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Summaries
Hanco Jürgens
‘From God's acre to nature's mirror. Changing perceptions of India's nature in the German missionaries' periodical Hallesche Berichte (1750-1810)’.
Since 1705, German missionaries were sent from the Halle orphanage to South India. The missionaries' diaries, letters and essays were published in the periodical the Hallesche Berichte. To bring the changing perceptions of India's nature into perspective, the interactions between science, religion and social change are further discussed. Until the 1780s, the missionaries were not in the first place focussed on India's nature. The curiosities of India were considered side issues, which could distract them from their main task: missionary work. Moreover, the rich and diverse species of nature were not considered by them of any importance to explain the wisdom of God. Instead, they ‘read’ nature in a semiotic way, as signs of divine providence, of God's punishing or forgiving hand. Storms and lightning were described as warnings for the ‘heathen’ people to convert as quickly as possible. With this interpretation of nature, the authors confirmed their strong religious dedication. After 1780 an enlightened worldview held sway among the missionaries, who now found the wisdom of God in the richness and complexity of India's nature. The missionaries John and Rottler actively collected, categorized and researched the plant and animal kingdoms and became a pivot between European and Indian scholars of natural history. Four factors can be distinguished to explain the striking change of style of the periodical: the theological Enlightenment, which paved the way for doing research in natural history; the expansion of the East India Company, which changed the missionaries' environment decisively; the growing interest in natural history among Europeans in Asia, illustrated by the foundation of learned societies in Jakarta, Calcutta en Tranquebar; and a change in missionary ideology, which tried to bridge European and Indian perceptions of nature. These factors cannot be studied separately but only as parts of a broader world-historical
development.
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Geert Palmaerts
‘“Laid down and determined by nature and by taste”: the concept of nature in eighteenth-century theory of architecture’.
This essay deals with the notion of ‘nature’ in eighteenth-century Dutch and French architectural theory. In 1790, the Dutch periodical Vaderlandsche Bibliotheek van Wetenschap, Kunst en Smaak published a series of articles in which architecture was considered ideal only when it was a representation of nature. By ‘nature’ the anonymous author(s) did not mean the flora of nature or the beauty of the human body. They rather had in mind a notion of the natural form of the first dwelling of mankind, which was thought to have been a primitive hut. Although only a theoretical construction, the hut was supposed to have generated superior architectonic principles. The Greeks were seen as the masters of the application of these building principles. Contemporary imitation of these principles led therefore to the ideal of classicism: soberness and sublimity. The theoretical background of classicism had been formed earlier: mainly by the works of the French writers Marc-Antoine Laugier and Antoine-Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quincy. In the articles of the Vaderlandsche Bibliotheek the
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influence of the earlier French theories is clearly perceptible. In this essay the consequences or implications of this classicist architectural theory are developed. Why, for example, did Goethe in 1772 reject Laugier's notion of the natural dwelling, while propagating the value of the gothic cathedral of Strasbourg?
The idea of the natural hut led not only to the creation of certain specific architectonic principles; it also led to a selective view of history. The adherents of classicism saw that in some periods of history there was no knowledge of the natural principles of the hut. These periods of art history, for example medieval architecture, were therefore considered to be ‘barbarian’ and the anti-type of the cultural emulation of classicism. The Dutch author(s) did not differ in opinion from the French classicists. It is consequently no surprise that the reaction to this historical and architectural theory in the Netherlands was much the same as elsewhere in Europe. From the 1800s onwards, ‘nature’ was rejected as the foundation of architecture, and a new historical perception took its place. The image of the natural hut disappeared and gave way to the admiration of for example gothic architecture, which was now no longer seen as a ‘barbaric’ building practice.
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Christian Bertram
‘Nature and national character: taking a trip with foreigners into the Dutch gardens’.
The little village of Broek and its gardens, almost unknown in our days, were considered to be ‘typically Dutch’ by foreign tourists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. A Dutch description of the Netherlands (1750) says that Broek seems to be the capital of neatness and cleanliness and that the gardens of Broek have their share in that neatness. In foreign descriptions, this ‘neatness’ and ‘cleanliness’ was more and more criticised in the second half of the 18th century and seen as evidence of a hostile attitude towards nature. The background to that development was the Netherlands’ diminished reputation in the second half of the 18th century. In that period the Netherlands lost the prestige it had earned in its so-called ‘golden age’, the 17th century. The business sense, the control over nature through an ingenious network of canals, dikes and mills constantly pumping the water out of the polders, the intensive use of ground, and the countryseats with formal gardens owned by wealthy merchants: all these evoked in the first half of the 18th century the astonishment and respect of foreign visitors. Now, in the last decades of the 18th and in the beginning of the 19th century this suppression of nature was seen as an indisputable sign of the Dutch lack of taste and sense of beauty. And here we have the reason for the extraordinary popularity of the little formal gardens of Broek at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century: Broek in Waterland fitted into the foreign preconception of the land of tasteless and dull merchants, a cliché that travellers - consciously or subconsciously - wanted to see confirmed on their travels through the Netherlands.
