scholarly journals Opponentindlæg: Lise Camilla Ruud. Doing Museum Objects in Late Eighteenth-Century Madrid.

1970 ◽  
pp. 105
Author(s):  
Samuel J. M. M. Alberti

Carlos III of Spain was especially fond of pachyderms. In 1773 an elephant arrived in the port city of Cadiz, a gift from the ruler of the Carnatic region of India via the Governor-General of the Phillipines. After trekking 600 km it fascinated nobility and the masses alike in Madrid, then lived out its days in the royal menagerie at Aranjuez. But elephants often have afterlives as interesting and varied as their lives, and this one was no exception. Upon its demise in 1777, Juan Bru, the dissector at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, hurried the 50 km to Aranjuez to preserve and prepare the specimen, and to secure it for his master, Pedro Franco Dávila. The King wanted an elephant to display, and Dávila wanted a specimen for the cabinet. Accordingly, Bru spent over a week defleshing his mammoth charge, cooking the bones, drawing everything as he went along. 

1970 ◽  
pp. 54
Author(s):  
Lise Camilla Ruud

The article analyses the field of eighteenth-century Hispanic history of science, little known to northern scholars, with the use of concepts from actor- network theory, combining these with a traditional Scandinavian ethnological close-up study of objects. The introductory part discusses the production of flasks as a way of standardizing natural objects at the late eighteenth-century Royal Cabinet of Natural History. The following section analyses how eight lizards were integrated into a variety of practices on their way to the Madrid museum. Thereafter, five different images of an anteater are discussed as forming part of the museum’s outreaching practices of display. The article demonstrates a fruitful approach to the histories of museums and their objects: Objects are seen as “enacted realities” which incorporate in radically different practices, and many versions of them exist simultaneously. Museum objects stretch out and connect with ideas and actors, objects travel and are continuously being done, inside and outside the museum building.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lise Camilla Ruud

<div><p>The article discusses how a malformed set of twins turned into a museum object at the late eighteenth-century el Real Gabinete de Historia Natural in Madrid. Foregrounding the practices through which the twins transformed, it is made clear how museum objects result from de-centered processes. Two different enactments are discussed. The first encompasses the process by which the malformed set of twins transformed into a specimen of interest to the learned. The second enactment addresses how the twins were transported to Madrid through practices of charity. These two versions differed radically, yet they were intimately intertwined, and dependent upon one another.</p><div> </div></div>


1972 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-163
Author(s):  
S.J. de Groot

The bibliography of a hitherto inaccurately described anonymous eighteenth-century popular German work on natural history is given, dealing with mammals, birds, fishes, amphibians and reptiles. As an addendum to this work the publisher has given an engraving of an unknown fish from the river Lech, river system of the Upper Danube. The fish could be identified as the cyprinid Leuciscus meidingeri Heckel, 1852. The observation of the species was made 66 years before its recognition as a new species by Heckel.


2015 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 725-744 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julie A. Smith

Animal autobiography – a first-person fictional narrative in which an animal tells its own story – emerged in the late eighteenth century as the first attempt to represent animal minds in extended narrative form. Authors of this genre were anxious to create accurate, believable animal characters, even as they afforded them human language and a habit of critical commentary. To do this, they wrote in sync with scientific understandings of animals as set out in books of natural history. A few authors are explicit about their debt to natural history, and their comments point to a broad but intended compatibility between the ideas of animal minds in animal autobiography and those in the popularized scientific discourse of the day.


2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Holmes

Following the extirpation of the red squirrel from much of Scotland by the end of the eighteenth century, nineteenth-century naturalists strived to find evidence of its native Scottish status. As medieval accounts and Gaelic place names proved ambiguous, the true extent of the squirrel's former habitat was a matter of some debate. While numerous reintroductions of the species were made from the late eighteenth century, general enthusiasm for the return of the squirrel quickly turned to dismay, ultimately followed by persecution. If the squirrel originally represented a symbolic mission to rediscover a lost species, the physical animal itself fell below expectations. It became publically perceived as both economically and ecologically destructive. The squirrel was despised by foresters and landowners for damaging trees, while naturalists condemned the species for the destruction of bird's eggs and nests. This article will investigate naturalists' quests to rediscover the red squirrel, before examining changing attitudes to the species upon its reintroduction and gradual proliferation. The narrative will emerge through the works and correspondence of Scottish naturalist John Alexander Harvie-Brown (1844–1916) and The new statistical account of Scotland (1834–1845). The argument will be made that the red squirrel as an object of antiquarian curiosity initially made the species endearing to natural historians, as part of a wider fascination with extinct British fauna. However, the clash between naturalists’ established ornithological interests did little to endear the species to that community, leaving the red squirrel open to a policy of general persecution on economic grounds.


Author(s):  
Pedro Damián Cano Borrego

<p>A<strong> </strong>finales del siglo XVIII la Monarquía adolecía de graves problemas económicos, derivados del estado permanente de guerra en el que se hallaba sumido el Reino, que impedía la arribada de remesas de metales preciosos y suponía unos ingentes gastos, lo que llevó a que a finales del reinado de Carlos III se creasen los Vales Reales, a modo de deuda pública. Por sus características, fueron desde el principio títulos de renta, amortizables en plazos más o menos grandes, dependiendo de las cláusulas que regían sus emisiones en un principio y más tarde de la situación del Tesoro Público.</p><p>In the late eighteenth century the Spanish monarchy had serious economic problems arising from the permanent state of war in which they had sunk the Kingdom, which prevented the arrival of remittances of precious metals and assumed a heavy expenses, which led to the end the reign of Carlos III the creation of the <em>Vales Reales</em>, a kind of public debt. By their nature, they were from the beginning income securities, redeemable in larger or smaller periods, depending on the terms governing their emissions at first and later on the status of Treasury</p>


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