Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon:

Childhood Confusions

Norman Simms

July 20, 2009

 

…all precision and luster are evidence of spiritual weakness, unable  to understand the truth, which is fuzzy and messy.

—Alexandru Philippide

 

Anna Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717),[1] a German-Dutch female painter of flowers, insects and small animals, grew up in a century when all children were subject to great stresses and strains due to the religious, social, and political unrest around them.  As the early modern world took shape, the nature of the family was redefined, and the whole of domestic politics seemed to be as tumultuous and violent as the religious and civil wars that shook Europe to its very foundations.  How a woman like Maria Sibylla should emerge with such success in both art and science raises many questions about the way in which she experienced the trauma of the seventeenth century.

In this paper, I want to focus on the confused and conflicted nature of her childhood to see how her upbringing and education fitted her into the transforming intellectual and aesthetic traditions of her ever-changing family relations.  Leonard Shengold shows, in a series of studies on nineteenth-century writers, such as Dickens, Chekhov and Kipling, that the creative person is able to rise above the abuses of infancy and early childhood by virtue of their art.[2]  In Maria Sibylla’s case it was not so much physical torment or sexual interference as the constant replacement of parental objects and the death of parents and siblings which caused her anxieties.  That she was female in an age when women’s social, political and cultural place was ambiguous at best, makes this story even more interesting.

To begin with, we must attempt to set out as clearly and with as much detail as possible the nature of her family life, since she was the product of a shifting, dynamic, contradictory set of forces.  Only then can we begin to analyze the texture of these many strands of influence on her life and try to see emerge the particular features of her own personality.  For in the crazy and traumatic world of seventeenth-century Central Europe, individual will and talent were not enough to ensure that a woman achieved success in her chosen career.  We will find, too, that not only do we need we to “novelize” these details into a coherent pattern in order to trace out the development of her career and her personality, but we shall have to see in her chosen interests as an adult—the insects and flowers of Surinam—a dream-like projection of her earliest childhood experiences.  In Shengold’s words, echoing Charles Dickens, the obsession with caterpillars, flowers and other small parts of nature provided the child with “places for the mind to go.”[3]

She was the daughter of Matthäus Merian I (1593-1650),[4] and Maria Magdalena de Bry (d. 1645).  Matthäus known as The Elder, whom Alexander Roob calls the “famous engraver”,[5] was also one of the most important publishers of his time.   For his more famous daughter, he represents a way into the traditions of Central European Renaissance intellectualism and those occult studies associated with engraving, printing and publishing. Matthäus.  As a young man, Matthias who would become a famous topographical artist and engraver had begun his studies with Dietrich Meyer in Zurich[6] and then traveled through France and Germany before becoming an apprentice to the de Bry brothers.[7]

This family consisted of key players connecting the Germanic world of Renaissance publishing and Rosicrucianism to the explorations of the New World conducted by the English and French.  Theodor de Bry (1528-1598) and his two sons Johann Israel[8] and Johan Theodor worked on the Great Voyages project between 1590 and 1634, producing “some thirty volumes, of both large and small folio size”, which together described “navigations to what was called at the time the ‘West Indies’, namely, the Americas and Oceania, and the Small Voyages, dealing with the East Indies, which included India, Japan, China and sometimes Africa.”[9] Along with Theodor’s two sons, Johann Theodor and Johann Israel, Matthäus Merian completed the project,[10] which continued until 1644 and compromised more than fifty-seven parts.[11]   In addition, both Matthäus and Johan Theodor “illustrated at least two alchemical texts, Atlanta fugiens, by M. Maier, in 1618, and the Tractatus, by Mylius, in 1620.”[12]  The significance of this double approach, one through forging a powerful new iconography for the realization in art and mythology, along with anthropology and zoology, of the New Worlds of the Renaissance, and the other a masterly attempt to depict the secret intellectual world of flux and metamorphosis in the occult sciences of the period,[13] together created a new syncretism and synthesis that would be passed to Maria Sibylla Merian.

