De verborgen natuurkennis van vrouwen in de vroegmoderne tijd: het contrast tussen de beeldvorming over Johanna Petronella de Timmerman, Elisabeth Maria Post en Rachel Ruysch, en de natuurkennis die uit hun eigen werk blijkt
Summary
Up until the modern period, women have been excluded from official learned institutions, such as universities. They were not expected to write scientific treatises. Currently, there has no Dutch woman been found who wrote a natural philosophical treatise during the early modern period. However, we know that many Dutch women engaged with the natural sciences during the eighteenth century.
To give these women a voice, and show their possession of natural knowledge, in this
thesis I study the expression of knowledge about nature in the poetry, prose and flower still lifes of respectively the Dutch women Johanna Petronella de Timmerman (1723-1786), Elisabeth Maria Post (1755-1812) and Rachel Ruysch (1664-1750). Comparing the knowledge of nature expressed in their work with reception documents evaluating the merits of these women, I argue that there is a discrepancy between the knowledge these women possessed, and the extent to which the possession of natural knowledge was ascribed to them.
In chapter one, I discuss the poems by and about Johanna Petronella de Timmerman. I will
argue that the image her contemporaries created of her knowledge of nature and the way in which she uses it is supported by her own poetry. However, this image embodies only a fraction of the areas of knowledge with which De Timmerman engaged in her own work. It will also become clear that although her scientific activities were stimulated and praised by those around her, these activities had to take place within a religious framework.
In chapter two, I analyse the prosaic texts by and about Elisabeth Maria Post. Although the
reviewers of Post's debut novel praised this text, I will argue that their reasons for this praise
confirm conventions about the types of knowledge women could acquire and express, but do not correspond with the knowledge Post shows to posses in her novel. It will become clear that Post very rarely described nature based on her own observations and imagination, and often implicitly or even explicitly indicated that she derived her knowledge from natural history books.
Chapter three focuses on the visual art of Rachel Ruysch. Ruysch is portrayed - both
visually and in words - as a very well-read lady, who, thanks to her upbringing in a scientific
environment, depicted the flowers and plants in her works with an eye for detail and scientific
precision. However, an analysis of her own paintings will show that Ruysch did not always paint as “femininely detailed” as people wrote about her, and that the insects she depicted often deviated from what could be observed in nature. Her knowledge of nature is rather evident from the special techniques she used to add nature (literally) into her compositions, by pasting butterfly wings on her canvasses. And from the flowers she selected to depict, it can be inferred that she implicitly referred to important medical events.
In chapter four, I show that certain types of natural knowledge were more easily ascribed
to these women compared to other types of knowledge, and I elaborate on how the roles of men in the acquisition process were described to be.
In conclusion, I underline the importance of investigating the nature knowledge of women
based on their own writings and pieces of art, since their actual knowledge often deviates from the images others constructed about their knowledgeability. I postulate that artistic sources - despite that the knowledge of nature shown therein is often implicit - form a fruitful source to study the knowledge of women.