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Chrysalis: Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis Paperback – Bargain Price, December 3, 2007

by Kim Todd (Author)

4.3 81 ratings

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Today, an entomologist in a laboratory can gaze at a butterfly pupa with a microscope so powerful that the swirling cells on the pupa’s skin look like a galaxy. She can activate a single gene or knock it out. What she can’t do is discover how the insect behaves in its natural habitat—which means she doesn’t know what steps to take to preserve it from extinction, nor how any particular gene may interact with the environment. Four hundred years ago, a fifty-year-old Dutch woman set sail on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis. She could not have imagined the routine magic that scientists perform today—but her absolute insistence on studying insects in their natural habitats was so far ahead of its time that it is only now coming back into favor. Chrysalis restores Maria Sibylla Merian to her rightful place in the history of science, taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to the Surinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merian’s insights fuel new approaches to both ecology and genetics.

Print length

352 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Mariner Books
Publication date

December 3, 2007
Dimensions

8.02 x 5.41 x 0.86 inches
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Editorial Reviews

Review

PRAISE FOR CHRYSALIS

"Todd's book is a portrait of the metamorphosis of an age, a society, and a woman whose passion to see the world through the metaphor of moths and butterflies would not abate. The illustrations reproduced in this fine biography affirm Merian's vision; the range of Todd's research and the eloquence of her writing give that vision voice."--Maurice Manning, BookForum

"In this spellbinding biography, Todd interweaves the life of Maria Sibylla Merian, a German artist and naturalist who became famous in the seventeenth century for her engravings of caterpillars, with the intellectual and scientific history of metamorphosis."--The New Yorker

From the Inside Flap

An artist turned naturalist known today mostly for her exquisite insect and butterfly prints, Maria Sibylla Merian was born just thirteen years after Galileo was prosecuted for proclaiming the earth orbited the sun. But in 1699, more than a century before Darwin or Humboldt, she sailed from Amsterdam to South America on an expedition to study metamorphosis. It was an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less a woman, and she undertook it at the age of 52 -- with only her daughter for company.

For two years, she stalked the tropical wilderness, looking for the caterpillars that were her passion, sketching her discoveries on scraps of parchment. Her careful observations of iridescent blue morpho butterflies and giant flying cockroaches made her one of the first to describe metamorphosis -- at a time when theories of spontaneous generation still held sway (old snow gave birth to flies; raindrops yielded frogs) -- and laid the groundwork for modern-day biological science, particularly ecology. But her accomplishments were mostly dismissed and then forgotten in the nineteenth century, when scientists feared that they would be discredited if they built on the work of "amateurs."

Now Kim Todd has restored Merian to her rightful place in the beautifully written and illustrated Chrysalis. Taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to the sweltering rain forests of Surinam to the modern laboratories where Merian's insights fuel a new branch of biology, Kim Todd brings to life an amazing seventeenth-century woman whose boldness and vision would still be exceptional today.

From the Back Cover

"Fascinating reading about a little-known, independent woman."--Science

Today, an entomologist in a laboratory can gaze at a butterfly pupa with a microscope so powerful that the swirling cells on the pupa’s skin look like a galaxy. She can activate a single gene or knock it out. What she can’t do is discover how the insect behaves in its natural habitat—which means she doesn’t know what steps to take to preserve it from extinction, nor how any particular gene may interact with the environment.
Three hundred years ago, a fifty-two year-old German woman set sail on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis. She could not have imagined the routine magic that scientists perform today—but her absolute insistence on studying insects in their natural habitats was so far ahead of its time that it is only now coming back into favor. Chrysalis restores Maria Sibylla Merian to her rightful place in the history of science, taking us from golden-age Amsterdam to the Surinam tropics to modern laboratories where Merian’s insights fuel new approaches to both ecology and genetics.