Looking more closely at the situation, we find that, after serving several years as apprentice to the de Bry brothers,[14] in 1618 Matthäus married Maria Magdalena,[15] the eldest daughter of John T(h)eodor de Bry.[16]  John Read us tell us that, after the death of Johannes Theodorus de Bry the firm’s “publications were continued by his two sons-in-law, Matthew [Matthäus] Merian and William Fitzzar.”[17] Other printer-engravers, such as Lucas Jennes, who also published and re-published Michael Maier’s alchemical books during the seventeenth century, would have formed part of the intellectual and occult environment of the young female child.  What is not told by Read and most other commentators is that both the Voyages project and the other business of the firm were also under the direction of the elder Theodor’s widow,[18] Maria Sibylla’s so-far unnamed grandmother.

The marriage alliance between the de Brys and Merian was a key and lasting factor in Maria Sibylla’s life, even though, as we shall see, her own step-siblings in the Merian clan did not always give her all the support she needed.   Although there is also a hint that, perhaps, since they were much older and part of a previous generation of thinking and perceiving the world, these sons of her birth-father were unwilling or emotionally unable to offer the kind of help their sister really required.[19]  The instabilities, uncertainties, and anxieties of her first five years must be taken as establishing the essential context of his personality, and as shaping the course of her future intellectual and aesthetic interests. 

When his first wife Maria Magdalena died in 1647, leaving him with seven children,[20] Matthäus Merian married Johanna Catherina Sibylla Heim (or Heiny),[21] the mother of Maria Sibylla.[22]  Thus Maria Sibylla’s mother was the daughter of Rentmeister Gandolph Heim, a patriarch of two hundred Walloon refugee families living in Hanau during the seventeenth century.  She was also the brother of the Dutch preacher and author of the Vinculum gratiae (1644), Wilhelm Christoph Heim.  This strongly pietistic family gave to Maria Sibylla an alternative, not always compatible tradition in which to grow up, one that was often at odds—both in domestic politics, and in her own personality—with the more old fashioned Renaissance occultism she received from her father Matthäus. 

At the same time that Matthäus received nearly a quarter of a century of training with the Antwerp landscape painter Gillis van Coninxloo, so that he too was not immune either to the pietism of the Low Countries or the emerging artistic trends of the Enlightenment. [23]  Of course, the interest in alchemy, like that in the wonders of the New World, was already juxtaposed to the fervent yet intellectualized Protestantism of the de Bry family[24] and their associates.  But it remained for these diverse traditions to blend artistically and scientifically—if not logically or even happily—in the person of Maria Sibylla.

However, to return to the few years Maria Sibylla shared with both Matthäus the Elder and her mother, it seems that she received the nurturance, love and guidance of both parents. On his deathbed, tradition records, the old man “prophesied…that the name of Merian would be remembered for ever on account of the genius of his then three-year-old daughter.”[25]  In other words, though her natural father hardly had any time to spend with his daughter, he saw already in her the hope for the future of his own labours.  Without, of course, being able to predict the specific directions her own intelligence and talent would take her, let alone the circumstances that would develop in her life, his faith in her meant that in his capacity as pater familias he set up an expectation—and probably a set of financial supports—that would ensure that little Maria Sibylla was taken care of properly, well-educated, and respected by other members of the family and the community of artists and intellectuals who interacted with the firm of engravers.

The newly-weds traveled to Switzerland but after less than three years in Basel, they returned to Frankfurt to allow Matthäus to take over his first father-in-law’s business after the old man’s death in 1650.[26]  For that reason, Matthäus would have been forced to concentrate his efforts on the business and to ensure that his own family was firmly in control of the de Bry operations.  This occurred at precisely the time when Maria Sibylla was most in need of good parental models.  By the time Maria was born, her father was fifty-four years old and in poor health, and he died three years later in the town of Schwalbach, not far from Frankfurt. With only a few years of actual fathering, Matthäus’s role was therefore to give his daughter a strong intellectual, aesthetic environment in which to grow, but he was unable to offer emotional or domestic stability—or guarantee such sincere affections thereafter.  However, the question remains as to whether his influence—through his wife, and then his sons and the circle of friends who remained loyal to the engraving firm—could compensate for the sense of profound loss in the young Maria Sibylla.

