Announcing the 2024 SHNH Natural History Book Prize shortlist (Thackray Medal)

We are delighted to announce the shortlist nominations for the SHNH Natural History Book Prize (John Thackray Medal), awarded for the best book published on the history or bibliography of natural history in the preceding two years.

We send our warmest congratulations to the authors and their publishers: Christine Jackson (John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd), Mackenzie Cooley (University of Chicago Press) Edith Widder (Virago) and Nicholas K. Menzies (University of Washington Press).

 

Christine E. Jackson, A Newsworthy Naturalist: The Life of William Yarrell

John Beaufoy Publishing Ltd. 2021.

William Yarrell (1784–1856), was an influential naturalist at a time when natural history was becoming an important factor in 19th century society. He wrote two important books: A History of British Fishes and A History of British Birds, still being quoted as the authorities well into the next century and admired today, especially for their delightful wood engravings. He was a member and sometime Treasurer, Secretary and Vice-President of the Zoological, Linnean and Entomological Societies. He was known to, and greatly admired by, the leading naturalists; Charles Darwin sought Yarrell’s advice on several occasions.

In addition to his key role as an organiser and disseminator of knowledge about the British fish and bird fauna, Yarrell also conducted significant original scientific research, being perhaps best known as the first person to recognise Bewick’s Swan as a separate species from the Whooper Swan, naming it Cygnus bewickii after his illustrious ornithological predecessor.

Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance

University of Chicago Press, 2022

The Renaissance is celebrated for the belief that individuals could fashion themselves to greatness, but there is a dark undercurrent to this fêted era of history. The same men and women who offered profound advancements in European understanding of the human condition—and laid the foundations of the Scientific Revolution—were also obsessed with controlling that condition and the wider natural world.

Tracing early modern artisanal practice, Mackenzie Cooley shows how the idea of race and theories of inheritance developed through animal breeding in the shadow of the Spanish Empire. While one strand of the Renaissance celebrated a liberal view of human potential, another limited it by biology, reducing man to beast and prince to stud. “Race,” Cooley explains, first referred to animal stock honed through breeding. To those who invented the concept, race was not inflexible, but the fragile result of reproductive work. As the Spanish empire expanded, the concept of race moved from nonhuman to human animals. Cooley reveals how, as the dangerous idea of controlled reproduction was brought to life again and again, a rich, complex, and ever-shifting language of race and breeding was born.

Edith Widder, Below the Edge of Darkness: A Memoir of Exploring Light and Life in the Deep Sea

Virago, 2021

Edith Widder’s childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light—as well as the importance of optimism. As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth’s last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness.

Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet’s oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem.

Nicholas K. Menzies, Ordering the Myriad Things: From Traditional Knowledge to Scientific Botany in China

University of Washington Press, 2021

China’s vast and ancient body of documented knowledge about plants includes horticultural manuals and monographs, comprehensive encyclopedias, geographies, and specialized anthologies of verse and prose written by keen observers of nature. Until the late nineteenth century, however, standard practice did not include deploying a set of diagnostic tools using a common terminology and methodology to identify and describe new and unknown species or properties.

Ordering the Myriad Things relates how traditional knowledge of plants in China gave way to scientific botany between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, when plants came to be understood in a hierarchy of taxonomic relationships to other plants and within a broader ecological context. This shift not only expanded the universe of plants beyond the familiar to encompass unknown species and geographies but fueled a new knowledge of China itself. The importance of botanical illustration is highlighted as a tool for recording nature—contrasting how images of plants were used in the past to the conventions of scientific drawing and investigating the transition of “traditional” systems of organization, classification, observation, and description to “modern” ones.

Read more on the SHNH Natural History Book Prize and on the 2023 winner  Henrietta McBurney for her wonderful publication

Illuminating natural history: the art and science of Mark Catesby.

Publisher: Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art,2021.  ISBN: 9781913107192.