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Volume Editors: and
This volume examines the ‘phenomenon’ of translation from Greek into Latin from the eleventh century to the thirteenth. These translated texts prompted Western scholars to rediscover the works of classical Greek and Byzantine authors and reshape the medieval intellectual landscape. Though our agenda focuses on translations of scientific texts, the collection of essays here also offers the reader insights into the broader cultural, social, and political functions and implications of individual translations and translation more broadly as a practice.
Contributors are Dimiter Angelov, Péter Bara, Pieter Beullens, Alessandra Bucossi, Luigi d’Amelia, Paola Degni, Michael Dunne, Elisabeth Fisher, Brad Hostetler, Estelle Ingrand-Varenne, Marc Lauxtermann, Tamás Mészáros, James Morton, Theresa Shawcross, and Anna Maria Urso.
Space, Time, and Experience (1300–1800)
How did the early-modern Christian West conceive of the spaces and times of the afterlife? The answer to this question is not obvious for a period that saw profound changes in theology, when the telescope revealed the heavens to be as changeable and imperfect as the earth, and when archaeological and geological investigations made the earth and what lies beneath it another privileged site for the acquisition of new knowledge.
With its focus on the eschatological imagination at a time of transformation in cosmology, this volume opens up new ways of studying early-modern religious ideas, representations, and practices. The individual chapters explore a wealth of – at times little-known – visual and textual sources. Together they highlight how closely concepts and imaginaries of the hereafter were intertwined with the realities of the here and now.

Contributors: Matteo Al Kalak, Monica Azzolini, Wietse de Boer, Christine Göttler, Luke Holloway, Martha McGill, Walter S. Melion, Mia M. Mochizuki, Laurent Paya, Raphaèle Preisinger, Aviva Rothman, Minou Schraven, Anna-Claire Stinebring, Jane Tylus, and Antoinina Bevan Zlatar.
Volume Editors: and
This book explores how European naturalists and artists perceived, investigated, and presented the relationship between insects and colors from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The contributors to this volume examine the creative methods and strategies that were developed to record color-related information about insects through studies on Hoefnagel’s glazed metal and hand-coloring practices; the lepidochromy technique used in paintings by Marseus van Schriek and later naturalists; the representation of sexual dimorphism of color and variable color of caterpillars in the images of Goedaert, Merian, Albin, and Rösel von Rosenhof; the painting-by-numbers technique applied to Schäffer’s bookplates on Regensburg insects; Schiffermüller’s watercolor originals of caterpillars; and finally, the color fading of exotic cabinet specimens and how this issue was tackled by Abbot and Smith. The volume is lavishly illustrated with rare and unpublished images and offers new insights into the interrelation between natural history and visual practices concerning the color of insects, with a special focus on butterflies and moths.

Contributors are Harald Bruckner, Kay Etheridge, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, Karin Leonhard, V.E. Mandrij, Kimberly Schenck, Stacey Sell, Giulia Simonini, and Friedrich Steinle.
Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880) provides a broad spectre of early modern manifestations of human fascination with fish – “fish” understood in the early modern sense of the term, as aquatilia: all aquatic animals, including sea mammals and crustaceans. It addresses the period’s quickly growing knowledge about fish in its multiple, varied and rapidly changing interaction with culture. This topic is approached from various disciplines: history of science, cultural history, history of collections, historical ecology, art history, literary studies, and lexicology. Attention is given to the problematic questions of visual and textual representation of fish, and pre- and post-Linnean classification and taxonomy. This book also explores the transnational exchange of ichthyological knowledge and items in and outside Europe.

Contributors: Cristina Brito, Tobias Bulang, João Paulo S. Cabral, Florike Egmond, Dorothee Fischer, Holger Funk, Dirk Geirnaert, Philippe Glardon, Justin R. Hanisch, Bernardo Jerosch Herold, Rob Lenders, Alan Moss, Doreen Mueller, Johannes Müller, Martien J.P. van Oijen, Pietro Daniel Omodeo, Anne M. Overduin-de Vries, Theodore W. Pietsch, Cynthia Pyle, Marlise Rijks, Paul J. Smith, Ronny Spaans, Robbert Striekwold, Melinda Susanto, Didi van Trijp, Sabina Tsapaeva, and Ching-Ling Wang.
Picturing Astronomical Miracles from the Bible in the Early Modern Era
Volume Editors: and
This volume puts two biblical miracles - the Sun reversing its course in II Kings 20:8-11/Isaiah 38:8 (Horologium Ahaz) and the Sun standing still in Joshua 10:12 -, in the early modern period centre stage. We pay special attention to the development of related imagery, their role as anti-Copernican arguments (in text and image), their reception, their treatment in the mathematical sciences, and their various cultural layers, with a focus on the history of art and the history of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The material discussed spreads from rather prosaic mathematical reflections to highly appealing visual representations of the two miracles.

