Career-Building across the Oceans in the Eighteenth Century: A Review of Marie-Christine Skuncke’s “Carl Peter Thunberg: Botanist and Physician”
Marie-Christine Skuncke, Carl Peter Thunberg: Botanist and Physician: Career-Building Across the Oceans in the Eighteenth Century (Uppsala: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, 2014), ISBN: 978-91-981948-0-7, 376 pp.
Sebestian KROUPA
Intellectual convictions and common cultural outlooks of contemporary thought have deep roots in a long tradition of English-Dutch relations, started in the seventeenth century Europe. While revisiting the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in spring 2013, Lisa Jardine, in her desire to capture a part of early modern history that usually escapes scrutiny, was inspired to write what would be her last book. The museum had just opened, after a long period of closure when it had gone through a process of refurbishment. The author saw in the museum a wooden box with a note inside and a rectangular block of stone on which, William Prince of Orange first set foot on English soil, a stone representing decades of political and cultural relations between the two countries. This, claims Jardine, has been the source of inspiration for a book that intends to present English-Dutch relations from a different historical perspective, a less common