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Rina Knoef
‘The concept of “Nature” in Boerhaave's Orations’
This article offers an interpretation of the orations of Herman Boerhaave, the famous Dutch professor of medicine, botany and chemistry, with special reference to his ideas on nature. Boerhaave's orations, held between 1701 and 1731, show a remarkable change in his views. While in the beginning of his academic career he presented a thoroughly mechanistic programme, he soon changed his mind and started ascribing changes in nature to latent im- | |
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material powers. This change necessarily involved a move away from mechanics to chemistry as the best means to study nature. At the same time, however, Boerhaave's views on the moral qualities of the natural philosopher remained the same. This continuity was based on Boerhaave's unchanging religious view of nature that did not allow for man to fully understand the works of the Creation - the natural philosopher, being a humble servant of nature, was entirely dependent on the knowledge of nature reflected upon his mind by the Creator.
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Frans Grijzenhout
‘Strolling through Dutch Arcadia’
In 1804 the prolific Haarlem author, printer and publisher Adriaan Loosjes (1761-1818) published Hollands Arkadia of Wandelingen in de omgeeving van Haarlem (Dutch Arcadia, or Strollings in the Surroundings of Haarlem. By a description of four walks in the ‘Dutch Arcadia’ beautiful surroundings, Loosjes gives a typical late-Enlightenment look on Dutch society: he considers all aspects of the Dutch landscape, nature, agriculture, economics, history, and contemporary morals from a combined utilitarian and patriotic-nationalistic point of view. He puts these words into the mouths of ten burghers of the city of Haarlem, who are making the walks Loosjes describes.
The surroundings of Haarlem were called ‘a Dutch Arcadia’ long before Loosjes. In the seventeenth century, however, religious connotations of the Haarlem Arcadia prevailed. Loosjes' book must also be considered in the light of the early eighteenth-century arcadian tradition in Dutch literature. Dutch art, especially in Haarlem and Haarlem-connected workshops, saw a remarkable upswing of original landscape painting and drawing, inspired by famous Dutch seventeenth-century examples like Meindert Hobbema. Although Loosjes was fully aware of this development, the illustrations to his work were traditional and backward looking, rather than innovating.
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Arianne Baggerman en Rudolf Dekker
‘The spectre of Sion, Nature and education in the late eighteenth century’
In this article the link between changing attitudes to nature and to education is explored, both in theory and in practice. Starting point are the views of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who pleaded for a return to nature and for more freedom both in gardening and in child rearing. While everywhere in Europe the old geometric French gardens were being replaced by English landscape parks, some parents started to raise their children according to the ideas Rousseau had presented in Emile, in most cases indirectly through the more practical oriented pedagogy of the German philanthropinists like Basedow and Salzmann. In both cases the ideal was more freedom, but not without control. How closely the two were related is sketched in detail in the case of Otto van Eck, a boy who kept a diary between 1791 and 1797. His father, who was an enlightened member of the Dutch elite, transformed the geometrical garden of his countryhouse De Ruit near Delft into an Arcadia with hills and meandering rivulets, while raising his son according to the most modern pedagogical manuals. Otto wrote in his diary how much he loved modern gardens, and showed his distaste for the old geometrical fashion, especially during a visit to one of the most famous gardens in Holland, Sion, also near Delft. He shared this taste with many of his generation, including the daughter of the owner of Sion, who has left us a travel journal of her visits to English-style estates
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in the province of Gelderland, which she, like Otto, admired. All her disgust was summed up in her name for the giant hedge-shears used at home: the spectre of Sion.
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Dorothee Sturkenboom
‘Inspired by Nature. Radermacher's maiden speech for the Ladies' Society for Natural Sciences in Middelburg (1790)’
On 10 November 1790 Daniël Radermacher, squire of Nieuwerkerk and regent of the Dutch East India Company, presented his first speech as chairman of the Ladies' Society for Natural Sciences in the Zeeland town of Middelburg. This society, founded in 1785 and liquidated in 1887, was probably the first scientific society for women anywhere in the world. All the more it is a pity that hardly any source material of this society has survived into today. This contribution not only offers the first publication of Radermacher's speech in print, but also an extensive introduction to the personality, scientific interests, and enlightened ideals of this Middelburg regent who helped the genteel ladies of his city to continue their controversial project after their first chairman and Maecenas, Johan Adriaen van de Perre, had died. Radermacher's address, written in the polished style typical for his milieu, is a characteristic example of the enthusiasm with which at the time the Dutch leisured class studied God's hand in Nature.
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