Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575-1715 by Eric Jorink (review)

Eric Jorink's stimulating book prompts the reader to reassess the relationship between religion and the observation of the natural world in the Dutch Golden Age. He argues that while the natural world was increasingly the object of empirical scrutiny and measurable observation during this period, its theological status as the Book of Nature (second only to the Bible) remained critically important, fundamentally shaping, and in turn being shaped by, new biblical scholarship that engaged with natural history. Jorink draws upon an extensive range of primary sources and deftly utilises methodologies drawn from the history of science, theology, and intellectual history. The work reflects the 'cultural turn' that has contributed to making the history of science such an influential sub-field in recent historical scholarship.

Reading the Book of Nature is thematically structured and weaves together analyses of texts and collections created by humanists, natural historians, and biblical scholars. It identifies a range of key figures including Constantijn Huygens, Nicolaes Witsen, Johannes Swammerdam, and Bernardus Paludanus, characterised by Jorink as 'the well and sometimes lesser-known scholars and curiosi' (p. 29). A particular strength of Jorink's book lies in his discussion of publications and discourses at a range of levels, rather than focusing on 'canonical natural philosophers' (p. 29) like René Descartes and Christiaan Huygens (who still feature, but do not dominate the narrative). Jorink argues for a very wide conception of early modern science that incorporates contemporary concepts including 'exegesis, the humanist tradition, natural history and the culture of the collecting of curiosities' (p. 19), and the book is accordingly wide ranging, though it does not lose focus. Following extensive preliminary material that conceptually teases out and historically contextualises the Book of Nature, the strands of the argument are woven together through a series of thematically organised chapters that provide convincing and coherent case studies.

In a substantial chapter on comets, Jorink builds upon traditional studies in the history of science that stressed the importance of comets for the development of techniques of precise observation and measurement, and on more recent analyses that have foregrounded early modern humanist debates about comet theory from antiquity. The chief contribution of this chapter lies in Jorink's examination of a series of Dutch authors who combined biblical and classical understandings of comets and in so doing subjected the astrological and prodigious functions of comets to increasing scrutiny. The overarching trend was a move towards a worldview in which comets still functioned as signs, but signs quite simply of 'God's almightiness' (a frequent phrase in the book) rather than as portents of events to come.

The following chapter examines the new seventeenth-century fascination with insects as objects of observation and representation. While this is relatively well-trodden ground in studies of scientific method and scientific instruments, and in studies of the iconography of Dutch art, Jorink throws new light on this field by situating lesser-known figures within a chronological overview, and especially by intensively reassessing the religious dimensions of Johannes Swammerdam's studies of insects in the 1660s and 1670s.

The two concluding thematic chapters - on collections of curiosities, and on printed books of wonders - work particularly well in tandem and provide nuanced readings of how evidence from the natural world, broadly conceptualised, was collected, scrutinised, and presented to wide publics through print as well as to smaller groups of connoisseurs. The discussion of collections extends to incorporate categories of objects beyond those found in the natural world, and most notably Egyptian artefacts. This allows Jorink, in one of the most compelling sections of the book, to establish how biblical scholarship and debates about language and chronology affected the changing categorisation and presentation of many forms of knowledge. He also traces an eventual shift towards a focus on regular rather than exceptional...