1. £14.00 (paperback).

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
JIM BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Science Museum ◽  
Early Modern France ◽  
Architectural Acoustics ◽  
Modern France

Sharon Macdonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. By Jim Bennett 99Charles Mollan, William Davis and Brendan Finucane (eds.), Irish Innovators in Science and Technology. By Enda Leaney 100Pamela O. Long, Openness, Secrecy, Authorship: Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to the Renaissance. By Catherine Eagleton, Karin Tybjerg and Koen Vermeir 101Antonio Clericuzio, Elements, Principles and Corpuscles: A Study of Atomism and Chemistry in the Seventeenth Century. By Christoph Lüthy 103Lisa Silverman, Tortured Subjects: Pain, Truth, and the Body in Early Modern France. By Sean M. Quinlan 105Trevor H. Levere and Gerard L'E. Turner, Discussing Chemistry and Steam: The Minutes of a Coffee House Philosophical Society 1780–1787. By William H Brock 106Claudine Cohen, The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History. By Bowdoin Van Riper 107David Elliston Allen, Naturalists and Society: The Culture of Natural History in Britain, 1700–1900. By Jim Endersby 108Roger Luckhurst, The Invention of Telepathy, 1870–1901. By Richard Noakes 110Benjamin H. Yandell, The Honors Class: Hilbert's Problems and Their Solvers. By I. Grattan-Guinness 112Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity: Architectural Acoustics and the Culture of Listening in America, 1900–1933. By Neil Pemberton 113

scholarly journals Planting dwelling thinking. Natural history and philosophy in sixteenth-century European dried gardens

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
María M. Carrión
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Recycled Paper ◽  
Modern Natural

Abstract European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with the emergence of early modern botany and its relation to the traditional genre of pharmacopeias. This study reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections and argues that the design and development of these herbaria or dried gardens (orti sicci), as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on nature and about the relationships of humans with the natural world than the ones with which they have been linked. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens—some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants—, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus that contributed significantly to early modern natural history and philosophy.

Quest for Permanence in the Tropics: Portuguese Bioprospecting in Asia (16th-18th Centuries)

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines G. Županov ◽  
Ângela Barreto Xavier
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
British Experience ◽  
The Tropics

The history of agricultural, botanical, pharmacological, and medical exchanges is one of the most fascinating chapters in early modern natural history. Until recently, however, historiography has been dominated by the British experience from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with Kew Gardens at the center of the “green imperialism.” In this article we address the hard-won knowledge acquired by those who participated in early modern Portuguese imperial bioprospecting in Asia. The Portuguese were the first to transplant important economic plants from one continent to another, on their imposing colonial chessboard. In spite of this, the history of Portuguese bioprospecting is still fragmentary, especially with respect to India and the Indian Ocean. We argue not only that the Portuguese—imperial officials, missionaries, and the people connected with them, all living and working under the banner of the Portuguese empire—were interested in gathering knowledge but also that the results of their endeavors were relevant for the development of natural history in the early modern period and that they were important actors within the larger community of naturalists.

Chimeras

2018 ◽  
pp. 164-190
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Texts

It was commonly perceived during the Renaissance that imagination could engender monstrous offspring: a mother’s imaginings could deform the fetus in her womb. This chapter notes that the early moderns thought of outlandish phantasms as monsters too, akin to the chimera—an unnatural creature, part lion, serpent, and snake. Ironically, the power of imagination to produce chimeras through combination is unconsciously mimicked by early modern natural history texts, in which exotic beasts are routinely described as assemblages of other animals. Shakespeare in The Tempest challenges the supposed difference between natural and unnatural forms using a motif of “shape”—misshapen Caliban, but also shape-shifting Ariel, and the shapely Miranda and Ferdinand.

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