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Natures, Contexts, and Natural History

Brita Brenna
Science Technology Human Values 2012 37: 355 originally published online 16
April 2012
DOI: 10.1177/0162243912439759

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 Science, Technology, & Human Values
37(4) 355-378
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Brita Brenna1

Abstract
How are contexts made and narrated? This article addresses the question
of how to identify relevant contexts for understanding a work of natural
history, in this case The First Natural History of Norway, published in two
volumes in 1752 and 1753. In addition to offering a rich and complex
description of Norwegian nature, this historical work serves as an impor-
tant source for investigating the ways in which nature was perceived in the
kingdom of Denmark-Norway in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Nature was manifold, serving as a source of aesthetic pleasure, economic
gain, religious reverence, and political power. It is argued that to understand
the different natures presented in this book, we need to relate them to
more than one context. But how do we determine the relevant contexts?
The approach explored in this article is to read the book closely in search of
the specific audiences that are addressed. By focusing on the ways audiences
are addressed, it is argued, we can make better historical accounts of how
natures are conceived and change in relation to different contexts.

Keywords
context, eighteenth century natural history, Norway, methods

1
Centre for Museum Studies, University of Oslo, Blindern, Oslo, Norway

Corresponding Author:
Brita Brenna, Centre for Museum Studies, University of Oslo, Box 1010 Blindern, Oslo 0315,
Norway
Email: b.s.brenna@ikos.uio.no

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356 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

Introduction
In June 1748, the newly appointed Danish bishop of the Bergen diocese,
Erik Pontoppidan, arrived in Bergen on the west coast of Norway, the town
which was to become his place of residence for six years. Pontoppidan’s job
was to oversee the clergymen and parish clerks, churches, schools, and poor
houses, as well as to deal with a wide range of civil administrative tasks.
Through his many visitation journeys within his diocese (which covered
most of the west coast of southern Norway), Pontoppidan collected obser-
vations and specimens. After three summers of traveling from parish to par-
ish, he had collected enough material to write a natural history of the entire
country, which contained, according to the book’s subtitle, ‘‘A particular
and accurate Account of the Temperature of the Air, the different Soils,
Waters, Vegetables, Metals, Minerals, Stones, Beasts, Birds, and Fishes;
together with the Dispositions, Customs, and Manner of Living of the Inha-
bitants’’ (Pontoppidan 17551). Four years after having arrived in Norway,
Pontoppidan had published the first part of a two-volume natural history
of Norway, and the second volume was also already drafted. In addition
to performing his administrative and clerical tasks, he had thus written the
first natural history of the kingdom. Furthermore, again according to the
subtitle, the book was ‘‘Interspersed with Physiological Notes from eminent
Writers, and Transactions of Academies’’ (Pontoppidan 1755). This illu-
strated, 800-page work on Norwegian nature was immediately translated
into German (published in two volumes in 1753 and 1754) and English
(published in 1755).
The reason I have chosen this first natural history of Norway as a
research object is my interest in popular nature—that is, public nature. I
am interested in how nature comes into being as a collective object, as well
as how and to what degree ‘‘science’’ participates in the making of such a
collective object. ‘‘Science’’ in our modern understanding of the word did not
exist in the middle of the eighteenth century, but was used as a term covering
a wide range of systematic enquiries, from theology to mathematics, from
church history to physics. In Denmark-Norway, the term was Viden-skaber
covering the same topics and practices as the German Wissenschaften. The
claim here is that systematic enquiries like Pontoppidan’s work contributed
to bringing different kinds of nature into being. While these natures have also
played important roles in later accounts of Norwegian nature, my main
purpose here is to identify the different versions of Norwegian nature that
were in play in this work. The motivation for seeking out these different ver-
sions of nature is to develop our understanding of how perceptions of nature

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Brenna 357

change historically in highly complex but significant ways that are difficult
to grasp if we insist on the singularity of nature.
Pontoppidan’s book is one of the first texts to make Norwegian nature
into a coherent and manageable entity, immediately connecting Norway
and nature in the title. The title of the work invites a reading of the book
as a history where a particular Norwegian nature is to be presented. The
subtitle indicates, however, a division of this nature into many different
categories that encompass the particular entities that can be found in
Norway—air and soils, beasts and birds. The very notion of natural history
signifies just this: a thorough description of particulars (see Pomata and
Sirasi 2005 for the development of the term historia). The title also implies
that the book takes part in a collective ‘‘scientific’’ endeavor presenting aca-
demically approved facts in the form of notes from well-reputed scholars.
Pontoppidan takes part in making nature into a collective entity by relating
it to a political territory and a collective group of people, but his own book
belies the existence of one unified nature, as I will show.
As a natural history work from the eighteenth century, this book has been
regarded as off the track of the main road of natural history, due both to its
physico-theological arguments and the credulity of its author when it comes
to monsters of land and sea. ‘‘Pontoppidan . . . has been universally hailed and
quoted by the rest of the world as the Munchausen of his day, and a very whole-
sale dealer in gratuitous and absolute falsehood,’’ and early nineteenth-century
article exclaimed (An 1826, 181 ). Recent volumes dealing with early modern
natural history have given us a new conception of this kind of literature.
Natural histories as Pontoppidan’s are regarded as part of the cultures of know-
ing nature, and both physico-theologists and credulous men and women are
seen as important participants in these cultures (see e.g., Jardine, Secord, and
Spary 1996; Smith and Findlen 2002). Building upon this work, I would like to
understand Pontoppidan’s text in the context of its time, but in this article my
chief aim is to query what exactly that might mean.
There are clear historical reasons why Pontoppidan’s book appeared at
this time and place and with this particular content. Such historical reasons
are referred to as context. Context, which is a metaphor derived from the
activity of weaving, is what makes up the fabric of history—the political,
social, and cultural conditions that historians seek out when trying to
describe and explain events. These are also the threads that make up our
narratives, the tools of historians. Thus, deciding upon the right context is
the arduous job of a historian. This quest entails, however, a circular logic
where context is both the precondition and the product of our work: we look
for contexts and we construct the contexts we use to explain. The context is

