Nature’s keepers: Working families and the economy of earthly objects

Abstract

This article develops a historical anthropology of craftspeople in the sciences through the story of the family Wunder, who for three generations (from 1771 to 1832) ran a prolific trade in rare plants and large mammal fossils from their workshop in the mountains of Upper Franconia. Studies of scientific homes and families have had an extraordinary impact on the history of science, showing how experiments and museums were so housed as to model highly exclusive scientific publics, and how projects of inquiry were shared among spouses, children, and servants. But this literature has rarely stepped outside of elite, urban homes and country estates. Doing so demonstrates how material flows conventionally oriented around metropolitan institutions could hinge on the spatial logistics of post roads, highland footpaths, inns and taverns – and the families who minded them. Viewed from the village, new university and museum institutions rose in reciprocal action with rural projects, otherwise excluded from the story of a liberal-bourgeois public sphere and the emergence of the modern natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften). I argue further for a thick description of science among craftspeople and peasants, suggesting nature’s keepers as a useful social category for actors involved in the everyday production of the economies and spatial logistics of natural inquiry. Across Central and Alpine Europe, inns, workshops, and country lanes composed a substructure of scientific life that materially shaped natural history and its theoretical horizons in “deep time,” directing the movements of earthly objects and educated travelers.

A wainwright’s tale

Anna Elisabeth Wunder (1766–1832) saw it all. From the village of Muggendorf, folded into the mountains of Upper Franconia, she was witness to perhaps the era’s most prolific trade in Pleistocene fossils, all run from a wagon-making and leather-tanning workshop. Well-to-do lowlanders came and went with the seasons, taking all manner of naturalia with them – cheaply-bought bones of exotic beasts, marine fossils from Muggendorf’s limestone, and dried plants from its high tablelands. All the while, three generations of Wunders maintained an obscure scientific dynasty on Muggendorf’s market square (Figure 1). Born in 1766, Anna’s earliest memories might have been the “Years of Hunger” brought on by the extreme cold of 1770–2. That is when her parents, Johann Georg Wunder and Catharina Mühlhäußer, turned to natural history as a new source of income. Together with her brother Ludwig, born amid crisis in 1771, Anna came of age in the craft of inquiry, with fossils and flowers strewn among the lumber, turning wheels, planers, and tree-bark required of the family trades. Ludwig inherited their father’s title, “Cave and Naturalia Inspector,” passing it on to his son, Daniel. But it was Anna, unmarried, who saw the trade from its first to final days.

Figure 1.

The market square in Muggendorf, featuring (above) lumber stockpiled before a barn-style house and (below) a lively inn with a prospect of the cliffs near Rosenmüller’s Cave, early nineteenth century.

Like the Wunder workshop, this article stands at the crossroads of material flows, rural economy, and working families in the history of science. Studies of scientific homes and families have had an extraordinary impact on the field as a whole. They have shown how experiments and museums were so housed as to create and model highly exclusive scientific publics, with projects of inquiry shared among spouses, children, and servants who were themselves subject to gendered divisions of labor and selective visibility. ¹ And yet this literature has rarely stepped outside of elite, urban homes, occasionally venturing to country estates and into the “affective geographies” of fieldwork. ² Meanwhile, studies of philosophical Swiss farmers and botany in British pubs suggest a historical anthropology of peasant and craft spaces excluded from the “learned world” of bourgeois science. ³

This article invokes Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s classic A Midwife’s Tale, based on a common diary from Maine, as much as it is engages historical and anthropological studies of village life, working identities, and upland communities. ⁴ As Ulrich wrote of her “trivial” hinterland source: “[b]y restoring a lost substructure of eighteenth-century life it transforms the nature of the evidence upon which much of the history of the period has been written.” ⁵ In the main, the natural sciences of this period are characterized by Latinate taxonomic schemes, the trained eye of European travelers (ever dependent on local expertise), and a dramatic increase in the number and kind of specimens that circulated to universities, societies, and new museum sites. ⁶ To that account the Wunders restore a substructure of scientific work that materially shaped natural history and its theoretical horizons in “deep time,” particularly through the traffic of large mammal fossils. ⁷ Moreover, the wainwright’s tale upends received histories by showing how material flows conventionally oriented around metropolitan institutions could hinge on the spatial logistics of post roads, highland footpaths, inns and taverns – and the families who minded them. ⁸ In this world, the remit of wagonmakers and innkeepers, it is not the artisan but the naturalist who appears transient, even marginal.

Concepts of friction and maintenance are as helpful here as they have proven useful in the study of global and imperial processes far from Franconia. Friction draws attention to the multiple mobilities at play in the sciences, as when colonial naturalists in Asia or the Americas intersected with subaltern communities subjected to coerced migrations. ⁹ “Friction reminds us that heterogenous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power,” Anna Tsing writes, gesturing to creolized knowledges and the key role of informants and intermediaries in imperial models of science. ¹⁰ So, too, unequal encounters shaped distinct arrangements of knowledge and power in Upper Franconia. Learned men both idealized the Wunders’ “rickety hut” and exploited their food insecurity to bargain for bones. ¹¹ In the first instance, however, the trade in naturalia caused conflict within the village, revealing how social inequality shaped scientific practice at multiple levels.

Friction can also be taken more literally along rugged country lanes, for the Wunders figure in a wider history of transportation and breakdown that turns attention to the practices of maintenance and repair that underpin circulation and observation. ¹² This perspective puts ships, roads, and wagons – and the actors who maintain them – on equal footing with those whose travels they facilitated: the Alexander von Humboldts, Ernst Moritz Arndts, W. H. Wackenroders, and Ludwig Tiecks of German travel writing, for example, all of whom passed through Muggendorf in the 1790s. A decade before Humboldt attempted to summit Mt. Chimborazo in the Andes, he arrived in Muggendorf with two servants in tow, sore from riding horseback in the “grim cold” of the highlands. ¹³ Arndt and Wackenroder likewise complained about country roads turned to rivers by rain; still others came by foot, seeking a wainwright to repair their broken axles. ¹⁴

What emerges at the crossroads is a new social category for the history of science: the titular keepers of nature. Akin to lighthouse-keepers, bee-keepers, or the “castellans” who kept watch over castles and the surrounding country, the Wunders’ sort were variously identified as wardens, inspectors, and cave-keepers (Höhlenwirth, from the word for innkeeper). ¹⁵ Seldom recognized as naturalists in their own right, the Wunders nonetheless belong to a heterogeneous group of tradespeople who maintained the information orders and material economies that structured natural history, down to the domestic manufacture of smocks, lanterns, and rope for cave-going clients. They did so over the six decades that straddled 1800, just as the natural sciences, or Naturwissenschaften, took their modern form and meaning in the German lands. ¹⁶ Viewed from Muggendorf’s market square, self-consciously modern university and museum institutions in Bayreuth and Erlangen rose in reciprocal action with rural projects, otherwise excluded from the story of a liberal-bourgeois public sphere. In the spirit of redress, this article builds a case for keepers as a critical category for understanding the Handwerk that set objects and people in motion. The resulting friction produced a distinct set of scientific attitudes, motivations, and identities among craftspeople.

