Insectopedia

by Hugh Raffles

  2. Thomas Moffett quoted in Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” in Archetypa, 42n14. Moffett’s volume is compiled from the entomological notes of the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, as well as from work by the Londoners Thomas Penny and Edward Wotton. See Edward Topsell, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects, vol. 3, The Theatre of Insects by T. Moffett (London, 1658; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1967). Gesner had planned the sixth and final volume of his Historiae animalium to cover the insects but managed to complete only a short section on scorpions before he died in 1565. On Moffett, see Frances Dawbarn, “New Light on Dr Thomas Moffet: The Triple Roles of an Early Modern Physician, Client, and Patronage Broker,” Medical History 47, no. 1 (2003): 3–22.

  3. Topsell, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in Theater of Insects, 6. Moffett is quoting Psalms 92:5 “How great are Thy works, oh Lord!” My thanks to Abigail Winograd for making this connection.

  4. Max Beier, “The Early Naturalists and Anatomists during the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century,” in History of Entomology, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 1973), 81–94. For a fascinating extended discussion of Aldrovandi, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); in relation to the study of insects specifically, see Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects.”

  5. Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 382.

  6. Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” 39. And see, for comparison, the similar but far more ancient East Asian preoccupation with miniaturization explored in Rolf A. Stein, The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also François Jullien, The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), esp. 94–98.

  7. See R.J.W. Evans, Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612 (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

  8. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48 (emphasis added).

  9. In this sense, Hoefnagel can be regarded as an eirenist. See ibid., 92–93.

  10. For an account of the ways in which epistemologies that appear contradictory to modern understandings could productively coexist in late-sixteenth-century scholarship, see Stephen J. Greenblatt’s insightful discussion of John Dee in Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). Also, famously, Frances A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991); Yates, The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (London: Routledge, 2001); and Anthony Grafton, Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

  11. Evans, Rudolf II and His World, 248 (emphasis removed).

  12. Francis Bacon, Sylva sylvarum, or A Naturall History in Ten Centuries (London, 1627), century 7, 143. Mary Poovey has convincingly argued that Bacon’s empirical “revolution” was more a question of style than substance, though no less effective for that. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–11.

  13. Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in The Moral Authority of Nature, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–126. For a discussion of wonder in relation to the exploration of the Americas, see Stephen J. Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For an account of an Elizabethan England in which (un)natural events were conventionally understood in terms of portentous correspondences, see E.M.W. Tillyard, The Elizabethan World Picture (London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), and the early chapters of Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility (New York: Pantheon, 1983).

  14. Topsell, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 3.

  15. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 14.

  16. Daston and Park, Wonders, 167. And, among others, Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds., The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe (New York: Clarendon Press, 1985); Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2002); and Findlen, Possessing Nature.

  17. Though, as the precision of Hoefnagel’s attention to morphology makes evident, it would be a mistake to imagine this break as one between new science and old superstition. For a brief and effective introduction to recent scholarship on this question, see Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

  18. Such as: “In all natural things there is something of the marvellous.” Aristotle, Parts of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 323 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), 645a.

  19. See Edward Grant, “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View,” History of Science 16 (1978): 93–106. We can extend this claim even to the alchemists, although as R.J.W. Evans makes clear, “their ‘Aristotle’ was a mystic sage.” Evans, Rudolf II and His World, 203n2.

  20. John Scarborough, “On the History of Early Entomology, Chiefly Greek and Roman with a Preliminary Bibliography,” Melsheimer Entomological Series 26 (1979): 17–27. Although there is no good analogue in contemporary systematics, the Aristotelian entomon resembled the modern Arthropoda phylum more closely than it did the class Insecta. As well as such anomalies as the worms, it included the modern insecta, arachnids, and myriapoda (centipedes and millipedes), although it excluded the crustaceans. For overviews, see Günter Morge, “Entomology in the Western World in Antiquity and in Medieval Times,” in Smith, Mittler, and Smith, History of Entomology, 37–80, and Harry B. Weiss, “The Entomology of Aristotle,” Journal of the New York Entomological Society 37 (1929): 101–9. See also Malcolm Davies and Jeyaraney Kathirithamby, Greek Insects (Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986). The Linnaean shift to morphology exiled worms, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, and others to different classes. For a detailed discussion of the taxonomic criteria at work in Aristotle and Linnaeus, see Scott Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

  21. Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, 38.