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358 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

performed in our narratives, but the context is also what we look for and
what we map.
The metaphors for identifying patterns and mapping contexts as though
they were simply ‘‘out there,’’ waiting to be detected, imply topologies which
have been questioned from different disciplinary perspectives in recent
decades. Specifically, I draw inspiration from versions of Science and Tech-
nology Studies (STS) that insist that contexts are made and brought into being
by different actors. The term ‘‘enactment,’’ as it has been developed by Anne-
marie Mol, is useful for understanding how entities are brought into being
together with their different descriptions and practices (Mol 2002). This
approach implies a rejection of looking for explanations and realities sepa-
rated from the events and objects that one wants to understand, to favor
instead a search for how these phenomena are simultaneously brought into
being. In other words, the task is to identify the heterogeneous sets of rela-
tions and pay attention to what is there—not as signs or portents of something
infinitely bigger or more important or more real, some strong and decisive
structure, but the words, peoples, and machines that are there—and attend
to how they are enacted. This seems to me to be one of the core lessons to
be learned from actor-network theory (and after) within STS (see e.g., Latour
2005; Law and Hassard 1999; Law 2004).
The concepts of ‘‘contexts’’ or ‘‘circumstances’’ have at different times
and different places been employed in opposition to figural or allegorical
readings (Burke 2002). In this understanding, contexts imply situating
something in ‘‘reality’’ rather than through figural interpretation. As such,
contextualizing could be seen as a way of deciding upon one single reality.
In accordance with recent STS research, I will propose that reading literally
can also be a strategy for highlighting and bringing to the fore tensions and
ambiguity, as well as simultaneous but not necessarily overlapping patterns
(see Haraway 1991; Mol 2002; Strathern 2004; Verran 2001).
Methodologically, I have thus read The Natural History of Norway look-
ing for the relations made in the text, or in other words, reading with an eye
on which contexts the book makes for itself. It is a literal reading, asking
the text quite simply: what and whom do you address? Which threads are
spun from the book toward something which comes into being as its con-
text? In STS studies, ethnographic methods have been favored when the
complexities of current medical, scientific, or technological practices are
being investigated. This case is meant to investigate how these insights
can be used to address historical phenomena, or more to the point, how
these insights can be particularly fruitful when accounting for a historical
object.

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Brenna 359

I will argue that Pontoppidan’s book enacts nature in multiple ways.

While showing that Norwegian nature is multiplied throughout the book,
I will also ask: what contexts does the book bring into being? Based on a
close reading of the text, I will focus on four contexts that are tightly knit
to the audiences the book addresses, namely the king, God, the marketplace,
and the community of learned men (which Pontoppidan in line with his con-
temporaries refers to as the Republic of Letters). In describing how these
contexts are brought forth in the text, I will show the multiple natures that
the book brings into being in relation to each of these contexts. Thus in read-
ing the book in this way, I encounter different natures that partly overlap
and are partly connected (see especially Mol 2002). These tensions can
be accessed through the different contexts the work sets for itself, contexts
which will also be addressed as its conditions of possibility. By claiming
that contexts and natures are brought into being in this book, my intention
is not to say that this is the only site where such construction work is carried
out. Pontoppidan’s text is only one among many phenomena which con-
structs the contexts of natures, but it is an important site for studying how
these contexts are in making in the period. Rather than telling one coherent
historical narrative which can give us an understanding of the text, its
context, and the way it establishes nature, my ambition is to separate out
different audiences, different natures, and different contexts. The four audi-
ences/contexts/natures that are identified will be examined through four
narratives which I present in four sections. At the end, I will discuss the ver-
sions of nature that I have found and point out how they might be connected.
Reading one book is not a sufficient method for investigating complex
historical phenomena, and I regard this article as an experiment, not in reading
only one book, but in insisting that the book is the best guide to its contexts.
However, the basis for my claims comes from archival research, and
unpublished material by and about Pontoppidan and his contemporaries.2
Ponotoppidan’s Natural History has received limited scholarly attention,
except for the recently published study by Simone Ochsner Goldscmidt who
has done a close reading of the book inspired by New Historicism, carefully
scrutinizing how knowledge is constituted through the use of sources and argu-
ments, text organization, and paratexts and materiality (Goldschmidt 2012).
Apart from this book, there are no comprehensive studies of Pontoppidan’s
natural history, and studies of natural history writing elsewhere in Europe serve
as useful comparative material. Working with this material, it has become
important to me to try to figure out how I can account for the diversity and rich-
ness of the Natural History of Norway, and my attempt is thus to inquire
whether the book can be seen as the best guide to the relevant contexts.

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360 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

The King
Pontoppidan was born into a family of clergymen in Århus, Denmark in
1698. He received theological education as an orthodox Lutheran, was certi-
ficated as a clergyman, and experienced a pietistic conversion (Pontoppidan
1834). From a modest position as a vicar, he was summoned to become
the Danish priest at the royal court. Pontoppidan, who earned the title of
extraordinary professor in theology in 1738, was a prolific writer. He was
closely connected to the king, his family and council, and he therefore
knew the king’s ambitions of trying to spread true Lutheran Christianity
and thus literacy to his subjects. As part of the ambitious scheme to edu-
cate the inhabitants of the kingdom in the right faith, confirmation was
instituted as a prerequisite to being considered a subject of the realm
(1736), a new catechism was introduced for obligatory use (by Pontoppi-
dan in 1737), and compulsory schooling was introduced (1739).
Literature written in the absolutist monarchy in Denmark-Norway was
directed upward toward a small, but powerful audience, namely the absolu-
tist king of God’s grace as the model recipient (on the literary culture, see
Apelseth 1998; Berge 1998), as well as the ministers of the country. In the
eighteenth century, the king of Denmark-Norway governed a large territory
that encompassed small colonies in India, some islands in West India, trad-
ing posts in Africa, and closer to home, Greenland, Iceland, the Faeroe
Islands, the North German duchies—and Norway. The most populous ter-
ritories were Denmark and Norway, hence the abbreviated form
Denmark-Norway which was most often used for this conglomerate state.
The uncontested center of the state was Copenhagen where the king resided
and the ministries and the university were situated (for a general introduc-
tion, see Feldbæk 1998).
Pontoppidan’s natural history book was directed at the king and his
council in Copenhagen. The eight-page dedication to Prime Minister Johan
Ludvig Holstein opened quite simply with the words, ‘‘Gracious Lord,
Always found and propitious patron’’ (Pontoppidan 1755). Holstein, who
had served as Pontoppidan’s patron during the latter’s service as a member
of court and priest to the king, is praised as a true and pious lover of the use-
ful sciences. However, Pontoppidan’s position while writing the Natural
History of Norway was ambiguous. He had been priest to King Christian
VI from 1735 until this king’s death in 1746. When Frederik V succeeded his
father to the throne, Pontoppidan was appointed bishop in the Norwegian city
of Bergen, an expulsion masked as a promotion, according to Pontoppidan’s
biographer (Neiiendam 1933). Allegedly, it was Pontoppidan’s strong

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Brenna 361

pietistic conviction that prompted the king to remove him from his court;
however, Holstein was a powerful minister and a pietist with whom Pontop-
pidan maintained strong contact, including throughout the reign of Frederik
V (who eventually called him back to Copenhagen after the Natural History
was published).
He had risen to power as a spokesperson for the improvement-oriented
reform politics the king was planning to implement in the state, a policy
developed further by King Frederik V. In line with an ambition of system-
atically documenting the resources of the kingdom, Pontoppidan’s first nat-
ural history of Norway was a work of economics that showed the values of
the Norwegian resources for the benefit of the king. ‘‘If physical knowlege
[sic] be not, like godliness, profitable to all things, yet it is so to many, and
in a certain degree to most things,’’ Pontoppidan wrote in the introduction to
the first book (Pontoppidan 1755, I: v). To Pontoppidan, what he termed
‘‘natural knowledge’’ or ‘‘physical knowledge’’ was useful for the practice
of law; it was also obviously useful for medicine. First and foremost, how-
ever, it was a science (Videnskab) that was useful for those who were going
to educate others on the road to salvation. A theological candidate ought to
study ‘‘physics,’’ Pontoppidan asserted, as well as metaphysical and logical
topics, ‘‘These last not being so indispensably necessary and useful as the
former,’’ argued Pontoppidan (Pontoppidan 1755, I: vi).
For priests who were summoned to a country parish, natural knowledge
will ‘‘not only furnish them with many clear arguments, and edifying reflex-
ions to themselves and their hearers,’’ argues Pontoppidan; ‘‘but it will
besides prove a liberal amusement in their solitude; it will enable them,
by much greater opportunities than the learned enjoy in towns, to make use-
ful discoveries or improvements, from the products of nature, to the lasting
benefit of their country, which it is their duty to promote’’ (Pontoppidan
1755, I: viii). Ambitiously, Pontoppidan also explained to the king’s admin-
istrative body about the importance of knowing Norway. ‘‘It is unquestion-
ably more necessary for our young statesmen, to know Norway and
Sweden, than to be able to decide which merits the preference, the Rhenish,
Italian, French, or Spanish wines,’’ he argued echoing similar statements
made in other European states, most notably Sweden (Pontoppidan 1755,
I: ix, Koerner 1999, compare also Withers 1999 for England and Scotland).
Utility was thus the guiding principle of the book. Few, if any, of the
stones, plants, birds, and animals were described without information about
whether they could be useful in some way or another. Pontoppidan’s
descriptions of many phenomena were indeed basic, yet the usefulness of
these phenomena as resources was considered whenever possible. Whether

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362 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

the theme was vegetables, minerals, or fish, the various chapters opened
with a consideration of how the resources were currently exploited, and
what possible improvements could be considered. On a few occasions, the
author seems to arrest himself in his utility-oriented approach; for example,
in a description of gold and silver in Norwegian mountains, Pontoppidan
notes, ‘‘However, my subject being rather the nature of things than the
benefits of them . . .’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, I:180).
Utility was invoked in many forms in the eighteenth century. ‘‘The value
that the naturalists poured into the parts of nature they studied so attentively
was simultaneously moral, aesthetic, and economic,’’ writes historian of
science Lorraine Daston (2004, 119). Daston goes on to note that the
eighteenth-century word for ‘‘this compound of norms’’ was ‘‘utility’’ and
that perhaps no other shibboleth was so often invoked in so many varied
contexts. ‘‘Utility also permeated natural history, not only in the justifica-
tions of natural history as edifying or . . . profitable, but also in the habits
of observation and the pleasures of attention that marked the naturaliste
de profession’’ (Daston 2004, 119). Pontoppidan was neither a naturalist
by profession nor an attentive dilettante. His vocation derived from Chris-
tian enlightenment based on Lutheran pietism, his chief merit as an author
being his ability to compile and process large amounts of texts and stories.
Still the version of nature he presents is an economic asset to the king, a
treasure house for the royal court and the ministries in Denmark to exploit
and use. Utility is certainly a compound of norms in Pontoppidan’s work,
but these norms are stressed and articulated differently—to some degree
aesthetically, to a larger degree morally, certainly politically and indisputa-
bly economically. Even so, economy was a concept that could subsume
some or all of the other norms, and it definitely subsumed the category of
nature. In Pontoppidan’s work, nature was the most important aspect of
economy.
Pontoppidan’s work was directed at the king and the bureaucracy. Thus
he addressed the ruler with a description of a territory whose treasures were
hidden, riches unknown. He was in line with proponents of cameralist doc-
trines in Northern Europe who took part in making cameralism—the art of
ruling a territory well—into a university subject. The concept of economy
had been transposed from denoting the household, and had increasingly
been used polemically, since the late seventeenth century, to describe the
divine management of creatures and of nature itself in different parts of
Europe (see articles in Schabas and Marchi 2003; Schaffer 2007; Tribe
1978). The cameralist doctrines developed in the German states and
Scandinavia involved making an inventory of resources, deploying them for