Ways of knowing

You wish to travel overland

Best have a wainwright near to hand. . .

Merchant’s wares beyond tally,

I’ll manage o’er mountain and valley.

Wainwright’s song ¹⁷

. . .we can be certain that many more men than writers have looked with intense interest at all the features and movements of the natural world: hills, rivers, trees, skies, and stars.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City ¹⁸

The conceit of lowland writers was that Muggendorf was off the beaten path and therefore needed to be discovered. Beginning in the 1790s, writers from cities near and far invented Upper Franconia as a hinterland at the heart of Germany, a quintessentially Romantic landscape they called the Franconian Alps. ¹⁹ It’s been said that “a working country is hardly ever a landscape.” ²⁰ However, Muggendorf’s prospects were the product of much labor. Centuries of sheep grazing kept vegetation low on the tablelands, save for juniper among the crags and woods of beech and fir that fell into the valley of the Wiesent River (see Figure 2). This gave travelers the sense that they wandered through a land of much greater elevation. Botanists reinforced the notion with accounts of “Alpine plants,” like yellow whitlow-grass, known to grow in the Pyrenees and Carpathians. ²¹ But those who claimed to discover an Alpine hinterland traveled, in fact, along well-established highways.

Figure 2.

Detail from east-oriented map of the cultivated, pastoral tablelands above Streitberg, Muggendorf, and Gailenreuth in the Wiesent Valley (1750).

Muggendorf and its neighbor Streitberg were customary waystations between the courts of the principalities of Bayreuth and Ansbach, a day’s ride in either direction. Significantly for Protestant travelers, roadmaps show the district as a Lutheran enclave in the lands of the Archbishopric of Bamberg (Figure 3). Muggendorf was not an obscure mountain village at all, then, but a regular thoroughfare for postmen and courtly pages, which could connect Prussia and Saxony in the north to the cities of the south, Nuremberg and Augsburg. ²² Regular traffic meant inns – of which Muggendorf had twelve among just fifty-three houses – and inns, of course, meant beer. ²³ With brewing licenses liberally granted in Upper Franconia, hops lined the Wiesent Valley. Before plants and fossils, beer and brandy were Muggendorf’s major exports, carted eight hours each way along the old post road. Cattle they drove further still, as far as Nuremberg some fifty kilometers south. ²⁴ The well-worn paths of postmen, carters, and herders thus underlay the circuits of later naturalists, who first appeared in the 1770s. In other words, an existing infrastructure of roads and inns framed the conditions of possibility for an influx of naturalists and a commerce in natural objects. Several of Muggendorf’s limestone caves were already well-known to villagers, even drawn on mid-century maps; but they were not yet commodified. ²⁵

Figure 3.

South-oriented roadmap of Streitberg District showing the route between Bayreuth and Ansbach, branching off to Muggendorf and Streitberg (1722).

This changed during the Years of Hunger in 1770–2. ²⁶ A spate of hard winters gripped the region, causing crop failures, high corn prices, and a typhus epidemic, dramatically visible in Muggendorf’s parish records (Figure 4). Muggendorf buried seventy villagers in 1772, probably about a quarter of the whole parish, including Johann Georg Wunder the elder. Johann the younger and his wife Catharina had faced twelve winters together, but none so hard as this, and now had to feed three young children (Figure 5). Contemporaries wrote of artisans selling their tools for food. ²⁷ Johann and Catharina turned to the trade in earthly objects.

Figure 4.

The Years of Hunger (1770–2) starkly visible in the net population change in Muggendorf Parish.

Figure 5.

Wunder family tree and three generations of Cave Inspectors. Based on records of the LAELKB, Dekanat Forchheim, Muggendorf (Bestattungen, Taufen, Trauungen).

It was at this moment that hints of fossil-filled caverns reached Johann Friedrich Esper (1732–81), a pastor and naturalist who lived near Erlangen, a university town to the south. ²⁸ Upon arriving in Muggendorf, Esper “heard a great deal about new discoveries,” including the newly named Wunder’s Cave. ²⁹ He proceeded to publish sensational accounts of fossilized “polar bears” and other strange beasts thought to have been swept into Franconia by a primordial deluge. Esper never mentioned the Wunders by name, but later naturalists describe the period as one of intensive collaboration between the Muggendorf artisans and a circle of Erlangen naturalists that included the apothecary Frischmann and the professor Johann Christian Schreber (1739–1810), director of the university’s cabinet and botanical garden. Several of those accounts came from students who said their professors had the Wunders “to thank for many plants and other naturalia once thought indigenous only to the most remote lands and to the far North.” ³⁰ In turn, Erlangen professors were supposed to have awakened in the Wunders a latent “aptitude for natural history,” even schooling them in Linnaean taxonomy. ³¹

The Wunders also practiced natural history on their own artisanal terms by licensing a country craft. In 1775, not long after Esper’s first publication on the “zoolite caves,” the Margrave of Bayreuth “acquiesced” to appoint Johann Georg Wunder as warden of “the natural history of the Fatherland,” coining the distinct title of Cave and Naturalia Inspector. ³² The Cave Inspector was not merely a warden and keeper of caves, but also a provisioner of natural objects (fossils, minerals, and plants) to the royal cabinet in Bayreuth. He, and later she, was therefore charged with identifying naturalia of worth and curiosity, typically an act of learned scrutiny. In an age of hunger, these services would be paid in kind with rations of corn and grain from the state.

