Marketing Maria Sibylla Merian, 1720–1800: Book Auctions, Gender, and Reading Culture in the Dutch Republic

Abstract

On May 29, 1798, almost two years after the death of Clara Magdalena Dupeyrou, the widow of a prominent Amsterdam magistrate, a catalogue was drawn up of her library in preparation for selling the books at auction. To her library was added another recently deceased magistrate's widow, Cornelia Jacoba van Schuylenburch. This is one of only a handful of extant printed auction catalogues recording the contents of a library that had belonged, at least in part, to an eighteenth-century woman, 1 and is hence of particular interest for studying women's access to books. In this article, we address some of the questions suggested by this catalogue and others like it by tracing the reception and circulation of the works of a single author-illustrator, the prominent natural scientist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717). We argue that auction catalogues are an underused source which can be used effectively to study the public personas of collectors, as well as the complexities of book ownership, authorial reputation, the literary market, and reading practices. Moving beyond methodology, and addressing issues more specifically of gender and reading culture, our case study ultimately seeks to nuance inherited generalizations concerning women's book collecting practices and the reception of female authors by bringing new source material to the table, and exploring new ways to use it.The printed catalogue of the 1789 auction of Dupeyrou's and Schuylenburch's books recorded the contents of the two libraries separately, with the title page advertising several of the more attractive volumes to be auctioned. These included legal works such as a six-volume folio Corpus Juris and the "Corps diplomatique by Dumont, Rousset, Barbeyrac, le Clerc &c. 33 parts bound in calf" 2 -which one may suppose had belonged to the magistrate husbands rather than their wives-as well as a complete set of the Encyclopédie, a quarto edition of Voltaire's Oeuvres in 24 volumes, and

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