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Brenna 363

making the inhabitants happy, and reducing the import of goods and the
export of precious metals (Cooper 2007; Koerner 1999; Tribe 1978). It also
involved developing a new language for describing the kingdoms. Good
government had become dependent on describing and managing nature.
Pontoppidan’s text was one of the very first in Denmark-Norway to knit
together good government and natural resources within a published work.
He was thereby doing the important work of inventing a language that made
connections not only between inhabitants and morals in Norway and the
king in Copenhagen but also between cows, grass and fish, the state, and
the well-being of the kingdom’s inhabitants. These connections were hardly
unique in contemporary Europe, but in Denmark-Norway the work paved
the way for what has been termed a veritable wave of cameralist and
economic publishing. In the years 1757-1764, Pontoppidan was the editor
of Denmark and Norway’s Oeconomic Magazin, which was the first public
forum for discussions of economics in the country and in 1759 he published
Eutropii Philadelphi Oeconomiske Balance—giving an estimate of the
natural and civil wealth of Denmark, according to its subtitle. Seen in this
perspective, the Natural History of Norway was directed at the king who
needed knowledge of nature to manage his household well.

God
Pontoppidan wrote his work to honor God, which is clearly indicated on the
title page: ‘‘In the honour of the wise and almighty Creator, as well as for his
reasonable Creatures for the opportunity for reflection.’’ In this absolutist
monarchy, one honored God and the king, but in Pontoppidan’s natural
history, God plays an especially prominent role. The first natural history
of Norway reads like a sermon emphasizing that one can know God through
the created world. The believer will have his belief strengthened by
thorough knowledge of the physical world because all that is, is created
by God, and thus by studying His work we can know Him better, we can
read Pontoppidan saying. Two of the central tenets of Lutheran pietism
were that true Christianity was there for everyone to experience through the
reading of the Bible and that personal belief was the road to salvation. For
Pontoppidan, the pietistic cause was not contrary to the study of nature. He
explained that one could read the book of nature through using reason.
Thus, science and natural knowledge were auxiliary to theology: ‘‘In the
instructive book of nature are many leaves, which, hitherto, no mortal has
thoroughly perused’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, I: iii). As the chief pietist ideolo-
gue of the state under the reign of Christian VI (Gilje and Rasmussen 2002,

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364 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

316), Pontoppidan had played an important role in enforcing a moderate

pietism on the country, damning dance and theater and praising schooling
and rational education. In his natural history, God was never left out of
sight.
In Pontoppidan’s book, the reader can find evidence of God’s existence
and of His goodness. If nature seems merciless, one has to search for the
reasons, that is, for God’s purpose. Then it will soon appear that there is
a purpose for everything and that this purpose is good. ‘‘As one of my chief
views in this work is,’’ says Pontoppidan, ‘‘according to my shallow knowl-
edge and insight into the harmony of things, to shew that all the works of
God are full of loving kindness, I must here observe that the moist and rainy
weather, which prevails all over the western coast of Norway, but chiefly
about Bergen, is excellently adapted to the necessities of the country, and
in several respects contributes to its welfare’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, 26).
God’s deeds are full of loving kindness, which Pontoppidan claims to prove
scientifically and empirically.
This belief in a purposeful and provident nature was important for the
physico-theology that Pontoppidan preached. In the latter part of the seven-
teenth and the first part of the eighteenth centuries, a long series of books
which provided physico-theological proof of God’s existence were
published in England and on the continent. Pontoppidan salutes William
Derham for having set out the plan of physico-theology. The subtitle of
Derham’s book Physico-theology defined it simply as ‘‘a demonstration
of the being and attributes of God, from his works of creation’’ (Derham
1716). The work of creation was varied, and different authors emphasized
different aspects of God’s work. The aspects mentioned by Pontoppidan
were astro-theology, pyro-, and hydro-theology; bronto-theology; pitano-
theology; acrido-theology; litho- and testaceo-theology, and so on. [theolo-
gies of the heavens, fire, water, thunder and lightning, locusts, stones,
snails, and mussels] (Pontoppidan 1755, I: vii).
A specific set of ideas was manifest in this tradition (based on Philipp
1967; Stebbins 1980, Theologische Realenzyklopädie 1996; Ray 1691;
Derham 1716). First, physico-theology decreed that everything that is cre-
ated is created with a purpose; nothing in nature is a result of chance or
without a plan. Second, the assumption within this tradition was that nature
is good, as also illustrated in Pontoppidan’s work. While earlier Christians
sometimes tended to regard the earth as wreckage left after the deluge, or as
‘‘a small dirty planet’’ in Thomas Burnet’s words in his sacred theory of the
earth from 1684, by the eighteenth century the earth had become a harmo-
nious and balanced home for humans (Porter 2003; see also Nicolson [1959]

