Spectacle or theater: Rumphius as knowledge-trader

Having survived the horrors of the Thirty Years War that had marked his youth in Germany, Gerhard Everhard Rumphius set out upon a Dutch ship sailing for the East Indies in 1652. Soon after Christmas he left as a low ranking soldier on the ship Muyden, having been more or less tricked into service. Later, by establishing himself in the Moluccas first as a soldier, then a tradesman, he would become one of the most remarkable and innovative scholars of his times, up until the very moment of his death on the island of Ambon in 1702. He would prove to be a pivotal figure in a shift from the theatrum sapientiae to a new theatrical regime that could no longer be understood in strictly theatrical terms. This shift was partly announced in a change from the so-called ‘wonder rooms’ or ‘curiosity cabinets’ to what would grow to be, much later, museums of natural history. Yet, in Rumphius’ case, the republican-baroque nature of his work consisted in a material connection with the world and a willingness to open up his form of science to indigenous forms of knowledge.

Eric Jorink describes Rumphius’ role as follows in a study entitled The ‘Book of Nature’: Dutch scientists and the wonders of God's creation: