A Tulip for a Cup of Tea? Commerce and Nature in the Dutch Golden Age

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹Klaus van Berkel, Albert van Helden and Lodwijk Palm (eds), A History of Science in the Netherlands: Survey, Themes, and Reference (Leiden, 1998). This kind of survey should be profitably contrasted with earlier accounts such as Derek J. Struik, The Land of Stevin and Huygens: A Sketch of Science and Technology in the Golden Age (Dordrecht, 1981).

²See, however, Theo Verbeek, Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650 (Carbondale, IL, 1992) for a fuller account of this encounter.

³Joella Yoder, Unrolling Time: Christian Huygens and the Mathematicization of Nature, 2nd edition (Cambridge, 1994).

⁴Edward Ruestow, The Microscope in the Dutch Republic: The Shaping of Discovery (Cambridge, 1996).

⁵Renk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750 (Amsterdam, 2002). This publication is part of the ‘Edita’ series on the history of Dutch science sponsored by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and distributed by the University of Chicago Press, which contains a number of titles of interest for further reading on Dutch science.

⁶Pamela H. Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2004).

⁷Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006).

⁸Florike Egmond, Paul G. Hoftijzer and Robert P.W. Visser (eds), Carolus Clusius in a New Context: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist (Amsterdam, 2008).

⁹See especially Kurt Wettengl (ed.), Maria Sybilla Merian, 1647–1717: Artist and Naturalist (Ostfildern-Ruit, 1998); Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empires: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA, 2004), passim; and Kim Todd, Chrysallis: Maria Sybilla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis (New York, 2007) for an introduction to this growing field of scholarship.

¹⁰Svetlana Alpers, The Art of Describing: Dutch Art in the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, 1984); and Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Intepretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987).

¹¹In addition to her many essays, see Claudia Swan, The Clutius Botanical Watercolors (New York, 1998); idem, Art, Science, and Witchcraft in Early Modern Holland. Jacques de Gheyn II (1565–1629) (Cambridge, 2005); and her current project, The Aesthetics of Possession: Art, Science, and Collecting in the Netherlands 1600–1650.

¹²Benjamin Schmidt, Innocence Abroad: The Dutch Imagination and the New World, 1570–1670 (Cambridge, 2001).

¹³Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (eds), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Art, and Science in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2001); Peter Dear, Lissa Roberts, and Simon Schaffer (eds), The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialisation (Amsterdam, 2007); and Benjamin Schmidt and Pamela Smith (eds), Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800 (Chicago, 2008). All three volumes contain a number of essays discussing the Netherlands.

¹⁴C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (New York, 1965); and Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, 1996), 16–152, passim.

¹⁵For examples of this kind of work on the Jesuits, see especially Steven J. Harris, ‘Confession-Building, Long-Distance Networks, and the Organization of Jesuit Science’, Early Science and Medicine, 1 (1996): 299–304; idem, ‘Long-Distance Corporations, Big Sciences, and the Geography of Knowledge’, Configurations, 6 (1998), 269–304; and idem, ‘Mapping Jesuit Science: The Role of Travel in the Geography of Knowledge’, in John W. O'Malley et al. (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences, and the Arts 1540–1773 (Buffalo, 1999), 212–40.

¹⁶Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Cambridge, 1995). See also H. Beukers, Antoine M. Luyendijk-Elshou, M.E. Van Opstall and F. Vos (eds), Red-Hair Medicine: Dutch-Japanese Medical Relations (Amsterdam, 1991); Annick Horiuchi, ‘When Science Develops Outside State Patronage: Dutch Studies in Japan at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century’, Early Science and Medicine 8 (2003): 148–71; and Shigehisa Kuriyama, ‘Between the Mind and Eye: Japanese Anatomy in the Eighteenth Century’, in Charles Leslie and Allan Young (eds), Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995), 21–43.

¹⁷Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 1993).

¹⁸Krzysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800, trans. Elizabeth Wiles-Portier (Oxford, 1990). For an interesting study of Dutch scientific collecting—I am restricting my citations only to English-language literature since the Dutch scholarship is considerable—see Bert van de Roemer, ‘Neat Nature: The Relationship between Nature and Art in a Dutch Cabinet of Curiosities from the Early Eighteenth Century’, History of Science, 42 (2004): 47–84.