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Brenna 365

1997). Third, people had a central place in physico-theology: it was every

person’s duty to know the creation of God and to look after and improve it
because the earth was considered to have been given to humans for their
use. Fourth, according to physico-theology, the earth had a regularity and
followed certain rules, not because it was governed by mathematical laws
but because the earth was created by God.
All these elements of physico-theology were to be found in
Pontoppidan’s work. God’s creation was the result of a plan: ‘‘If it be farther
asked, how it is possible that nature can regulate herself by the necessities of
the inhabitants, . . . I answer, that it is no miracle, but purely the result of
the primary natural disposition of things’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, 15). There
are no miracles in this nature that God had created; rather it was perfectly
planned from the beginning. The duty of the naturalist was to search out the
rules whereby nature works, and these rules were not neutral but absolutely
good as they were put in place by God.
Writing about the Norwegian terrain, Pontoppidan first considers the
inconveniences caused by the mountains before he considers their advan-
tages. The first benefit of mountains which he identifies is that they collect
the clouds and dissolve them into rain, and since mountain water is more
fertilizing than common rainwater, he contends that this makes the small
peasant’s fields ‘‘fat and fertile.’’ Second, he suggests that ‘‘the mountai-
nous countries may be considered as the store-houses or treasuries of pro-
vidence . . . from whence [God] kindly dispenses . . . those metals and
minerals, which have become so indispensable in human life’’
(Pontoppidan 1755, 63). He also contends that the mountains afford shelter
and defense. And finally, according to Pontoppidan, ‘‘these natural fortifi-
cations seem also to be an ornament and decoration to the country . . . In this
respect our country affords the most delightful contrasts in the diversity of
its prospects. And these most magnificent structures of the great architect of
nature, raise and animate the mind of man, by inspiring him with the most
agreeable and the most sublime sentiments’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, 64).
Nature is in this text made for the benefit of man, it is beautiful, and
provides people with happiness and joy. One can deduce how wisely every-
thing is made from studying the fish in the sea. The fish that naturally
breed below the North Pole, ‘‘seem instigated by the Creator to come
forth into the wide ocean for the service of mankind, and as soon as that
happens, toward the end of the year, the Whale, and his associates . . .
stand ready to execute God’s decree, which is to hunt and terrify these
small Fish, and to send them where they are wanted’’ (Pontoppidan
1755, II: 103).

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366 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

Pontoppidan’s natural history is thus a book about God’s creation,

written to praise God and to prove his existence, and executed with the aid
of reason and empirical investigation. This strictly Christian universe
signifies a nature that is perfectly planned and harmonious. The mastermind
behind it ensures both its benevolence and its rationality. In importing a
law-abiding Newtonian nature as popularized in England to Norwegian ter-
ritory, Pontoppidan’s book does astonishingly well, secured as the theory is
by the uniformity of nature. Nevertheless, it is striking how the universal is
translated into the specific Norwegian nature, allowing for a description of
this particular part of God’s nature which proves to be just as good proof of
God’s might as more cultivated landscapes of Europe. Divination works
everywhere, and Pontoppidan manages to insert religious value into the
barren Norwegian cliffs and the icy North Pole. This was in fact quite an
accomplishment, hinging on the possibility of literally transposing English
clergymen’s praise of the mountains onto other territories. This transposi-
tion was secured by the God who seems to be the same everywhere.

The Marketplace
Pontoppidan also offered his book to the market. This market focused on a
specific commodity, namely natural history books. The emerging public
sphere, in the form of an arena for the exchange of words, was a prerequisite
for the flourishing natural historical book market. This book production was
also connected to a market for collecting, exchanging, and talking about
natural historical objects. Natural history was not an institutionalized disci-
pline in Denmark-Norway as in most other European countries (see e.g.,
Allen 2001; Cooper 2007; Sparry 1999 and 2000). Instead, natural history
was a sport for those who had their means of living from other sources.
Pontoppidan was part of a network of people who used their time to collect
curiosities and natural objects, and the book market was tightly interwoven
with trade in natural objects. Objects that used to have places of honor in the
cabinets of curiosities of princes and nobles in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries were now becoming part of a broader bourgeois and upper-class
culture (Smith and Findlen 2002; Pomian 1990). Rare and unknown objects
were pouring in from the New World, while native European treasures were
also increasingly collected for both their exchange and exhibitionary value.
This was a strongly commercialized culture, and the objects were admired
as much for their high price as for their natural characteristics. Pontoppidan
addressed this market on several occasions, as when he mentions the high
price of the unicorn horn (before it was determined that it actually was a

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Brenna 367

narwhale’s tusk). He also tells readers about the serpent, a young dragon
with seven heads and necks, thick body and four legs, which he once saw
in Hamburg. The price of this object, in its time plundered from Prague, was
considerable (Pontoppidan 1755, II: 37-38). This young dragon was known
by naturalists throughout Europe as one of the last fabricated and fantastic
animals considered real; significantly its price was its most important claim
to fame (see Findlen 2002).
Upon leaving Copenhagen for Norway in 1748, Pontoppidan had sold
half of his library as well as his manuscripts, natural objects, prints, and
antiquities, which earned him a considerable sum of money (Neiiendam
1930-1933, 142). In Norway, his collection soon increased again. In The
Natural History of Norway, he stated that in his study he had a small collec-
tion ‘‘of naturals of Norway, such as stones, ores, fossils, sea-trees, corals,
snails, muscles, uncommon birds, fishes, and the like’’ (Pontoppidan 1755,
I: xvii). New objects were collected on his visitation journeys or sent by
clergymen and correspondents from different parts of Norway. Pontoppidan
obviously found his position as a superintendent of the Church useful for
gaining access to curiosities from his diocese: a bishop was a receiver in
a network of gifts—historically these were natural goods for his kitchen, now
they were specimens for his cabinet (for the ways bishops could become
collectors and naturalists through their church networks see Andersen et al.
2009; Brenna 2011).
The market for books on natural history was also burgeoning around the
mid-eighteenth century (Allen 2001). To sell broadly, the books needed to
have illustrations and they had to be written in the vernacular. Pontoppidan’s
work was a book for this market, as it was written in Danish at a time when
Latin and German were the languages of the learned community and Danish
was the predominant language for religious books in Denmark-Norway.
Pontoppidan’s text also addressed, however, an audience beyond the
borders of the kingdom. Soon after its publication in Copenhagen, the book
was published in both English and German. Pontoppidan addressed this for-
eign public, ‘‘I have endeavoured to rectify the erroneous idea which many,
even among the learned, have, for want of better information, formed of
several, in themselves very wonderful natural phænomena, here in Norway;
such as a bottomless sea-abyss growing in the Moskoe-strom, penetrating
quite thro’ the globe; of ducks growing on trees . . . and many other such
things, which, some who have had no opportunity of enquiring further, or
others who were not disposed to it, have received as undoubted facts. The
reader will meet with many strange, singular, and unexpected things, here,
but all of them strictly true. . .’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, I: vi).

