This dissertation, Layered Loyalties: The Natuurkundige Commissie in the Netherlands Indies (1820-1850), studies the Natuurkundige Commissie. The Commissie was established by Royal Decree on May 2,... Show moreThis dissertation, Layered Loyalties: The Natuurkundige Commissie in the Netherlands Indies (1820-1850), studies the Natuurkundige Commissie. The Commissie was established by Royal Decree on May 2, 1820, by King Willem I and its purpose was to ‘to promote the knowledge of the natural condition and the products [of nature] of our possessions in the East Indies.’ Between 1820 and 1842, eight members and six assistants were appointed and sent to the Dutch East Indies. An additional two members and 14 assistants were appointed in the East Indies. These 30 naturalists mapped the nature of the Netherlands Indies over a period of 30 years until the Commissie was dissolved in 1850. The main goal of this dissertation is to find out how the Natuurkundige Commissie functioned across space (between the Netherlands and the Indies) and time (over a period of thirty years). Studying the relationship between the participants and the three main stakeholders (the Dutch government, the natural history museum in Leiden, and the colonial government) of the Commissie leads to a new understanding of how the Commissie functioned and fulfilled its intended purposes. Show less
This contribution looks back on a period of 35 years of Middle Dutch Studies, through the perspective of the retirement of Frits van Oostrom, who played a central role in the field in the past few... Show moreThis contribution looks back on a period of 35 years of Middle Dutch Studies, through the perspective of the retirement of Frits van Oostrom, who played a central role in the field in the past few decades. Starting from a1989 volume in which Van Oostrom, along with Frank Willaert and several other specialists of Middle Dutch Literature, looked towards the present and future of the field, I aim to gauge whether their expectations havecome true. Supported by the work of fellow scholars who have discussed general developments in the field of Middle Dutch Studies in the past, I aim to draw a balance of the field’s position in terms of international dialogue, digital research methods, methodological innovation and the broader embeddedness in the (diachronic) study of Dutch literature. Show less
This dissertation examines how in eighteenth-century Europe, naturalists sought to study, grasp and capture the world of fish. Working on the intersection of the history of science and book history... Show moreThis dissertation examines how in eighteenth-century Europe, naturalists sought to study, grasp and capture the world of fish. Working on the intersection of the history of science and book history, this research aims to shed light on how naturalists came to present themselves as authorities in an emerging field. It does so by focussing on a set of ‘fish books’, i.e., natural historical works that describe and depict fish. The first is Francis Willughby and John Ray’s "Historia piscium" (Oxford, 1686); the second Peter Artedi’s "Ichthyologia sive opera omnia de piscibus" (Leiden, 1738), and the third Marcus Élieser Bloch’s twelve volume series "Allgemeine Naturgeschichte der Fische" (Berlin, 1782–1795). These works are analysed alongside correspondences, manuscripts and natural historical collections. Together, these sources show that the development of the study of fish in this period can be best be understood as a process of continuous demarcation. This dissertation argues that the study of fish was subject to recurrent debates on subject, method and practitioner, and that such discussions were of both epistemological and social nature. In presenting their fish books, naturalists leveraged such discussions as to secure a place for themselves in the capricious environment of early modern natural history. Show less
A pharmacopoeia is an official compendial publication containing medicinal products, their components and composition, thereby providing specifications and quality standards. In this thesis the... Show moreA pharmacopoeia is an official compendial publication containing medicinal products, their components and composition, thereby providing specifications and quality standards. In this thesis the results are presented of an investigation of national pharmacopoeias, six editions and revised reprints, issued in the Netherlands between 1851 and 196,6 were studied and analyzed extensively. The thread in this study was derived from the ambition of the national commissions, who were composing the Pharmacopoeias, to update the text in conformity with ‘the present state of science’.Historical and political aspects of the Netherlands in relation to the editing of the new pharmacopoeia were also described. The legal significance of these official standards was discussed. Surrounding countries issued also a pharmacopoeia on a regular base, so the international context was reviewed as well. Already in 1865 practitioners and scientists promoted the drawing of an international pharmacopoeia. In 1902 harmonization of the potency of highly effective pharmaceuticals was realized by governmental cooperation through the Brussel Convention. This initiated further cooperation between national pharmacopoeia authorities in the League of Nations, after the Second World War in the World Health Organization. In 1964 the Council of Europe published the Convention on the Elaboration of a European Pharmacopoeia. It resulted in the end of publishing independent Dutch editions of the pharmacopoeia. Show less
