Maria Sibylla
Merian:
Crises
in
Spirit, Intellect and Marriage
Norman
Simms
Part One:
Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon:
Childhood Confusions
In order to understand the life of Maria Sibylla
Merian (1647-1717) it is not enough to recount the events of her life
in a
chronological order and to note patterns of cause and affecting her
development
in response to the changing environment as she matures and increases
her
knowledge and skills sufficiently to be recognized as a major
naturalist and
engraver of butterflies and flowers. Her life, insofar as we can piece
together
the scattered fragments of evidence from a wide variety of sources, is
punctuated by a number of crises that mark breaks and swerves from what
would
otherwise seem to be a logical or natural progression of social and
intellectual maturation. These crises in her life help us creative an
investigative structure for the development of her life and work,
especially
how the great volumes of pictures and reports on insect and plant life
came
about, not only as significant contributions to Enlightenment science
and art,
but also as manifestations of her emergence as an "exceptional woman,”[1] at the
end
of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. In
this essay
I will look carefully at the dynamics of her marriage at the age of
eighteen to
Johann Andreas Graff[2] and its
break-up many years later, its relation to her decision to join and
then leave
the radical Calvinist sect of Labadists, and her preparation for the
expedition
to Surinam and, thus, to her fully mature career in natural philosophy
and
aesthetic art.[3]
The
breakdown of her marriage provides an early indication to the
development of
her mature personality. We therefore need to re-examine the evidence
and the
patterns of disjuncture, not from the perspective of nineteenth-
century
patriarchy, but using the insights of modern psychohistory, to see the
emergence of domestic crises from the woman's and child’s point of
view. The
problematic relationship of husband and wife provides a clue to the
understanding of Maria Sibylla Merian's intellectual and spiritual
crises. The
first such crisis in her life had been less openly traumatic: this may
be seen
in the unstable pattern of her parental and family relations. In other
words, it
was a crisis spread over several years, during which her natural father
died
after taking as a second wife the woman who was to be Maria Sibylla's
mother;
then her birth mother remarried, giving her a step-father who was very
supportive, until illness forced him to put her into the care of other
men, at
least one of whom eventually became her husband. Though there was
strength in
the original family of Matthaus Merian and its extension into the DeBry
household from which he inherited the great engraving and publishing
firm he would
pass on to his sons,[4] the
young Maria
would no doubt have experienced the deaths of parents and the
reconfigurations
in her own small emotional world as a profoundly confusing and
troubling set of
events. Her step-father Jacob Marrel's affectionate support for her
precocious signs
of artistic and intellectual abilities is warmly recorded in the
preface to her
books; but as he became increasingly ill and consequently distant, the
child
would have felt the pangs of neglect and abandonment. The young
apprentices who
were charged with caring for her also had predatory designs on the
girl, if not
overtly sexual, then at least professionally and financially: any
ambitious
young man who married into the DeBry-Merian conglomerate would gain a
firm hold
on the publishing and artistic world of the mid- to late seventeenth
century in
German and Dutch-speaking lands.[5]
Maria
Sibylla eventually did marry one of her stepfather Marrel’s
apprentices, and
one of her first tutors in art,[6] Johann
Andreas Graff (1637-1701) of
It is
important to note that the first volume of Der Raupen wunderbare
Verwandlung
und sonderbare Blumennahrung was already begun when her second
child was
born, that is, when she was still in close proximity to both sides of
her
family. Successful publication, with the copper plates by the author,
positioned
Maria Sibylla for international fame at this point. The
artist-scientist's
career did not properly take off until much later. This book also
ambiguously
appears to have been jointly worked on by her husband,[12]
although
she later disassociated him from serious artistic and scientific
endeavours under
her name. I would suggest, for reasons that will be explained in due
course,
that when she wrote in 1679 that Raupen was partly due to "the
accomplished help of my dear spouse",[13] she
only
partly meant what she said; this was an unconscious slip for saying
that it was
her father that she really wished to thank for launching her successful
career—but,
because her father died too soon, he, like her husband, was partly
responsible
for her inability to stand on her own two feet Just
as her childish mind could not cope with
contradictions and confusions of all the parents and step-fathers,
siblings and
step-brothers in her early life, as well as the rivalry of other
relatives from
different parents, so her adult consciousness was stymied in the first
stages
of her career from mature independence: by the ordeal of influence, in
general,
and the debts of gratitude, in particular, she was often asked to pay.