Still, necessity is too narrow an explanation for an enterprise that posted fossils as far as Paris and London. Artisan autobiographies from the period show scenic tours and “thirst for knowledge” as markers of “honor” among craftspeople, as much as ownership over means of production signaled distinction from the lower orders of corporate society. ³³ The Wunders’ biographies were mostly mediated by travel writers and sometimes through correspondence with territorial authorities. One botanist said “Old Wunder” exhibited the common globe daisy under the Latinate genus of Sesleria, and even “beheld it as the crest of Muggendorf.” ³⁴ Such stories set the craftsman’s sense of honor in the language of learned inquiry. Botanical skill was a particular point of pride for the Wunders. Both Johann and Ludwig claimed to discover new caves while searching the hills and clefts for “rare plants,” asserting the priority of their botanical interests over the fossil-hunters who came after. ³⁵ In this way, Ludwig had discovered his own cave, Ludwigshöhle, in 1788, at age seventeen, while “on his wanderings [auf seinen Wanderungen] for plants and petrifactions,” an Erlangen man wrote. ³⁶ Reference to Ludwig’s “wanderings” hints at the artisanal nature of their science, invoking a journeyman year (Wanderjahre or Wanderungen) en route to mastery.

Follow the Wunders far enough along the post roads and footpaths of Upper Franconia and natural history takes on a country character of its own. Rural wagonmakers knew the woods particularly well, associated as they were with a thorough knowledge of trees – elm for the hobs, oak for the spokes, birch for the tow shaft, and so on. ³⁷ Thus, one lowland visitor purchased a “Collection of Muggendorf Wood Species in 60 Pieces” along with boxes full of rare herbs and fossils. ³⁸ If bear skulls and marine invertebrates struck visitors as oddities, the Wunders’ array of dried plants and petrified woods was not out of place in a workshop stocked with lumber and barks and resins for tanning. The associated skills were also critical to the family enterprise, since caves required considerable woodwork (bespoke steps, doors, ladders, and lighting systems) to be made navigable. ³⁹ Indeed, a sturdy wagon was perhaps the most essential technology to the country craft of natural history, required for the transport of skeletons and stalagmites over tough mountain roads. ⁴⁰

Roads also help to explain why a family of wainwrights, of all people, were at the center of this economy. The region’s roads were as notorious as they were well-trafficked, making maintenance a particularly salient category for country science. ⁴¹ To be waylaid at the mercy of locals was something of a trope in the sixty or so published narratives of Muggendorf. Traveling by covered chaise in the summer of 1792, the Erlangen writer Köppel had an axle replaced en route to Muggendorf only to find the “narrow, mountainous” roads by Streitberg nearly impassable in a sudden thunderstorm. ⁴² Similar scenes echoed in the verse of visitors like Tieck, who came to Muggendorf “over swamp, or upon snow” the following summer. Of travels further afield he later reminisced:

From the path erred,

By storm beset,

From rain soaked,

I seek shelter here

In this country dwelling. ⁴³

Rutty lanes presented a twofold opportunity for the Wunders, who were by trade already indispensable to travel. The organization of transport was a customary source of income for upland communities, involving muleteers, carters, and wainwrights alike. ⁴⁴ Historians have even noted how rural communities sometimes neglected roads, since broken axles brought work. ⁴⁵ The Erlangen anatomist Johann Christian Rosenmüller (1771–1820) called Muggendorfers “mischievous gnomes” for this very reason, though he conceded that paving the roads would starve those who “feed themselves by harnessing and leading others’ horses.” ⁴⁶ Only toward the end of the Wunders’ enterprise, around 1830, did the road to Bayreuth appear on maps as a paved chaussée, as maps themselves made locals redundant. ⁴⁷

The Wunders used the region’s roads to marvelous effect, steering geological imaginaries just as fossils became witness to mass extinction events in the reconstruction of earth history. ⁴⁸ The same fossil-rich limestone that accounted for Muggendorf’s many caverns also made for sandy thoroughfares, subject to flooding. Melting snows and summer rains turned roads into a “sea floor,” as the phrase went among travelers (see Figure 6). ⁴⁹ The Wunders cultivated this imaginary by leading visitors on a route replete with mollusks and crustaceans (Figure 7), some of them found on footpaths over the tablelands. ⁵⁰ The effect combined well with “antediluvian” mammal skeletons, which most said were swept in from afar. Others, like Rosenmüller, thought these megafauna might have lived on the Franconian shores of a primordial ocean. ⁵¹ Either way, scenes of real-time inundation allowed visitors to virtually witness events that shaped the surface of the Earth, leaving exotic carcasses and marine fossils in their wake. Diluvial theories that sprang from Esper’s speculations were taken up by later generations of naturalists like August Goldfuß (1782–1848), who succeeded Schreber in Erlangen, and William Buckland (1784–1856), who described how Muggendorf’s valleys were “excavated by the diluvian waters” in his Reliquiæ diluvianæ (1823). ⁵² Both dealt extensively with the Wunders, led down theory-laden paths and back to the market square.

Figure 6.

The Wiesent River washing out a fence on the road to Muggendorf.

Figure 7.

Cephalopoda from Gaillenreuth in the Wiesent Valley, collected by William Buckland while on a tour with Anna Graf in July 1816.

The upland exchange

To follow the Wunders is not to turn away from conventional sites of science entirely. It is to see the university, cabinet, and museum as part of an information order that included the keepers of caves, inns, and workshops. The reciprocal action of these spaces produced a new whole, a system of upland exchange in which Muggendorf’s market square is only as marginal as a university cabinet, depending on one’s position. However novel the Franconian Alps appeared to lowland writers, the relation between the two followed a long-standing intercourse between the highlands and the plains, which is documented across the Continent. High, geographically remote valleys are often associated with isolation and stasis, generically portrayed as “closed” subsistence economies and intellectual backwaters besides. Yet the very marginality of high valleys spurred communities to “open” their economies through seasonal emigration. ⁵³ Muggendorf’s upland exchange similarly demands an anthropology of sliding scale, alive to modes of economic sociability within and beyond the village.