At least since the late twentieth century, historians of science have discussed the skills, character and virtues that make for good scholarship. Different virtues have been emphasized by different... Show moreAt least since the late twentieth century, historians of science have discussed the skills, character and virtues that make for good scholarship. Different virtues have been emphasized by different authors. These virtues include love of truth, impartiality and imagination. In my study I look at virtues of scholarship in the practice of everyday scholarly life, such as collaborating on a text edition, editing a scholarly journal and evaluating one’s peers in book reviews and letters of recommendation.I take a close look at peer networks of leading late nineteenth-century German academics. I mostly focus on the orientalist Theodor Nöldeke, the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt and the bacteriologists Robert Koch and Emil Behring. This interdisciplinary perspective allows me to identify virtues shared by scholars with very different intellectual backgrounds who use different methods to study different matters.My research shows that loyal collegiality and critical independence were the virtues that were central to all practices of scholarship across all disciplines. The relations between these virtues, however, were complicated. Academics continuously struggled to balance loyalty and independence vis-à-vis each other, institutions of scholarship, the state and the private sector, in what is best described as a moral economy of scholarship. Show less
Large collections of historical biodiversity expeditions are housed in natural history museums throughout the world. Potentially they can serve as rich sources of data for cultural historical and... Show moreLarge collections of historical biodiversity expeditions are housed in natural history museums throughout the world. Potentially they can serve as rich sources of data for cultural historical and biodiversity research. However, they exist as only partially catalogued specimen repositories and images of unstructured, non-standardised, hand-written text and drawings. Although many archival collections have been digitised, disclosing their content is challenging. They refer to historical place names and outdated taxonomic classifications and are written in multiple languages. Efforts to transcribe the hand-written text can make the content accessible, but semantically describing and interlinking the content would further facilitate research. We propose a semantic model that serves to structure the named entities in natural history archival collections. In addition, we present an approach for the semantic annotation of these collections whilst documenting their provenance. This approach serves as an initial step for an adaptive learning approach for semi-automated extraction of named entities from natural history archival collections. The applicability of the semantic model and the annotation approach is demonstrated using image scans from a collection of 8, 000 field book pages gathered by the Committee for Natural History of the Netherlands Indies between 1820 and 1850, and evaluated together with domain experts from the field of natural and cultural history. Show less
This study examines the provenance of the mineralogy and palaeontology collections of Teylers Museum in Haarlem. These objects, combined with the thousands of handwritten labels that have been... Show moreThis study examines the provenance of the mineralogy and palaeontology collections of Teylers Museum in Haarlem. These objects, combined with the thousands of handwritten labels that have been preserved, most of which date from the 18th century, are silent witnesses to a largely forgotten world of collecting practices, classifications, academic networks, commercial practices, debates on the nature of fossils and the formation of the earth’s crust, and much more besides. My research is an attempt to reveal the world behind these objects, all of which were once collected for Teylers Museum by the first Director Martinus van Marum (1750-1837). It seeks to give the collection back its voice. Combining the financial records of the Teylers Foundation with the minutes of meetings held by the directors and Teylers’s Second Society, as well as Van Marum’s travel journals, written records of public lectures, correspondence, and other manuscripts made it possible to reconstruct his purchases and to match labels to objects. When the entirety of Van Marum’s geological endeavours is surveyed, he emerges as more of a follower of scientific developments than a knowledge producer. He published very few articles in this field, and the ideas he presented in them were seldom new and sometimes misconceived. His activities in geology were not on a par with his great achievements in physics and chemistry. However, by virtue of his positions in the Teylers Foundation and the Holland Society of Sciences, as well as his publications on plant physiology and static electricity, he was regarded as one of the most influential scientists of his day. Show less
A special interest in optics among various seventeenth-century painters living in the Dutch city of Delft, has intrigued (art-)historians for a long time. Equally, the impressive career of the... Show moreA special interest in optics among various seventeenth-century painters living in the Dutch city of Delft, has intrigued (art-)historians for a long time. Equally, the impressive career of the Delft microscopist Anthony van Leeuwenhoek has been studied by many historians of science. However, it has never been investigated who, at that time, had access to the mathematical and optical knowledge necessary for the impressive achievements of these Delft practitioners. We have tried to gain insight in Delft as a ‘node’ of optical knowledge by following the careers of three minor local figures in early-seventeenth-century Delft. We argue that through their work, products, discussions in the vernacular and exchange of skills, rather than via learned publications, these practitioners constituted a foundation on which the later scientific and artistic achievements of other Delft citizens were built. Our Delft case demonstrates that these practitioners were not simple and isolated craftsmen; rather they were crucial components in a network of scholars, savants, painters and rich virtuosi. Decades before Vermeer made his masterworks, or Van Leeuwenhoek started his famous microscopic investigations the intellectual atmosphere and artisanal knowledge in this city centred on optical topics. Show less
