Chapter 10 - Retrospective

Summary

MARGGRAFE’S IMPORTANCE AS AN EARLY MODERN SCHOLAR

Our account of MARGGRAFE’s life and work reveals that he was a remarkable and talented scholar with an inquisitive mind. Born in Saxony into a family of Lutheran pastors, he escaped the atrocities of the Thirty Years’ War by making a Peregrinatio Academica through a large number of important scholarly sites in continental Europe. In this ten-year journey, he acquired a broad spectrum of knowledge and skills. At home in Liebstadt, he mastered the classical languages and developed his skills, both in drawing and music; elsewhere in Germany, he learnt alchemic medicine, mathematics and theoretical astronomy. But to understand his success as a naturalist in Brazil, MARGGRAFE’s practical training at Leiden University seems crucial. His stay at Leiden University perfected his knowledge and skills. It was in the Leiden Hortus Botanicus where MARGGRAFE learned the basics of hands-on botany; it was in the Leiden Theatrum Anatomicum that he was taught how to dissect, and it was at the brand-new Leiden Observatory – the Theatrum Astronomicum – that he learned to use mathematical and optical instruments. There he trained himself to systematically observe and carefully record everything he had seen in a journal.

With this set of skills, MARGGRAFE embarked to Brazil with the ambition to chart the Southern Hemisphere. Besides that, his 1640- letter to DE LAET demonstrates that he had promised this bewindhebber to investigate the rarities of Brazilian nature. This as repayment for the support that De Laet had provided him to facilitate his journey to Brazil. So, when the circumstances prevented him from working on his astronomical ambitions, MARGGRAFE used his capacities to make careful observations of the novelties he came across in the non-European nature of this South American continent. Already in August 1638, only a few months after his arrival in Dutch Brazil, he was fascinated by Brazilian snakes. It is telling that he not only caught a boa constrictor and dissected the animal to investigate its structure, but also started taking notes about his observations. These notes were supplemented over time by many other observations of particulars in Brazilian nature.