"What makes Chrysalis such a pleasure is that our awe is guided by Merian's discoveries. Her life was dedicated to understanding and depicting the science of transformation, yet she never lost her enchantment with what few of us could deny is also miraculous."--Orion

"This lovely and thoughtful book sets Maria Merian's work in its natural context, restoring its true meaning and the reputation she deserves."--Andrea Barrett, author of The Voyage of the Narwhal

Kim Todd's previous book, Tinkering with Eden, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Sigurd F. Olsen Nature Writing Award. Her essays and articles have appeared in Sierra, Orion, Backpacker, and Grist, among other places. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

About the Author

KIM TODD's previous book, Tinkering with Eden, received the PEN/Jerard Fund Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, among others. She has an MFA in creative writing and an MS in environmental studies from the University of Montana. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER ONE
The Most Noble
of All the Worms
How many creatures walking on this earth
Have their first being in another form?
—Ovid, Metamorphoses

Frankfurt am Main, 1647– 1665

A nother pupa, another time. Cocoon walls, thick with silk, wrapped their contents tight. Inside, the organs altered. The mouth disappeared. The white body darkened, turned dusky gold. Pressed between the wings, the antennae waited to sense the morning.
At a table near dawn, the girl watched and gripped her paintbrush. She’d woken early enough this day to catch the adult moth dissolving the silk strands and pushing them aside. Other times she got up too late or waited and waited, grown cramped from sitting still. How to capture the thin threads swathing the oval, the precise folds of the pupa? Once out, the moth changed so fast, shifting from second to second as it dried. It was hard to move her wrist quickly enough to make the black lines of scrabbling legs.
This pale silkworm, its dowdy moth, drew her in. At thirteen, she may have felt her own innards alter, traced a finger over a face now unfamiliar in the mirror. It’s the time when the young most anticipate a spectacular transformation, hoping for a future saturated with color, shimmering with iridescence. But she had chosen to focus not on some gaudy butterfly, but this dowdy little insect. Those strands, so thin, so strong, that wrapped the cocoon, tied the worm to stockings, and skirts and hair ribbons, bound it to daily life. It was a practical choice, though no one could call this activity practical. She labeled the silkworm “the most useful and noble of all worms and caterpillars.”
Between chores, she cared for her subjects. In the chill of early spring when the mulberry leaves were not yet in bloom, she raised the caterpillars on lettuce. She built them cone-shaped paper houses where they could spin their cocoons, covering the insects if a storm threatened. Thunder made them ill. So many things could go wrong: a room too cold, leaves wet and rotten, eggs that collapsed and failed to hatch, a clumsy finger brushing scales off the wings.
But eventually she captured the whole process, egg to adult. It was an odd picture, not like any her stepfather showed her—full still-life paintings where a moth might echo a color used on a flower petal, or more humble engravings where beetles and butterflies of many species crowded together. Just the simple insect, alone with all its stages. The wings, crumpled like paper, not fully dry. The adult tipped forward, as if still finding its legs. A tiny caterpillar, no longer than a thumbnail, inching across the page. A larger version, fat on mulberry leaves, made of bleached white segments, large as teeth. The pupa lay curved and motionless, wrapped like a mummy in its hard casing, covering the knots of nerve as they came undone to reform in another shape.
As she rinsed her hands and rubbed her brush to clean it, she probably couldn’t say what pulled her to gather all these parts and paint them together, condensing and stopping time for a moment. More likely her thoughts jumped to the unknown striped caterpillar she glimpsed along the riverbank, whether she could find another, how to raise it, when she could do it again.