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368 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

While Pontoppidan had an ambition to tell the truth, he neither could nor
would make Norway too common and plain. Instead, he retold the histories
of those wonderful and strange phenomena and theories that earlier authors
had brought forward (e.g., that Scylla and Charybdis were actually located
in the north of Norway). After presenting pages of curious stories, he would
conclude that they were not to be trusted; in this way he managed both to
tell appealing stories and to challenge mythical images of Norway.
Pontoppidan’s work addresses an audience with money to buy illustrated
and bound volumes for pleasurable reading. There is, however, no reason to
conclude that Pontoppidan wrote his natural history for financial reasons.
Yet his ability to draw on cultures of collecting, on natural histories and
a craze for curiosities and the exotic was a prerequisite for getting the book
published and translated into foreign languages. Pontoppidan’s book was
instrumental in creating and opening up this market of the rare, the strange,
and the exotic, where strange facts from Norwegian nature would be
welcomed. Nature as related by Pontoppidan became a collectable rarity,
a pleasurable pastime, and a treasure house of stories.

The Republic of Letters

Finally, Pontoppidan published a book that expressed a strong conviction
about the necessity, utility, and desirability of improving ‘‘natural knowl-
edge,’’ a term which for him could encompass both natural philosophy and
natural history. By arguing with notable academics and natural philosophers
such as Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz, as well as a host of lesser known
scholars, Pontoppidan’s text inserts itself into what he called the Republic
of Letters, which was his term to denote a European-wide community of
learned men. Our concern here is not whether this community upheld their
ideals or whether it actually constituted a community; what is of importance
is how Pontoppidan addresses a learned public which he assumes could
appreciate the breadth of his learning, the novelty of his reports, the order
of his thoughts, and the strength of his arguments. As stated on the title
page, the book was ‘‘Interspersed with Physiological Notes from eminent
Writers, and Transactions of Academies.’’ The awkwardness of this
sentence aside, the author is clearly indicating here that he was a man who
was knowledgeable about the books, most important journals, and debates
in the community of the learned.
Like most other natural histories of the period, Pontoppidan’s was a nat-
ural history which heralded experience, improvements in knowledge, and
enlightenment. Regardless of their differences, natural historians observed,

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Brenna 369

described, and classified the visible world, paying particular attention to

qualities such as color and form. It was this league of scholars to whom
Pontoppidan addressed his text and footnotes. He emphasized recent prog-
ress in knowledge: ‘‘[T]he present times are blest with the happy advantage
of all the important discoveries made in natural philosophy, since the com-
mencement of this century, which are superior in number and merit to those
of many preceding ages’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, I: 3). ‘‘Improvement’’ was a
key word in his portrayal of knowledge. In his view, the main contributors
to the improvement of knowledge were learned societies, which also were
responsible for communicating and making knowledge publicly available.
Pontoppidan himself was among the founding fathers of the Danish Society
of Sciences in Copenhagen in 1742, and he had published widely on Church
history, and on antiquarianism, in addition to his devotional writings. These
writings voiced his desire to communicate knowledge, to make knowledge
travel, and to enlighten others. In an absolutist monarchy with a strict
censorship, this bishop also insisted: ‘‘let no one imagine that a difference
of opinion, decently delivered, will give me any offence, or trouble; the dis-
covery of truth, is in this and every other respect, my chief end’’ (Pontoppidan
1755, I: xi). This is a statement which is hard to accept at face value. On two
occasions, it was publicly known that Pontoppidan was willing to use his
strong connections to the court to stop others from writing critically about his
work (see Brenna 2009). In principle, however, this book was engaged in a
free exchange of ideas and was open to critique. Pontoppidan suggested that
thoughts and facts should be announced in the public realm and put on trial,
which would lead to progress.
As a contribution to the field of natural knowledge, the purpose of the
book was not to tell fables or excite the admiration of the reader, but rather
to correct misconceptions and contribute to the coming of a new age. ‘‘I live
in an age,’’ Pontoppidan states, ‘‘which not content with mere hypotheses,
unsupported by proofs, requires that every fact or position, which is
advanced as real, be at least demonstrated possible, and consonant to the
nature of the things in question’’ (Pontoppidan 1755, I: xi). One significant
problem was how to relate to the testimonies of others. It was impossible to
rely wholly on one’s own experiences, even for Pontoppidan who traveled
widely on his visitation journeys. Criteria for deciding whom to trust had to
be established (Withers 1999; Shapin 1994). Pontoppidan’s method was
connected to his pietistic Lutheran insistence on the rationality of all
humans. In Pontoppidan’s insistence that everyone could and should read
the book of nature, one can hear an echo of the proclamation that everyone
could and should read the Bible. However, there are differences between

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370 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

