Embroidering the New Science

Abstract

Abstract An unruly object of seventeenth-century experimental science is the metal needle, an instrument that begins Robert Hooke’s Micrographia (1665) but also was the essential tool used in women’s embroidery work. This article follows traces of the needle through the historical record and florilegia – a genre that bridged botanical and artistic studies – to argue that needlework provided a way of seeing that facilitated the development of empiricism. Using evidence from the works of Isabella Parasole, Elizabeth Isham, and Maria Sibylla Merian, I show how the needle surfaces in scenes of scientific illustration, thereby resituating natural histories and the scientific process of ordering minute organisms.