Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:33:45.813Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Such Monsters Do Exist in Nature”: Mermaids, Tritons, and the Science of Wonder in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 December 2017

Vaughn Scribner
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

While a thick vein of scepticism marked Enlightenment thinkers’ studies, such investigations cannot be divorced from their concurrent quest to merge the wondrous and the rational. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in philosophers’ investigations of merpeople. Examining European gentlemen’s debates over mermaids and tritons illuminate their willingness to embrace wonder in their larger quest to understand the origins of humankind. Naturalists utilized a wide range of methodologies to critically study these seemingly wondrous creatures and, in turn, assert the reality of merpeople as evidence of humanity’s aquatic roots. As with other creatures they encountered in their global travels, European philosophers utilized various theories—including those of racial, biological, taxonomical, and geographic difference—to understand merpeople’s place in the natural world. By the second half of the eighteenth century, certain thinkers integrated merpeople into their explanation of humanity’s origins, thus bringing this phenomenon full circle.

Keywords

mermaidtritonscienceEnlightenmentnature
Type
Articles
Information
Itinerario , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , December 2017 , pp. 507 - 538
Copyright
© 2017 Research Institute for History, Leiden University 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

Vaughn Scribner is an assistant professor of history at the University of Central Arkansas. His research investigates early American history in a global context, specifically striving to understand how early modern Britons sought to define (and redefine) their positions in the empire. He would like to thank John Parrack, Beatrice Phillpotts, Becky Saylor, Leslie Tuttle, and Lina Waara for their aid.

References

Bibliography

Unpublished Primary Sources Google Scholar
Cotton Mather to the Royal Society, July 5, 1716. Cotton Mather Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston, Massachusetts.Google Scholar
Sir Robert Sibbald to Sir Hans Sloane, 29 November 1703. Sloane MS 4039, ff. 218–19, British Library (London). Microfilm: The History of Science and Technology Series One: The Papers of Sir Hans Sloane, 1660–1753 from the British Library, London Part 1: Science & Society, 1660–1773, Reel 2 Sloane Mss. 4038, 4039 98460.Google Scholar
Newspapers Google Scholar
Boston Evening-Post Google Scholar
British Apollo Google Scholar
British Journal or Weekly Gazetteer Google Scholar
General Advertiser Google Scholar
Pennsylvania Gazette Google Scholar
Providence Gazette Google Scholar
Public Advertiser Google Scholar
St. James Evening Post Google Scholar
Virginia Gazette Google Scholar
Published Primary Sources Google Scholar
Aldrovandi, Ulisse. Monstrorum Historia. Bologna, 1642.Google Scholar
Bartholin, Thomas. “Of the Mermaid, &c. from the Miscellanea Naturae Curiosorum, Dec. 1, 1671.” In Acta Germanica: or, the Literary Memoirs of Germany, &c. Vol. 1.120. London: G. Smith, 1742.Google Scholar
Boaistuau, Pierre. Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature: Containing a Description of Sundry Strange Things. London: Henry Bynneman, 1569.Google Scholar
Boreman, Thomas. A Description of Some Curious and Uncommon Creatures, Omitted in the Description of Three Hundred Animals. London: Thomas Boreman, 1740.Google Scholar
Boswell, James. Boswell’s Life of Johnson. London: Henry Frowde, 1904.Google Scholar
British Curiosities in Nature and Art. London: J.H., 1713.Google Scholar
Carl Linnaeus to Kungliga Svenska Vetenskapsakademien, 29 August 1749. “The Linnaean Correspondence.” Accessed July 20, 2015. http://linnaeus.c18.net/Letter/L1041.Google Scholar
