Early Modern Natural History Research Articles

Kesar doodh is my love-language <3

Kesar doodh1 is my love-language <3 Pinka Popsickle (bio) Keywords Pinka Popsickle, poetry, saffron Stranger, your hands hangingloose at your sides, don't // become you; they—of dark wood and dirty nails, belong on— pale gold thighs; lost in crippled fingers; and my Maggi (curled like curled fingers) in between pale gold thighs/ sighs/ size sighs/s∧Iz/ verb emit a long, deep audible breathsize/s∧Iz/ noun estimate or measure of a body's expansesays/seIz/ verb utter words Stranger, your lip hangingloose 'round your joint, doesn't // become you; it—of bruised plum tandoor meat, belongs to— mountain(s)peak moans, lost in craggy contours; and silver tongue (slurs like slurred speech) in between mountain-speak/ mountain's peaks/ mouth-in-speech [End Page 748] speak/spi:k/ verb say something to expresspeak/pi:k/ noun climax in Freytag's pyramidspeech/spi:t∫/ noun expression, usually censored in words Stranger, your dick hangingloose in your pants won't // become you; it—of piss-stench failed love belongs on— graffitti walls; lost in translations, slogans, nations; and narrations (twisted like twisted spines) in between pure gold lies/ guise/ gai-sguise/g∧Iz/ noun external form/ manner of presentation that conceals somethingguy/g∧I/ verb ridiculegai/g∧I/ गाय noun; transl. sacred cow Pinka Popsickle pinka popsickle/priyanka d`souza is an "artistorian" from Mumbai, India. In her academic and artistic practice, she works with crip time and protest in ecological reimaginings, Mughal miniatures, early modern natural history, and the concept of the ajai'b (wondrous/strange), particularly in imaginings of borderlands of nation-empires and as applied to anomalous/disabled bodies. She is a poet fellow at Zoeglossia '22, and has been an artist-in-residence at Delfina Foundation, London '21, and a Dara Shikoh Fellow '16. NOTE 1. transl. Saffron milk. Copyright © 2022 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.

The Apocalyptic Herbarium

AbstractAnselm 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.”

Visible Labour? Productive Forces and Imaginaries of Participation in European Insect Studies, ca. 1680-1810*.

The practice of early modern natural history depended on the collective collecting activities of a great variety of people. Among them, artisans played a major role in acquiring and distributing knowledge about the natural world and they contributed significantly to the scholarly labour in natural history. This distributed labour was both acknowledged by contemporaries as well as hidden from sight, reflecting the period′s dominant norms for class and gender. By combining an interpretation of the visual representation of labour in European insect studies with an examination of written sources about natural history practices from about 1680 to 1810, this article decodes the often‐codified frontispieces and other more symbolic illustrations to offer new insights into the labour of natural history. Those who identified as scholars and artisans (or both) conceptualised their own intellectual and practical engagement with natural history within the semantic field of work. Some seemed to have even envisioned a new social role for academics as well as artisans. This article analyses the diversity of the “productive forces” in insect studies as they changed over time and it reconstructs what I will call the social imaginaries of participation.

The cancer multiple: Producing and translating genomic big data into oncology care

This article provides an ethnographic account of how Big Data biology is produced, interpreted, debated, and translated in a Big Data-driven cancer clinical trial, entitled “Personalized OncoGenomics,” in Vancouver, Canada. We delve into epistemological differences between clinical judgment, pathological assessment, and bioinformatic analysis of cancer. To unpack these epistemological differences, we analyze a set of gazes required to produce Big Data biology in cancer care: clinical gaze, molecular gaze, and informational gaze. We are concerned with the interactions of these bodily gazes and their interdependence on each other to produce Big Data biology and translate it into clinical knowledge. To that end, our central research questions ask: How do medical practitioners and data scientists interact, contest, and collaborate to produce and translate Big Data into clinical knowledge? What counts as actionable and reliable data in cancer decision-making? How does the explicability or translatability of genomic Big Data come to redefine or contradict medical practice? The article contributes to current debates on whether Big Data engenders new questions and approaches to biology, or Big Data biology is merely an extension of early modern natural history and biology. This ethnographic account will highlight how genomic Big Data, which underpins the mechanism of personalized medicine, allows oncologists to understand and diagnose cancer in a different light, but it does not revolutionize or disrupt medical oncology on an institutional level. Rather, personalized medicine is interdependent on different styles of (medical) thought, gaze, and practice to be produced and made intelligible.

