prints – German Historical Institute London Blog

Capturing Images: Butterfly Collecting and the Colour Printing Revolution

In 1767, the taxonomist Carl Linnaeus coined the term imago to describe the adult stage of an insect’s life cycle, borrowing a Latin word meaning ‘image’ or ‘likeness’.¹ He thereby designated the winged insect as the true form of each species: the ‘image’ revealed once an insect has shed its prior disguises as an egg, larva, or pupa. Yet by the nineteenth century, as butterfly and moth (or Lepidoptera) collecting expanded from a fringe activity to become a widespread recreational pastime, the metaphor acquired a deeper resonance. With their spectacular colours, patterns, and symmetries, adult moths and butterflies came to be valued above all as images. Their beauty, argued Christian Friedrich Vogel in his 1822 butterfly guide, ‘is probably the reason why so many collectors place their collected butterflies under glass like pictures, in order to decorate a room.’² Yet the seventy-eight finely coloured illustrations in Vogel’s book go to show that butterflies were a peculiar kind of picture. In order to create them—a laborious art that encompassed seeking, chasing, catching, killing, spreading, drying, pinning, and arranging—you needed to start with pictures. My PhD project takes this doubling of specimen and image as its point of departure, investigating the role of colour-printed illustrations in transforming moths and butterflies into collectable commodities.

Carl Linnaeus, Systema naturae per regna tria naturae, secundum classes, ordines, genera, species, cum characteribus, differentiis, synonymis, locis, 12th edn, 3 vols. (Stockholm, 1767–8), vol. i, pt. ii. 535. [↩]
Christian Friedrich Vogel, Schmetterlings-Cabinet für Kinder (Leipzig, 1822–8), p. iii. [↩]

New Publication on Manuscript Newsletters around 1700

The new volume Scribal News in Politics and Parliament 1660–1760, which has just been published as a special issue of the journal Parliamentary History, gathers twelve essays by scholars from Britain, Europe, and North America on the role of scribal news in reporting about parliament and politics in Britain between 1660 and 1760. The volume grew out of a one-day conference held between the History of Parliament and the German Historical Institute London (both institutions are neighbours on Bloomsbury Square) in December 2018 to explore a hitherto underinvestigated topic at the intersection of political and media history.

Vicarious Observation: Conveying Pleasure and Sensory Experience in Eighteenth-Century British Periodicals

The time I spent perusing the British Library’s early modern treasures—thanks to a scholarship from the German Historical Institute London—left me with much to think about for my current research project on the body and pleasure in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century periodicals. First and foremost, my time in London gave me a heightened sense of how newspapers and magazines functioned as a medium for conveying pleasure, not least as a sensory experience.

Manuscript News Sheets: A Neglected Medium of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Europe

At the turn of the eighteenth century, newspapers had established themselves as the principal port of call for readers with a strong taste for current affairs. One hundred years after the first newspaper had been printed in Strasbourg in 1605, the new medium had spread to all parts of western and central Europe.