Reading is needed: a study of a community of traveler-readers in the 19th century: Mawe, Eschwege, Wied-Neuvied, Spix and Martius and Saint-Hilaire

Abstract

This article seeks to investigate the reading scientific sociabilities of European naturalists who traveled around Brazil in the early 19th century, the interactions of these travelers with each other and with Portuguese-Brazilian naturalists who preceded them in the description of Brazilian nature in the 18th century. To this end, the sources were the travel reports by John Mawe, Wilhelm Ludwig von Eschwege, Maximilian de Wied-Neuwied, Auguste François César de Saint-Hilaire, Johann Baptiste von Spix and Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, who were in Brazil from 1807 onwards and published their accounts in their countries of origin during the following decades. We sought to verify, in these reports, the allusions, references and bibliographic notes used, seeking common readings, particularly those of the Portuguese-Brazilian naturalists who described parts of Brazil in the service of the Portuguese crown between 1770 and 1800. This study allowed us to understand how a community of scientific readers emerged, who shared readings, references and even libraries, but who also cited each other or openly copied the descriptions of each other – and their Portuguese-Brazilian predecessors of the late 18th century – according to their own publishing interests or authorial needs, building a whole canonical set of descriptions of Brazil that permeates the historiography about the period.