Maria Sibylla had two step-brothers as part of the older generation of Matthäus’s family by his first wife.  Both sons had been born in Basle,[27] and were later to become artists in their own right:  Matthäus the Younger (1621-1687), a well-known painter and engraver, trained in Holland with Joachim van Sandrart[28] and Kaspar (1627-1687),[29] tutored by his father.[30] When Maria Sibylla’s father died, the widow was pushed aside by Matthäus the Younger, the older step-brother, when he returned to Frankfurt from his artistic training-tour of Europe to take over the family business. [31]   At the same time, Kaspar moved in with the young widow to help Johanna raise Maria Sibylla and her own small children.  Kasper brought his new wife Rachel Mozians, whom he married in 1650,

A year later Johanna remarried, this time to the Dutch flower-painter called Jacob Marrell, (1614-1681),[32] a pupil of deHeem.[33] Marrell was born in 1614 , the son of a Syndikus, in the painters’ colony of Frankethal, and was then apprenticed in Frankfurt to a still-life painter named Georg Flegel (1563-1638), one of the leaders of the Flemish school of flower-painters,  and he also later studied with the renowned flower painter Jan i Davidsz de Heem (1606-1679)[34] of Utrecht.[35] Hence Marrell was recognized as part of the Utrecht School, “chiefly distinguished for its use of insects in flower painting.”[36]   After working in Utrecht for about eight years as a painter and engraver of flowers, as well as art dealer, Merell’s first wife died in 1642. He was left a widower with three young children.  He subsequently departed for Frankfurt to take over a small legacy from a relative, the goldsmith Jacob Plenmis.  In Frankfurt he was introduced to the Merian family, and in due course asked the newly widowed Johanna to marry him and take in his children with her own, a fairly normal arrangement among Central European bourgeois widowers and widows in the Renaissance.

The marriage to Jacob Marrell in 1651 meant that young Maria Sibylla had a second artistic circle and a new set of step-siblings in the family’s multi-generational and competing domestic political and intellectual environment. This second family was deeply embedded in the new naturalism of the Dutch and German schools.  As he never gave over his atelier in Utrecht, Jacob made long trips to that city to oversee business.  During these periods of his absence, Johanna and the children lived a so-called “secluded life” according to strict pietistic rules.  Was this a form of parental neglect and abandonment to further upset the social and emotional development of the future artist and scientist?

Insofar as he spent any time with Maria Sibylla, the new step-father—at this point, in his late thirties—took an active part in the young girl’s education. [37] Like many fathers of female artists, poets and scholars of the early modern period, Maria Sibylla’s step-father (like her birth-father when she was three) recognized  her talents and nurtured them.  Typically, mothers[38] tended to take a more conservative, domestic approach.[39]  “He taught her painting and took her with him on field trips, despite the objections of her mother, who felt such excursions were distinctly unladylike.”[40]  Despite her concern that the young girl be brought up according to strict rules of pietistic morality and gender divisions, Johanna had to accept the child’s manifest genius and her husband’s promotion of this talent.  Maria Sibylla was consequently alotted a small workplace in the attic where she could draw.  There are stories told that the child had an irrepressible urge to climb into the neighboring garden of Graf Ruitmer to look at and then draw his famous tulips.  On one particular occasion, she picked flowers and took them to her little work table where she painted them in watercolor.  On a visit to the Marrels a short while later, the Prince noticed the pictures and recognized his own missing tulips.  Rather than call for her punishment as a little thief, as the family expected, the charming and discerning Prince Ruitmer praised the work of the budding artist; and it may have been this occasion which convinced both father and mother of Maria Sibylla’s genius—if they needed any further confirmation of what Matthais had originally predicted. 