Fantasmas de la ciencia española by Juan Pimentel

Reviewed by: Fantasmas de la ciencia española by Juan Pimentel Jaime Marroquín Arredondo Juan Pimentel. Fantasmas de la ciencia española. MARCIAL PONS, 2020. 416 PP. JUAN PIMENTEL PRESENTS US with a panoramic history of Spanish science, from the early sixteenth century to the present. Its leitmotif is an understanding of science as a ghostly and haunting activity in the context of Spanish culture, where science has been underrepresented and lacking in national and international recognition despite the abundant achievements of scientists from Spain over the centuries. To illustrate his argument, Pimentel makes good use of some of the most impressive scientific accomplishments in the history of Spain and Hispanic America. Chapter 1, "Espectro y avistamiento del Mar del Sur," studies the so-called discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Núñez de Balboa (1475–1519) and the subsequent first cartographic representation of the Americas' Pacific coast: the Carta portulana representando el Mar del Sur (1518), a cartographic milestone Pimentel finds "haunted" by the "ghosts" of the extinct Cueva people, particularly Ponquiaco, main cacique of the Panamanian coast; these Amerindian spectral presences accompany the "ghosts" of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian experts who helped demarcate and imagine a coast that included Dabaiba, a mythical golden city precursor of the most famous El Dorado. If native people of Darién and Veragua were responsible for a great deal of the geographical information gathered by the Núñez de Balboa expedition, the Indigenous presence in early modern Spanish science is even more haunting in the work of doctor Francisco Hernández de Toledo (ca. 1515–87). The author of the Historia natural de Nueva España is, along with Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934), the most famous of all Spanish men of science. Hernández tackled the unimaginable task of updating, perfecting, and completing the Natural History of Pliny with a natural history of the New World. In chapter 2, "Naturalezas de otro mundo," Pimentel relates Hernandez's massive project to an equally gigantic enterprise: the gathering of reliable geographical and naturalist information about Spain's overseas possessions by the Council of Indies in the 1570s. The most visible result of these efforts is the well-known Relaciones Geográficas de Indias (1579–85), of which Pimentel provides a beautiful example: the mestizo map of the Zapotec town of Macuilxochitl, where Indigenous informants provided the immense majority of the knowledge displayed, including their consciousness of the ecological changes brought about by Spanish presence in their lands. The [End Page 179] polyphonic knowledge included in the Relaciones de Indias and in Hernández's natural history became a ghostly presence in early modern science accounts as neither of these two massive works sponsored by the Council of Indies would be published for centuries. Nevertheless—and despite the tragic loss of all of its colored illustrations—the work of Hernández had considerable influence in the development of early modern natural history through new processes of selection, translation, appropriation, and misappropriation. In chapter 3, "La mirada del ángel," Pimentel dissects some of the interconnections between the emerging field of microscopic medicine and its artistic representation using techniques and conventions common to the Spanish baroque. Among the distinctive qualities of the famous Golden Age of Spanish arts are a refined retrenchment into an orthodox Catholic culture and an accompanying literary disenchantment with the vain concerns of this world. The baroque thus promoted a profoundly moral vision of the world, even at the dawn of "el irremediable ascenso de la tecnología y el materialismo" (137). Such a view remained an intrinsic part of cutting-edge scientific achievements such as the impressive Atlas anatómico (ca. 1689) of Crisóstomo Martínez (1638–ca. 1694), where masterful macroscopic and microscopic images of human bones documenting their growth are accompanied by common moral symbols of life and death, or sin. Like the majority of baroque art, this moralized anatomy helped sustain the Spanish political body. Pimentel demonstrates how a common way of coupling the emerging microscopic view of nature with the all-encompassing Catholic view of the world was through the analogy of the angel's gaze, capable of seeing both the...