If the Wunders appear subordinate, even servile, in learned accounts, local sources show them as village notables, jealous of land and resources. What outsiders described as a “rickety hut on the market” was, in fact, prime real estate. It marked the Wunders’ centrality in the concentric order of village life. While peasants and day-laborers lived on the outskirts of German villages, “citizens” dwelt in close proximity to the twin pillars of rural society: church and tavern, both visible from the Wunder home (see Figure 1). ⁵⁴ What is more, parish records reveal the elder Johann Georg Wunder as a member of the district court (Gerichtsverwandter), the same court in Streitberg that became the family’s primary conduit to natural history cabinets in Erlangen, Bayreuth, and beyond. ⁵⁵ Where learned categories like “guide” and “assistant” present the Wunders as mere laborers, titles like Gerichtsverwandter and Cave Inspector invite a thicker description of status and meaning, both locally and among the artisans’ interlocutors at provincial courts.

Understanding science as artisanry means appreciating Handwerk not merely as a working process but “a set of norms governing exchange,” in Mack Walker’s words. ⁵⁶ The Wunders practiced science as artisanry in a sense specific to the Holy Roman Empire, a patchwork of 300-plus territorial units from principalities and kingdoms down to autonomous “home towns.” The legal status of Handwerk in the countryside framed unique conditions of possibility. It meant, firstly, that the Wunders were not beholden to the guilds that controlled labor and markets in towns and cities. ⁵⁷ Indeed, natural history provided an alternative to “going on the tramp” for journeymen likely to face hostility from the guilds (as when a Muggendorf carpenter was denied work even in a nearby town). ⁵⁸ But exclusion could convey a rare degree of autonomy for country artisans who were therefore able to practice several trades – wagon-making, leather-tanning, and cave-inspecting, say – all at once. Moreover, they did so at the discretion of the territorial ruler, explaining the remarkable fact of the Wunders’ line of communication with princely authorities in Bayreuth. ⁵⁹ Even more remarkable, the Wunders’ official ties endured regime change time and again: first when Prussia annexed the Principalities of Ansbach and Bayreuth in 1792, then again when Franconia fell under the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1810, after years of French occupation. ⁶⁰

These exchanges produced an archive that emphasizes the primacy of the Wunders’ stately relations, even before their workshop became a regular site of “pilgrimage” among students and sightseers. ⁶¹ As Anne Secord wrote of artisan botanists in Britain, “the scientific élite were communally regarded as just another link (albeit a very useful one) in their own networks.” ⁶² Likewise, the key node in the Wunder network was the district court in Streitberg, where Johann Georg gave notice of “perfectly whole, monstrous skulls of completely unknown species” and, in turn, received orders to send “the most magnificent” of them in a crate with “Coachman Ott” to Bayreuth, for example. ⁶³ Receipts of “rare plants” sent to Bayreuth or the botanical garden in Erlangen are mixed with shipments of “Zoolites” bound for Berlin, Paris, and London. ⁶⁴ Another directive from Bayreuth shows how men of laboring and learned worlds were commonly enrolled in princely science: when the Cave Inspector was compensated for a shipment of “calcified AnimalBones [sic]” in 1777, the naturalist Esper was commissioned to write a book about them. ⁶⁵

This was not an epistolary network, then, as among artisan botanists in Britain, but a scribal economy of nature embedded in the workings of the German states. The Wunders dictated their finds to a representative of the Margrave (and later of Prussian and Bavarian monarchs), and in at least one case dispatched their own first-person reports. All were stamped and filed among affairs of state, in a dossier titled “Police: Natural Rarities.” The Cave and Naturalia Inspector was himself a delegate of the royal cabinet, a corresponding agent to the Inspector of Naturalia Collections in Bayreuth, who was coincidently named Friedrich Wilhelm Wunder (1742–1828). ⁶⁶ Already by about 1780, then, the Wunders had supply chains of naturalia running both ways along the old post road, to Bayreuth and Erlangen, some thirty-five kilometers in either direction.

Muggendorf’s upland exchange was also characterized by considerable conflict and inequality. On one level, travel narratives performed a great deal of “boundary-work” in positioning the Cave Inspector outside the learned pursuit of natural history. ⁶⁷ As a rule, writers restricted the Wunders to a state of potentiality, ever striving toward “cultivation” (Bildung). Johann Georg was possessed of “all the makings of a naturalist” without ever becoming an equal member of the learned world. ⁶⁸ It was probably Rosenmüller, writing anonymously in 1804, who described “old Wunder” as a “half-learned” man “hurling Latin stones about, comically enough,” in his attempt at Linnaean taxonomy. ⁶⁹ But social histories of science should beware the bourgeois assumption that craftspeople and keepers wanted to become “men of science” after their own image. After all, Bildung was the invention of the same Romantic generation that claimed to discover the Franconian Alps. The Wunders were preoccupied with boundary-work of their own, laying exclusive claim to local resources.

Decades before the subdivision of Muggendorf’s commons, the Wunders petitioned authorities in Bayreuth for the “Enclosure of Caves Near Muggendorf.” ⁷⁰ This was the title of a set of exchanges in 1777–8 in which Johann Georg raised the specter of villagers ransacking fossil-filled caverns, their contents “broken, chipped, and destroyed.” ⁷¹ He specifically targeted Muggendorf’s poorest class of tenants (Inwohner), who lacked real estate and civic rights, implying they were to blame for the “foreign sale” of Muggendorf’s “rare and remarkable zoolites, entire skulls, and bones.” ⁷² Only, some of the caves in question were not actually in Muggendorf, territorially speaking, nor even in the Margraviate. The richest caves lay in the wooded hills behind Burg Gaillenreuth, upstream and clear across the valley, in the lands of the Archbishopric of Bamberg. Bayreuth’s response not only made the Wunders sole wardens of Muggendorf’s “Cabinet-pieces” but also expanded their remit beyond territorial bounds, with exclusive license to cart fossils across territorial lines (vividly red-lined in Figure 2). ⁷³ Further orders were given to keep the caves under lock and key as authorities imposed an embargo on earthly objects. All commerce in “attention-worthy naturalia” was formally restricted to official channels with royal cabinets and gardens. ⁷⁴

But the Wunder enterprise fast outgrew its stately confines, responsive to a growing market of educated travelers and, no doubt, to meager pay in irregular rations of corn and grain. One writer’s lament that the family must “occasionally starve” echoes through the Wunders’ own pleas to state authorities for adequate remuneration. ⁷⁵ Little wonder, then, that within a decade of the official embargo, the Wunder home became a center of illicit commerce. Writers of the 1790s only slightly exaggerated when they said the Wunders furnished “nearly all the natural history cabinets in and outside of Germany with the petrified bones of strange beasts,” bear skulls being Muggendorf’s most famous export. ⁷⁶