Not only did Marrel thereafter give Maria Sybilla his own expensive exercise sheets to work on, but he instructed the apprentices Flegel and de Heem to tutor her.  As she grew older, she was placed into the hands of Abraham Mignon (1640-1679) [41] another student who was to become a well-known Dutch nature painter.  Mignon especially was charged to look after the young girl while Marrel was absent and to ensure that she was receiving advanced lessons in art from the two other apprentices in the Frankfurt workshop.  Art historians tend to see the influence of Flegel on Maria Sibylla as most significant, as well as that of her real father, Mathäus the Elder, and, not least, her step-father, Jacob Marrell.

In addition to the mixed messages she was receiving about her place in the family and the community of artisans and artists from her mother and step-father, Maria Sibylla—still a very young child—also was experiencing the traumas of family loss and instability that were so common in pre-Modern Europe.  In 1652, one of the children Johanna had by her first husband, Johann Maximilian, passed away, this death to be followed very soon after of two of Marell’s own children by his first wife.   The five year old Maria Sibylla started to withdraw into herself. Our contemporary clinical understanding of how such repeated traumas effect young boys and girls makes it more than likely that her innate talents mixed with her desire to emulate and gain the approval of the authority-figures and other surrogate parents in her family led to her concentration on art.  Art would be a form of compensation and protection of her emotional self.  The stresses she would have experienced and the fears she would have imagined in her childish way seem to have created a magical specialness for her in the talent she displayed—and was praised for in the family and in the community.  Her art, for the moment at least, gave her a right to live while so many other children around her were dying.  The whole situation of changing parents, new siblings, fatal illnesses, and shifting composition of the household would have been mysterious and frightening for the young Maria Sibylla. 

While there is no evidence that she was neglected or abused in any way, there is no doubt that the experience of parents disappearing from her life—through death or merely through extended travel—as well as brothers and sisters, whether blood relations or not, would certainly leave its mark on her character and her artistic achievement.  As Shengold shows in the case of Rudyard Kipling, albeit in the nineteenth century, when a child suddenly realizes some loved caregiver or companion is gone, he cannot understand the confusion within himself (or in Maria’s case, herself) or the changed circumstances in the home.[42]  Feelings of loss and disorientation become too strong for the child’s immature psyche to contain and he or she rages with mysteriously and suddenly erupted passions of hatred against both the missing individuals and those who have substituted for them.  Most children have no overt means of expression, particularly since the girl will at the same time realize both that she is dependent upon her new caregivers and become more anxious about the rage within her.[43] Luckily for Maria Sibylla, however, she found an outlet to articulate her confusions in her talent for drawing and interest in natural life, at the same time as she was encouraged in this expression by the remaining family members and new adults in her life.[44]  She also was able to create a new place in her drawings and embroidery for herself, a place which she could control and gain praise for, and she could take over the role of progenitor, care-giver and divine protectress by concentrating on flowers, insects and small animals.[45]  Of course, the reality of her life required her to pass through three major stages of development before she could do more than dream out this magical-thinking: her difficult marriage, her refuge in a strict Calvinistic religious order, and her journey to Surinam to study flora and fauna.

At the age of eleven, shortly before she reached puberty and sexual awakening, we learn that Maria Sibylla mastered the art of copper etching.  At the same time, she was introduced to the wonders of silkworms.  This fascination with small creatures would prove the key to her later successes in the world of artistic-naturalism and entomology.[46]  What for others, since the days of Aristotle, were regarded as the product of spontaneous generation and within Christianized folklore as “the devil’s vermin,” became for this unusual little girl, on the verge of her adolescence, and cut off from a normal supportive family-life, the center of her attention.  Maggots, worms, flies, fleas, gnats, beetles were her playmates and imaginary friends.  They also proved to be a key metaphor which over the course of the years, and through many difficult periods of self-doubt and turning to false structures of support, a lens for finding insight into her own character.[47]  Shengold explains briefly:

The metaphor insight refers to the coming to consciousness of the power that metaphor itself possesses to make psychic connections of force and meaning.  Insight is a “condition, catalyst and consequence (Blum 1979, 66) of the psychoanalytic process in what Kris (1956a) called the “circularity” of the insight process (p. 261).[48]

 

