Images of Botany: Celebrating the Contribution of Women to the History of Botanical Illustration

Collections ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 547-567
Author(s):  
Heather Pardoe ◽  
Maureen Lazarus

The superb botanical illustration collection of Amgueddfa Cymru– National Museum Wales in Cardiff, Wales, has developed through bequests, donations, and selective purchases. Numbering more than 7,000 works, 15% of these are by women, including the work of well-known Victorian artists and leading contemporary artists such as Gillian Griffiths, Pauline Dean, and Dale Evans. In particular, the Cymmrodorion Collection is the most prestigious collection, containing illustrations dating from the 18th century and featuring works by Elizabeth Blackwell, Jane Loudon, and Sarah Drake. Using this and other collections from the museum, this article examines the contribution that women artists have made to the field of botanical illustration by referring to the lives of these women and considering their motives, whether they pursued botanical illustration out of financial necessity, out of scientific curiosity, or to allay boredom. The article further examines the social restrictions and prejudice that many of these women had to overcome.

Author(s):  
S.N. Korusenko

This paper aims at reconstructing the genealogy of Siberian Tatars of Knyazevs (Western Siberia), identifying the origins of their surname, which is not characteristic of the Tatars, and at analysis of the influence of socio-political and socio-economical processes in Russia in the 18th through 20th centuries on the social transformation of the family. The sources were represented by the materials of the Inventory Revision Book of Tarsky District of 1701 and census surveys of the end of 18th through 19th centuries, which allowed tracing the Knyazev family through the genealogical succession and identifying social status of its members. In this work, recordkeeping ma-terials of the 18th–20th centuries and contemporary genealogical and historical traditions of the Tatars have been utilized. In the research, the method of genealogical reconstructions by archival materials and their correlation with genealogies of modern population has been used. The history of the Knyazev family is inextricably linked to the history of modern village of Bernyazhka — one of the earliest settlements of the Ayalintsy (a group of the Si-berian Tatars) in the territory of the Tarsky Irtysh land which became the home to the Knyazevs for more than three centuries. The 1701Inventory Revision Book cites Itkuchuk Buchkakov as a local power broker of the Aya-lynsky Tatars in the village. During the 18th century, this position was inherited by his descendants who eventually lost this status in the beginning of the 19th century in the course of the managerial reforms by the Russian gov-ernment. Nevertheless, the social status of the members of the gens remained high. In the mid. 19th century, the village moved — the villagers resettled from the right bank of the River Irtysh onto the left one. As the result, the village was situated nearby the main road connecting the cities of Omsk and Tara. At the same time, the village became the center of the Ayalynskay region. That led to the strengthening of the social status and property en-richment of the descendants of Itkuchuk Buchkakov. The Knyzevs’ surname first appeared in the materials of the First All-Russia Census Survey of 1897. Some of the descendants signed up under this surname later in the Soviet period. During the Soviet years, members of the Knyzev’s gens had different destinies: some worked in the local government, whereas the others were subjected to political repressions and executed. Knyazevs took part in the Great Patriotic War and seven of them perished. Presently there are no descendants of the Knyazevs in Bernyazhka as they spread over the villages of the Omskaya Region, some living in Omsk and other towns of Russia and abroad.


2020 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 105-129
Author(s):  
Cătălina Chelcu

For the historical period we refer to, no proper inventories have been made containing the unjustly appropriated goods. They are just mentioned as such or listed, if that was the case, according to the size of the damage. There are also documentary sources in which the object of the theft is less represented, the justice system focusing in those cases rather on the wrongdoers, than on the wrong actions. That is why, the blood money “paid for some reason”, with no other specific details, is quite frequently cited. Rare or frequent, these documents are complaints addressed by the victim to the Prince and his officials, documents in which the perpetrators admitted their fault, or deeds issued by the judicial authority subsequent to the investigation of the criminal act. In discussing the theft of/from the wealth, i.e. from the whole amount of the available goods, we are interested in clarifying some aspects pertaining to a reality that the historian should reconstruct, with all the complexity of its evolution: the motivations of the theft and its circumstances, the types of theft, the social categories involved, the time and space of the misdemeanour, the perpetrators’ punishment. Briefly, the study is about starting to write a history of the reprehensible acts liable to punishments for theft and robbery in 17th and early 18th century Moldavia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
Irina-Andreea Stoleriu