The Wunder trade was enmeshed in a complex web of social and legal relations, within and beyond the village. Their home should be understood in these capacious terms, as an “open house” in Joachim Eibach’s conception of the interhousehold sociability that characterized early modern economic life. ⁷⁷ Arguably more important than transient naturalists were alliances and kinship ties within the village, beginning with Johann Georg’s marriage to Catharina Mühlhäußer. ⁷⁸ The Mühlhäußers owned one of Muggendorf’s two mills as well as an inn, and so ranked above the Wunders in the village economy of social capital. ⁷⁹ Alliances also with innkeepers Leicht and Zöbelein were advantageous in establishing a private trade outside of official channels. ⁸⁰

In a village where one in every five buildings was an inn, tavern scenes were soon written into natural history. ⁸¹ A dish of trout from the Wiesent and pints of “high repute” became part of the spectacle of country science as first narrated in the 1780s. ⁸² The same writers could be said to have invented the figure of “old Wunder,” albeit in ways that reflected the family’s commercial attitudes. “He reads and traverses mountains in search of herbs,” wrote an Erlangen man traveling with his sons:

Woefully he complained to us, what a shame it would be if he could not see the entirety of these mountains. But he lacks sufficient pay and legitimacy to lay aside his wagon-work and devote himself entirely to the discovery of important treasures. Still, he hopes his complaints will be heard, and his wish to draw the entire land within the scope of his activity will be granted. ⁸³

Others recalled Wunder sharing breakfast at the tavern before a day’s tour or returning them to their lodgings in what became an increasingly sentimental journey to Muggendorf in the 1790s. By the time of his death, in 1799, the wainwright of Muggendorf was a vessel for early Romantic notions of a Lebensart, or way of life, characterized by “sylvan solitude” and depth of feeling. ⁸⁴ Cave, meadow, mountain, and inn all had a place in this drama. A somewhat more sober reading recognizes the social functions of rural taverns, as scenes of everyday business and encounter with outsiders – a fitting arrangement for the Wunder trade. ⁸⁵ Their home on the market square, remote and “rickety” though it seemed, was shrewdly positioned among taverns and caverns.

The opening of Rosenmüller’s Cave in 1792 shows the whole complex of upland exchange in a single episode, all the more revealing for the tension between its learned namesake and its local discoverer. As in Esper’s case two decades earlier, hints of an unexplored cave filtered down the Wiesent to Erlangen, where Rosenmüller was a twenty-one-year-old medical student. Upon arriving in Muggendorf, Rosenmüller found the local infrastructure of natural inquiry already in place. Indeed, by his own account, it was the Cave Inspector and his son Ludwig (also twenty-one) who “had the design to assemble a company of nature-admirers” to rappel into the cave from a cleft in its ceiling. ⁸⁶ Hardly a half-hour’s walk into the heights above Muggendorf, the cave’s bold rockface was visible from the market square, and very likely from the Wunders’ doorstep (Figure 1). The “company of nature-admirers” was also near at hand, reflecting the household’s links to key village institutions. Ludwig and his older brother, Johann Friedrich, led the operation to descend into the cave by rope and erect a system of ladders for further exploration. They were joined by Rosenmüller’s innkeeper, Zöbelein, and a church elder. As the company proceeded to blast and hew a new entrance from the cliffside, Zöbelein’s relative, a mason, joined the Wunders in the requisite stone- and woodwork. ⁸⁷ Rosenmüller’s work was neither manual nor managerial. He operated rather like a Streitberg scribe, or a courier to Bayreuth, presenting a “report in the name of the Cave Inspector” to the Prussian minister who took charge of Bayreuth and Ansbach that year. ⁸⁸

Rosenmüller’s report was to secure royal funds to open the cave to an educated public. Crucially, it was also an opportunity for the lowlander to register the cave under his name. Ludwig contested Rosenmüller’s stake in a remarkable document of his own making, quite possibly the only surviving source written (or at least dictated) by a Wunder. With the passing of his father in 1799, Ludwig addressed Prussian authorities to claim his patrilineal right to the title of Cave Inspector. ⁸⁹ His bid for mastery included a register of the seven caves in the Wunders’ keeping, with Rosenmüller’s name dramatically struck from the record. “The Rosenmüller’s Cave,” said Ludwig,

whose beauty and abundance of various stalagmites exceeds all other caves found in the region, terminates the valley from Streitberg to Muggendorf on the midnightly [north] side, the so-called Kupfe, and was discovered by Herr Prosector Rosenmüller and me while prospecting for herbs [Figure 8]. ⁹⁰

Figure 8.

Perhaps the only extant writings of the Wunders, a register of Muggendorf caves signed by Johann Ludwig Wunder, August 13, 1799. StABa, Kastenamt Streitberg, Nr. 3.

The striking from the record of one of Muggendorf’s principal publicists suggests considerable friction in the upland exchange, as the Wunders endured meager remuneration and unfair bargaining. ⁹¹ The episode also captures a changing economy of nature in Muggendorf around the turn of the nineteenth century, as the Wunder trade was progressively commercialized and their collections ultimately sold in their entirety. The family’s fate allows us to revisit the making of the modern Naturwissenschaften as a commodity history, one in which metropolitan museums rose in proportion to the plunder of countryside cabinets.

Wagons full of fossils

Prussian annexation in 1792 coincided with a new era of renown and enterprise for the Wunders, though it was also one of precarity. Ludwig’s ascension to Cave Inspector in 1799 was followed, crucially, by his marriage to Anna Graf (b. 1777), who became his partner in the business of natural history. While regime change spurred an influx of travelers from north Germany, generational change in the south brought Ludwig and Anna into sustained contact with their contemporaries at the University of Erlangen, notably Rosenmüller and Goldfuß. Published accounts provide a peek in the window of the workshop: an apparently “decrepit, dark building,” where one Berliner “purchased a heathen urn, a fossilized terebratula, and a pair of red stalagmites.” ⁹² Others suggest the cabinet’s relocation into a dedicated room in their home, “a small room where Wunder’s treasures are spread about, fossils, teeth, jawbones, whole heads of unknown beasts and other petrified objects.” ⁹³ The cabinet’s separation from the workshop reflected the distribution of trades among the Wunders: wagon-making to Johann Friedrich, cave-keeping to Ludwig, and leather-tanning taken up by another line. ⁹⁴ In time, the Wunder cabinet became the stuff of verse:

A great many stalagmites,

Spar, crystal, sea urchin,

Pectinates and fungates

 All brought to light.

