scholarly journals Academic practice par excellence: Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein’s role in Adelbert von Chamisso’s career as naturalist

Author(s):  
Anne MacKinney ◽  
Matthias Glaubrecht

AbstractAdelbert von Chamisso’s (1781–1838) career as a naturalist is increasingly well-documented. Comparatively little, however, is known of his mentor and director of the Berlin Zoological Museum, Martin Hinrich Lichtenstein (1780–1857). This article highlights Lichtenstein’s influential role in Chamisso’s early career by reconstructing key moments of the student-mentor relationship from twelve yet unpublished letters (letters are presented in full in a separate contribution). It investigates the resources, rhetorical strategies, and allies necessary for establishing oneself as a scholar in the early nineteenth-century academic culture of Berlin.

2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (3) ◽  
pp. 581-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
James A. Jaffe

With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-290
Author(s):  
Uri Zvi Shachar

The study of castles has formed a major part of crusade historiography since its inception in the early nineteenth century. Fortification has been taken to represent the magnificence of the efforts to rule the Holy Land and the battle between Christianity and Islam. Recently, however, scholars have recognised that, inasmuch as castles were celebrated as the epitomes of resilience and hostility, military architecture was far more dialogical than previously noticed. The design of castles involved a highly nuanced familiarity with the culture from which they were intended to defend. This article seeks to show that not only the physical characteristics of castles but also ideas about what made them religiously successful, in their capacity to enact and protect ritual spaces, were shaped through a dynamic inter-religious dialogue. Taking Safed as a case study, this article brings together three narratives—in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew—that share the attempt to laud the castle by drawing a dialectic between its strategic might and the sanctity of the soil upon which it is built. While the three accounts differ radically in their political stakes, the rhetorical strategies they employ in order to contemplate the spiritual efficacy of the castle is profoundly entangled.


2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 533-574
Author(s):  
ARNAUD BARTOLOMEI ◽  
CLAIRE LEMERCIER ◽  
VIERA REBOLLEDO-DHUIN ◽  
NADÈGE SOUGY

This article discusses the relational and rhetorical foundations of more than 300 first letters sent in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by merchant or banking houses based in Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Americas to two prominent French firms: Roux Brothers and Greffulhe Montz & Cie. We used a quantitative analysis of qualitative aspects of first letters to go beyond the standard opposition between premodern personal exchanges and modern impersonal transactions. The expansion of commercial networks during the period under analysis is often believed to have relied on families and ethnic networks and on explicit recommendations worded in the formulas prescribed in merchant manuals. However, most first letters did not use such resources. In many cases, commercial operations began thanks to a mutual acquaintance but without a formal recommendation. This was in fact the norm in the eighteenth century—and an underestimated foundation of the expansion of European commercial networks. In the early nineteenth century, this norm became less prevalent: it was replaced by diverse relational and rhetorical strategies, from recommendations to prospective letters dispensing with any mention of relationships. Whether before or after 1800, the relational and rhetorical resources displayed in letters did not systematically influence the sender’s chances of becoming a correspondent; instead, they depended on the receiving firm’s commercial strategy.


2020 ◽  
pp. 036319902092890
Author(s):  
Karime Parodi

Studies of rapto—commonly known as the theft of a woman by a man—in scholarship on Chile are extremely scarce. While research into the judicial–legal culture of colonial nineteenth-century Chile from a sociohistorical framework includes judicial files on rapto, scholars have neglected the specific rhetorical and judicial strategies deployed by individual elite legal actors in cases of rapto as an opportunity to explore women’s agency and to understand rapto as an avenue for intergenerational conflict about free will in marriage choice. In this article, I look into the judicial file of a trial of rapto by seduction and its appeal, which took place during the years 1823–1824 in Santiago. I examine the judicial and rhetorical strategies used by a father, his daughter, and her suitor’s public defender to make their claims in court through the lens of gender, honor, and class. Although the father uses rapto by seduction as a tool to hide his daughter’s consent from the judges, her willingness to elope with her suitor eventually comes to the fore and disrupts the trial. In this case, the parties turn to several judicial and rhetorical strategies not only to bolster their cases but also to argue about larger social issues and conflicts specific to the early nineteenth century, such as autonomy in marriage choice and honor.


2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hans-JüRgen Lechtreck

Two early nineteenth century texts treating the production and use of wax models of fruit reveal the history of these objects in the context of courtly decoration. Both sources emphasise the models' decorative qualities and their suitability for display, properties which were not simply by-products of the realism that the use of wax allowed. Thus, such models were not regarded merely as visual aids for educational purposes. The artists who created them sought to entice collectors of art and natural history objects, as well as teachers and scientists. Wax models of fruits are known to have been collected and displayed as early as the seventeenth century, although only one such collection is extant. Before the early nineteenth century models of fruits made from wax or other materials (glass, marble, faience) were considered worthy of display because contemporaries attached great importance to mastery of the cultivation and grafting of fruit trees. This skill could only be demonstrated by actually showing the fruits themselves. Therefore, wax models made before the early nineteenth century may also be regarded as attempts to preserve natural products beyond the point of decay.


2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 197-216
Author(s):  
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker

Through an examination of the extensive papers, manuscripts and correspondence of American physician Benjamin Rush and his friends, this article argues that it is possible to map a network of Scottish-trained physicians in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Atlantic world. These physicians, whose members included Benjamin Rush, John Redman, John Morgan, Adam Kuhn, and others, not only brought the Edinburgh model for medical pedagogy across the Atlantic, but also disseminated Scottish stadial theories of development, which they applied to their study of the natural history and medical practices of Native Americans and slaves. In doing so, these physicians developed theories about the relationship between civilization, historical progress and the practice of medicine. Exploring this network deepens our understanding of the transnational intellectual geography of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century British World. This article develops, in relation to Scotland, a current strand of scholarship that maps the colonial and global contexts of Enlightenment thought.


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