The
reasons for this apparently sudden swerve from the logical or natural
progression in her career must be sought in her domestic life. However,
there
is no indication that she saw herself as anything other than a good and
dutiful
wife, as she had been a good daughter, in her youth; but, for precisely
that
reason—and the way in which private and intimate issues like this were
not
given public utterance in the period—biographers need to be alert for
signs in
the psychological dimensions of her life story for those subtle and
fragmentary
indications of rebelliousness and independence.
Or, if we are to take the documents at face value, then we need
to learn
to interpret the spiritual assertiveness she comes to display in
letters and
actions. These kind of oblique and
understated indicators take on, in retrospect, the dimensions of a
crisis, that
is, radical turning points in Maria Sybilla’s life-history.
These
historical markers that show that the crisis emerged in stages are
hinted at in
the way she described the drawings of insects she was engraving: not
just as
evidence of God's presence in the world, but of that presence as part
of a
dynamic and creative process of developmental growth and change.[14] This
attitude
suggests that the religious conversion she was about to undergo—or, at
least,
to announce to the world—had been brewing for some time below the
surface of a
slight tilt towards Calvinist from Lutheran views. More tellingly,
though, cracks
seem to have opened up in the solidarity of the Merian family, on one
side, and
in the public pose of conventional happy marriage with Graff, on the
other.
Indeed, more important than the typical arguments and lawsuits between
members
of her father's children was the almost sudden separation from her own
husband.
It may be that her marriage to
Graff did not work out perhaps because, as Valiant claims, her
husband's
"career did not develop as expected".[16]
Obviously,
there would have been some jealousy and rivalry between two artistic
spouses,
perhaps exacerbated by the birth of a second daughter and the young
family's
increased dependence on the extra money brought in from Maria Sibylla's
artistic
work. The usually given reason, her husband's failure in the art
business,
however, does not fully satisfy the urgency of the situation. Nor does
the
explanation that he was unwilling to follow her into the Labadist cult
satisfy.[17] I is
more
likely that her decision to join the cult was consequent to the
marriage
breakdown and it provided Maria Sibylla with the means of gaining
freedom from
her husband’s attempts to control her life. Once
her mother died and she had effectively separated
herself and her children from Graff, she saw herself sufficiently free
to
pursue her career with strength of character she had not been able to
muster
earlier in her life.
But this kind of interpretation
of the situation means going beyond the very sparse and fragmentary
details
available in surviving written documents. We have to see between and
through
the lines, guided by several premises: first, that like all children
brought up
in dysfunctional homes, Maria tried very hard to control and hide her
rage
against her parents and all the surrogate authority-figures they
provided for
her—her brothers, her tutors, her husband.
Second, the historian needs to note that her interest in small
insects,
reptiles and other small animals, and the accurate depiction of their
relationship to one another in a living organic environment was not
merely part
of an emerging new Enlightenment science but also a coded language, a
means of
speaking about. Terefore, it needs to be read as a way of creating
herself out
of her own imagination—a way of living that corrected the faults of her
early
childhood, compensated for the deficits imposed on her by various
step-parents,
and opened avenues of development otherwise unavailable, and indeed
unimaginable before then.
The biographer must therefore
consider that her husband's financial losses or his spiritual
deficiencies might
have been borne with greater equanimity had he been more responsible—or
emotionally responsive—in a physical way. Yet
the possibility arises that he was either
a drunkard, a gambler, a wife-beater or some combination of the three.[18] Those
reasons were part of her marriage for a very long time and cannot be
taken in
themselves as sufficient to explain the "abrupt" change in her life
when she left with her mother and daughters to join the Labadists.
Something
deeper in her psychological makeup needs to be identified. To the end
of her life,
it would seem, Maria Sibylla remained "bitter" about her marriage.[19]
There is also another
suggestion that Maria Sibylla at this time was exhibiting pietistic
tendencies,
as manifest in the "Caterpillar Hymn" by C. Arnold which was placed
at the head of her 1679 volume of plates. A closer reading of this text
points
in a different direction, although it may well have been that she, like
others
around her, was unable to identify anything more in the lyrics than the
religious concepts they normally held for her time. The other direction
is
towards the projection of her own childish helplessness, crying out for
a power
that would develop only after a period of metamorphosis, a withdrawal
from the
crawling stage of the caterpillar into the protective passivity in the
cocoon,
before she can emerge into the world and reveal herself as a fully
developed
butterfly. The God referred to here is thus, not only the Christian
deity
expounded by the Lutherans and then the Calvinists; but, above all, an
idealized image of her father, the loving, caring, nurturing,
artistically
encouraging parent who, however, mysteriously disappeared from her life
before
she could ever really get to know him, but who is always present in her
mind as
a guide and a light towards which her own longings are ever turned:
Liebster
GOTT so wirst Du handlen
Auch mit
uns, zu zeiner Zeit;
Wie die
Raupen sich verwandlen,
Die, durch
ihre Sterblichkeit,
Wiederurn
lebendig werden,
Gleich den
Todten, in der Erden:
Lass mich
armes Wurmelein
Dir alsdann
belohlen sein!