Echinates, ammonites, and the like,

 Polar bear skulls, jaws, teeth,

And more –ates and –ites besides

 All here to see in great quantity. ⁹⁵

The poet also recognized the cabinet as capital of a kind, calling it the “Wunder-inheritance.” With four children, born between 1801 and 1807 (Figure 5), Anna and Ludwig show natural science as a strategy of economic survival across generations. ⁹⁶

Behind these cornucopian verses was an extraordinary labor of extraction, with “wagons full of fossils” carted from Muggendorf since the early 1780s. ⁹⁷ In 1810, Goldfuß reported that Ludwig excavated 150 bear skulls from the Gaillenreuth Cave in just three years. Decades of excavation stocked cabinets in Bayreuth and Erlangen. ⁹⁸ An 1840 catalogue shows that one in every five fossils in Bayreuth’s natural history collection came from Muggendorf, 1,451 specimens in all. ⁹⁹ The private sale of plants and fossils is far more difficult to gauge, though travelers’ accounts suggest a considerable uptick after Prussian annexation. This is consistent with a Prussian policy that fused liberal commercial principles with aggressive control over natural resources in Franconia. ¹⁰⁰ Some records suggest the state both officiated and curtailed the Wunders’ trade, imposing price restrictions. ¹⁰¹ Another believed the Wunders too easily bargained on objects that could otherwise be “expensively sold.” ¹⁰² Receipts are rare but revealing. “We bought a fine bears head for . . . £2 — teeth for 5 Creuz[er] a piece,” wrote the geologist Greenough, traveling with Buckland in 1816; “—our whole lot cost about £7.” ¹⁰³ Today, the “lot” of Buckland’s collections in Oxford include 229 specimens from Muggendorf, including two fine bear skulls (Figure 9). ¹⁰⁴

Figure 9.

Cave bear skulls in William Buckland’s collections, likely labeled “Muggendorf” and “Gailenreuth” by Mary Moreland.

These objects of the Wunder trade show their hand in the making of scientific careers and curating of natural history museums. Rosenmüller’s rise to prominence as an anatomist hinged on his three-week trip to Muggendorf and subsequent dissertation on the cave bear, which he classified as Ursus spelaeus Rosenmüller. ¹⁰⁵ A decade of publications on Muggendorf’s caves and fossils led to his appointment as prosector of the Leipzig Anatomical Theater, and to Continental renown as a theorist of earth history. Muggendorf was a regular training ground for the Erlangen medical program, a sort of scientific Wanderjahr that sent students on the tramp to Muggendorf’s master cave-keepers. They followed in the footsteps of Professors Frischmann, Schreber, and Eugen Esper (brother of Johann Friedrich Esper), who made their own careers in Muggendorf. The most prolific of Erlangen students was the paleontologist Goldfuß, who spent his Wanderjahr of 1809 among the “as yet inexhaustible stock” of Muggendorf’s large mammal fossils. ¹⁰⁶ Goldfuß’s handbook of 1810 classified lions among bears as the denizens of a vast cave-network, which he mapped across the region. ¹⁰⁷ It also positioned him to take over vacancies in natural history and zoology at Erlangen, following the deaths of Schreber and Esper in 1810. Under Goldfuß’s management, the university’s cabinet accrued the private collections of the Erlangen trio (Schreber, Frischmann, and Esper), who owed much to Muggendorf. The founding of Erlangen’s first natural history museum in 1813 was thus an act of re-assemblage that displaced the mountains and meadows of Muggendorf into the plains.

Museology shows how learned collections were dissociated from rural keepers. In this process, the commodity status of a natural object is overwritten by curatorial acts of indexing and display. But this was rarely done without a trace of a keeper’s hand. At the Oxford University Natural History Museum, several drawers of Buckland’s collections open to molars, vertebrae, ribs, ulnas, and metacarpals – all labeled “M” or perhaps “W” (Figure 10), likely by the Wunders themselves. ¹⁰⁸ After Buckland and Greenough visited the “Wunder dealer in Bear bones,” they posted a box of fossils to England. ¹⁰⁹ Upon arrival, Mary Morland Buckland (1797–1857) was known to organize and label specimens for her husband. Yet the fossils in Figure 10 already bore the mark of Muggendorf, or even Wunder. The Wunders would not have been the only keepers to mark their work. Another Buckland fossil came from the cliffs of Lyme Regis bearing the initials of Mary Anning (1799–1847), the cabinet-maker’s daughter who supplied remarkable marine reptile fossils. ¹¹⁰

Figure 10.

Cave bear ulnas in Buckland’s collection, labeled “M” or “W” in one hand and “Gailenreuth” in another.

Anna Graf, of mining heritage, became the face of Muggendorf’s trade in the time of Buckland’s two tours, in 1816 and 1822. ¹¹¹ She appears unnamed in Buckland’s illustration of the Gaillenreuth “Bear Cave,” drawn up for lectures on geology. ¹¹² Distinguished from the gentlemen by her dress and slight figure, Anna eyes a great heap of skeletons at the base of a vertical shaft as Greenough scampers down to her level, unable to evade the “flaming pitch” that rained down from Buckland’s torch. Greenough described it in his diary as a dangerous and suffocating affair, and a foreboding one in light of Ludwig’s pulmonary illness. Ludwig died of a lung infection (Auszehrung) in February 1819 and spent the last years of his life in ill health. ¹¹³ He was not there that rainy day in July 1816 – the so-called Year without Summer – when Buckland reached his companions in the depths. “[I]n a short time the smoke became so oppressive that Buckland returned,” said Greenough.

[T]he delay of a minute also almost rendered the light of the flambeau invisible & stopped respiration – it was with great difficulty that the woman who was our guide & myself could command sufficient strength to return up the chasm into a freer atmosphere. ¹¹⁴

A feeble flame was an ill omen for miners and cave-keepers alike, a clear sign of irrespirable air. But Anna, then thirty-nine, was a capable guide. From a family of local quarry workers, she was well-placed to take the torch in Ludwig’s absence.