The present study is meant to underline the importance of a famous work from the baroque period, Las Meninas, made by the painter Diego de Silva y Velásquez who has become a source of inspiration for future generations of artists. Numerous modern and contemporary artists have integrally or partially ”paraphrased” Velásquez’s composition by intercepting the portrait of revolutionary group for the time when it was created, extremely innovative regarding its compositional qualities and its hidden meanings which underlined the role and status of the artist in the context of a conservative society. Thus, the painting becomes the living proof of the way in which the artist manages to overcome the limitations of the social status of ordinary human beings, by portraying himself as a close friend of the royal family and by opening, through this type of representation, an important chapter in the history of portraiture.


2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (26) ◽  
pp. 29-64
Author(s):  
Jakub Bodaszewski

The village of Chlebna near Jedlicz between 1772 and 1791. A contribution to the history of the place The village of Chlebna is a very interesting example of lack of any changes whatsoever in the social and economic system in Galicia, the region which at the end of the 18th century remained under Austrian rule. Thanks to a multitude of preserved archive materials, it has been possible to reconstruct both the sequence of owners of the village in the mentioned period, economic issues and the situation of the residents in the system of private serfdom villages. The paper presents the occupational structure and spatial arrangement of the place. It also discusses the influence of the area and the water network on the economy of Chlebna. The comparison of the condition in 1773 and in 1785–1789 does not show any signs of improvement in the economic situation. The article is also interesting for genealogists. It is, however, but a small fragment of the history of a small Galician village.


2021 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104

The article focuses on Michel Foucault’s work with the social history of medicine and evaluates its potential for analyzing the political impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. Foucault reveals the bond between quarantine measures in European cities and the gradual perfection of techniques of power. He uses organized anti-epidemic activities applied to leprosy and plague as examples of “compact models” of power relations that he discusses in terms of exclusion and discipline. He reveals complex relationships between the physical body of an individual and what he calls the “social body” of a state. Foucault describes how “health policy” was formed during the second half of 18th century when it drastically changed urban space and became one of the key techniques of government. In Foucault’s lectures published as Security, Territory, Population, he turns to the concept of a “prevailing” or literally “reigning” disease. The countermeasures against the disease enable the development of special techniques applicable to the population in a given historical period. He uses the statistical description of patients suffering from smallpox as an example of how a regime of power and government of the population develops by invoking security and risk assessment. In the concluding section, the author estimates the potential of Foucauldian historical analysis as a tool for anticipating the tendencies inherent in the techniques of power mobilized to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.


2020 ◽  
Vol 63 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 643-681
Author(s):  
Daniel Beben

Abstract This article examines how a text attributed to the renowned Central Asian Sufi figure Aḥmad Yasavī came to be found within a manuscript produced within the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿī community of the Shughnān district of the Badakhshān region of Central Asia. The adoption of this text into an Ismāʿīlī codex suggests an exchange between two disparate Islamic religious traditions in Central Asia between which there has hitherto been little evidence of contact. Previous scholarship on Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relations has focused predominately on the literary and intellectual engagement between these traditions, while the history of persecution experienced by the Ismāʿīlīs at the hands of Sunnī Muslims has largely overshadowed discussions of the social relationship between the Ismāʿīlīs and other Muslim communities in Central Asia. I demonstrate that this textual exchange provides evidence for a previously unstudied social engagement between Ismāʿīlī and Sunnī communities in Central Asia that was facilitated by the rise of the Khanate of Khoqand in the 18th century. The mountainous territory of Shughnān, where the manuscript under consideration originated, has been typically represented in scholarship as isolated prior to the onset of colonial interest in the region in the late 19th century. Building upon recent research on the impact of early modern globalization on Central Asia, I demonstrate that even this remote region was significantly affected by the intensification of globalizing processes in the century preceding the Russian conquest. Accordingly, I take this textual exchange as a starting point for a broader re-evaluation of the Ismāʿīlī-Sufi relationship in Central Asia and of the social ‘connectivity’ of the Ismāʿīlīs and the Badakhshān region within early modern Eurasia.


