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 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 “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.

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

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).

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.

The Encounter of the Emblematic Tradition with Optics

Nuncius ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-331
Author(s):  
Susana Gómez López
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Early Modern Science ◽  
Excellent Work ◽  
Central Sets ◽  
Made In

In his excellent work Anamorphoses ou perspectives curieuses (1955), Baltrusaitis concluded the chapter on catoptric anamorphosis with an allusion to the small engraving by Hans Tröschel (1585–1628) after Simon Vouet’s drawing Eight satyrs observing an elephant reflected on a cylinder, the first known representation of a cylindrical anamorphosis made in Europe. This paper explores the Baroque intellectual and artistic context in which Vouet made his drawing, attempting to answer two central sets of questions. Firstly, why did Vouet make this image? For what purpose did he ideate such a curious image? Was it commissioned or did Vouet intend to offer it to someone? And if so, to whom? A reconstruction of this story leads me to conclude that the cylindrical anamorphosis was conceived as an emblem for Prince Maurice of Savoy. Secondly, how did what was originally the project for a sophisticated emblem give rise in Paris, after the return of Vouet from Italy in 1627, to the geometrical study of catoptrical anamorphosis? Through the study of this case, I hope to show that in early modern science the emblematic tradition was not only linked to natural history, but that insofar as it was a central feature of Baroque culture, it seeped into other branches of scientific inquiry, in this case the development of catoptrical anamorphosis. Vouet’s image is also a good example of how the visual and artistic poetics of the baroque were closely linked – to the point of being inseparable – with the scientific developments of the period.

Providence and exile in early seventeenth-century Ireland

1994 ◽  
Vol 29 (114) ◽  
pp. 174-188 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Caball
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Traditional Society ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Social Environments ◽  
Detailed Understanding ◽  
James I ◽  
Irish History ◽  
Interesting Development ◽  
Made In

The depth of change which the country experienced in the reign of James I has become an axiom of early modern Irish historiography. The extension of crown government throughout the island, the flight of the northern earls, the subsequent plantation in Ulster and the putative religious reformation of the indigenous inhabitants contributed to a climate of flux and tension. The burgeoning scholarly interest in this phase of Irish history has resulted in a more detailed understanding of administrative, political, regional and religious trends in the period. Progress has also been made in the study of contemporary mentalities. An interesting development has been the use of sources in the Irish language for the reconstruction of previously obscure intellectual currents amongst the Gaelic élite. The recent appearance of Michelle O Riordan’s monograph on the Gaelic reaction to the collapse of traditional society represents the fullest exposition yet of an interpretation which has characterised the early modern Gaelic ideological response to conquest and social change as fundamentally passive and backward-looking. O Riordan has, in effect, elaborated upon the conclusions of preceding commentators, notably Tom Dunne and Bernadette Cunningham, in portraying the Gaelic understanding of socio-political transformation as lacking in critical perception. This essay is intended as a further contribution to the elucidation of the mental climate of the time. More particularly, it will focus on two themes which figured prominently in the separate, but in this instance similar, communal reactions of the Gaelic Irish and the New English settlers to their respective political and social environments.

Mapping Angels in Early Modern Amsterdam

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 227-256
Author(s):  
Angela Vanhaelen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
International Market ◽  
Global Mapping ◽  
Made In

Abstract The angel was a recurrent marginal embellishment on hundreds of maps made in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, whose innovative commercial mapmaking dominated the international market. This essay explores how the mapmakers adapted pervasive conventions of cartographic angelology as a means to explore the expanding possibilities as well as the limitations of their own practice. The peculiar pictorial partnership between cartographers and their guardian spirits was a means to delineate cartography as inspired work. However, an interrogation of the implications of this spiritual service tracks the angels’ descent as downfall. The migrations of this ubiquitous visual device across numerous maps and representations of Amsterdam reveal the various ways that spirits were enlisted into their earthly ministry to the global mapping enterprises of the Dutch trading empire.

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

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