Maria Sibylla Merian’s first book on these silk-spinning worms and other creeping creatures appeared in 1669 when she was twenty-two years old, but the illustrations must be the product of at least the previous ten years of concentrated study when, as she tells us, she gave up other social connections.  These adolescent years, then, were negotiated by intellectual and aesthetic manipulation of her character-shaping metaphor, even though it would not be until after her journey to Surinam—when she had finally left her husband, given over her attraction to the cult of the Labadists, and come to a new commercial understanding with her daughters and their husbands—that she allowed herself to emerge from the cocoon as a full-fledged artist-naturalist and accepted her European-wide reputation.  As David Lashmet puts it, hinting at the shift from Renaissance symbolism to the Baroque mixing of this older Aristotelianism with a Neoplatonic sense of a more dynamic and secret coherence in the world of nature,

She noticed for the first time in Western culture that each caterpillar depended on a particular flower, and she judiciously followed the pollinating and egg-laying butterflies to the appropriate leaves.  These she included in her paintings, careful too to include the land, the earth, the ground of the composition of the whole.  In this she diverged from her father, who doubtless influenced her sense of light as transcendence.[49]

 

But this proleptic knowledge of an organically coherent world—not quite achieved until the journey to Surinam—came at the expense of a normal socializing into the world of young girls, to the dismay of her mother who could not understand why she was always stealing the fruit and staring at its rotten pulp crawling with disgusting creepy things. The unaesthetic nature of her artistic and scientific research was moving her away from the more acceptable drawing of beautiful flowers and butterflies, subjects which were part of the art books for young ladies learning embroidery and other home crafts.  Maria Sibylla’s interest in the devil’s vermin, as her mother warned, put her at risk of being called a witch or a heretic.  Her obsession with caterpillars, however, did not lead directly to a scientific understanding of insect metamorphosis. It wound through a more oblique track that led back into her father’s occult and Rosicrucian background, where the knowledge of signatures in nature moved slowly towards Neoplatonic mysticism. 

Yet she also could not shake off completely the Calvinistic pietism that came through her mother and her step-father Marrell. Her entry into the Labadist cult with her mother and her daughters represented both a further retreat from worldly success and independence and a necessary refuge from the ties to an unhappy and in many ways emotionally disabling marriage.   Lashmet’s attempt to read a late eighteenth-century romantic spirituality into this flirtation with the cult of the Labadists may go beyond the more complicated hesitancy of Maria Sibylla’s situation (which makes her a figure somewhere between Aphra Behn in England[50] as well-aware of the Enlightenment and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz in Mexico unable to give herself to the new ideas but greatly troubled by the inherited Counter-Reformation struggle with incipient modernity):[51]

First and foremost, [Maria Sibylla] Merian’s painting and publishing became both spiritual quests and spiritual teachings.  Still stinging from a public and bitter divorce, Merian’s seclusion into the Labadist community and later the Labadist colony [in]  Dutch Surinam also gave her work a notably feminist character.[52]

 

Once her mother died, Maria Sibylla felt free enough to leave the cult headquarters in Frieseland and embark on the dangerous voyage to the tropical jungles of Surinam.  There is perhaps a submerged analogy here with the feelings of ambiguous release Sigmund Freud felt when his father died and he could forge ahead with his book on the interpretation of dreams.  Her visit to South America served a dual purpose: on the one hand, it put off for another few years her public career as a naturalist painter and engraver; but, on the other, it was the necessary completion of her own metaphoric metamorphosis into a butterfly through self-realization and articulation as an intrepid explorer and field-worker, someone who from then on had behind her the achievement of collecting and observing her subjects first hand in the jungle.  For she like the insects and small animals she saw in the wild caught up in the tangled network of organic relationships, Maria Sibylla came to view herself as a woman who could depend only on herself and not on her own children and their families; she was no longer an artificial cipher of her troubled domestic background nor an emblem for failed marriage. 