Da Costa, Emanuel. “Art. III. Elements of Conchology, or an Introduction to the Knowledge of Shells. By Emanuel Mendez da Costa, Member of the Academia Caesar. Imper. Nat. Curios. Plinius IV. And of the Botanic Society of Florence. With Seven Plates, containing Figures of every Genus of Shells. 8 vo. 7s. 6d. Boards. White. 1776.” In The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, Volume LVI, From January to June, 1777, 94. London: R. Griffiths, 1777.Google Scholar
d’Argenville, J. Dezallier. L’histoire naturelle éclaircie dans une de ses parties principals, la conchyliologie. Paris: De Bure l’aîné, 1757.Google Scholar
Benoit de Maillet, Benoit. Telliamed; or Conversations between an Indian Philosopher and a French Missionary on the Diminution of the Sea. Translated and edited by Albert V. Carozzi. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1968.Google Scholar
The General Chronicle and Literary Magazine. Volume 4, from Jan. to April 1812. London: Edmund Lloyd Harley, 1812.Google Scholar
Glover, Thomas. “Account of Virginia, Its Scituation, Temperature, Productions, Inhabitants, and their Manner of Planting and Ordering Tobacco.” Philosophical Transactions 11 (January 1676): 625–26.Google Scholar
Josselyn, John. Account of Two Voyages to New-England Made during the Years 1638, 1663. Boston: William Veazle, 1865.Google Scholar
Linnaeus, Carl, and Abraham Osterdam. Siren lacertina, dissertatione academica orbi erudito data. Uppsala, 1766.Google Scholar
Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. London, 1690.Google Scholar
Martin, Benjamin. The Philosophical Grammar. London: John Noon, 1753.Google Scholar
Mather, Cotton. Diary of Cotton Mather, 1681–1708. Volume 7. Boston: The Massachusetts Historical Society, 1911.Google Scholar
Misson, Maximilien. A New Voyage to Italy. With Curious Observations on Several Other Countries. Volume 1, part 1. London: R. Bonwicke, 1714.Google Scholar
The Naturalist’s Pocket Magazine; or, Compleat Cabinet of Nature. London: Harrison, Cluse, and Co., 1698.Google Scholar
Pontoppidan, Erik. The Natural History of Norway, in Two Parts, translated from the Danish original. London: A Linde, 1755.Google Scholar
“Proofs of the Existence of Mermaids.” In The New London Magazine for August 1786. London: Alex Hogg, 1786.Google Scholar
Renard, Louis. Poissons, Ecrevisses et Crabes. 2nd ed. Amsterdam: 1754.Google Scholar
The Scots Magazine for November 1758, Volume 20. Edinburgh: Sands, 1758.Google Scholar
Stengel, George. De Monstris et Monstrosis. Ingolstadt: Gregor Haenlin, 1647.Google Scholar
Stewart, John. The Revolution of Reason: Or the Establishment of the Constitution of Things in Nature, of Man, of Human Intellect, of Moral Truth, of Universal Good. London: J. Ridgway, 1790.Google Scholar
Urban, Sylvanus. Gentleman’s Magazine, and Historical Chronicle. Vol. 19. London: Edward Cave, 1749.Google Scholar
Urban, Sylvanus. Gentleman’s Magazine for December 1759. London: D. Henry, 1759.Google Scholar
Urban, Sylvanus. Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1762. London: D. Henry, 1762.Google Scholar
Urban, Sylvanus. Gentleman’s Magazine for May 1775. London, D. Henry, 1775.Google Scholar
Uring, Nathaniel. A History of the Voyages and Travels of Nathaniel Uring. London: John Clark, 1749. This book was originally printed in 1726.Google Scholar
Valentijn, François. Beschryving van Amboina. Amsterdam, 1726.Google Scholar
Von Hohenheim, Theophrastus. Four Treatises of Theophrastus von Hohenheim Called Paracelsus. Edited by Henry E. Sigerest. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Whitbourne, Captain Richard. A Discourse and Discovery of New-Found-Land. London: Felix Kingston, 1620.Google Scholar
Wilkins, John. An Essay Towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language. London: Sa. Gellibrand and John Martyn, 1668.Google Scholar
The Wonders of Nature and Art; Being an Account of Whatever is Most Curious and Remarkable throughout the World. Vol. 4. Reading: C. Corbett, 1750.Google Scholar

