Abstract
It was the nineteenth century English politician and writer Disraeli who wrote in his book, Contarini Fleming: “read not history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” Today, it does not make sense to discern between biography and history. Biography has become a genre itself. In this chapter, I intend to recreate Maria Sibylla Merian's life by putting together loose pieces, collected here and there, from which not only a whole picture of her and her work should emerge, but also a general view of her time, her family, the places where she lived, and her cultural influences. Merian was an important insect and flower painter and entomologist in her time, and also a mother in charge of her two daughters. My aim is to help develop insight into her influence both on her own society and on subsequent generations of entomologists, including that her work and innovations were nearly forgotten by history.
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Notes
- 1.
“The second Adam”, “the greatest genius”…according to Rousseau and Goethe respectively…“The Plinius of the North”, “The prince of botany”…In sum, a woman in a world of men. For the rest, although in a strict sense Merian was a pioneer she certainly was strongly influenced by some of her most distinguished contemporary male peers, like the Dutch artist Jan Goedaert or Jan Jacob Swammerdam. The first one was the author of “Metamorphosis Naturalis”, a series of drawings on metamorphosis but without asking himself the origin of such metamorphosis or the way it worked. The second one published “Historia Insectorum Generalis”, a compilation of drawings, descriptions and observations that included the same ongoing mistakes from Aristotle’s time. In the previous century, the so-called “father of modern Zoology”, Conrad Gessner, published his own “Historia animalium”, which introduced an accurate nomenclature and classification of flora and fauna and meant a big step forward in the field of entomology. It is proven that for Merian he constituted an essential reference.
- 2.
In his evaluations of Merian's work there was both acknowledgement and criticism.
- 3.
In turn, these travels—along with Labadism—influenced the development of her thought.
- 4.
Aphra Behn also traveled to Surinam when she was a child and as a consequence of her stay in the Antillean lands, wrote her famous text “Oroonoko” about slavery.
- 5.
Anna Muria van Schurman was a multifaceted writer, painter, translator, shaped in her artistic excellence by other illustrious women such as Anna Roemers.
- 6.
Some of those relevant women were María Blanca Álava y Arigón, from whom no works are preserved, but it is documented that she cultivated history and poetry and had a good knowledge of Latin. She lived between the seventh and the eighth century. Another notable case was Rosario Cepeda, born in Cádiz in 1756, who was only 12 when she was accepted in a Women’s Society of her town after having proved her mastery in the translation of the work of the Greek poet Anacreon. She was able to speak several languages and organized herself some tertulias at her home around the 60s of the eighth century. Mariana de Alderete, Marquise of la Rosa del Monte, was famous because of her knowledge of rhetoric, philosophy and mastery in several classical languages. Madame Stael and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse or Madame Necker, just to mention a few, were brilliant women engaged in the salons.
- 7.
Aristotle, De animalibus (according to the translated version of Michael Scot).
- 8.
Redi, F. (1668). Esperienze intorno alla generazione degl'insetti.
- 9.
Redi feared to suffer the same fate as Galilei did. There was no salvation for the heretics.
- 10.
Merian, M. S. (1705). Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium.
- 11.
Bacon, F. (1620). Novum organum.
Bacon, F. (1620). De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum.
- 12.
Merian, M. S. (1679). Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung.
- 13.
Johann Andreas Graff was a German painter, engraver and publisher, born in Nuremberg in 1636 and died in the same city in 1701. He is the author of several engravings with some views of his native city.
- 14.
She had already published several of her most famous books. Two years before leaving Germany she brought to light the second volume of her book Der Raupen wunderbare Verwandlung und sonderbare Blumennahrung, a text of motley typography and profusely illustrated, and basically devoted to flowers in its description and to the insects in the plates. It also includes an opening poem written by Christof Arnold, a poet from Nuremberg.
With respect to the reasons for leaving her country and her husband there are different versions, and we would like to give due credit to the one of Elizabeth Fries Ellet (a writer from the nineteenth century who became famous mainly because of her disputes with Edgar Allan Poe) published in 1859, Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, that sustains that the affairs of Graff were so “embarrassing” that he in fact left his family and his country. Abandoned and humiliated, Merian never used her married surname again.
- 15.
It could be relevant to point out, on this issue, how important Labadism (you have to explain what is Labadism for those not familiar with the term) was in attracting intellectually talented women to be integrated into the everyday life of the community, maybe because, despite the duties related to faith and discipline, women had freedom to cultivate their spirits and minds. It would be enough to remember the paradigmatic story of Anna Maria van Schuurman, born 4 decades before Maria Sibylla, or the case of Elisabeth of the Palatinate. Both women, by the way, corresponded with each other, and with other contemporary intellectuals of their times, like Descartes, in the case of Elisabeth, or Constantijn Huygens, Bathsua Makin or Queen Christina of Sweden, in the case of Anna Maria. There is no doubt that women found a propitious ground to make intellectual links more solid and cultural networks wider. On the other hand, Labadism attracted to its cause not only members of the European royalties, as we just could see, but also some reputed experts of all kind, like i.e. Hendrik van Deventer, with a good knowledge of chemistry and medicine, and one of the first obstetricians in Holland.
- 16.
It is also believed that Nicolaas Witsen, former director of the Dutch East India Company and other relatives of his, had some plantations in Surinam and kept a collection of rarities that they later sent to Amsterdam. Some documents state that Maria Sibylla would have seen some Surinamese insects that she could examine from the previous decade on her travel to Surinam.