Yet she could not cut herself off completely from the intellectual heritage received through her connections to the de Bry and Merian families. Eventually, she could not stop depicting nature in itself as alive with signs (“signatures”) of God’s power and influence and (as in those circles of nature painters and engravers she grew up in), the beauty of the divine.  Her concentrated observations of the growing, transforming, and interacting forms of nature finally revealed to her, however, not so much the secrets of a fixed universe of occult mysteries, evident in the works illustrated and printed by the de Bry brothers and the Merian family, but the new biological sciences of the eighteenth century that were emerging out of the so-called occult sciences of the previous generations in her family, and forever-flitting among the flowering rational systems of Linnaeus and other scientists who found the accuracy of Maria Sibylla Merian’s books stimulating to their work.



[1] This account began with the biographical information provided in Sharon D. Valiant, “Questioning the Caterpillar: How a Curious Girl became one of the Premier Painters of Nature’s Wonderland” Natural History 101:12 (1992) 46-59.The reproductions of plates by Maria Sibylla Merian remain its main inspiration.

[2] Leonard Shengold, Soul Murder: The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation (New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1989).

[3] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 182.

[4] Richard Feller and Edgar Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz vom Spätmittelalter zur Neuzeit, Bd. 1 (Basel/Stuttgart: Helbing & Licherhahn, 1979) pp. 370-372.

[5] Alexander Roob, The Hermetic Museum: Alchemy and Mysticism (Cologne, Lisbon, London, New York, Paris and Tokyo: Taschen, 1997) p. 15.

[6] Arthur M. Hind, A History of Engraving & Etching from the 15th Century to the year 1914, being the Third and Fully Revised Edition of “A Shoirt History of Engraving and Etching” (New York: Dover, 1963 [1923])  p. 105, n. 105.

[7] Brockhaus Enzyklopädie (Wiesbaden: F.A. Brockhaus, 1971) vol. 12, p. 424. Cp. Hind, A History of Engaving & Etching, pp. 124-125 and 136.

[8] Johann Israel’s second name suggests some kind of Jewish connection, just as the oblique allusion to Maria the Jewess the Egyptian alchemist, does in regard to Maria Sibylla’s name; but as both the de Bry and the Merian families were strong Protestants, the Old Testament resonance could more probably derive from this source.

[9] Bernadette Bucher, Icon and Conquest: A Structural Analysis of the Illustrations of de Bry’s Great Voyages, trans. Basia Miller Gulati (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1981 [1977]) p. 3.

[10] Chester M. Cate, “De Bry and the Index ExpurgatotoriusThe Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 11:3-4 (1917) 136.

[11] Henry M. Stevens, “The De Bry Collector’s Painefull Peregrination along the Pleasant Pathway to Perfection” Bibliographical Essays: A Tribute to Wilberforce Eames (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924) p. 269.

[12] Bucher, Icon and Conquest, p. 20.

[13] Bucher, Icon and Conquest,  p. 21.

[14] Hind, A History of Engraving & Etching, p. 428.

is A. Yates points out that this John Theodore de Bry was the son of the Theodore who died in 1598, also a well-known printer and engraver (The Art of Memory [Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1969 (1966) p. 413, n. 4].  See also Roob, The Hermetic Museum, p. 15.

[16] Schweizerisches Geschlechterbuch (1955), vol X, p. 282.

[17] Read, Prelude to Chemistry, pp. 235-236.

[18] Cate, “De Bry and the Index Expuragatorius” 136.

[19] For a discussion of how the de Bry print-works passed into the control of the Merian family, see Read, The Alchemist, p. 68.

[20] Anonymous, “A Surinam Portfolio” Natural History 71:1 (1962) 29.

[21] Schweizerisches Geschlechterbuch (1955), vol X, p. 282

[22] See the Publisher’s Note to Carol Berlanger Grafton, ed., 1300 Real and fanciful Animals from, Seventeenth-Century Engravings, Matthäus Merian the Younger (Minola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), p. iv.

[23] On Matthias Merian as an engraver of plants, see Coats, The Treasury of Flowers, Plate 38 and Note..

[24] Bucher, Icon and Conquest, p. 55.