Dearest
GOD, thus will You deal also with us in due time; as the caterpillars
are transformed,
they who through their mortality become enlivened anew, like the dead
in the
ground: Let me, poor little worm, at that time be commended to You.[20]
We shall explore this matter further when we
consider Graff’s visit to the Labadie colony in
It is therefore not at all
clear whether these pious sentiments expressed by
A
psychohistorian must also ask whether or not this young woman needed to
measure
her relationships with men against the idealized image she had of her
father
and the warm close love she had for her stepfather? Her real father
died before
she could know him in any self-conscious way, but his presence as a
paradigm of
ancestral prestige, honour, and artistic traditions of
At first Maria Sibylla remained
in
Nevertheless Martia Sybilla’s
smouldering disappointment in marriage—she lived in
Back home again in
“In
about
But was it a purely spiritual
decision or did it also, and perhaps predomi- nantly, satisfy a number
of different
psychological needs that Maria and her mother felt strongly? It is very
likely
that the scandal caused by Anna Maria van Schurman's decision to join
the
Labadie community, a decision justified in her spiritual auto-
biography Eukleria,[34] influenced
Maria Sibylla's decision, as well as the example of her brother and the
promptings of her mother. Of van Schurman's book, Saxby writes:
In simple
yet beautiful Latin she speaks of her disenchantment with Cartesianism,
which
she saw as profane, with the world of learning and with the established
church
of her day. Its honesty of spiritual confession and its accomplished
style have
led to Eukleria's comparison with Augustine's Confessions.
Its
effect was immediate. Throughout
If Merian agreed with van
Schurman in theological matters and in anti- Cartesianism,[36]
nevertheless, a decision to leave the world of learning went against
Maria
Sibylla's pattern of increased personal independence. On the one hand,
Van
Schurman's “independent act of joining a breakaway religious movement
was a
bold rejection of the polite society that had shaped and in some ways
confined
her.”[37] On the
other, there is no indication that Merian was making this kind of
radical break
with her own intellectual and artistic development. Nor had she shown
any
earlier signs of being drawn to the strict spiritual governance
practiced among
the Labadists, although she may have been attracted by the ideal of a
primitive
Christian simplicity and the model of intellectual independence
demonstrated by
van Schurman in her Eukleria.
She may have sympathized with
her brother Caspar's reasons for joining the cult, but also
saw-consciously
and/or unconsciously—in this retreat a strategic move to establish her
independence as a woman in preparation for the career moves evident in
her last
years. This need not be seen in purely modern, cynical terms, however,
as the
Labadists scrutinized their new members carefully and were highly
sensitive to
hypocrisy and half-hearted commitments. Maria Sibylla and the others
would not
have been let in had they not proved their spiritual bona fides to
the
managers of the cult headquarters.
Yet we
know today that people who join religious cults of this sort go in for
a
variety of contradictory reasons, no matter how much they may convince
themselves
and others of the purity of their vocation.[38] For
instance, Saxby suggests that Caspar joined the Labadists for reasons
familiar
to those who study modern cult movements; namely, at the death of his
first
wife and child, he felt lonely and depressed. Soon after he moved into
the
community at Wieuwerd in 1677 he started to write to his relatives to
beg them
to join him there.[39]
Saxby's
next description is therefore peculiarly interesting.
His sister
Maria Sibylla, who had not long published a book of entomological
drawings of
exceptional merit, proved open to the Labadist message, but there was a
snag.
Since 1665 she had been married to Johann Andreas Graff, a pupil of her
father's, but the marriage was not a success and Graff was not a
spiritual man.