In doing so, Anna Graf describes the vital role artisanal women played in maintaining the continuity of family trades, in the crafts as in the sciences. ¹¹⁵ Her son Daniel, in line to be the third Cave Inspector, was only ten years old when Buckland’s company arrived in 1816. But even when Ludwig was im good health, the Wunder trade functioned as a family enterprise. Official instructions all but outlined the two-supporter model of the premodern household in mandating that a “suitable person” be present at all times on the market square, ready to ply the trade in the Inspector’s absence. ¹¹⁶ Ludwig’s death saw Anna assume the role of Inspector (feminized as Höhl-Inspektorin), supported by her children Daniel, thirteen, and Anna Maria, fifteen. ¹¹⁷ The title was given to her by a new handbook of 1820, though it was not the official view of the new territorial ruler, the Kingdom of Bavaria. Ludwig’s death coincided with the sale of the family cabinet to the Bavarian state, suggesting both precarity and adaptation.

The sale of the cabinet underscores the inherent multiplicity of natural objects: evidence of geohistorical change to some, fossils were strategic assets for Anna Graf as she steered the family through illness, death, and uncertainty. Turning her zoolites over to rented rooms for display, Anna maintained control over the cabinet in the 1820s as she headed guiding services and took up beer brewing besides. ¹¹⁸ She soon become as much a spectacle as “old Wunder” had been. As the 1820 handbook counseled:

Best way is to call upon,

 The blissful Wunder-wife,

Bold, she slips into every chasm,

 And all’s reveal’d precise. ¹¹⁹

Some sources obscured Anna’s centrality to Franconian earth science, in keeping with geology’s patriarchy. By 1823, a new figure appeared in Buckland’s illustration of the Gaillenreuth Cave, as “refined” for publication in Reliquiæ diluvianæ. ¹²⁰ Yet Anna headed the Wunder family trade for a full decade, until Daniel assumed the title in 1829. Like his parents, Daniel shared the trade with his wife, Anna Rosina Nutzel (b. 1801), from an innkeeping family. Both died young, however. “Cave Inspector here. Widower. Consumption,” reads the record of Daniel’s death in 1832, aged “26 years 2 months 27 days.” ¹²¹

The last wagons full of fossils were wheeled away to Bayreuth that year, 1832, as cave-guiding was distributed among the villagers. A new site for Bayreuth’s Provincial Naturalia Cabinet came with orders to appropriate Muggendorf’s collections, still plentiful in the skulls of caves bears and wolves and the feet of lions. ¹²² And yet this is not only a story of the artisans’ alienation from their fossil means of production. Daniel had in fact seen lowland cabinets with his own eyes in his early twenties, in training to take up the Inspectorate. Inverting the travels of Rosenmüller and Goldfuß, he descended to Erlangen to study natural history at the university. Daniel’s studies passed through the university garden, sown with Muggendorf plants, and a museum stocked full of Gaillenreuth fossils. It must have looked something like his childhood home. However briefly, this third-generation cave-keeper represented a new and remarkable incarnation of country science: Daniel was a tradesman of university learning, schooled in Linnaean taxonomy first in the workshop, then the museum.

The road from Franconia: toward a history of keepers

Only the enormous condescension of their elite interlocutors made the Wunders seem a quaint and singular story, a “wonder” of their low station and rural setting. The same condescension romanticized the Wunders in self-serving narratives about bourgeois cultivation: the villagers’ potential set against the fulfillment of the Bildungsbürgertum (educated bourgeoisie), their “comely cabinet” and “corrupt Latin” a debasement of well-ordered Linnaean gardens and ostensibly public museums. ¹²³ The displacement of nature from one cabinet to another was an argument about the social difference between rural keepers and learned collectors: bones deemed oddities in the Wunder workshop were “eloquently staged” in collections in Bayreuth and Erlangen, or Paris and London, as geohistorical facts. ¹²⁴

These tales warrant a thick description of science among people who worked for a living, often in places deemed high, wild, remote, or unseemly and subject, therefore, to alien invention and “discovery.” This is to write toward a historical anthropology of (rural) poverty and Handwerk in the sciences, which joins a wide spectrum of the intersectional and colonial inequalities that shaped natural knowledge on a global scale.

The category of keeper is especially apt for this study, being both relational (within local and regional economies of nature) and constitutive of working identities. The keeping of nature can be counted among “constitutive tasks,” where work is understood as a social performance that may attest to one’s status and credibility in a community. ¹²⁵ In the Wunders’ only known testimony (Figure 8), their trade comprises acts of discovery (entdecken), ascent (besteigen), and prospecting (aufsuchen). These verbs are a far cry from their usual reduction as guides and suppliers of naturalists, echoed in Fernand Braudel’s description of mountains as a “reservoir of men for other people’s use.” ¹²⁶ The category of keeper does not take the purposes of the scientific elite as its measuring stick. Instead, the everyday production of the economies and spatial logistics of natural inquiry takes precedence over the question of a keeper’s “contribution” to a particular theory or body of knowledge. More important in Muggendorf were the terms the Wunders negotiated with state authorities, constitutive tasks of warding, inspecting, and keeping nature.

Theirs is a remarkable story but a more likely one than might be assumed. Numerous variations of the Wunder family trade appeared in uplands across Central and Alpine Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century, suggesting as many new keeper-histories. The Wiesent watershed alone saw related enterprises emerge among innkeepers in Ebermannstadt (downstream) and Waischenfeld (upstream) of Muggendorf. Eighteen kilometers upstream, the Förster family was said to keep a cabinet that rivaled the Wunders’, with bear skulls displayed in a glass case. ¹²⁷ “Forster’s inn tolerable,” noted Greenough; “very bad at Muggendorf.” ¹²⁸ That Greenough’s fare included “books purchased” broadens the picture of the Förster cabinet to include a library alongside bear skulls and stuffed owls. The innkeeper even hired a miner to make the “Förster Cave” navigable for visitors. ¹²⁹ He also alleged that the Wunders came by night to rob their caves of lucrative fossils and stalagmites. ¹³⁰ Competition among keepers is a reminder that the country craft of science was not only shaped by asymmetrical exchanges with university men and elite naturalists. It was also shaped by the country’s own forcefield of hostilities and reciprocities, from kinship ties to rival claims on resources. ¹³¹

