Abstract Summary
This article examines the reception history of Jan van der Straet (Stradanus)’ Nova reperta, the iconic visual account of the modern inventions of the scientific revolution. It reconstructs how contemporary publics responded to Stradanus’ prints within Europe and across the globe. As I argue, the Nova reperta had a rather limited reception compared to the rest of Stradanus’ oeuvre; modern inventions seem not to have been popular in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Interest in Stradanus was limited to the circles of the Medici in Florence, who used his prints to invent a tradition of supporting learnings and craftsmanship, and to a few humanists and antiquarians who used the Nova reperta within a highly religious framework. The talk focuses on two case studies: the French engraver Melchior Tavernier, who relied on the prints of the Nova reperta in a court case agains the booksellers’ guild in the Paris of the 1620s, and the Oxford antiquarian Thomas Hearne, who used the Nova reperta to learn more about the the early history of printing in order to criticize the 18th-century book trade in the wake of the Copyright Act of 1710. As these two cases reveal, the Nova reperta’s images were used for highly political purposes in this period, and were not taken to be as unproblematic accounts of artisanal or scientific work.
