Picturing Nature: Gender and the Politics of Natural-Historical Description in Eighteenth-Century Gdańsk/Danzig

The concept of ‘description’ has increasingly come under scrutiny in the history of science. This paper explores eighteenth-century debates over description through the case study of a scientific family in Gdańsk (the former Danzig). There, on the shores of the Baltic, physician Johann Philipp Breyne took Latin notes on naturalia, while several of his daughters drew and painted vivid representations of them ‘from life’ and one daughter wrote ‘poetical descriptions’ of them. In the Breyne family’s work, different forms of description of the natural world were juxtaposed to reveal what might be termed a gendered politics of description.