Secondary Sources

Albanese, Denise. New Science, New World. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Anderson, Margaret Jean. Carl Linnaeus: Father of Classification. Springfield: Enslow, 1997.Google Scholar
Bates, A. W. Emblematic Monsters: Unnatural Conceptions and Deformed Births in Early Modern Europe. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.Google Scholar
Belsey, Andrew and Belsey, Catherine. “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I.” In Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c. 1540–1660, edited by Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, 11–36. London: Reaktion, 1990.Google Scholar
Benedict, Barbara M. Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Benwell, Glenn and Waugh, Arthur. Sea Enchantress: The Tale of the Mermaid and Her Kin. New York: The Citadel Press, 1965.Google Scholar
Brett-James, Norman G. The Life of Peter Collinson. London: Edgar G. Dunstan, 1926.Google Scholar
Brito, Cristina. “On Mermaids and Manatees: A First Approach to the Evolution of Natural History Images in Early Modern Times.” In Proceedings of the ECS Workshop, From Nature to Science: Scientific Illustration on Marine Animals Throughout the Centuries. Old Challenges and New Perspectives, edited by Ana Cristina Roque and Andrew J. Wright, 12–22 . ECS Special Publication Series 56 (Nov. 2013).Google Scholar
Bushaway, Bob. “‘Tacit, Unsuspected, but Still Implicit Faith’: Alternative Belief in Nineteenth-Century Rural England.” In Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850, edited by Tim Harris, 256–277. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Cook, Harold J. “‘Not Unlike Mermaids’: A Report About the Human and Natural History of Southeast Africa from 1690.” Kronos 41 (2015): 61–84.Google Scholar
Craciun, Adriana. Fatal Women of Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katherine. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998.Google Scholar
Davies, Owen. “Newspapers and the Popular Belief in Witchcraft and Magic in the Modern Period.” Journal of British Studies 37:2 (April 1998): 139–165.Google Scholar
Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula. “Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe.” Renaissance Quarterly 43 (Summer 1990): 292–331.Google Scholar
Fleming, James Rodger. Historical Perspectives on Climate Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Fox, Christopher, Porter, Roy and Wokler, Robert, eds. Inventing Human Science: Eighteenth-Century Domains. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Gibson, Susannah. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?: How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Goldgar, Anne. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–1750. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Gunnarsson, Britt-Louise, ed. Languages of Science in the Eighteenth Century. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gura, Phillip F. “Thoreau and John Josselyn.” The New England Quarterly 48 (Dec., 1975): 505–518.Google Scholar
Impey, Oliver and Macgregor, Arthur, eds. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985.Google Scholar
Jones-Baker, Doris. “The Graffiti of Folk Motifs in Cotswold Churches.” Folklore 92 (1981): 160–167.Google Scholar
Kenseth, Joy. “The Age of the Marvelous: An Introduction.” In The Age of the Marvelous, edited by Joy Kenseth, 25–60. Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1991.Google Scholar
Koerner, Lisbet. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.Google Scholar
Lowengard, Sarah. “Jacques-Fabien Gautier, or Gautier d’Agoty.” In The Creation of Color in Eighteenth-Century Europe. New York: Gutenberg-e, 2006.Google Scholar
Lynn, Michael R. Popular Science and Public Opinion in Eighteenth-Century France. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
MacGregor, Arthur. “The Tradescants as Collectors of Rarities.” In Tradescant Rarities: Essays on the Foundation of the Ashmolean Museum 1683 with a Catalogue of the Surviving Early Collections. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.Google Scholar
Morgan, Jennifer L. Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.Google Scholar
Murphy, Kathleen S. and Parsons, Christopher M.. “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in the Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics.” Early American Studies 10:3 (Fall 2012): 503–539.Google Scholar
O’Neill, Jean and Mclean, Elizabeth P.. Peter Collinson and the Eighteenth-Century Natural History Exchange. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2008.Google Scholar
Parrish, Susan Scott. “The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World.” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 475–514.Google Scholar
Parrish, Susan Scott. American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Parsons, Sarah. “The ‘Wonders of the Deep’ and the ‘Mighty Tempest of the Sea’: Nature, Providence and the English Seafarers’ Piety, c. 1580–1640.” In God’s Bounty?: The Churches and the Natural World, edited by Peter Clarke and Tony Claydon, 194–204. Woodbridge: Ecclesiastical History Society, 2010.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Tara E. Mermaids and the Production of Knowledge in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate, 2015.Google Scholar
Pedersen, Tara E.. “‘We shall discover our Selves’: Practicing the Mermaid’s Law in Margaret Cavendish’s The Convent of Pleasure.” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 5 (2010): 111–135.Google Scholar
Philbrick, Nathaniel. Away off Shore: Nantucket Island and Its People, 1602–1890. New York: Penguin Press, 2011.Google Scholar
Phillpotts, Beatrice. Mermaids. New York: Ballantine Books, 1980.Google Scholar
Pietsch, Theodore W., ed. Fishes, Crayfishes, And Crabs: Louis Renard’s Natural History of the Rarest Curiosities of the Seas of the Indies, in Two Volumes. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Pietsch, Theodore W.. Samuel Fallours and his ‘Sirenne’ from the Province of Ambon.” Archives of Natural History 18 (1991): 1–7.Google Scholar
Porter, Roy, ed, The Cambridge History of Science. Vol. 4, Eighteenth-Century Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Ritvo, Harriet. “Amateur Mermaids and Professional Scientists: Beating the Bounds in 19th-Century Britain.” Victorian Literature and Culture 19 (1991): 277–292.Google Scholar
Scribner, Vaughn. “Fabricating History: The Curious Case of John Smith, a Green-Haired Mermaid, and Alexander Dumas.” The Junto (16 June 2015). http://earlyamericanists.com/2015/06/16/guest-post-from-vaughn-scribner-fabricating-history-the-curious-case-of-john-smith-a-green-haired-mermaid-and-alexandre-dumas/. Accessed 21 July 2015.Google Scholar
Scribner, Vaughn. Fabricating History Part Two: The Curious Case Continues.” The Junto (2 July 2015). http://earlyamericanists.com/2015/07/02/fabricating-history-part-two-the-curious-case-continues/. Accessed 21 July 2015.Google Scholar
Selections from the Asiatic Journal and Monthly Register for British India and its Dependencies, Vols. XIV to XXVIII, July 1822 to December 1829. Vol. II. Madras: Higginbotham, 1875.Google Scholar
Shields, David S. “The Manuscript in the British American World of Print.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102 (1992): 403–416.Google Scholar
Stearns, Raymond Phineas. Science in the British Colonies of America. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1970.Google Scholar
Thoreau, Henry David. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1873.Google Scholar
Trent, William P. and Wells, Benjamin W., eds. Colonial Prose and Poetry: The Beginnings of Americanism, 1650–1710. New York: Thomas Y. Cromwell, 1901.Google Scholar
Tuttle, J. H.“The Libraries of the Mathers.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 20 (1910): 269–356.Google Scholar
Vaughan, Alden T. Review of Paul J. Lindholdt, ed., John Josselyn, Colonial Traveler: A Critical Edition of Two Voyages to New England (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1988).” In Early American Literature 24 (1989): 266–67.Google Scholar
Wootton, David. “Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period.” Journal of Modern History 60:4 (1988): 695–730.Google Scholar