people’s knowledges, and the practice of establishing knowledge had to be

adjusted to this. While his role as a bishop brought him into contact with the
common people, and he appreciated the information they conveyed to him,
these common people were not in themselves authoritative when it came to
establishing facts about nature. ‘‘Their answers to my several questions, I
afterwards examine with the ministers of the parishes, or some other person
well acquainted with the country, and whatever I hear confirmed by several
testimonies, or not controverted, or doubted of, I enter among my miscella-
neous observations, and, at my return home, compare them with the descrip-
tions of such countries, especially the mountaineous, or which are in any
other respect analogous to Norway’’ (Withers 1999; Shapin 1994). The last
method of establishing the truth that Pontoppidan applies is based on refer-
ence to the natural objects in his own collection; they could furnish the
reader with a visual record that was a warrant for truth.
As he evaluated his sources and thoroughly described the steps he
followed in establishing knowledge, Pontoppidan thus proved to be a good
man of knowledge. At certain times, however, stronger authorizations were
necessary. The most circumstantial of these were to be found in the chapter
on certain monstris marinis, or strange and uncommon sea animals (in
Pontoppidan 1755: II, Chapter VIII). Here Pontoppidan treads on uncertain
ground, as he knew that his reputation as a natural historian might easily be
destroyed when he insisted on the existence of these animals. By the mid-
eighteenth century, many of the strange beings that had straddled earlier
natural histories had been established as fanciful inventions and fables. One
cannot be too incredulous, Pontoppidan states, also noting the danger of
ignoring the truth by refusing to believe something unexpected or unusual
when it is actually probable according to the laws of nature (Pontoppidan
1755: II, 185). As Daston and Park note, as early as the end of the seven-
teenth century it had become the norm to include a new criterion for authen-
tication in addition to the traditional and legalistic, namely the probability
of the observation (Daston and Park 1998). This approach is also the most
important tool for Pontoppidan in his discussion on the strange sea crea-
tures, when he asks if it plausible that these seamen exist. His answer is yes,
based on the fact that there are many creatures on land which have their par-
allel in the sea, such as sea horses, sea cows, and sea wolves. Since there are
human-like animals on land, such as monkeys and ‘‘orangutans,’’ it is just as
possible that they will exist in the sea.
Throughout his work, Pontoppidan thus negotiates the truths of nature. A
crucial question is how he can ascertain the truth of his versions of nature.
Through his ‘‘method,’’ that is, his way of reading, interrogating witnesses,

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Brenna 371

and collecting natural objects as means of authentication, he established

ways of convincing his readers of the veracity of his account. The work was
directed to a learned and curious public that he invited to correct and expand
upon the observations he had made. His authority also rested, however,
upon his connection to God and the king, and these connections also helped
ensure the authority of the text. As the Danish title indicates, the first natural
history of Norway provides us with a trustworthy account of Norwegian
nature because the well-connected Pontoppidan wrote it. But what is this
nature?

Tensions among Natures

I started by asking whether we could say that the different contexts this
work makes for itself also imply the enactment of different natures and
whether nature was done in different ways. What I have been trying to show
is that the book seems to enact a nature of the king, of God, of the market-
place, and the Republic of Letters. I have identified four narratives of nature
that have connected Pontoppidan’s text to the different audiences it
addresses. I have claimed that we encounter nature as a national entity and
an economic resource. The king and his subjects can use this nature to pro-
duce food, to find export goods, and secure incomes. Nature is useful as a
geographical and physical unit, which is united already in the title: the nat-
ural history of Norway. What are the relations to the nature of God? The
economy of nature is an important part of the religious enactment of it. The
divine economy of nature and the economic government of the king are so
to say created for each other. Natural harmony and divine order were part
and parcel of enlightened government of the territory, as Pontoppidan’s nat-
ural history sets out. That does not mean that they are necessarily the same.
Divine harmony pertains to a nature created to perform certain tasks to ful-
fill God’s plans; it is directed toward a future, and it is also dependent on a
source of action that one cannot know—the path of God is unknowable. The
king’s plans were of course not public; still, the work of Pontoppidan along-
side other economic treatises published during the 1750s was to lay the
foundation for a rational government in which the resources were known
and the kinds of actions necessary to utilize them were public. A rational
nature was thus promoted by Pontoppidan’s book along with and inter-
twined with a nature which functioned as a sacred machine whose engine
could not and should not ever be known.
The nature which Pontoppidan brought to the marketplace as a commod-
ity is not necessarily opposed to these other natures. As a commodity, an

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372 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

account of natural history should be entertaining, and Pontoppidan’s stories

indicate his desire to entertain. This nature thus attracts the attention of
those with a sense for the bizarre and unexpected. Nature becomes an exotic
asset of Norway, and this would of course give more return in a market for
natural history as a commodity wrapped in paper or as curious specimens.
Indeed, it would not be possible to enact a too oppositional nature within the
rules of censorship, as the natures which were described by ‘‘atheists, deists,
and materialists’’ were banned.3 Nonetheless, strange phenomena abounded
on the pages of Pontoppidan’s work. They could be known rationally, but
they were presented and reflected upon to a degree that was obviously
important for making this an ‘‘entertaining’’—to use his own words—piece
of work. Delight was not only to be had by delving into the harmony of
things ordinary, but by being told stories that could evoke sentiments—the
bears tearing out baby boys from the wombs of females, the Kraken, a sea
animal the size of an island, and swallows resting on the bottom of lakes. He
fills pages with what he himself believes are fanciful descriptions of the
phenomena. He might do this to correct erroneous beliefs about the nature
of Norway, as he states, but the number of pages he uses for the descriptions
belies this. This last point is important—that the exoticism involved also
participates in an identification of a territory delineated as Norwegian.
The sciences, Videnskaberne in the broad German–Scandinavian sense
of the term, enact nature differently. In terms of a natural history that
addresses the Republic of Letters, Pontoppidan’s work reveals a strong
desire to identify with a field of knowledge that is concerned with nature
as an object of systematic investigation. Things are ordered in ways that are
not always in accordance with the latest methods within the different fields,
plants according to the alphabet, for example, a rather crude categorization
system. However, this does not mean that Pontoppidan disapproves of or is
unaware of other systems of classification. The chapters on animals are
introduced with a discussion on different classification methods, where
Linnaeus and Buffon are his main sources, and Pontoppidan chooses, as
he claims Buffon does, to classify the animals according to their usefulness
to humans (Pontoppidan 1755: II, 1-2). The book thus plays out a natural
order that is open to different approaches and that can be ordered in a
philosophical way, not always according to human usefulness, even if that
is what it most often ends up being. Nonetheless, the emphasis on discuss-
ing and formulating different approaches shows his allegiance to rational
discussion.
The tension between this nature and the marketplace nature is striking:
whereas the curious stories tell of how people practice nature, how they live

