Klerk, Saskia (Author)
While some seventeenth-century scholars promoted natural history as the basis of natural philosophy, they continued to debate how it should be written, about what and by whom. This look into the studios of two Amsterdam physicians, Jan Swammerdam (1637–80) and Steven Blankaart (1650–1705), explores natural history as a project in the making during the second half of the seventeenth century. Swammerdam and Blankaart approached natural history very differently, with different objectives, and relying on different traditions of handling specimens and organizing knowledge on paper, especially with regard to the way that individual observations might be generalized. These traditions varied from collating individual dissections into histories, writing both general and particular histories of plants and animals, collecting medical observations and applying inductive reasoning. Swammerdam identified the essential changes that insects underwent during their life cycle, described four orders based on these ‘general characteristics’ and presented his findings in specific histories that exemplified the ‘general rule’ of each order. Blankaart looked to the collective observations of amateurs to support his reputation as a man of medicine, but this was not supposed to lead to any kind of generalization. Their work alerts us to the variety of observational practices that were available to them, and with what purposes they made these their own.
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Book
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Nature's Bible: Insects in Seventeenth-Century European Art and Science
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Chapter
Jorink, Eric;
(2011)
Beyond the Lines of Apelles: Johannes Swammerdam, Dutch Scientific Culture and the Representation of Insect Anatomy
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Article
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Chapter
Jorink, Eric;
(2007)
Between Emblematics and the “Argument from Design”: The Representation of Insects in the Dutch Republic
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Book
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(2014)
Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age
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Book
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(2020)
The Flowering of Ecology: Maria Sibylla Merian’s Caterpillar Book
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Chapter
Etheridge, Kay;
(2011)
Maria Sibylla Merian: The First Ecologist?
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Book
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(2011)
The Insect and the Image: Visualizing Nature in Early Modern Europe, 1500--1700
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Article
Dominik Hünniger;
(2021)
Visible Labour? Productive Forces and Imaginaries of Participation in European Insect Studies, ca. 1680–1810
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Book
Roos, Anna Marie Eleanor;
(2011)
Web of Nature: Martin Lister (1639--1712), the First Arachnologist
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Book
Dario Generali;
(2008)
Antonio Vallisneri. La figura, il contesto, le immagini storiografiche
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Article
Ogilvie, Brian W.;
(2012)
Attending to Insects: Francis Willughby and John Ray
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Chapter
Eric Jorink;
(2018)
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Article
Theodore W. Pietsch;
Hans Aili;
(2023)
Peter Artedi's “Manuscriptum ichthyologicum”, a source for Albertus Seba's Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri accurata descriptio (1759)
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Article
Ian M. Davis;
(2020)
Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and measuring the invisible: The context of 16th and 17th century micrometry
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Article
Sleigh, Charlotte;
(2012)
Jan Swammerdam's Frogs
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Book
Gero Seelig;
Staatliches Museum Schwerin;
(2018)
Medusa's Menagerie: Otto Marseus van Schrieck and the Scholars
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Article
MA Martje aan de Kerk;
(2018)
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Article
Daniel Stolzenberg;
(2019)
The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters: Roman Censorship, Dutch Atlases, and the European Information Order, circa 1660
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