This dissertation analyses the use of the Leiden anatomical collections in the nineteenth century. It investigates what happened to anatomical preparations after they were added to institutional... Show moreThis dissertation analyses the use of the Leiden anatomical collections in the nineteenth century. It investigates what happened to anatomical preparations after they were added to institutional collections. Four chapters discuss the four main audiences of the Leiden collections: students, researchers, lay visitors, and university governors. The medical audiences (students and researchers) kept using the collections throughout the nineteenth century; the non-medical audiences (visitors and governors) stopped using the collections in the second half of the century. The dissertation argues that, to understand these developments, we need to see anatomical collections as dynamic entities: intended for active, hands-on use and containing objects that, as philosopher of biology Hans-J_rg Rheinberger has put it, are made of what they represent. These properties enabled researchers and students to continuously reinterpret the preparations as medical theories and practices changed. In the new medicine, the collections were placed in a closed laboratory environment, and the reinterpretations disconnected the preparations from their past and the moral stories once attached to them. Hence, they became hard to access and use for lay visitors and university governors. Even today, old preparations linger in hospitals and laboratories, waiting for new uses __ as do newly built collections of bodily material. Show less
A life-like human arm decorated with lace sleeves, holding an eyelid on a string, fragments of skin swivelling in a phial with a twig, a shiny silvery liver, a dog with a cleft palate, a human ear... Show moreA life-like human arm decorated with lace sleeves, holding an eyelid on a string, fragments of skin swivelling in a phial with a twig, a shiny silvery liver, a dog with a cleft palate, a human ear with a tiny pox mark, foetuses decorated with colourful beads. At first sight, it seems an odd collection of specimens. Yet they are all part of the eighteenth century Leiden anatomical collections, made by Leiden anatomists and their acquaintances and acquired by Leiden University afterwards.A lot has been written about the anatomists and their discoveries, but very little is known about these preparations. That is odd, as it are the preparations themselves that evoke so many questions: why these body parts, plants, animals? Why these decorations and combinations? Why did their makers conceive them? Why were they acquired by the university? It is also worrying that we know so little about these preparations, as they are steadily deteriorating - no matter how great the curatorial efforts made.This Ph.D. thesis uses the materiality of the anatomical preparations as the starting point to answer the questions they evoke, combining material and contextual analysis. The author argues that aesthesis, an epistemic culture that included a tacit quest for beauty and perfection rooted in sensory experience and intertwined with the rise of the new field of aesthetics, was defining for the way the eighteenth-century Leiden anatomists made and used their preparations. The knowledge embedded in the materiality of these historical objects is essential for making informed decisions about their preservation and display, now and in the future. Show less
The German chemist-apothecary Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773-1854) offers a fascinating window on Dutch culture and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By providing an... Show moreThe German chemist-apothecary Caspar Georg Carl Reinwardt (1773-1854) offers a fascinating window on Dutch culture and society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By providing an in-depth analysis of his multi-faceted career in the Netherlands and the Malay Archipelago, this study sheds light on the co-evolutionary character of science, governance, and empire. It argues that seeds of Reinwardt’s professional flexibility lay in his practical training in one of Amsterdam’s chemical workshops and his socialization in a broader cultural context where the improvement of society and economy played a crucial role. Show less
This study focuses on the life and work of the sixteenth-century botanist Carolus Clusius in the context of court culture. Before accepting a position at the university in Leiden at the age of 67,... Show moreThis study focuses on the life and work of the sixteenth-century botanist Carolus Clusius in the context of court culture. Before accepting a position at the university in Leiden at the age of 67, Clusius spent a large part of his career at the courts of emperors, princes and aristocrats in Middle-Europe. There he met a wealthy and well-educated elite, who shared his passion for plants, gardens and travelling. But he also encountered a rich diversity of interests and approaches regarding the study of plants. These differences were used by Clusius to establish his authority as a professional botanist and to determine the standards for the proper scientific study of plants. Show less
