In eighteenth-century New Spain, the concern of expeditionaries and collectors about avoiding or delaying the deterioration and loss of their animalia collections was not a minor problem but an important issue that involved many and diverse, visible and invisible actors. They all contributed, in one way or another, to the search for the best way of preserving specimens, some of them used by surgeons and others by embalmers of human corpses. The aim of this paper is to show the phases in the life, death and transformation of natural history specimens linked to day-to-day preservation practices, a work that was essential, but extremely demanding and paradoxically unseen.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
Carla Yanni, Nature’s Museums: Victorian Science and the Architecture of Display (Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Kenneth Kitchell, “The View from Deucalion’s Ark: New Windows on Antiquity,” The Classical Journal, 1993, 88: 341-357; Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Jim Bennett and Scott Mandelbrote, The Garden, the Ark, the Tower, the Temple: Biblical Metaphors of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Museum of the History of Science in association with the Bodleian Library, 1998).
Daniela Bleichmar, “Seeing the World in a Room: Looking at Exotica in Early Modern Collections,” in Collecting Across Cultures. Material Exchanges in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Daniela Bleichmar and Peter C. Mancall (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011) pp.15-30; José Ramón Marcaida and Juan Pimentel, “Dead Natures or Still Lifes? Science, Art and Collecting in the Spanish Baroque,” in Collecting Across Cultures. Material Exchanges, cit., pp. 99-115; Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature: 1150-1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998); Juan Pimentel, “Across Nations and Ages: The Creole Collector and the Many Lives of the Megatherium,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and the Global Intelligence, 1770-1820, edited by Simon Schaffer et al. (Uppsala: Science History Publications, 2009); Paula De Vos, “The Rare, the Singular, and the Extraordinary: Natural History and the Collection of Curiosities in the Spanish Empire,” in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800, edited by Daniela Bleichmar, Paula De Vos, Kristin Huffine and Kevin Sheehan (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2009) pp. 271-289.
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “Exchanging Perspectives: The Transformation of Objects into Subjects in Amerindian Ontologies,” Common Knowledge, 2004, 10, 3: 463-484.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 309 | 58 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 130 | 4 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 45 | 13 | 0 |
In eighteenth-century New Spain, the concern of expeditionaries and collectors about avoiding or delaying the deterioration and loss of their animalia collections was not a minor problem but an important issue that involved many and diverse, visible and invisible actors. They all contributed, in one way or another, to the search for the best way of preserving specimens, some of them used by surgeons and others by embalmers of human corpses. The aim of this paper is to show the phases in the life, death and transformation of natural history specimens linked to day-to-day preservation practices, a work that was essential, but extremely demanding and paradoxically unseen.
All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
---|---|---|---|
Abstract Views | 309 | 58 | 9 |
Full Text Views | 130 | 4 | 0 |
PDF Views & Downloads | 45 | 13 | 0 |