Kiser, April M. (Author)
This dissertation examines the ways naturalists used images to study, understand, order, describe and discuss nature in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pictures facilitated encounters with natural objects and aided in organizing and prioritizing individual details. Focusing on descriptions of animals from printed natural histories, this dissertation argues that images played an important role in forging new understandings of nature during the Scientific Revolution and encouraged learning about nature through looking, physical inspection and interaction. Images encapsulated the practices and values that bound together communities and practitioners. Thus, pictures worked as guides for the study of nature, yet they proved flexible in their encounters with natural objects. This made pictures especially useful in the seventeenth century as Europeans collected natural objects and massive amounts of information about nature and struggled to make what they acquired significant. This dissertation also argues that pictures functioned as more than mere copies of natural objects. Instead, pictures transformed nature into objects that were meaningful in European collections and useful to the new science. Contributing to the literature on the visual culture of science and the history of nature, this work demonstrates the ways conceptions of nature and the techniques for seeing and learning about nature changed during the Scientific Revolution. Edward Topsell's History of Four-footed Beasts (1607), the first case, exhibits animals rich with meanings and interconnections. By the middle of the same century, John Ray distanced his work from Topsell's dense entries. He considered them filled with morals and stories that he considered distractions from proper natural history. This dissertation charts the ways images remained useful as ideas about nature changed. Naturalists were critical consumers of images. They used them to sharpen their skills of inspecting objects and were prepared to correct pictures when necessary. Consequently, pictures proved important in the experimental context of the Royal Society of London, which privileged the manual manipulation of nature. Naturalists carefully implemented pictures and remained cautious of their power to describe and order nature as well as to mislead or distract students of nature.
...MoreDescription Cited in ProQuest Diss. & Thes. : doc. no. 3440303.
Book
Ray, John;
Oswald, P. H.;
Preston, C. D.;
(2011)
John Ray's Cambridge Catalogue (1660)
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Article
Wragge-Morley, Alexander;
(2010)
The Work of Verbal Picturing for John Ray and Some of His Contemporaries
(/isis/citation/CBB001023397/)
Thesis
Doherty, Meghan C.;
(2010)
Carving Knowledge: Printed Images, Accuracy, and the Early Royal Society of London
(/isis/citation/CBB001567175/)
Book
Fairman, Elisabeth R.;
Art, Yale Center for British;
(2014)
Of Green Leaf, Bird, and Flower: Artists' Books and the Natural World
(/isis/citation/CBB001500458/)
Article
Grindle, Nick;
(2005)
“No Other Sign or Note Than the Very Order”: Francis Willughby, John Ray and the Importance of Collecting Pictures
(/isis/citation/CBB000641147/)
Book
Roos, Anna Marie Eleanor;
(2015)
The Correspondence of Dr. Martin Lister (1639--1712)
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Article
Wragge-Morley, Alexander;
(2012)
“Vividness” in English Natural History and Anatomy, 1650--1700
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Book
Jorink, Eric;
Ramakers, Bart;
(2011)
Art and Science in the Early Modern Netherlands
(/isis/citation/CBB001201611/)
Book
Alexander Wragge-Morley;
(2020)
Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650-1720
(/isis/citation/CBB757195097/)
Article
Kusukawa, Sachiko;
(2011)
Patron's Review: The Role of Images in the Development of Renaissance Natural History
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Book
Charlotte Sleigh;
(2017)
The Paper Zoo: 500 Years of Animals in Art
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Chapter
Robert Felfe;
(2018)
Spatial Arrangement and Systematic Order
(/isis/citation/CBB069022839/)
Article
Kusukawa, Sachiko;
(2011)
Picturing Knowledge in the Early Royal Society: The Examples of Richard Waller and Henry Hunt
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Book
Martin, David L.;
(2011)
Curious Visions of Modernity: Enchantment, Magic, and the Sacred
(/isis/citation/CBB001251944/)
Article
Thomas, Jennifer;
(2011)
Compiling “God's great book [of] universal nature”: The Royal Society's Collecting Strategies
(/isis/citation/CBB001200258/)
Article
Berg, W.;
Thamm, J.;
(2008)
Systematic Study of Natural Artifacts. On the Program of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum of 1652 and Its Early History
(/isis/citation/CBB001232299/)
Article
Bleichmar, Daniela;
(2008)
Resumen de El imperio visible: la mirada experta y la imagen en las expediciones científicas de la Ilustración
(/isis/citation/CBB001022555/)
Book
Anna Marie Roos;
(2019)
Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters: The Art of Science in the Seventeenth Century
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Article
Acheson, Katherine;
(2009)
The Picture of Nature: Seventeenth-Century English Aesop's Fables
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Book
Rix, Martyn;
(2013)
The Golden Age of Botanical Art
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