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The tale of the hermaphrodite monkey: classification, state interests and natural historical expertise between museum and court, 1791–4

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 February 2006

ANNA MAERKER
ANNA MAERKER
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Wilhelmstr. 44, D–10117 Berlin, Germany.
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Abstract

A purportedly hermaphrodite monkey which was offered to Grand Duke Ferdinando III of Tuscany in 1791 was sent to the Royal Museum of Physics and Natural History for an evaluation. In their investigation, the museum's naturalists encountered a fundamental classificatory problem which made it impossible to decide whether the animal was monstrous or normal – a ‘taxonomist's regress’ which constitutes a special case of finitism as analysed in the Edinburgh school's readings of Wittgenstein. The communication between museum and court shows that in resolving this ambiguity, museum naturalist Giovanni Fabbroni demarcated experts from laypeople and defined state interest by distinguishing between the grand duke's private interests and those of the state. This case thus highlights the role of late Enlightenment absolutism for the creation of modern practices and concepts of expertise in the service of the state.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , March 2006 , pp. 29 - 47
Copyright
2006 British Society for the History of Science

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Peter Dear, John Downer, Sonja Schmid, Emma Spary, the anonymous reviewers and participants of the Joint Atlantic Seminar for the History of Biology and the European History Colloquium at Cornell for their comments and suggestions, and Patrizia Ruffo for guidance in the archive of the Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza, Florence. Research for this paper was supported by a Luigi Einaudi Graduate Fellowship of the Cornell Institute for European Studies, an International Dissertation Research Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council, and a Dissertation Improvement Grant of the National Science Foundation (award no. SES-0222179).