Prospects ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Maria Irene Ramalho de Sousa Santos

American exceptionalism, Joyce Appleby has recently reminded us, is “America's peculiar form of Eurocentrism.” Now that the multicultural history of the United States is finally being written, nothing would justify another look at American exceptionalism, except perhaps the need to examine the intellectual ways that have hidden American historical and social diversity for so long. In this essay I basically argue that a certain appropriation of the 18th-Century conception of nature as “what is” played a role also in the development of American exceptionalism. The naturalist rhetoric in American discourse in the 19th Century, I further argue, ran parallel to the most savage depredations of nature ever performed by humankind. I am particularly interested in foregrounding the discrepancy between the steady construction of that greatest of modern artifacts, the American nation, and its concomitant self-justification as a thing of nature. The other side of the commodification of America is its naturalization, an idea that I find is supported, whether critically or uncritically, by many American poets and artists. In recent times we have witnessed a number of ecological attempts at the social recovery of nature in the most advanced capitalist countries, including, of course, the United States. I am not concerned here with these developments, of which ecofeminism is arguably one of the most interesting ones.


2010 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 515-527
Author(s):  
Jon Helgason

The purpose of this article is twofold. First, I wish to discuss the origins of The Swedish Academy Dictionary against the backdrop of the social and cultural history of lexicography in 18th and 19th century Europe. Second, to consider material aspects of lexicography – the dictionary as interface – in light of German media scientist Friedrich Kittler’s “media materialism”. Ultimately, both purposes intend to describe how letters and writing have been constructed and arranged through-out the course of history. In Kittler’s view, “the intimization of literature”, that took place during second half of the 18th century, brought about a fundamental change in the way language and text were perceived. However, parallel to this development an institutionalization and disciplining of language and literature took place. The rise of modern society, the nation state, print capitalism and modern science in 18th century Europe necessitated (and were furthered by) a disciplining of language and literature. This era was for these reasons a golden age for lexicographers and scholars whose work focused on the vernacular. In this article the rise of the alphabetically ordered dictionary and the corresponding downfall of the topical dictionary that occurred around 1700 is regarded as a technological threshold. This development is interesting not only within the field of history of lexicography, but arguably also, since information and thought are connected to the basic principles of mediality, this development has bearings on the epistemo-logical revolution of the 18th century witnessed in, among other things, Enlightenment thought and literature.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
Svyatoslav S. Brazevich ◽  

The article presents the results of the analysis by G.V.Plekhanov of the genesis of Western European sociological thought based on the consideration of the social ideas of the French materialists of the 18th century, the rudiments in their philosophical systems of the historical approach to the study of society and understanding the causes of social inequality and injustice as well as overcoming them. The sources and content of the philosophical and historical theories of the French historians of the Restoration period are revealed, those who recognized the struggle of classes as the cornerstone of the social, political and mental development of European society, including the interpretation of the concept of “social environment” as a set of economic relations of classes, which was a contribution to the history of sociology. The analysis of the sociological views of utopian socialists and representatives of German classical philosophy is conducted. It was revealed that a significant contribution to the development of the theory of society were the ideas of social progress and the creation of a new social science that served the cause of social organization, developed by the utopian socialists, as well as the statement that the future of society is decided in the sphere of social and economic relations, and not political and legal ones. It is emphasized that Hegel’s application of dialectics to the analysis of social changes meant undoubted progress in the development of sociological thought, which consisted in the advancement of the idea of the regularity of the social process. The methodological basis of the author’s study of the problem of the genesis of Western European sociological thought in the works of G.V.Plekhanov is made up of dialectical-materialistic and comparative-historical methods, as well as the method of textological analysis and historical-philosophical reconstruction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 124-131
Author(s):  
Jane Black

The Australian National Botanic Gardens plays an important role in the study and promotion of Australia's diverse range of unique plants through its living collection, scientific research activities and also through the art collection held in the institution's Library and Archives. Australia's history of formal botanical illustration began with the early voyages of discovery with its popularity then declining until the modern day revival in botanical art. The Australian National Botanic Gardens Library and Archives art collection holds works from the Endeavour voyage through to the more contemporary artists of Celia Rosser, Collin Woolcock, Gillian Scott and Aboriginal artists including Teresa Purla McKeeman as well as photographs and outdoor installations.


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