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Brenna 373

with and off nature, this science-nature is analytical in the sense that it
divides the natural into different departments, into species, sorts, kinds, and
things. This is a different nature from the utility-nature which is involved in
the king’s government. There the fishing gear is more important than the
color of the fish, the mining machines more important than the name of the
minerals. Both the marketplace and the king are served a nature where
humans, animals, and matter are interwoven and intertwined in histories
that make them unthinkable without each other.
One effect of the many natures is that the book could serve different
communities; it had an important Wirkungsgeschichte in varied realms. A
genre of topographical literature which described in detail different places
and regions of the country came into being in the wake of Pontoppidan’s
natural historical work, and in this genre Pontoppidan’s book was to have
a huge influence (Supphellen 1979). This genre was used by local state
employees to prove their usefulness as citizens of the state and to help pave
their way to promotion by the king (Supphellen 1979). Pontoppidan’s book
also served as a travel guide for gentleman explorer–tourists of Norway
well into the nineteenth century (Clarke 1977; Coxe 1975). The fact that
it was available in English made for its international fame, as did its descrip-
tions of curious animals. After having inspired sea monster poetry and fic-
tion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pontoppidan’s work is still
cited as the first scientific description of sea monsters. In the Republic of
Letters, the book made a name for Pontoppidan. Even if he was never
proclaimed a great naturalist, Pontoppidan was recognized as the first to
describe a number of birds, as for example the common guillemot. Theolo-
gically, other books by Pontoppidan, such as his Catechism from 1737 (still
reprinted) and his textbook for holding sermons from 1757 (Collegium
Pastorale Practicum), would have a much greater impact than his
physico-theological approach. Yet within all these fields of knowledge, the
various natures of Pontoppidan can be discerned.

Conclusions, Contexts, and Natures

Why these contexts? Why these natures? Historians of science often work
to establish why one object comes into being, or rather they insist on the
historical contingency of one particular object. Versions of actor-network
theory (Law 2004; Mol 2002; Moser 2003) insist on the possibility of the
simultaneous existence of more than one version of an object, which has
inspired me to look for more than one nature enacted on the pages of
Pontoppidan’s book. This approach depends on an openness to there being

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374 Science, Technology, & Human Values 37(4)

more than one context for the work. Talking about more than one nature and
more than one context could be viewed as a cheap trick for not deciding
which aspect of the social, political, and cultural context of Pontoppidan’s
work is important—and what nature was made to be. There are, however,
strong reasons for insisting on more than one fabric, on threads that do not
always make up discernible patterns and that do not always come together
in the same fabric, even if they are there in the same book. The reason for
this strategy relates to the complexity of historical change. Like the
cherished genre of ‘‘period rooms’’ in museums, a ‘‘period culture’’ or a
‘‘period nature’’ would be static and ghostlike. A ‘‘period room’’ represents
one version of how a culture might look like at one particular time in
history. Works of art, furniture, household utensils, and architecture are
assembled in the one, accepted version of a culture’s way of life. While
period rooms can be good pedagogic tools for conveying a sense of how
things once were different from today, they are less useful for providing
an understanding of the complexities of culture, nature, human–nature
relationships, and of how historical changes come about. Identifying
different enactments of nature is not a means of explaining change, but
this is a way of showing that what nature is connected to is vital for
understanding what it is and how it may change. Although these con-
nections may be multifaceted and difficult to discern, they may appear
literally in the same work.
The tools I have used to establish Pontoppidan’s natures are four narra-
tives where the audiences that were addressed provide the connections to
the contexts which are viewed as important. My claim is that an analysis
which stresses different types of connections draws attention to the power
relations involved in describing nature. The different contexts that enact
natures in Pontoppidan’s book are fraught with power: the power of the
king, the literati, religion, and the marketplace. My attempt to disentangle
these contexts and the way natures are enacted differently in relation to
them is also a way of highlighting the contested nature of nature. Pontoppi-
dan’s book enacts nature in different ways that do not always fit easily
together, and the ways they do not fit have been important for later versions
of Norwegian nature. Insisting that these natures are not one, but many, also
opens for the possibility of understanding the different contexts that made
some natures politically powerful, while others were relegated to different
territories inhabited by, for example, women, farmers, bears, and sea
serpents. These territories and creatures are all there in Pontoppidan’s text,
but their territories are made exotic or marginal in later versions of these
natures.

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Brenna 375

Acknowledgement
In working with this article I am particularily thankful to Kristin Asdal, John Law,
Ingunn Moser, Lars Risan, Erling Sandmo and Jane Summerton for lively and
thought-provoking discussions about natures and contexts. I am also grateful for the
period of five months I was allowed to conduct research as a visiting post.doc. at the
Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Germany.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was conducted
as part of my post.doc. position at the Center for Technology, Innovation and
Culture, at the University of Oslo, Norway.

Notes
1. The Danish volumes appeared in 1752 and 1753, the English and German trans-
lations in 1755. In this article, I will refer to the English 1755 edition, which
accounts for the awkwardness of some of the English spelling and vocabulary
in my quotes. As the English version is a text of two volumes in one book I will
refer to them as I and II.
2. Pontoppidan’s Visitation Protocols are in The National Archives Central Office
in Oslo, material related to his stay in Bergen is found in The Regional State
Archives in Bergen, and further documents are found in the Manuscript Depart-
ment at the Royal Danish Library in Copenhagen. The best account of his life and
work is Neiiendam 1930-1933, a two-volume biography.
3. Pontoppidan was exempted from censorship as a bishop of Bergen, which meant
that he would not need an imprimateur from the University in Copenhagen. This
was of course contingent on his ability to perform self-censorship.

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Bio
Brita Brenna is a professor of Museology at the Centre for Museum Studies at the
University of Oslo. She has written on World’s Fairs in the nineteenth century and
on Norwegian natural history in the eigteenth century with a special emphasis on
two fields; landscape representations and collecting practices. Her current interest
is in museum glass cases. A recent publication is Routes, Roads and Landscapes
with Mari Hvattum, Beate Elvebakk and Janike Kampevold Larsen, Ashgate 2011.

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