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

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.

Talking of animals: whales, ambergris, and the circulation of knowledge in seventeenth‐century Rome

AbstractThe sixteenth century marks a watershed in the study of the natural world, and animals within it. Never before did so many Europeans devote so much ink to describing animals, their physical characteristics, their utility, and the environment in which they lived. Reading, observation, correspondence, illustration, and conversation represented key moments in this process of knowledge production. While the first four aspects have received sustained attention from intellectual historians and historians of science, much less emphasis has been placed on the key role of the spoken word in shaping early modern natural knowledge. This article examines the significance of oral discourse in transmitting natural knowledge within the social setting of seventeenth‐century Rome and among Italian natural historians more broadly. It focuses on the way in which the study of unusual animals such as the whale (and by extension ambergris, the substance that it allegedly produced) was shaped by the oral testimony of those who saw it first‐hand, often with little distinction being made between the social and professional status of different informants. While the oral testimony of a learned missionary may have trumped that of others, ultimately pride of place was given to first‐hand experience over second‐hand written accounts. Personal acquaintance also played an important role. On the whole, the examples analyzed in this article aim to illustrate the plurality of means and voices that actively contributed to the making of early‐modern natural knowledge of animals. Within the inductive method that characterized early modern natural history, conversation and hearsay thus played an active and significant role that historians of science have mostly underestimated.

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy

Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy

Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history.

This 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.

Nero and the last stalk of Silphion: collecting extinct nature in early 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.

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

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.

Rubens and the bird of paradise. Painting natural knowledge in the early seventeenth century

This paper explores the interconnections between early modern natural history and European visual culture by focusing on the representation of a single motif, the bird of paradise, in one of Peter Paul Rubens's most celebrated paintings: the Adoration of the Magi (1609; 1628–29), now in the collection of the Museo del Prado in Madrid. Portrayed as an aigrette in the Black Magus's headwear, the bird of paradise is interpreted as a symbol of exoticism and geographical diversity, in a painting of unmistakable Counter‐Reformist facture, produced in a context of tense religious and political disputes and conflicting commercial interests. By considering the representation of this motif in the Prado Adoration as well as in other works by Rubens and his contemporaries, this paper studies the contribution of artists and paintings to the dissemination of natural knowledge, and examines early modern visual culture as part of a wider context shaped by religiosity, political interests, the cult of the exotic and global trade.

Specimen Lists: Artisanal Writing or Natural Historical Paperwork?

The epistolary exchanges of early modern natural history have long been of interest to historians of science, as they reflect the dynamic nature of the emergent discipline better than the printed volumes of natural history. Less attention, at least until recently, has been paid to the unfinished pieces, the cryptic marginalia, and the practical notes that more often than not accompanied letters. Lists of specimens sent or requested were among the new tools at the naturalist's disposal for dealing with a scientific world increasingly populated by objects. This essay seeks to reconstruct the genealogy of specimen lists by focusing on little-known apothecaries in northern Italy: the individuals traditionally held to be social counterparts to these modest strings of words. It seems that the operations at the back of the shop and the literature generated by the centuries-old drug and spice trades may have been a more defining influence on early modern naturalists than the humanist practices of indexing and commonplacing that were concurrently embraced by Italian studiosi.

