Imagining the earth: Prints as evidence in natural philosophical discourse, 1640-1740

Between 1640 and 1740, the earth was given a new face. The middle of the seventeenth century witnessed a surge of publications that focussed on the ‘physiology’ of the earth – its subterranean structure, its physical creation, the origin of mountains, rivers, and the Deluge. Mechanistic and corpuscular ideas heavily influenced both natural philosophers and other scholars who concerned themselves with the study of ‘sacred events’ such as the Deluge, but thinking about the earth certainly was not limited to these ‘novel’ scholarly approaches. Chymical, meteorological, mineralogical, natural-historical and other approaches were involved, too. Some publications are in direct scholarly discussion with each other, such as a series of ‘Theories of the Earth’ published around 1700 mainly in England, but overall, these works cannot be said to have been part of a single, coherent scholarly conversation. Instead, they reflect a plethora of approaches, questions, and understandings of the earth. Nevertheless, there is one thing that many of these publications have in common: they are larded with prints, from simple woodcuts to page-filling engravings. These visualisations of the earth – its past, formation, and constitution – are the object of this study. How does one study that which cannot be seen? This question is central to the project ‘Imagining the earth: Prints as evidence in natural-philosophical discourse, 1640-1740’. Events such as creation, the Deluge and the end of time cannot be known by using one’s senses, but somehow, natural philosophers managed to form a (visual) image of these events. In this way, prints become empirical instruments in their own right that serve as evidence for these philosophers’ claims. The act of imagination becomes central to their scholarly practices and early modern ideas about the earth, resulting in a true transformation of our worldview. In particular, this research investigates the relation between images, knowledge and the imagination. As such it connects to a still growing field of scholarship that investigates scientific images, or ‘epistemic images’, and the relation between visuality and knowledge. The leading question of this research concerns the role and meaning of early earth prints between 1640 and 1740. The central concept in this analysis is that of ‘denkinstrumenten’ – instruments to think with.