Georg Christoph Stirn, 1638

Commentary
Georg Christoph Stirn, 1638

PRESCRIBED SOURCE

Images 1-2  Georg Christoph Stirn (1616–1669), Councillor in Nuremberg, from 1649 Councillor for Hanau in Buchsweiler. Portraits from 1649 and 1669 respectively.

Images 3-4. Travel Diary of Georg Christoph Stirn, Bodleian Library, Add. MS B. 67,l pp. 494-5.  

Edition and translationH. Hager, Geschichte der Deutschen in England von den ersten germanischen Ansiedlungen in Britannien bis zum ende des 18. Jahrhunderts (Strassburg: K.J. Trübner, 1885). Reproduced with permission from The Digital Ark: General Editor, Brent Nelson; OCR and Proofing, Elias Nelson; Encoding, Robert Imes: http://drc.usask.ca/projects/ark/XML/Stirn/.

Introductory commentary. The Digital Ark reproduces the following note (origin uncertain): ‘The MS. of the Bodleian library marked Bodl. Add. B. 67 contains a diary in German by a student who travelled in Switzerland, France, England and Holland. The name of the traveller is missing, but Dr. Neubauer (Athenaeum, 1884 May 17th p. 632) by connecting the remark at the end of the book that the writer 'was preparing his disputatio inauguralis for the degree of Doctor Juris Utriusque at the University of Altorf for the following year (1641) when he will be aged 25 years' with the Catalogus Candidatorum of Altorf, has clearly shown that it is one Georg Christoph Stirn of Nürnberg. His notes are roughly strung together without any attempt at style; I have translated the original as closely as possible, inserting only rarely in square brackets words necessary for the construction.’

Text (with annotations from The Digital Ark: also available on Weblearn)

In the art museum [Kunstkammer] of Mr. John Tradescant [are] the following things: first in the courtyard [495]  there lie two ribs of a whale, also a very ingenious little boat of bark; then in the garden all kinds of foreign plants, which are to be found [enumerated] in a special little book which Mr. Tradescant has had printed about them.[1] In the museum itself we saw a salamander, a chameleon, a pelican, a remora, a lanhado[2] from Africa, a white partridge, a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree,[3] a flying squirrel, another squirrel like a fish, all kinds of bright coloured birds [496] from India, a number of things changed into stone,[4] amongst others, a piece of human flesh on a bone, gourds, olives, a piece of wood, an ape's head, a cheese etc; all kinds of shells, the hand of a mermaid, the hand of a mummy, a very natural wax hand under glass, all kinds of precious stones, coins, a picture wrought in feathers, a small piece of wood from the cross of Christ, pictures in perspective of Henry IV and Louis XIII of France, who are shown, as in nature, on a polished steel mirror, when  this is held against the middle of the picture, a little box in which a landscape is seen in perspective, pictures from the church of S. Sophia in Constantinople copied by a Jew into a book, two cups of 'rinocerode' (the horn of the quadruped, or the beak of the hornbill?[5], a cup of an East Indian alcedo which is a kind of unicorn,[6] many Turkish and other foreign shoes and boots, a sea parrot, a toad-fish, an elk's hoof with three claws, a bat as large as a pigeon, a human bone weighing 42 pounds, Indian [498]  arrows, an elephant's head, a tiger's head, poisoned arrows such as are used by the executioners in the West Indies — when a man is condemned to death, they lay open his back with them and he dies of it — an instrument used by the Jews in circumcision (with picture) [499], some very light wood from Africa, the robe of the king of Virginia, a few goblets of agate, a girdle such as the Turks wear in Jerusalem, [a representation of] the passion of Christ carved very daintily on a plumstone, a large magnet stone, [a figure of] S. Francis in wax under glass as also of S. Jerome, the Pater Noster of Pope Gregory XV, pipes from the East and West Indies, a stone found in the West Indies in the water, whereon were graven Jesus, Mary and Joseph, [500] a beautiful present from the Duke of Buckingham, which was of gold and diamonds affixed to a feather by which the four elements were signified, Isidor's MS. of de natura hominis, a scourge with which Charles V. is said to have scourged himself, a hat band of snake bones.

Notes (unless otherwise noted, from The Digital Ark)

[1] Museum Tradescantianum, p. 41: 'A Booke of Mr. Tradescant's choicest Flowers and Plants, exquisitely limned in vellum, by Mr. Alex. Marshall.'  This is Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1461, commonly known as ‘Tradescant’s Orchard’. Barrie Juniper and Hanneke Grootenboer, The Tradescants' Orchard: The Mystery of a Seventeenth-Century Painted Fruit Book (Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2013). Further images available here.  Credits: Howard Hotson

[2] Museum Tradescantianum, p. 6: lanhado is mentioned amongst snakes.

[3] The OED, describes the ‘barnacle goose’ as follows: ‘This bird, of which the breeding-place was long unknown, was formerly believed to be produced out of the fruit of a tree growing by the sea-shore, or itself to grow upon the tree attached by its bill (whence also called Tree Goose), or to be produced out of a shell which grew upon this tree, or was engendered as a kind of ‘mushroom’ or spume from the corruption or rotting of timber in the water.’  The ‘goose barnacle’ is ‘the “shell-fish” out of which the Barnacle Goose was supposed to be produced.’  On the history of this extraordinary derivation, see F. Max Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2 vols. (London, 1866, 1877), vol. ii. 583-605, esp. the text from the Philosophical Transactions, 586-7.  Credits: Howard Hotson

[4] Evidently fossils.

[5] P. B. Duncan, Introduction to the Catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum, p. 4, mentions as deserving of especial notice ‘the beak of the helmet hornbill, from the East Indies, which has been but lately imported in the entire state, having been long suspected to have been a foolish imposition contrived to deceive Tradescant’.

[6] The Museum Tradescantianum does not give ‘alcedo’, but it mentions (p. 53) Albado horn together with Unicorn horn and Rhinoceros horn.