Article ID: CBB001023397

The Work of Verbal Picturing for John Ray and Some of His Contemporaries (2010)

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Wragge-Morley, Alexander (Author)


Intellectual History Review
Volume: 20
Pages: 165--179


Publication Date: 2010
Edition Details: Part of a special issue, “Picturing Collections in Early Modern Europe”
Language: English

By far the largest part of Nehemiah Grew's account of a seventeenth-century collection of rarities, his Musaeligum Regalis Societatis (1685) is taken up with 'thick', verbal descriptions of things in the Royal Society's repository. Not only, Grew suggests, do his descriptions serve to signify the contents of his collection, but they enable us to discern among species and to think about the collection's pieces in new ways. Verbal descriptions did not just signify things in the Royal Society's collection, but had the capacity to alter their meanings. The essay discusses the 'picturing' of natural things in Early Modern Europe with little direct reference to the contemporary media of graphic representation - drawings, engravings, paintings etc. - in order to highlight the role of the then most widely used, but now least discussed of these media, verbal descriptions.

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Description On verbal descriptions of natural items.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001023397/

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Authors & Contributors
Wragge-Morley, Alexander
Roos, Anna Marie Eleanor
Rose, Edwin
Ray, John
Quinn, Terry J.
Preston, C. D.
Concepts
Natural history
Visual representation; visual communication
Botany
Scientific illustration
Anatomy
Science and art
Time Periods
17th century
18th century
19th century
Places
Great Britain
London (England)
Institutions
Royal Society of London
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