Beyond Waischenfeld, Bayreuth linked to all points north, including caves of still greater renown in the Harz Mountains. They also had their keepers. The “Brocken-keeper” (Brockenwirth) kept meteorological records atop the Harz’s highest point, while the Becker family had warded the region’s caves since the seventeenth century. ¹³² The opening of a new cave near the village of Rübeland in the mid-1780s closely resembled the Wunder enterprise. ¹³³ A marble quarryman, Christian Friedrich Becker, was well-tooled for blasting and boring. He did so with the help of his two daughters, who appear in sources much as Anna Graf – unnamed and yet at the fore of travels in vertical nature. ¹³⁴ Here, too, cave-keeping was a country craft: the Becker family was licensed by ducal authorities to guard naturalia from the “rabble” and keep a logbook of cave-goers. ¹³⁵ Over a thousand visitors signed in the first seven years, drawn to the inn at the center of Rübeland, just opposite the Becker home. ¹³⁶

Traveling south of Muggendorf, the road to Nuremberg could carry one on to noted naturalia-dealers in Regensburg or Munich, as advertised among merchants of the period. ¹³⁷ Beyond them, other roads led to Alpine villages where travelers found cabinets kept “for sale” at inns. One writer’s quip about a “mineralia cabinet” ensconced in the stone walls of his lodgings hinted at the ubiquity of natural inquiry in high Europe. ¹³⁸ In elevated valleys from Savoy to Slovenia, natural history took the forms of pastoral and wild game economies, entering into an existing intercourse between the highlands and the plains. A Ljubljana naturalist, for example, embedded himself in a family of chamois hunters in the Julian Alps, just as the cabinet in Bayreuth sourced minerals from a Franconian Jägermeister. ¹³⁹ When the hunters came to sell meat in the plains, Franc Hohenwart (1771–1844) went with them to track down minerals and fossils, even lodging in their highland “farmhouse.” ¹⁴⁰ Hohenwart returned from such hunts to stock Ljubljana’s first natural history museum as its founding president.

Upland exchanges were also conditioned by patterns of seasonal emigration, as highlanders descended to help with the harvest in lower pastures or work as notaries and schoolmasters in the plains. Their migrations help to explain why literacy levels rose with altitude, higher in the Alpine villages of Savoy and Piedmont than the surrounding valleys. ¹⁴¹ Such was the transhumant and literate world of the Savoyard peasant communities who mobilized a new Alpine physics in the later eighteenth century, just as the Wunders and Beckers led natural history into the depths. ¹⁴² Those who guided Genevan savants – local hunters like Jacques Balmat (1762–1834) and Jean-Marie Coutet – entered print culture as making a “craft, indeed an art” of guiding around the turn of the century. ¹⁴³

As Franconian wagonmakers proved well-placed for natural history, so Alpine guiding grew from the customary by-employment of highlanders, as porters and muleteers who moved people and goods over mountain passes. In the Swiss Alps, transportation turned to grand tourism in the later eighteenth century. In the Bernese Oberland, artisans of Interlaken even formed a “sort of guild” by 1816. ¹⁴⁴ The guild was reportedly designed to manage competition among rival outfits and distinguish “practiced” and “industrious” pathfinders (Wegweiser) from mere porters (Packträger). Here, as in Franconia and the Harz, tradespeople jealously guarded their mountain-going crafts from the itinerant and propertyless. ¹⁴⁵

Handbooks ranked the brothers Michel chief among Bernese guides, with Jakob Michel (b. 1761) at the head of yet another family enterprise of upland travel. ¹⁴⁶ Jakob was distinguished by his ability to speak Italian and French as well as the local German dialect, as passed on to his son Jonathan (b. 1782). “He is the Nestor of his kind,” reads one handbook, after the orator and voyager of Homeric legend. ¹⁴⁷ The moniker suited Jakob’s customary craft of cobbling, known for producing “shoemaker intellectuals” and “village politicians.” These proverbs stem from the high turnover rate faced by journeymen cobblers, compelling them to wander further and longer than other artisans – certainly as far as French- and Italian-speaking lands from Interlaken. ¹⁴⁸ This gave cobblers an uncommonly rich experience of people, books, and news, especially in roadside inns. ¹⁴⁹ (Cobblers were also associated with taverns and drink.) A cobbler was thus as likely as a wainwright to have an ear to the ground as travel accelerated among the educated classes. ¹⁵⁰ At this junction, the inns of Interlaken, Rübeland, and Muggendorf became houses of call for highland science and travel. ¹⁵¹

Inns, workshops, and country lanes composed a substructure of scientific life that shaped the movements of earthly objects and educated travelers. That structure was not so much hidden or erased from the learned world as re-presented to it in “eloquent things”: in the staging of museum objects and in the discursive figure of the guide and keeper. ¹⁵² “Old Wunder” reappeared at the heart of Romanticism after Berlin writers Wackenroder and Tieck met the man “engaged in the searching and selling of fossils and botanical herbs.” ¹⁵³ Four years later, Tieck described a fictional Franconian, Walther, in the same terms: an aged man who wanders as far as the Harz “to collect herbs and stones, and is engaged with their order and classification.” ¹⁵⁴ But Walther is revealed as an apparition and shape-shifter, a fancy of “sylvan solitude,” or Waldeinsamkeit. He is but a woodland spirit that haunts and deceives, conjuring chimera of “subterranean treasures.” ¹⁵⁵

As upland exchanges displaced and rearranged those treasures, keepers themselves were isolated and staged – or shot dead in Tieck’s telling. Yet Tieck’s fictions also gesture toward the social history of sylvan solitude; they hint at that curious pairing of artists and artisans that took place in the mountains and caves. ¹⁵⁶ This article has juxtaposed the two – artist and artisan, collector and keeper, museum and workshop – reading the tramp against the traveler, or Wanderer in Romantic parlance. Artists of Tieck’s time appropriated the artisanal lifecycle for a literature on bourgeois self-cultivation, depicting the Lehr- and Wanderjahre of middle-class men. ¹⁵⁷ The same terms describe the career paths of Erlangen students for whom the Wunder workshop led to anatomical theaters and spectacles of museology. Historians can start down the same roads to understand the scientific worlds shaped by working families and highlanders, and they can take them many miles from Muggendorf.