  22. G.E.R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 18.

  23. I have drawn on Morge, “Entomology in the Western World,” for these examples.

  24. In 1668, Francesco Redi carried out his famous series of experiments in which several flasks containing meat were prepared with various types of coverings. Maggots appeared only in those to which flies had access, a result that dealt a significant but not fatal blow to the theory of spontaneous generation. The question, in fact, stayed open long after the use of microscopes became widespread. It was only with Pasteur’s experiments of 1859 that the basis of the dispute shifted firmly from philosophy to experiment.

  25. Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 42; Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” 40–41.

  26. Grant, “Aristotelianism,” 94–95.

  27. Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 380–82.

  28. Quoted in ibid., 378; Job 14:1.

  29. Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (1578–80), in The Complete Works, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003), 182–93.

  30. Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum histo
ria was published posthumously in 1642. See Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 377. In this respect, the González family took its place in the history of exhibition and examination visited on all kinds of non-normative others transported to Europe in the colonial period. Effective accounts of well-known examples—of which there are many—include Londa Schiebinger’s discussion of Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume’s Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

  31. Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects.”

  32. Lee Hendrix, “The Writing Model Book,” in Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphiae monumenta, 42.

  33. Frazer distinguishes homoeopathic magic from contagious magic based on what he calls the law of contact, which works on substances—such as hair or nail clippings—drawn from the targeted body itself rather than its likeness. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (London: Macmillan, 1911), 3:55–119.

  34. R.J.W. Evans explains this as follows: “The object of such a philosophy was not only to describe the hidden forces of nature but also to control them, since the initiate who understood their powers could also apply his knowledge. This pursuit was magic, yet—as its exponents never ceased explaining—the magic was ‘natural’ and not ‘black,’ for the inspiration which made it possible was divine not diabolical.” Evans, Rudolf II and His World, 197.

  35. “It is no accident that the great conquering races of the world have done most to advance and spread civilization,” he wrote in a characteristic commentary. Frazer, Golden Bough, 3:118.

  36. Frazer, Golden Bough, 3:55, 56.

  37. Michael Taussig, My Cocaine Museum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 80; Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 333–36.

  38. Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 79–99. For a very different discussion of this painting, which situates it in the history of early-modern ideas of beetles, see Yves Cambefort, “A Sacred Insect on the Margins: Emblematic Beetles in the Renaissance,” in Insect Poetics, ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 200–222.

  39. Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg, Mira calligraphiae monumenta.

  40. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 253–64; and Benjamin, “One-Way Street,” in Reflections, 61–94.

  41. Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, 217–52.

  42. Kaufmann, Mastery of Nature, 38–48.

  Jews

  1. Aharon Appelfeld, The Iron Tracks, trans. Jeffrey M. Green (New York: Schocken Books, 1998).

  2. Heinrich Himmler, speech to SS officers, April 24, 1943, Kharkov, Ukraine, reprinted in U.S. Office of Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1946), 4:574.

  3. In exile in Britain and the United States, Szyk worked tirelessly to publicize events in Europe. A friend of Vladimir Jabotinsky and, later, Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), he put his work at the service of the Revisionists—whose movement was founded on the principle of a sovereign, undivided Jewish state—campaigning first for a Jewish army, then for open immigration to Palestine, and consistently on behalf of the paramilitary Irgun. See Stephen Luckert, The Art and Politics of Arthur Szyk (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2002), and Joseph P. Ansell, “Arthur Szyk’s Depiction of the ‘New Jew’: Art as a Weapon in the Campaign for an American Response to the Holocaust,” American Jewish History 89 (2001): 123–34.

  4. Christopher R. Browning provides the rather remarkable statistic that over 50 percent of the people killed by the Nazis died in the eleven months between March 1942 and February 1943. Browning, Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), xv. By the time the United States acceded to the pressure to acknowledge events across the Atlantic, the fate of European Jewry had been effectively settled.

