The Invention of Nature: Enlightenment Natural Histories

Catalog description

From butterflies and caterpillars to indigo and sugar cane, the natural world exploded in the eighteenth century onto the pages of books, maps, and manuscripts, rewriting nature and history on a planetary scale. This course brings students into contact with this reinvented world of nature through the extraordinary collection of the John Carter Brown Library, one of the leading special collections libraries with a spectacular repository of books related to the natural history of an expanding globe. From the colorful pages of Maria Sibylla Merian to the florid descriptions of Alexander von Humboldt, we will explore materials from Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and far beyond, with the goal of understanding how early modern naturalists and travelers imagined these colonial spaces and described their environments and inhabitants – animal, vegetable, mineral, and human – for all the world to see.