Early modern natural history: Contributions from the Americas and India

The early success of its oceanic voyages brought contrary pulls to bear on Europe, with the practical needs of the hour standing in contradistinction to the age-old religious authority, sectarian antagonism and the recovered Greco-Roman intellectual tradition. How in course of time the former triumphed over the latter in the case of natural history is an interesting and instructive line of enquiry. This article examines in some detail how the Materia Medica of the Americas and India were incorporated into the European mainstream. When the English East India Company was established in 1600, the telescope had not yet come into existence. It is no more than a coincidence that the telescope was invented in the Netherlands (van Helden 1977) the same year (1608) the first English ship reached India. This brings home the important point that modern science and technology grew hand in hand with maritime exploration, colonial expansion and domination over nature and fellow human beings. And yet a distinction needs to be made between exact sciences on the one hand and botany and zoology on the other. A sailor with skill, experience and luck could still steer his ship safely even before the benefits of scientific navigation became available, but there was no way to avoid disease and death on ship and in distant lands. While developments in astronomy and related disciplines were an all-European affair, in the case of natural history and healthcare, traditional knowledge and wisdom of the local people had to be tapped. The requirements operated at two distinct levels. There were health concerns and needs of sailors and administrators who went to the distant colonies. At the same time Europe was interested in new medicines and exotic remedies from America and Asia. Distant lands introduced Europeans to new diseases, which called for new cures and remedies. At the same time new drugs could be tried for old diseases as well. Medical botany was a necessity. Scientific botany emerged from it. Colonialism in course of time created a

Naturalia : the history of natural history and medicine in the seventeenth century

In 1712 the poet Elkanah Settle (1648–1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris , dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister.[1][1] Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, because Lister had been Vice-President of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first

Natural history and information overload: The case of Linnaeus

Natural History can be seen as a discipline paradigmatically engaged in ‘data-driven research.’ Historians of early modern science have begun to emphasize its crucial role in the Scientific Revolution, and some observers of present day genomics see it as engaged in a return to natural history practices. A key concept that was developed to understand the dynamics of early modern natural history is that of ‘information overload.’ Taxonomic systems, rules of nomenclature, and technical terminologies were developed in botany and zoology to catch up with the ever increasing amount of information on hitherto unknown plant and animal species. In our contribution, we want to expand on this concept. After all, the same people who complain about information overload are usually the ones who contribute to it most significantly. In order to understand this complex relationship, we will turn to the annotation practices of the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). The very tools that Linnaeus developed to contain and reduce information overload, as we aim to demonstrate, facilitated a veritable information explosion that led to the emergence of a new research object in botany: the so-called ‘natural’ system.

Data-driven sciences: From wonder cabinets to electronic databases

Even by the journal’s own standards, this was a wild claim. In July 2008, Wired magazine announced on its cover nothing less than ‘‘The End of Science’’. It explained that ‘‘The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data’’. Such claims about the emergence of a new ‘‘data-driven’’ science in response to a ‘‘data deluge’’ have now become common, from the pages of The Economist to those of Nature. Proponents of ‘‘data-driven’’ and ‘‘hypothesis-driven’’ science argue over the best methods to turn massive amounts of data into knowledge. Instead of jumping into the fray, I would like to historicize some of the questions and problems raised by data-driven science, taking as a point of departure the three rich papers by Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Muller-Wille on Linnaeus’ information processing strategies, Sabina Leonelli and Rachel Ankeny on model organisms databases, and Peter Keating and Alberto Cambrosio on microarray data in clinical research. That a historical approach is warranted is made clear by the remark of the great book historian Robert Darnton that ‘‘every age was an age of information, each in its own way’’ (Darnton, 2000, p. 1). In particular, perceptions of an ‘‘information overload’’ (or a ‘‘data deluge’’) have emerged repeatedly from the Renaissance though the early modern and modern periods and each time specific technologies were invented to deal with the perceived overload (Ogilvie, 2003; Rosenberg, 2003). This commentary will explore the similarities and differences between past and present data-driven life sciences, from early modern natural history to current post-genomics. Renaissance naturalists were no less inundated with new information than our contemporaries. The expansion of travel, epitomized by the discovery of the New World, exposed European naturalists to new facts that did not fit into the systems of knowledge inherited from the Greeks and Romans. This prompted those interested in understanding the natural world to devise newmethods for managing this data, such as note-taking strategies, and new systems of classification (Blair, 2010; Ogilvie, 2006). Ironically, as Charmantier and Muller-Wille point out, these methods and systems, which were meant to tame the information overload, made it possible to accumulate even more data. But accumulation was usually only a mean to an end. These early naturalists established collections, which included specimens, drawings, and texts, so that they could compare these items systematically and draw from the comparisons conclusions about the natural world. In general, they were not testing specific hypotheses, but trying to bring order to the bewildering diversity of natural forms by examining large amounts of collected ‘‘data’’. This tradition continues to be central in natural history to the present day. As George Gaylord Simpson, the leading American paleontologist of the twentieth century,made clear in 1961, natural history, and taxonomy in particular, was the ‘‘science that is most explicitly and exclusively devoted to the ordering of complex data’’ (Simpson, 1961, p. 5). What is striking about Simpson’s definition is not only that he chose the ‘‘ordering of complex data’’ as the most essential element of natural history, but also how similar his definition is to current characterizations of the supposedly unprecedented data-driven sciences. This should come as no surprise since, for several centuries, the natural historical sciences have fundamentally been data-driven sciences. But was natural history driven by data alone? Most likely not, because natural history has never been free of ontological assumptions. For example most naturalists assume the existence of natural groups. As Charmantier and Muller-Wille show, Linnaeus who struggled with a data deluge of his own creation and devised numerous note-taking methods to deal with it, could only do so because he began with a hypothesis about the genus categories he used to organize his data. In other words, Linnaeus may have been driven by his data, but his approach was not exclusively datadriven. This conclusion, however, is insufficient to distinguish early modern approaches to data with contemporary ones. Indeed, as Keating and Cambrosio show in their paper, modern day biostatisticians analyzing cancer microarray data were equally driven by various hypotheses. For example, the determination of the sample size needed to produce statistically significant results required researchers to make an hypothesis about the number of classes that the data might reveal. In other words, they too were guided by