[25] Terry Brown, “Merian, Maria Sibylla: Natural Historian (1647-1717)” online at http://www. astr.ua.edu/ 4000WS/MERIASN.

[26] Feller and Bonjour, Geschichtsschreibung der Schweiz, p. 370.

[27] Das Grosse Duden Lexicon (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1964) Vol. 5 L/M/N.

[28] Phaidon Encyclopedia or Arts and Artists, (London: Phaidon, 1978) p. 440.

[29] Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, London, etc.: William Benton, 1970), vol. 15, p. 191.

[30] Phaidon Encyclopedia of Arts and Artists , p. 440.

[31] In an Internet page on “Merian, Maria Sibylla: Natural Historian (1647-1717), Terry Browne of Dublin claims that “The publishing business was taken over by the children of Matthauus Merian and Maria’s mother received a settlement.  Maria had nothing to do with the publishing bsuienss after that.  The more lasting influence was that of Jacob Marrell…”

[32] There seems some confusion as to whether the name should be spelled Morrel or Marrel.

[33] Coats, A Treasury of Flowers, p. 16.

[34] Some sources say he died in 1684.

[35] Terry Browne, Internet Page.

[36] “A Surinam Portfolio” 30.

[37] Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art and Society, 2nd. ed. rev. and expanded (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996 [1990]), p. 134.

[38] Elsen Honig  Fine in Women & Art: A History of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the 20th Century (Montclair/London: Allenheld & Schram/Prior, 1978) states that “she expressed an early interest in art and entomology, much to her mother’s distress” (p. 34).

[39] Norman Simms, “Good Parenting in the 14th Century: Christine de Pisan” Clio’s Psyche 5:4 (1999) 158-159.

[40] “A Surinam Portfolio” 30.

[41] Browne implies that Mignon was Maria Sibylla’s first husband, whom she divorced before her wedding to Graff, but I have found no mention elsewhere, let alone confirmation for this marriage.

[42] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 248.

[43] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 275, and the references there and on p. 276 to Anna Freud.

[44] Shengold reports a case study with interesting near-parallels to Maria Siybylla’s life: “R. began to mirror her idealized teacher; her father  had previously recognized and encouraged her brightness.  The comparatively benign indifference of R’s mother changed when her father left for a long European business trip.  The mother began to interfere with R.’s going to school, insisting that the child was ill.  When the mother was called to school for a conefrence with the teacher, R. became both hopeful and anxiou”,  Soul Murder, p. 306).

[45] Octavio Paz, Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, o Las tramps de la fé (México: Fonds de Cultura Económica, 1998 [1982]), pp. 320-321.

[46] David Lashmet, “Unfurling the Worm: Insecto-theology in William Blake’s Thel,” Prometheus Unplugged online at http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panels/1A/D.Lashmet.

[47] Shengold, Soul Murder, pp. 284 ff.

[48] Shengold, Soul Murder, p. 297.  The references are to H. Blum, “The Curative and Creative Aspects of Insight,” Journal of the American Association, Supplement 27 (1979) 41-70 and E. Kris,  “Some Vicissitudes of Insight” in Selected Papers of Ernst Kris (New Haven and London: Yale University Pres, 1975) pp/ 252-297.

[49] Lashmet, “Unfurling the Worm.”

[50] Norman Simms “The Early Jewish Settlement in Surinam and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko as a Converso Novel” Journal of Unconventional History 11:1 (1999) 57-89; and “Aphra Behn: A Conversa from Surinam” in Mary Ann O’Donnell, Bernard Dhuicq and Guyonne Leduc, eds., Aphra  Behn (1640-1689) Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000) pp.215-224.

[51] Paz, Las tampas de la fé, p. 369.

[52] Lashmet, “Unfurling the Worm.”


Second Part: Maria Sibylla Merian: Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage


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Norman Simms:

A Preference for Horses: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Luis de Carvajal el Mozo's Autobiography
The Healing of Aeneas and Menelaus: Wound-Healers in Ancient Greek and Classical Roman Medicine
Andrés Laguna, Marrano Physician, and the Discovery of Madness (Jan. 4, 2006)


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