So Maria was not free to follow her own inclinations, and the situation
worsened when in 1681 her stepfather, Jacob Marrelus, died and she went
to look
after her mother, Johanna Catherina (nee Heim). Correspondence
continued and
Maria found her heart drawn, particularly by the hymns and poems sent
to her
from Wieuwerd (doubtless Heylige Gezanges, the Labadist
hymnal), and
finally in 1685 she determined to travel to Wieuwerd with her mother
and her
two daughters, Johanna and Dorothea. Whether or not with was with Graff
s
permission is uncertain, but she was there a year before her husband
came to
take her to
Let me comment and correct a
few points here before moving on to the crucial account of Graff's
visit to
Merian among the Labadists and his attempt to take her home.
Maria Sibylla' s marriage was
probably only nominal before she went to
From what follows, it may be
that when Maria Sibylla took her daughters home to her mother in
Saxby's account of J.A.
Graff’s visit to
Wieuwerd in 1682 fills out this picture a little more, as it replicates
a scene
all too familiar to contemporary social workers reporting on the
attempts of
abusive husbands to retrieve their wives and children from women's
refuges.[43] In the
late seventeenth century, of course, there were no non-molestation
orders to be
requested from the civil courts.
Pastor of the Labadists, Copper was a former
Reformed Minister from Issburg, and his efforts here were to intercept
Graff
and protect Maria Sibylla and her daughters. Yet he had no authority to
force
the "aggrieved" husband to leave, and when Graff started to whine
about having no money, the Christian community permitted him to
stay-but not
"to sleep with her in a holy place",[45] as
Maria
Sibylla herself stipulated with her iron will. Instead, he was offered
a rather
menial laboring position to earn his keep, "outside the main
complex." Again, this behavior is familiar as the typical of abusive
husbands—men who humiliate and beat their wives—and who pretend (and
perhaps at
the time believe themselves) to be sorry for their action, hiding their
anger
behind promises, penitence and reform. Years later, for those who took
Graff’s
side, the break-up of the marriage had been due to her "ca- price", a
euphemism for the determination of an independent woman unwilling to
surrender
to a husband's demands for authority; for the others who sympathized
with her
plight, the separation was due to Graff’s "shameful vices.”[46]
The continuation of the story
recalls still more the generic pattern of the dysfunctional
husband-wife
relationship even further. Saxby writes
that
Graff tried on
two separate
occasions to become a member, but on both occasions his motives were
suspected
and he was refused. Finally, with the strain of work and the emotional
torment
of his marital position, he fell ill. Normally permission would have
been
needed to visit a non-member in such circumstances, but Maria went of
her own accord
to see him.[47]
Though Saxby seems to take the side of Graff as
the put-upon husband in these sentences, the scenario is nevertheless
clear.
All Graff s efforts to see his wife were rejected by the Labadist
community and
his claim to be a spiritual convert eager to join their movement was
seen
through as without merit and hypocritical. Though hardly a site of
feminist
feelings, despite the major position held by Anna Maria van Schurman in
its
formative years in exile,[48]
Wieuwerd
was a spiritual community that protected its own and were acutely
sensitive to
the wiles of the outside world. Nevertheless, either to urge him to
depart
peacefully or drawn by some residual affection for the man, Maria
Sibylla
agreed to meet him at the gate of the compound.
Following this brief encounter
at the gate, Graff left
Other reasons suggest
themselves, however, such as that he had obsessively stared at the
forbidden
grounds where his wife and children were always out of his control and
sought
to gain possession of them through this minutely detailed drawing. What
he did
while on "tour" and why he prosecuted divorce proceedings against his
wife upon his return to
It could
not, however, save the marriage, and when he recovered, Graff embarked
on a
tour of the United Provinces before returning to Nurnburg, where he
started divorce
proceedings. He died in 1701. His gift to posterity, however, is the
ground plan
and inset picture of Waltstate, drawn in
That Maria Sibylla Merian's
motives for joining the Labadists were not purely a search for
spiritual fulfilment
or salvation may be adduced from the fact that soon after her mother
died in
1690, she took her children and returned to
But this is something we must
infer rather than find explicitly stated; for as
The process of transformation
plays itself out further after her departure from the Labadist
community. The
next year her elder daughter Johanna married Jakob Herold. Though he
too had been
a Labadist in Wieuwerd, he chose to leave the community, having made
himself “unpopular
at Walta-state by claiming that the mortifications served only to force
certain
people to leave,” as Saxby puts it.[54] Very
likely, then, Maria Sibylla Merian and her daughters also felt out of
place in
this strict community and, once older Mrs. Merral had passed away they
could depart.
For we must assume that it was the Maria Sibylla's mother who was the
only
person in their family who had a positive and coherent reason for
joining it.