While curiosity could be suspect, even dangerous, in a girl, Maria Sibylla Merian was born into the ideal household for an inquisitive mind. Her father, Matthaus Merian the Elder, owned a thriving Frankfurt publishing house, specializing in books illustrated with lavish pictures and maps engraved by him, his children (including Matthaus the Younger), his sons-in-law, and apprentices.
Maria Merian’s early childhood would have been punctuated by the clatter of the printing press, the heart of the business and family enterprise. Peering into the workshop, she could watch her father or brothers selecting type or planning the next season’s catalog. Trays of metal letters of different fonts and sizes lay jumbled on shelves. Printed sheets hung overhead like laundry out to dry. Murmurs of conversation of visiting artists and buyers curled in the corners of rooms. Hired workmen in smocks bustled around the printing press itself, a hulking machine that looked like a bookcase straddling a table, often braced with boards against the ceiling, with scissors and a hammer dangling off the front. On the table lay three boards hinged together, like a triptych on its back. One man smeared ink on the letters arranged in a tray, called a “coffin,” that made up one of the three sections. The other put the paper on the middle board, cushioned with blankets or padding. The final panel, just a hollow frame, contained another piece of paper, with holes cut for the text to go through. It sopped up any spills. The frame folded over the paper, which folded over the coffin, and one man slid the whole stack under the press. Then he grabbed the handle called the devil’s tail and screwed a plank down to meet the coffin, banging the text against the paper. This way, they produced 200 pages an hour.
The press’s ability to spread information so rapidly made it invaluable but also gave it the taint of subversion. The business depended on the dreaming up of fresh ideas, always a risky endeavor when the only reading material above suspicion was the Bible. Some had doubts about whether anyone but ministers should read even that. A refuge for scientists, religious minorities, and visionaries, a publisher’s workshop drew free thinkers of every stripe. Whether the writers wanted to publicize discoveries about the mechanism of the human heart or incite a religious revolution, they needed the type, the paper, and the press, to have any influence. The astronomer Johannes Kepler, when he wasn’t contemplating the orbits of planets or the movement of the tides, lingered at the printers where his books were in progress, looking over tables and evaluating illustrations. It was a coffee house before anyone in Europe drank coffee, where the heady brew was ink. The Merians themselves had their own secrets. The whole extended family comprised refugees from one place or another. The publishing house was launched in the late 1500s by the de Bry family, Calvinists who fled Belgium when Catholics took over. Theodor de Bry, the founder and noted engraver, passed the company on to his son Johann Theodor de Bry. As a young man, Matthaus Merian, originally from Basle, worked for Johann Theodor and eventually married his daughter, Maria Magdelena. Though Matthaus wasn’t the most obvious successor (he had moved away and other sons-in-law were more involved in the day-to-day operations), de Bry’s widow must have respected his business instincts, because she helped ensure that Matthaus took over theprint shop when his father-in-law died in 1623. Matthaus split the company assets (backlogs of books and engraved copper plates) with another son-in-law, but Matthaus got by far the more valuable share.
When his first wife died, Matthaus quickly remarried, wedding Johanna Sibylla Heim. About Johanna Heim, not much is known: her family were Walloons (French-speaking residents of a region of Belgium), who moved to Hanau, where her brother served as a preacher. Since Hanau was a Calvinist city, the Heims were probably also fleeing religious persecution. By the time Johanna and Matthaus’s daughter, Maria Sibylla, was born in April 1647, many of Matthaus Merian’s older children from his first marriage were adults, skilled artists themselves. The youngest in a family with two half brothers and two half sisters in their twenties, a half sister in her late teens and another half brother who was twelve, the young Maria Merian risked being underfoot.
Later, biographers writing just after she died would say this youngest daughter was her father’s favorite, that as the toddler raced around with outstretched fingers, he prophesied Maria would ensure the name “Merian” lived on in fame. They said her mother worried over her odd and dirty interest in insects, an obsession thought to have been launched when Johanna looked at a collection of bugs while Maria was in her womb. Sensitive and porous, the pregnant body let in all sorts of impressions—sight of a lame beggar could result in a child with a damaged foot and an unmet desire for strawberries could leave a strawberry-colored mark.
Other rumors said Merian raised her caterpillars in the attic and stole a tulip from a neighbor’s garden to paint. And that the neighbor was so enchanted by her artwork, that he forgave the girl for taking the flower and asked only for the picture in exchange. Who knows if it’s true? But it shows what admirers wanted to believe about the girl who would become such an exceptional woman: Her rule-breaking and blazing talent were apparent from the first.
Whether or not Matthaus Merian recognized his artistic gifts in his youngest daughter, he would surely have recognized his face. The planes of the cheekbones, the long nose, the mouth—a little too wide, a little too thin—that looked clamped down on some funny secret. The likeness was as apparent as if an engraving had been run through the printing press twice, with a few revisions, with a span of years in between, but the main lines clear and unaltered.
Copyright © 2007 by Kim Todd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be submitted online at www.harcourt...

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B0025VL8YO
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Mariner Books (December 3, 2007)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 352 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 8.02 x 5.41 x 0.86 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #8,298,023 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,700 in Biology of Butterflies
- #5,459 in Plant & Animal Art (Books)
- #12,108 in Artist & Architect Biographies

Customer Reviews:
4.3 81 ratings

About the author

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Kim Todd

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Kim Todd is an award-winning science and history writer.

Her most recent book is SENSATIONAL, THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF AMERICA'S "GIRL STUNT REPORTERS" (HarperCollins 2021), a vivid work of narrative nonfiction that brings to light the writers who went undercover and into danger to expose the rot at the heart of the Gilded Age. Kirkus called it “An engaging and enlightening portrait of trailblazers who ‘challenged…views of what a woman should be.’”

Previous books include SPARROW (Reaktion 2012). Part of Reaktion Books popular "Animal Series," SPARROW explores the history and natural history of this much loved, much hated bird.

