Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters by Anna Marie Roos (review)

Martin Lister and his Remarkable Daughters is another excellent read by Prof. Anna Marie Roos. The volume continues Roos's outstanding work on Martin Lister (1639–1712), Fellow of the Royal Society and local neighbourhood spider-man (Lister is commonly referred to as the first arachnologist as well as the first conchologist). In this volume, turning her attention to Lister's Historiæ Conchyliorum allows Roos to further explore his relationship with his daughters, particularly the two whom he trained in scientific illustration—Susanna and Anna. The resulting work is a rich and valuable tapestry that contributes to our knowledge of family life, early experimental methods, and the historical contribution of women to the sciences. The book is divided into an introduction and three clear chapters focusing on a broad biography of the Lister family (drawn primarily from Roos's previous volume Web of Nature), the production and methodology of the Historiæ Conchyliorum, and the intellectual and archival legacy of the work.

The Historiæ Conchyliorum is one of Lister's masterworks that have earnt him a place among the founding fathers of the modern natural sciences. The work consists of seven volumes—four main volumes and three appendices—published between 1685 and 1692 (p. 118). They include descriptions, illustrations, and analyses of over one thousand shell specimens from creatures living on land, in rivers, and in the sea. The majority of specimens were, for want of a better word, fresh, but the work also included petrified and fossilized samples. Just gathering together so many unique varieties, complete enough and of good enough quality that they could be used as the basis of scientific classifications, was a massive undertaking in and of itself: an undertaking that provided Roos with the opportunity to contextualize the work among Lister's network (a roll call that reads much like an edition of Who's Who from 1683), the Republic of Letters more broadly, and the seventeenth-century predilection for collecting. Indeed, Roos deftly masters the undulations of the suspension bridge that tethers activities around the building of hobbyist or antiquarian collections and cabinets of curiosities in this formative period of experimental science.

Another strength of the work stems from Roos's ability to humanize the historical actors she portrays. An informative and clear, yet lively and entertaining style draws out the personality of the characters under investigation, as well as the character of the relationships between them. Through the account of Lister's exasperation, normally highly esteemed and revered print artists become all too human, either unable to supply a complete inventory of requested images (William Lodge, p. 86) or supplying images that had to be redone (Francis Place, p. 87)—and all in an untimely fashion. This frustration inspired Lister to enlist the assistance of two of his young teenage daughters. Drawing on an impressive range of sources (including correspondence, notebooks, diaries, sketchbooks, printed texts, printed images, material objects, and copperplates), Roos enlivens this process for the reader. She traces their careers from the early days when feedback for the budding artists was noted in their father's hand on their preliminary drawings (p. 99), to the inclusion of their etching and engravings in their father's books and the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (pp. 111–13), to the time when they faded from history after they all (both daughters and their widowed father) married and moved on with their lives (pp. 128–29).

Similar praises can be said for the more intellectual themes Roos addresses in the book. She deftly and efficiently guides the reader through the necessary intricacies of various topics required to fully comprehend and appreciate the Listers' achievements. Whether it be seventeenth-century etching and engraving techniques, the intricacies of training the eyes in scientific observation, the artistic skills necessary to translate the three-dimensional information seen with the eye onto a two-dimensional page (p. 99...