Abstract
Today, the gentlewoman Eleanor Glanville (1655–1709) is often remembered as the first lady of British butterflies. In Glanville’s own lifetime, she gained a reputation amongst London naturalists as an astute collector of butterflies from the South West region of England. Yet, a turn towards Glanville’s material archive, namely, her extant specimens held at the Natural History Museum, London, reveals Glanville’s success as a collector of rare butterflies from the Americas and thus, her complicity in colonial collecting. This article provides an object biography of a single pipevine swallowtail or Battus philenor, c. 1700, labeled “Glandvill.” It follows the butterfly specimen from its obscure origins in the Americas, to Glanville’s residence in the Atlantic port city of Bristol, and to London naturalists’ cabinets of curiosities, where it would became part of a collection that helped found the British Museum, the first public museum of its kind. The life cycle of this object attests to the role that empire played in building one woman’s collection of insects and her contributions to the making of present-day museums. It also suggests that while empire opened up opportunities for some women naturalists, it did not necessarily advance their reputations as collectors.
A 320-year-old Battus philenor, or pipevine swallowtail butterfly, survives as part of the Petiver Historical Entomology Collection at the Natural History Museum, London (NHM). The specimen’s faded but still iridescent blue, black, and yellow-spotted wings lay enclosed in its original preservation materials: an envelope made of transparent mica on one side and hand-laid paper on the other (Figure 1). This insect-artifact—both a product of the natural world and the shaping of human hands—shows material traces of its origins, revealing its circuitous route from the Americas to Bristol, and from Bristol to its final resting place in a London collection. The specimen itself, a species exclusive to the North American continent, confirms that this butterfly originated from the British Atlantic colonies. The name “Glandvill,” scrawled on a square of paper affixed to the bottom edge, discloses that this butterfly once belonged in the collection of the entomologist Eleanor Glanville (1655–1709), one of England’s earliest women entomologists.
Eleanor Glanville’s Pipevine Swallowtail (Battus philenor), c. 1700. Pressed between a sheet of mica and paper, sealed around the edges with paper strips. Top ink inscription in the hand of one of Sir Hans Sloane’s curators. Bottom ink inscription in the hand of James Petiver. Vol. 1, f. 40, in the Petiver Volumes, Entomology Department. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © Natural History Museum, London.
Today, the gentlewoman Eleanor Glanville is often remembered as the first lady of British butterflies. 1 In fact, her efforts earned her a butterfly by her name, the Glanville Fritillary, a name which endures to this day. Yet, a turn towards her material archive reveals Glanville’s success as a collector of butterflies from the Americas and thus, her complicity in colonial collecting. This article provides an object biography of one of Eleanor Glanville’s surviving “exotick” butterflies, her pipevine swallowtail, collected circa 1700. Drawing on archival evidence, it follows the most likely path that the specimen travelled, from its obscure origins in the Americas, to Glanville’s residence in the Atlantic port city of Bristol, to her correspondent, the apothecary-naturalist James Petiver in London, and finally, to Sir Hans Sloane whose collections served as the foundation of the British Museum, the first public museum of its kind. The story of this single extraordinary artifact sheds light on the role that empire played in one Englishwoman’s contributions to the making of modern entomology and the rise of public museums. It also suggests that while empire opened opportunities for some women naturalists, it did not necessarily advance their reputation as collectors.
Object biography offers a particularly useful approach to natural history museums and their collections. 2 Often, specimens in these collections are treated “as part of the natural world, containing only biological or geological information,” as opposed to cultural artifacts with important human histories attached to them. 3 As the curators Miranda Lowe and Subhadra Das have pointed out, such natural history specimens are usually addressed from a “decontextualized, ahistorical ‘hard science’” point of view. 4 This “hard science” approach tends to overlook the contributions of the many historical actors—women, children, servants, enslaved people, and indigenous people—who made such collections possible. By reconstructing the story of Glanville’s insect-artifact, this article contributes to the larger project of elucidating the historical context in which natural history collections formed, with a focus on the role that empire and women played in their making.
Glanville’s pipevine swallowtail can be found amongst the folio pages of aneighteenth century collection of butterflies, known simply as the “Petiver Volumes” held in the entomology department at the Natural History Museum, London (Figure 2). Cromwell Mortimer, a curator of Sir Hans Sloane’s collections, assembled these two volumes in 1738 out of butterflies and moths from the collections of James Petiver, a prolific naturalist and Fellow of the Royal Society whose collections Sloane purchased upon Petiver’s death in 1718. Bound in heavy wooden boards, these volumes once contained over 700 lepidoptera specimens packaged in paper and mica envelopes, attached to folios by paper hinges (Figure 3). Today, only 412 survive. 5
Title page to Petiver Volumes. Paper and ink. Assembled by Cromwell Mortimer, 1738. Entomology Department. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © Natural History Museum, London.
Example of specimen packets arranged and attached to folio sized paper by paper hinge on left side. Remnants of the hinges on the top right and bottom right show where specimens have been torn out. Glanville’s pipevine swallowtail is on the third row, right column. Vol. 1, f. 40. Petiver Volumes, Entomology Department. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © Natural History Museum, London.
These packets vary slightly in the way that Petiver and Sloane’s curators preserved and labeled them, but all the artifacts use the same materials of paper, mica, and ink. Glanville’s pipevine swallowtail—one of her eight surviving specimens—has been pressed between a piece of paper and a sheet of mica cut to size and sealed around the edges with thin paper strips. As is typical of other specimens in the collection, it bears ink inscriptions that attest to multiple transfers of ownership before landing in Sloane’s collections. On its top edge appears a label written in Mortimer’s hand, “1459.e.,” that corresponds to Sloane’s catalogue of insects. A second label written in the unmistakable hand of James Petiver, “M.P. 523 Glandvill” appears on a small square of paper pasted to the bottom edge. Here, M.P. 523 refers to an entry in one of James Petiver’s printed catalogues, Musei Petiveriani, published in 1699. 6 And “Glandvill,” a variant spelling of “Glanville,” refers to Eleanor Glanville, a gentlewoman from the southwest of England with whom he corresponded with about butterflies.
In Eleanor Glanville’s own lifetime, she achieved recognition as an astute collector of exclusively English butterflies. At her estate at Tickenham Court in Somerset, she waded through the moors and meadows, enlisting servant girls to help her catch rare, local insects. 7 Her efforts caught the attention of London naturalists, some of whom applauded her collection as “the noblest Collection of Butterflyes all English.” 8 Between 1699 and at least 1704, Glanville exchanged letters and specimens with James Petiver. Except for a handful of letters, all of her correspondence, notebooks, and natural history paperwork have not survived, leaving much unknown about her career as an entomologist. But a turn towards the material archive reveals what has been lost in the documentary one: that Glanville collected “exotick” butterflies too.
Undoubtedly, Glanville’s Battus philenor specimen in the Petiver Volumes came from the North American continent. Given the wide geographic distribution and diverse habitat of the species Battus philenor across North America, Glanville most likely sourced it from one of the British mainland colonies along the Atlantic seaboard. 9 How did Eleanor Glanville, a gentlewoman living in the idyllic English countryside, acquire specimens from abroad? The answer lies in her proximity to the Atlantic port city of Bristol, which lay only 10 miles from her lands. In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a dramatic increase in trade with the New World flushed the city with wealth and commodities. Glanville’s pipevine swallowtail could have arrived on any of the ships frequenting Bristol’s harbor from Charleston, Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Virginia. 10
Eleanor Glanville would have had ample opportunity to cultivate relationships with both men and women travelling to any of these destinations. No records directly connect Glanville to the slave trade or any overseas investment, but she did have ties to officials at the Customs House, a government office that regulated imports and exports. Glanville’s second husband, Richard Glanville, held a post as a customs cashier for Bristol in the 1680s alongside the surveyor and naturalist William Cole, who was an avid collector of foreign naturalia. Cole’s position put him in frequent and direct contact with seafarers, who he enlisted to collect specimens. 11 It remains unclear if Eleanor Glanville and William Cole ever met; nevertheless, Cole’s liaisons through the port demonstrate the availability of travelers from Bristol with an interest in collecting natural history specimens.
Glanville’s own scant archival evidence puts forth the possibility that this butterfly hailed from Virginia, and that it may have been collected by a ship doctor or a young gentlewoman. But these possibilities should not be taken as fact. In the postscript of the only full-length letter that survives in Glanville’s hand, dated from Bristol in December of 1702, she wrote to James Petiver, “I am Just now making an Intrest with a young Gentlewoman that is going to her freinds in Virginia and also a young man of my acquantence which is going with the fleet and 2 Docters of Ships all this wil not fail me, for they promis to send me some fine Inseccts.” 12 No written evidence—no correspondence or inventory—confirms that any of the persons mentioned in Glanville’s letter followed through on their promise to send her butterflies. But this missive demonstrates Glanville’s ambition to expand her collection to include exotic butterflies. It also gives a hint of the kind of social relations she relied on to realize that ambition. Furthermore, the inclusion of a young gentlewoman puts forth the possibility that Glanville relied on female networks to carry out her aims.
Regardless of the exact location of this specimen’s origin or who caught the specimen, its exclusivity to America means that it was captured in a colonial context. Scholars such as Emma Spary, Londa Schiebinger, James Delbourgo, and Kathleen Murphy have established how natural history relied on and furthered the economic and political imperatives of European empires. 13 Enterprising merchants and government entities frequently sponsored or facilitated overseas expeditions to evaluate natural products—cacao, nutmeg, tobacco, indigo, sassafras, brazilwood, and many other resources—for profit as commodities. But many home-bound naturalists, including Eleanor Glanville and James Petiver, who sought to build up their private collections, took it upon themselves to strike up connections with all sorts of travelers, such as ship doctors, masters of ships, sailors, and missionaries. Often, these itinerants relied on indigenous and enslaved informants for their knowledge and their labor about the natural world, while simultaneously erasing or downplaying their very contributions. 14
Eleanor Glanville’s reputation as a collector of English lepidoptera has meant that she is largely left out of the intertwined histories of empire, natural history, and museums in the early modern period. Few other women appear in these histories. Yet, the presence of her pipevine swallowtail amidst the folios of the Petiver Volumes testifies to her very participation in such historical developments. Furthermore, the provenance of this insect-artifact suggests that Eleanor Glanville successfully leveraged her social connections in the maritime city of Bristol, and that these social connections were made possible by the far-reaching tentacles of empire.
Glanville’s foreign butterflies never attracted much notice. Instead, her domestic butterflies met the increasing demand for local specimens, as European naturalists began to value intensely regional natural histories. 15 In December of 1702, Glanville sent James Petiver a box of exclusively English butterflies and moths. But the letter that accompanied this box filled with local lepidoptera contained a postscript—the one that assures Petiver that her acquaintances traveling to Virginia will send her “some fine Inseccts.” This closing line of her letter offered a promise and the hope that Glanville would soon expand her collection to include foreign butterflies too, and add to Petiver’s own stores. Glanville’s surviving pipevine swallowtail affirms that she did in fact fulfill her promise to Petiver. He memorialized her contribution by recording “Glandvill” on the bottom edge of the specimen’s preservation materials. When he died in 1718, Petiver’s collection of naturalia, papers, letters, and drawings moved into the already vast museum of Sir Hans Sloane. And in 1753, Sloane bequeathed his collection of over 71,000 items to the British nation, which served as the founding collection of the British Museum. 16
In 1701, James Petiver complained to his fellow naturalists that England was “very barren in the Exotick part of that Recreative diversion. . .Viz. the Papiliones.” 17 By the opening of the British Museum in 1759, the nation was no longer barren of foreign butterflies. Its collection of lepidoptera had been decades in the making, with specimens sourced from many naturalists who relied on the technologies of empire to build their own collections. Eleanor Glanville’s pipevine swallowtail places her amongst such naturalists whose contributions, in sum, made the British Museum.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank entomology curators Suzanne Ryder and Joseph Monks for providing access to the Petiver Historical Collection of insects in the summer of 2022.
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(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Research for this article was generously supported by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Bibliographical Society of America, Graduate Women International, and various funding bodies at the University of Oregon.
2.
Caroline Drieënhuizen and Fenneke Sysling, “Java Man and the Politics of Natural History: An Object Biography,” Bijdragen Tot de Taal-, Land- En Volkenkunde / Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia, 177, no. 2–3 (2021): 290–311; Taika Dahlbom, “Matter of Fact: Biographies of Zoological Specimens,” Museum History Journal, 2, no. 1 (2009): 51–72; Chris Gosden and Yvonne Marshall, “The Cultural Biography of Objects,” World Archaeology, 31, no. 2 (
): 169–78.
3.
Drieënhuizen and Sysling, “Java Man and the Politics of Natural History,” 291.
4.
5.
For more on the purposeful destruction of Sloane’s insect collections that were likely carried out in the early nineteenth century, see Mike Fitton and Pamela Gilbert, “Insect Collections,” in Sir Hans Sloane: Collector, Scientist, Antiquary, Founding Father of the British Museum (London: Published for the Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Press in association with Alistair McAlpine, ), 279–90.
6.
James Petiver, Musei Petiveriani Centuria Prima-[Decima] Rariora Naturae; Continens: Viz. Animalia, Fossilia, Plantas, Ex Variis Mundi Plagis Advecta, Ordine Digesta, et Nominibus Propriis Signata (Londini: S. Smith & B. Walford, 1695–1703), available at: .
7.
The court case Ashfield v. Goodricke held at The National Archives, hereafter TNA, 5/222/25 contains depositions that testify to these collecting methods and activities.
8.
Bodleian Library, MS Radcliffe Trust, c. 1, f. 68. Letter, William Vernon to Richard Richardson, February 12, 1701/2.
9.
Present day and eighteenth century sources hold that the Battus philenor has a wide geographic distribution, but that it can commonly be found in the deep south and mid-Atlantic. See James P. Brock, Butterflies of North America, Kaufman Focus Guides (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2003). For eighteenth century sources, see Dru Drury, Illustrations of Natural. . .Vol. 1 (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by B. White, 1770); George Shaw, Vivarium Naturæ Or the Naturalist’s Miscellany. . .(London: Nodder & Company, 1790); James Edward Smith and John Abbot, The Natural History of the Rarer Lepidopterous Insects of Georgia: Including Their Systematic Characters, the Particulars of Their Several Metamorphoses, and the Plants on Which. . .Vol. 1. (London: Printed by T. Bensley, for J. Edwards [etc.], ).
10.
Patrick McGrath, ed., Merchants and Merchandise in Seventeenth-Century Bristol, vol. XIX (Bristol: Printed for the Bristol Record Society by J.W. Arrowsmith LTD., 1955); Richard Stone, “The Overseas Trade of Bristol in the Seventeenth Century” (Unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bristol, 2012). Walter E. Minchinton, The Trade of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1957); David Harris Sacks, The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700, New Historicism 15 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, ).
11.
See TNA E 134/4Jas2/Mich20 and E 134/4Jas/East36 for trial records that name Richard Glanville as Bristol Customs House cashier. On Cole, see A. J. Turner, “A Forgotten Naturalist of the Seventeenth Century: William Cole of Bristol and His Collections,” Archives of Natural History, 11, no. 1 (): 27–41.
12.
British Library, hereafter BL, Sloane MS 4063, f. 188v. Letter, Eleanor Glanville to James Petiver, December 28, 1702.
13.
Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 70, no. 4 (2013): 637–70; Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); James Delbourgo, Collecting the World (London: Allen Lane, ).
14.
15.
Alix Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge; New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Yale, Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain, Material Texts (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc, ).
16.
Delbourgo, Collecting the World.
17.
BL Sloane MS 3334, f. 39. Letter, James Petiver to Mr. Bobart, April 29, 1701.