Summary

This chapter investigates fish out of water; more specifically, pufferfish specimens found in museum collections and represented in different media. It illuminates the complex processes behind preserving and depicting pufferfish as well as how and which knowledge about this species circulated in the context of 18th-century German collections. To gain scientific knowledge, fish bodies were preserved as wet and dry specimens, and/or translated into prints and written descriptions. These various strategies of representation are especially interesting to investigate when they appear within collections without direct access to the ocean. Tracing one specific pufferfish species, then called Tetrodon hispidus, two exemplary Central European natural collections are examined under an art historical lens. By comparing wet and dry specimens from the ichthyological collections of the Leipzig based Linck family as well as Marcus Elieser Bloch (Berlin), I show that what characterized “the” Tetrodon hispidus differed significantly. Through the additional examination of written and pictorial sources, mainly Bloch’s Naturgeschichte der ausländischen Fische, it becomes apparent how the various ways of representation interdepend. Yet, despite the challenges of conserving the animals’ bodies, the specimens’ differences, and the living species’ characteristics unknown to the collectors, one can, surprisingly, trace a coherent iconography of the fish. Thus, shedding light on the production of ichthyological knowledge, this chapterpaper demonstrates the Enlightenment period’s focus on completeness, classification and generalisability as well as the unique role of fish specimens within it.

Open Access
In: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880)

Summary

The Swiss naturalist and physician Leonhardt Thurneysser zum Thurn (1531–1596) travelled to Lisbon in 1555/56. During his sojourn there, as a guest of the Portuguese Royal chronicler, diplomat and humanist Damião de Góis (1502–1574), he described Portugal’s nature. The little-known manuscript of more than 300 pages contains many descriptions of plants, including herbs and trees. Thirty-two folios deal however with descriptions of fishes and other aquatic and marine animals (mammals, crustaceans and molluscs), which he probably observed at the fish market or in nature. An important part of the species is mentioned by their Portuguese names most probably collected from the fishermen and traders the author interviewed. In the present chapter these names are presented together with the respective modern scientific (binomial) and Portuguese common names, as far as it was possible to identify the animals mentioned by the author, at species level, with reasonable certainty. To our knowledge, this is the first inventory of the aquatic and marine fauna of mainland Portugal.

Open Access
In: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880)

Summary

This chapter aims to contribute to the analysis of a particular phenomenon in the history of science, that is the emergence of a new view of nature, as manifested by the formation of a specific academic community and the publication of numerous treatises, between 1530 and 1565. It does not so much intend to praise the energy and foresight of those whom a history of event-driven sciences calls precursors, as to assess the evolution and conditions of this movement. Focusing on ichthyology, it presents a brief analysis of five stages, beginning with the first re-publications of ancient sources, in particular Aristotle and Pliny. It continues with comparisons between the species described and the observations of 16th-century naturalists. Finally, it turns to the treatises themselves, whose prefaces already document the awareness of a new approach and methodology. It thus aims to further a better grasp of the often misunderstood movement of Renaissance natural history with its characteristic and permanent attempts to reconcile ancient texts with a sensory appropriation of nature, and whose influence extended until the middle of the 18th century.

Open Access
In: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880)
Author:

Summary

The origins of the European study of nature can be traced back to Greek and Roman antiquity, but illustration for science first flourished during the Renaissance, and was seen by contemporary scholars as a ‘combination of art and science’. From the 17th-century natural illustrations of fish emerged in China, produced by individual scholars and anonymous workshops painters in Canton. This chapter is a survey of painted natural illustrations of fish in China from the 17th to the 19th century and examines their development in different contexts. This overview of the depiction of fish and other marine creatures in Chinese art offers a view on the varied way in which these paintings came about and the purposes for which they were made. Ranging from an attempt at scientific accuracy, to societal commentaries and entertainment purposes, the illustrations and descriptions of the various species highlight that science and art at times work in parallel but often also may proceed in different degree. Unlike its development in Europe, this survey of the development of natural illustration of fish in China, however, shows a different path.

Open Access
In: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880)

Summary

Many of the major works of 18th- and 19th-century European ichthyology depended on “second hand” information that could not directly be verified. Since their authors had few opportunities to travel outside Europe, they critically depended on specimens and accompanying information from contacts abroad. This chapter examines the strategies of gathering, organizing and verifying zoological information in Marcus Elieser Bloch’s Natural History of German and Foreign Fishes (1782–1795) which presented one of the first accounts of “all” known fish species according to the Linnean system. Bloch’s case illustrates how 18th-century naturalists crucially depended on textual-critical skills to extract facts from often narrative and anecdotal source material.

Open Access
In: Ichthyology in Context (1500–1880)