CHRYSALIS, MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN AND THE SECRETS OF METAMORPHOSIS (Harcourt, 2007) looks at the life of a pioneering explorer/ naturalist who traveled to South America in 1699 to study insect metamorphosis. The story also traces ideas about metamorphosis through time. The New Yorker called it a “spellbinding biography,” and Kirkus said CHRYSALIS was “a breathtaking example of scholarship and storytelling.” It was selected as one of 25 “Books to Remember” for 2008 by the New York Public Library. Research for CHRYSALIS led her to Surinam to retrace Merian's steps through the rain forest.

Her first book, TINKERING WITH EDEN, A NATURAL HISTORY OF EXOTIC SPECIES IN AMERICA (W.W. Norton 2001), tells the stories of non-native species and how they arrived in the United States. Species covered range from pigeons, brought over by some of the earliest colonists, to starlings, imported by a man who wanted to bring all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to Central Park. The book explores our developing understanding of exotic species as we become more aware of the potential problems they may pose for native ecosystems. TINKERING WITH EDEN received the PEN/ Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and was selected as one of Booklist’s Top Ten Science/ Technical Books for 2001.

Todd has lectured extensively about Merian, women in history, and the intersection of history and biology, including talks at the Getty Museum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Denver Botanical Gardens, and Wellesley College.

She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two children. Please visit her at www.kimtodd.net.

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Kindle Customer

Enjoyed the first half

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 13, 2023

Verified Purchase

The first half of the book is an interesting, rich read of Merian's life. Second half is more about the insects she discovered.

Pleasantly suprised

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 24, 2013

Verified Purchase

This turned aout to be a lot more interesting than I tought it was going to be. I was interested in reading about her time as a Labadist because I have people in my family who were also Labadists.

There were some good things about this book.

1) Kudos to the author. I would like to know how she found her info and details, but she did a great job of opening that world view up to the reader.
2) I was amazed by the belief about where animals, and insects came from. It really made me appreciate how difficult it must have been to be a scientist at that period in time and a woman too. I really got to see how superstition prevailed in the Middle Ages and how ignorant we were as a species of life itself.

I am not good about writing long product reviews but this book is a keeper for me. I'm glad I found it.

12 people found this helpful

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 8, 2021

Verified Purchase

Learned a lotThe author does a wonderful job I’m describing a person I had not known about and the contributions she made. Very important knowledge

Excellently researched; but still a very readable biography!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 16, 2021

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My further education and fascination with biology, botany, and eighteen century largely unsung women heros!

2 people found this helpful

Brief history fleshed out with ponderings

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 8, 2017

Verified Purchase

Apparently not enough historical data survives to write a thorough biography of this remarkable 18th naturalist . The author has filled her pages with general historical information and "what if" surmises. Okay for a person with little knowledge of the period but not okay for a person seeking biographical data.

3 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Excited to read this!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 23, 2014

Verified Purchase

First of all, I love the work of Maria Sibylla Merian. I also love the Mottahedeh tableware pattern inspired by her work and called "Merian". So far, this book is a delight to read and the author truly has a gift with words. I received this very soon after placing my order and the book arrived in even better condition than described.

7 people found this helpful

Required reading for entomologists and ecologists

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 31, 2017

Verified Purchase

Another hidden female figure of science uncovered. I wish I had read about Merian as a girl and had her alongside Jane Goodall as a role model. Unconventional women making strides in field research and consequentially changing our understanding of the natural world.

8 people found this helpful

this book has all of these as well as a great story.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 24, 2017

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History, art, botany, biography...this book has all of these as well as a great story.

One person found this helpful

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L. Taylor

Detailed biography, packed with context.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on March 20, 2023

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Very well researched. Excellent biography of the life & work of MSM, set fully in the context of European life at the time & the research of others.

DyslexicTess

easy to read and telling a story I had never ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on April 23, 2016

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Loving this book... easy to read and telling a story I had never heard of.

One person found this helpful

Heliopete

a joy to read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 10, 2015

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an inspiring book ,a joy to read.

Matilde

Correcto. Tal cual como se ve en las fotos y en la descripción

Reviewed in Spain 🇪🇸 on November 7, 2019

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Perfecto por el precio que tiene. Un libro muy bonito

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Lindy Lou

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on May 5, 2016

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Many thanks for a lovely product and a pleasant transaction.

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