Remaking Natural History in Seventeenth-Century Northern Europe

Date of Award

Spring 1-1-2025

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Renaissance Studies

First Advisor

Bass, Marisa

Abstract

This dissertation examines the artistic responses to natural history in seventeenth-century Northern Europe. Natural history was born as a discipline in the mid-sixteenth century, dedicated to studying nature. Its primary practitioners, naturalists, standardized knowledge about the natural world in printed natural history treatises with uniform illustrations. As natural history continued to expand in the seventeenth century against the colonizing exploits of Northern Europe and the development of numerous subfields, I showcase that the discipline's practitioners also extended to a more diverse group of makers, including artists, enthusiast collectors, and connoisseurs of art and nature. I analyze these individuals' contributions to natural history through their engagement with natural history books, albums, herbarium collections, and drawings. I identify three material practices as significant forms of interaction with natural history: annotating, coloring, and pasting. I demonstrate that people experienced and experimented with what natural history looked like in the visual realm through these practices, allowing them to produce a personalized account of natural history. Looking at both text and image, the aim of this dissertation is to derive from a vast and widely dispersed archive a history of active, hands-on reception of natural history that is as relevant to the history of science as it is to the history of art. The works I investigate in this dissertation, ranging from annotated natural history treatises and pasted scrapbooks by anonymous makers to miniature paintings by lesser-known artists like Jan Augustin van der Goes, reveal an alternative visual scientific genealogy of natural history imagery, highlighting these previously overlooked individuals as key participants in the pursuit of knowledge. Even though their contributions were what I call "small-scale interactions" and "quiet interventions" with natural history, I argue that they markedly enhanced the field's dynamic growth. Ultimately, investigating people's interaction with the book allows for expanding our understanding of natural history as a manifold discipline.

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