  5. Both of these images are discussed in Richard I. Cohen’s fascinating and comprehensive Jewish Icons: Art and Society in Modern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 221–30. As Cohen points out, Nossig’s innovation was to take an image that was widely familiar at the time and imbue it with an utterly different sensibility.

  6. Jacob Döpler, Theatrum poenarum (Sondershausen, Germany, 1693), and Jodocus Damhouder, Praxis rerum criminalium (Antwerp, 1562), quoted in E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals: The Lost History of Europe’s Animal Trials (1906; repr., Boston: Faber and Faber, 1987), 153 (emphasis added).

  7. Boria Sax, Animals in the Third Reich: Pets, Scapegoats, and the Holocaust (New York: Continuum, 2000).

  8. Alex Bein, “The Jewish Parasite: Notes on the Semantics of the Jewish Problem, with Special Reference to Germany,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 9 (1964): 3–40. See also Michel Serres, The Parasite, trans. Lawrence R. Schehr (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

  9. Bein, “Jewish Parasite,” 12.

  10. Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007), 78.

  11. Mahmood Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide in Rwanda (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002), 13. For this type of argument in relation to the Holocaust, see Marvin Perry and Frederick M. Schweitzer, Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 2–3, and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 71.

  12. Insectification such as this from a January 1994 article in the Hutu-power newspaper Kangura was a common feature of the Rwandan genocide. Quoted by Angeline Oyog, “Human Rights-Media: Voices of Hate Test Limits of Press Freedom,” Inter-Press Service, April 5, 1995, and cited in Mamdani, When Victims Become Killers, 212.

  13. Shmuel Almog, “Alfred Nossig: A Reappraisal,” Journal of Israeli History: Politics, Society, Culture 4, no. 1 (1983):1.

  14. The ZOB mainly targeted the notorious Jewish police. See Hanna Krall, Shielding the Flame: An Intimate Conversation with Dr. Marek Edelman, the Last Surviving Leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, trans. Joanna Stasinska and Lawrence Weschler (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 50, and Vered Levy-Barzilai, “The Rebels among Us,” Haaretz Magazine, February 18, 2007, 18–22. Levy-Barzilai estimates that the ghetto underground liquidated thirty-three Jews. My thanks to Rotem Geva for drawing my attention to this source.

  15. Cohen, Jewish Icons, 227.

  16. Alfred Nossig, Próba˛ rozwia˛zania kwestii ˙zydowskiej [An Attempt to Solve the Jewish Question] (Lvov, Poland, 1887), quoted in Ezra Mendelsohn, “From Assimilation to Zionism in Lvov: The Case of Alfred Nossig,” Slavonic and East European Review 49, no. 117 (1971): 531.

  17. The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniakow, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanislaw Staron, and Josef Kermisz, trans. Stanislaw Staron and the staff of Yad Vashem (Chicago: Elephant/Ivan Dee in association with U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 1999), 84.

  18. Michael Zylberberg, “The Trial of Alfred Nossig: Traitor or Victim?” Wiener Library Bulletin 23 (1969): 44.

  19. Arthur Ruppin, Memoirs, Diaries, Letters, ed. Alex Bein, trans. Karen Gershon (New York, Herzl Press, 1972), 74–76; Mitchell B. Hart, Social Science and the Politics of Modern Jewish Identity (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 33.

  20. John M. Efron, “1911: Julius Preuss Publishes Biblisch-talmudische Medizin, Felix Theilhaber Publishes Der Untergang der deutschen Juden, and the International Hygiene Exhibition Takes Place in Dresden,” in Yale Companion to Jewish W
riting and Thought in German Culture, 1096–1996, ed. Sander L. Gilman and Jack Zipes (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 295.

  21. Virchow was a distinguished political liberal and a founder of German anthropology. His conclusions cut against the grain of belief in the anthropological and pathological distinctiveness of the Jews and were received with general skepticism. See John M. Efron, Defenders of the Race: Jewish Doctors and Race Science in Fin-de-Siècle Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994), 24–26; George L. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 90–93; and Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” in Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 79–154.

  22. Mitchell B. Hart, “Racial Science, Social Science, and the Politics of Jewish Assimilation,” Isis 90 (1999): 275–76. For a sustained discussion of degeneration as the narrative complement to evolutionary theorizing, see Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848–c. 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).