The others had a mixture of
reasons, none as strong, and so could find various reasons for leaving
the
Labadist compound. Having sent away and perhaps bought off Graff, the
dangers
of either a violent outburst or a legal attack had greatly diminished.
For the first
time in many years, Maria could feel emotionally free enough to follow
her
career. It was not just that Graff wouldn't bother her, but at a
psychological
level, that her mother's passing cut certain ties to the childhood
doubts and
anxieties inherent in the confused dangers a little girl experienced
after a
succession of deaths, changes, and competing intellectual pressures.
Maria
Sibylla could now concentrate her efforts on art and science. Yet she
had to do
one more thing before she could emerge fully from the cocoon of her
self-doubts
and emotional confusions: she had to undertake what, under "normal"
circumstances for a woman of the period would have been an almost
impossible
adventure, a scientific expedition to
[1] For a discussion of this phrase as it is constituted during the eighteenth century, see Mary D. Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), esp. pp. 1-6.
[2] Natalie Zemon
Davis, Women
on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (
[3] A very interesting two-page overview of her career is given in the anonymous "Publisher's Note" to Maria Sibylla Merian, Flowers, Butte1jlies and Insects: All 154 Engravings from "Erucarum artus" (New York: Dover Publications, 1991), pp. iii-iv.
[4] For an overview of the DeBry family and their publishing empire, see Anthony Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery, with April Shefield and Nancy Sinaisi (Cambridge, MA and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992) pp. 128-129.
[5] Because of the
scarcity of
data, we can only raise questions as to the relationship between Maria
Sibylla
and her older brothers in the DeBry-Merian family, such as: Were they
available
to help raise and educate their sister during the first three years of
her life
before Matthaus died? Did they maintain any attachments after their
step-mother
married Marrel? What part did the brothers play in marrying off their
sister to
the ne'er-do-well I.A. Graff? Did they give her any moral, emotional or
financial support during the years of her estrangement from her
husband? What
part did they play in publishing her books before the volumes printed
after the
[6] Margaret Alic, Hypatia's Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity to the late Nineteenth Century (London: The Women's Press, 1986) p. 109.
[7] Elsa 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), pp.
34-35 names him as a resident of
[8] Valiant gives
the date as
1668 (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), but Fine suggests 1665 (Women &
Art,
p. 34), which seems likely if the first daughter was born in
1668--unless,
of course, the marriage was occasioned by this pregnancy.
through the
Nineteenth Century [
[9]
Marilyn Bailey Ogilvee writes that both of
these daughters were given a medical education and were both artists,
converted
to the Labadist cult with their mother, and later travelled with her
around
Europe, to
[10] Fine, Women & Art, p. 35.
[11] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 145.
[12] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 154.
[13] Cited in
[14] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 156
[15] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 157.
[16] Valiant, "Questioning the Caterpillar" 51.
[17] Davis, Women on the Margins, 160
[18] If Andreas's family began its interest in painting and engraving with Urs Graf (c.1485-1527/8) there may be some sort of congenital propensity to such behaviour in this Basle-based clan. Urs seems to have been an unsteady character known, as The Oxford Companion to Art coyly puts it "for his lively and uninhibited drawings of mercenaries, peasants and ladies of easy virtue" (Harold Osborne, ed., OUP, 1970, p. 498). However, it is likely that this Graff was born in Nurenberg on 1 May 1637 and, after his wife left him, returned to that city, where he died on 5 December 1701; see Deutsche Biographische Enzyclopedie (1996) vol 4, p. 130. See further discussion in the body of the text.
[19] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 199.
[20] Flowers, Butterflies and Insects, p. iii.
[21] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 159.
[22] Anonymous, "A
[23] At this stage,
we also cannot
know whether Jacob Marrel had brought pietistical ideas with him from
[24] Alic, Hypatia's Heritage, p. 109
[25] Fine, Women &
Art,
p. 35.
[26] Alic, Hypatia's Heritage, p. 109.
[27] Valiant, “Questioning the Caterpillar,” 53.
[28] Alic, Hypatia's Heritage, p. 109. Two years after Maria Sibylla left Graff he returned to Nurenberg, where he worked until his death in 1701 (Personal communication from Dr. Niklaus Landolt, Staatsarchiv des Kantons Basel-Stadt, 26 May 1998). Terry Browne suggests there was a divorce in 1685, but he clearly confuses a separation with a legal divorce. For further discussion of Graff's final attempt at a reconciliation, see the discussion below on his visit to the Labadist settlement in Frieseland.