As a general context, it is important to recall that after 1700 Surinam became a colony under the complete control of the Surinam Society (created in 1683), the Dutch West Indies Company and the Van Sommelsdijk family, closely connected to the merchant world and protectors of Merian. The native population lived in a regime of slavery, whose slave-masters, owners of the plantations, gradually formed and consolidated a the middle-class in the colony. Most slaves were of African origin (in the time Merian there were about 53,000 slaves, an overwhelming large number compared to the 5,000 Europeans living there).
- 17.
It is well-known that, in her last years, Merian collected and sold specimens and watercolors. The latter were not only painted by herself but also by her daughter Johanna Helena.
- 18.
Other letters, previous to her American travel, where her close friend Dorothea Auer or her dead brother Caspar were loyal interlocutors, remain unfortunately lost.
- 19.
Although in a short footnote we would like to emphasize that in the Dutch cultural context of that time, in the full flourishing of the Golden Age, several women played an important role as artists and pioneers. Just to mention a few of her female contemporaries we should remind allegoric painters and portraitists like Diana Glauber, Anna Cornelia Holt and Sophia Holt; the flowers painters Maria von Oosterwijkck, Maria Margaretha van Os and Anna Ruysch, daughter of the good Merian's friend, Frederik Ruysch; the landscape painter Catharina van Knibbergen. And specially those women who were naturalist painters and that sometimes worked together with Merian or her daughters, like Maria Monninckx or Alida Withoos; in a less prominent position was the painter of insects Margaretha de Heer.
In the wake of Merian there were other naturalist women, like Elizabeth Blackwell, who in 1739 published A Curious Herbary. Later on reference can also be made, for example, to Linnaeus' daughter Elizabeth Christina, who discovered the luminous properties of some flowers, and even the discoverer and collector of fossils, Mary Anning, died when she was 47.
- 20.
The cabinet of curiosities emerged as a phenomenon in the European context of the sixteenth century.
- 21.
Guided as usual by practical sense, she affirmed that “Hochdeutsch is not useful in this country”.
- 22.
Diverse sources differ in their versions. Whereas in some of them Peter the Great was personally in Amsterdam, according to others only Robert Areskin, court physician of the Russian monarch, was there. In any case they bought some watercolors and engravings, worth three thousand guilders. It is well known that, be that as it may, Areskin also bought the Flowers Book for himself.
- 23.
In the year of Merian’s death her daughter Dorothea sold several engravings and texts from the flowers and caterpillar books, and the book on Surinam's insects out of financial necessity.
- 24.
For Linnaeus naming was extremely important, to the extent of stating in his Philosophia Botanica, 1751: “If you don't know the names of things, the knowledge of them is lost, too” or “Nomenclature, the other foundation of botany, should provide the names as soon as the classification is made...If the names are unknown knowledge of the things also perishes...For a single genus, a single name”, or even “The names of the plants ought to be stable certa, consequently they should be given to stable genera”. It goes back to the old debate launched by Quintilian about the certainty or uncertainty of a definition going beyond the use of a term and putting the focus on what a term includes. In the Plato’s “Cratylus” Hermogenes clarifies Cratylus’ position, insisting that “everything has a right name of its own which comes by nature...there is a kind of inherent correctness in the names...”. Aristotle, in his The Organon, postulates the essentialist verbal reference in the linguistic taxonomy of the species. It was an old discussion, as old as the human being itself: all what language doesn’t reach becomes darkness. Linnaeus made a point to what he considered Merian's “absence of names”. However he used the names suggested by Merian for animals from Surinam. In fact he relied on her drawings. For the insects that he had never examined personally he accepted Merian's name and renamed them in Latin.
- 25.
William Sharp McLeay was a British entomologist (1792–1865). He was the creator of the Quinarian System of Classification of Species (into groups and subgroups).
- 26.
Special mention deserves the book Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, from Elizabeth Fries Ellet, published in 1859, that we have already mentioned before and that includes a biography of Merian using laudatory wordings.
- 27.
In the meantime at the end of the century other female entomologists emerged with crushing vigor specially in the Anglo-Saxon society, like the Americans Anna Botsford Comstock, devoted to insect illustration, famous for bringing her students to study nature outside, and Mary Treat of Vineland, who worked and corresponded with Darwin. We should also mention the British Eleanor Anne Ormerod. A new generation. A new perspective on insects, their lives and the way they impact in our own existence. The romantic aura around a non-existent profession, like in the case of Merian, made way for a new discipline taught in universities.
- 28.
She first married a surgeon from Heidelberg, with whom she had a child who died. She became a widow some years after her mother's death. Later she married Georg Gsell, a widower himself with 5 female children. With Georg Gsell she had a girl.
Bibliography
General References
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References on Maria Sibylla Merian and Her Works
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Pomeroy, S. (2017). Maria Sibylla Merian seen through her portraits. Academia.edu. https://www.academia.edu/34399224/Maria_Sibylla_Merian_Seen_Through_Her_Portraits
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Direct References of Sibylla Merian’s Works
Merian, M. S. (1905). Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium. Collection of William Schaus.
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Díaz-Cabal, N.F. (2023). A Forgotten Name in the Natural History: Maria Sibylla Merian. In: Harry, C.C., Vlahakis, G.N. (eds) Exploring the Contributions of Women in the History of Philosophy, Science, and Literature, Throughout Time. Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39630-4_6
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