scholarly journals The Apocalyptic Herbarium

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 391-413
Author(s):  
Yota Batsaki
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fossil Fuels ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Mnemonic Device ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Slow Violence

Abstract Anselm Kiefer’s monumental Secret of the Ferns (2007) redirects the artist’s apocalyptic sensibility, honed in response to the Holocaust, to the slow violence of extinction. The installation adopts a foundational practice of early modern natural history: the herbarium’s preservation and presentation of dried, pressed plant specimens. It also mobilizes the symbolic associations of ferns, which Kiefer calls “the first plants” but which are reimagined in the gallery space as the last plants in a postapocalyptic future. The framed specimens hang in a massive hall, with two abandoned concrete bunkers spewing out coal in the center—an allusion to ferns as the source of fossil fuels. Coal appears again in the enigmatic charcoal inscriptions on the frames that allude to ferns’ rich associations with rituals of magic and transformation. The overall mood is of a temporality at the end of time, a proleptic elegy that anticipates the extinction of even the most common and resilient plants, and the human cultures associated with them. Transmuted from mnemonic device to vehicle of commemoration, Kiefer’s apocalyptic herbarium elicits grief and mourning—but also, perhaps, what Judith Butler has called “the transformative effect of loss.”

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.

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.

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.

Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphion: Collecting Extinct Nature in Early Modern Europe

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vera Keller
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Change ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Research Agendas ◽  
Modern Europe

Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silphion across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the possibility of natural loss was well aired. Paper technologies for collecting extinct nature ran parallel to investigations of newly found nature, and thus can place the latter in a new light. Although ideas of natural mutability often drew on ideas of historical or political change rather than philosophical concepts of natural constancy, techniques developed for extinct nature, such as the list of lost things, remained influential for the research agendas of naturalists.


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.

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