Robert Paul Willem Visser

Florike Egmond

Paul Gerardus Hoftijzer

Carolus Clusius (Arras 1526-Leiden 1609) was one of the most eminent botanists of the European Renaissance. His name is closely connected with the introduction of many exotic plants in Europe, in particular the tulip. In this volume a group of distinguished scholars explore his role in both the botanical renaissance and the genesis of botany as a field of study. Clusius’ wide-ranging correspondence provides a rich source of information and documents the formation of the European community of naturalists. These interdisciplinary essays will fascinate anyone interested in natural history, the history of science, and Renaissance culture.

Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist

Carolus Clusius

Image-transforming techniques such as close-up, time lapse and layering are often linked to the age of photography, but they were already being used half a millennium ago for the purposes of identification and study. This is why Renaissance drawings of plants and animals are immediately recognizable to the modern viewer. Discussing natural history images made throughout Europe during the sixteenth century, Eye for Detail traces the early history of image manipulation techniques. Florike Egmond shows how the roles and formats of images in nature study changed dramatically during this period, as high-definition naturalistic representation became the rule, and large image collections of plants and animals were created for identification and illustration. She investigates what the use of visual techniques like magnification can tell us about how early modern Europeans studied and ordered living nature, and focuses on how attention to visual detail reveals the overriding question that continued to occupy the minds of naturalists from antiquity well into the modern age: the secret of how life originates. Featuring many striking colour illustrations that have never been published before, this beautiful volume is an arresting guide to the large Continental collections of naturalia drawings and an absorbing study of natural history art of the sixteenth century.

Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science, 1500-1630

Eye for Detail

Robert Zwijnenberg

A strong preoccupation with the human body - often manifested in startling ways - is a characteristic shared by early modern Europeans and their present-day counterparts. Whilst modern manifestations of this interest include body piercing, tattoos, plastic surgery and eating disorders, early modern preoccupations encompassed such diverse phenomena as monstrous births and physical deformity, body snatching, public dissection, flagellation, judicial torture and public punishment. This volume explores such extreme manifestations of early modern bodily obsessions and fascinations, and their wider cultural significance. Agreeing that an interest in physical boundaries, extreme physical manifestations and situations developed and grew stronger during the early modern period, the essays in this volume investigate whether this interest can be traced in a wider range of cultural phenomena, and should therefore be given a prominent place in any future characterization of the early modern period. Taken as a whole, the volume can be read as an attempt to create a new context in which to explore the cultural history of the human body, as well as the metaphors of research and investigation themselves.

Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture

Bodily Extremities

Peter Mason

Adriaen Coenen

Kees Lankester

In the late 16th century, Dutch beachcomber Adriaen Coenen scanned the beaches of Holland for interesting marine material and produced several illustrated manuscripts of his findings, covering anything from the commonplace herring to the exotic moonfish. Coenen's work contains the earliest European pictures of whales, naïve but easily identifiable, which makes it a rare visual and textual source for the natural world of his day. The Whale Book offers a representative selection of more than 100 pages from Coenen’s manuscripts that deal mainly, though not exclusively, with whales. Coenen’s charming, lively watercolors are reproduced in color alongside translations of his texts, and both are accompanied by modern marine-biological identifications and observations that amplify and explain his work, setting it within the wider context of this period in Northern European history. The Whale Book will appeal to all those interested in the natural world and the preservation of threatened marine wildlife, as well as those active in the fields of cultural history, art and the natural sciences. In addition, readers will gain unexpected insights into the experiences of an everyday figure caught up in the events of a turbulent period in Dutch history.

Florike Egmond

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