Sophia Hendrikx MA

PhD candidate

E-mail: s.m.hendrikx@hum.leidenuniv.nl

Area(s) of interest: Early Modern History, Environmental History, History of Books

Cohort/Start PhD: 2016-2017

Tradition and Innovation. Conrad Gessner and Sixteenth-Century Ichthyology (1551-1602)

Leiden University
Project: A New History of Fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550-1880
Promotor(es): Prof. dr. Paul Smith, Prof. dr. Karl Enenkel
Aanstelling: vanaf maart 2015
My PhD project is part of the NWO funded project A New History of Fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550-1880. This overarching project focuses on the development of ichthyology as a scientific discipline, how this took shape as a field of expert knowledge, and the role of ichthyology in zoology from 1550. “
Within this larger project my research concentrates on the development of ichthyology as a field of study in the 16th-century. Within the context of a broad corpus of primary sources, including well-known authors such as Pierre Belon, Hippolito Salviani, and Guillaume Rondelet, as well as lesser-known authors such as Gregor Mangolt and Johann Kentmann, I take Conrad Gessner’s Historia piscium (1558) as my point of focus. In addition, discussions of fish in emblem books, poetry, calendars, and cookery books are taken into account.