For
early modern European naturalists, the ocean depths were the edges of the
world. Making knowledge about deep sea life required distinctive approaches
to identifying, collecting, and interpreting evidence from places that were
almost unreachable via bodies, senses, or instruments. Davies’s paper will
show how making knowledge about oceanic animals required the sustained,
deliberate imagination of category-breakers: monsters. Visual images of
monstrous marine life were diagrams that enabled viewers to see in ways that
were impossible in real life.
Surekha
Davies is a historian of science, art and ideas and a postdoctoral fellow at
Utrecht University.
Jennifer
M. Rampling:
“Deciphering the Dragon: Monsters and Image-Making in English Alchemy”
European
alchemy is renowned for its obscure, allegorical imagery, populated by green
lions, phoenixes, and serpents devouring their own tails. What were these
images supposed to signify, and did they have any relation to identifiable
alchemical practices? In this talk, I will focus on depictions of two
important monsters—the dragon and the basilisk—in the English alchemical
tradition. These bizarre figures expressed what more naturalistic drawings of
chemical substances could not: the hidden properties and structures of
matter. But the act of copying could also alter the content and meaning of
figures, reflecting new attitudes towards both alchemy and image-making.
Jennifer
Rampling is associate professor of history at Princeton, where she teaches in
the Program in History of Science.