[29] Valiant,
"Questioning
the Caterpillar," 54.
[30] Valiant,
"Questioning
the Caterpillar," 53. There are some alternative details offered by
Alic
in Hypatia's Heritage. In 1685, after 17 years of marriage,
Merian
converted to Labadism, an ascetic Protestant sect that claimed among
its
adherents Anna Maria van Schurman. Merian left her husband, resumed her
maiden
name, and took her two daughters to live in the commune of the
religion's
founder, Jean de Labadie, located at the
[31] Valiant, "Questioning the Caterpillar," 54.
[32] Mirjam DeBaar
and Brita Rang,
"Anna Maria van Schurman: A Historical Survey of her Reputation since
the
Seventeenth Century" in Mirjiam DeBaar, Macheld Lowenskyn, Marit
Monteiro
and A. Agnes Sneller, eds. Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van
Schurman
(1607- 1678) (Dordrecht, Boston, London: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1996)
pp. 1-21. See Joyce L. Irwin, "Introduction: Anna van Schurman and her
[33] "A
[34]Erica Scheenstra, “On Anna Maria van Schurman’s ‘Right to Choice’ in DeBaar et al., Choosing the Better Part, pp. 117-131.
[35] T.J. Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem, Jean de Labadie and the Labadists, 1610-1744 (Dordrecht, Boston, Lancaster: Martinus Nijhoff, 1987) p.225.
[36] Angela Roothaan, "Anna Maria van Schurman's 'Reformation' of Philosophy" in DeBaar et aI, Choosing the Better Part pp. 103-110.
[37] Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem, p.225.
[38] Even with Anna Maria van Schurman, her decision to take the bold step of joining the Labadists in their community-in-exile was timed to coincide with the freedom to act independently following a long period of caring for two sick and elderly aunts, and the scandal she caused the Dutch Reformed Church by moving in with Labadie at precisely the time when they were in effect excommunicating him gained her maximum publicity, and ensured that all her previous male supporters would have to argue the rights and wrongs of her decision in public. In other words, her decision was hardly a private and purely spiritual one. Cpo Irwin, "Introduction" p. 7.
[39] This was a year
before Anna
Maria van Schurman died; though confined by illness to her room most of
the
time, she was still a potent force in the community while Caspar
settled in.
But as so often happened in her life, when Maria Sibylla arrived in
[40] Saxby, The Quest for the New Jersualem, pp. 264-265.
[41] Obviously, all
this is my
speculation. The historical "facts" are few and far between; but the
"symptoms" are readily visible to be diagnosed. The argument of this
study is that sensitive inter- pretation is not only possible, but also
valid
insofar as it starts to make sense of the ensemble of otherwise random
and
fragmented details in Maria Sibylla Merian's life. But as speculations,
these
"novelizing" efforts remain subject to correction as new data becomes
available, and that new data becomes available because the acts of
speculation
keep raising new questions.
[42] Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem, p. 381, n. 93.
[43] Interestingly,
though she
takes a generally feminist perspective on Maria Sibylla's life,
[44] Saxby, The Quest/or the New Jerusalem, p. 265
[45] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 160
[46] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 161.
[47] Saxby, The Quest for the New Jerusalem, p. 265
[48] Van Schurman
surprised,
disappointed, and offended many of her supporters, male as well as
female, when
she joined the Labadists in their exile because she had been a model of
female
intellectual and artistic integrity and modesty, and this move seemed
to be a
rejection of all she stood for during her childhood and early maturity.
It
seemed to them a retreat from her earlier strong position on a
Christian
woman's right and duty to study the humanities and to take an active
part in
moral and ethical debate. Cp. Caroline Van Eck, "The First Dutch
Feminist
Tract? Anna Maria van Schurman's Discussion of Women's Aptitude for the
Study
of Arts and Sciences" in DeBaar, Choosing the Better Part pp.
43-53.
[49] Saxby makes one further suggestion for her departure in 1691, namely, an epidemic which struck the community (The Questfor Jerusalem, p. 269). If Merian hesitated after her mother's death, the threat of disease to herself and her daughters may have propelled her to take a decision she still had some hesitation over.
[50] Valiant, "Questioning the Caterpillar," 54.
[51] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 163.
[52] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 165
[53] Davis, Women on the Margins, p. 167.
[54] Saxby, The
Quest for the
New Jerusalem, p. 269.
Links:
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)