Maria Sibylla Merian and the metamorphosis of natural history

Known primarily for creating beautiful images of butterflies and flowers, Maria Sibylla Merian (German, 1647-1717) has remained largely unappreciated for her seminal contribution to early modern natural history. Merian was indeed a talented artist, but she clearly thought of herself as a naturalist, and employed both text and images to depict lepidopteran metamorphosis and behavior with unprecedented accuracy and detail. Merian documented larvae and adult insects feeding not only on plants, but also on other animals, and she depicted other creatures preying on insects. An image of battling spiders and ants and the accompanying text in her 1705 Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium illuminated the world of tropical arthropods in a way that was groundbreaking, and set the stage for a new way to envision nature.

Charlotte Smith and "The Swallow": Migration and Romantic Authorship

Avian seasonal migration posed one of the great unresolved questions of early modern natural history. In her poem about the seasonal disappearance of swallows, published in both her ornithological handbook for children and her posthumous Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807), Smith simultaneously stakes her claims to poetic and to natural-historical authority, rewriting through the figure of the swallow the traditional association of female art with the pathos of the Philomelaas-nightingale story. Signifying through its natural-historical associations simultaneously the domestic and the mysterious, the maternal and the exotic, the swallow offers Smith a complex and personally appropriate emblem of female Romantic authorship.

THE PERSISTENT IMAGE OF AN UNUSUAL CENTAUR. A BIOGRAPHY OF ALDROVANDI'S TWO-LEGGED CENTAUR WOODCUT'

This article traces the biography of a particular scientific image in early modern natural history, that of an unusual, two-legged centaur. It begins by examining the preconditions for the emergence of this image in the work of the eminent Bolognese natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi. I then analyse its various shifts in content and function as it re-emerged in different publications and, finally, the reasons for its eclipse around 1700. An examination of this trajectory yields valuable insights into the way in which Aldrovandi and other naturalists of the late Renaissance dealt with visualisations. It is reminiscent of their practices of excerpting and reusing textually represented bits of knowledge. The fact that authors like Aldrovandi borrowed and reproduced images from earlier printed sources on a variety of subjects - many aimed not only at naturalists - led to their wide circulation and contributed to the endurance of an older visual style. As a result, one notes a certain amount of inconsistency between the then dominant "epistemic virtue" and the visualisations used during this period: While natural historians heeded "natural particulars" much more than the usual productions of nature, their depictions of them, much like their descriptions, were often highly generalised. Particular phenomena did not have to be individualised ones.