Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and his impact on the history of microscopy Conference 14 - 15 September 2023, 09:00 - 17:00
£45 per day (£25 concessions)
Overview Three hundred years ago the Dutch microscopist Antoni van Leeuwenhoek died. He had been
corresponding with the Royal Society for fifty years. Leeuwenhoek, born in Delft in the Netherlands in
1632, developed himself into one of the most prolific early microscopists. He made his own lenses
and small hand-held microscopes which were more versatile than most other devices at the time.
With these instruments and his outstanding preparation and observation techniques, he was the first
to see and describe red blood cells, bacteria and many other things.
In this conference we will take a close look at Leeuwenhoek’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
microscopic practices as well as the development of the field of microscopy from his death to the
twenty-first century. We will show how Leeuwenhoek was working as part of a large European
network of scientists exploring the natural world with microscopes. The papers in this conference will
make clear that microscopic practices and the way in which scientists communicated their findings to
each other started in Leeuwenhoek’s time and are still used today.
Conference organisers: Dr Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art
History; Drs Tiemen Cocquyt, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave; Professor Dr Eric Jorink, Leiden University &
Huygens Instituut.
Programme
Thursday 14 September
9am Welcome and opening remarks
Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History,
Rome, Italy
Session 1: The Royal Society and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
9:15am Instrumental visions in the early Royal Society
Sachiko Kusukawa, University of Cambridge
Idol of the tribe: Leeuwenhoek, the Dutch and the Royal Society
Eric Jorink, Leiden University & Huygens Institute, Netherlands
10:45am Coffee and Networking (25 minutes)
Session 2: Antoni van Leeuwenhoek in his historical context
11:10am The nutmeg and the mite: on Antoni van Leeuwenhoek’s ecological expertise
Christoffer Basse Eriksen, Humboldt-Universität, Berlin, Germany
Leeuwenhoek and the study of plants in the seventeenth-century Dutch
Republic
Fabrizio Baldassarri, Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow at Ca’ Foscari, Venice, Italy
and Indiana University, Bloomington, USA
12:40pm Lunch (50 minutes)
Session 3: Early microscopy and images
1:30pm Many hands, many oaks: Leeuwenhoek and Grew in conversation
Pamela Mackenzie, SSHRC visiting Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Cambridge
The Making of the microworld: observation, drawing, print
Ellen Pater, Huygens Institute & Leiden University, Netherlands
3pm Coffee and Networking (30 minutes)
Session 4: Instruments and Philosophical Questions
3:30pm Positioning Leeuwenhoek’s microscopes in seventeenth-century microscopy
practice
Tiemen Cocquyt, Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, Leiden, Netherlands
But what were they actually looking for?
Christoph Lüthy, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands
5pm Close
Friday 15 September
Session 5: Circulating microscopic discoveries
9am Reading images – understanding texts – replicating experiments
Sietske Fransen, Bibliotheca Hertziana - Max Planck Institute for Art History,
Rome, Italy
Microscope modification and use by Antoni van Leeuwenhoek
Lesley Robertson, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
10:30am Coffee and Networking (30 minutes)
Session 6: Microscopy post-Leeuwenhoek
11am Fit for polite society: Pierre Lyonet (1706 – 1789) on publishing natural history
in the eighteenth century
Larissa van Vianen, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
The Royal Microscopical Society – where it came from and where it is going
John L Hutchison, Royal Microscopical Society
12:30pm Lunch (60 minutes)
Session 7: All about lenses
1:30pm Changing perspectives: practising with solar microscopes
Peter Heering, Europa-Universität Flensburg, Germany
What’s new about an old optical (hi)story? Re-thinking the 'birth' of the
achromatic lens
Marvin Bolt and Michael Korey, Technische Universität Berlin and Mathematisch-
Physikalischer Salon, Dresden, Germany
3pm Coffee and Networking (30 minutes)
Session 8: Bringing Antoni van Leeuwenhoek into the twenty-first century
3:30pm The Collected Letters of Antoni van Leeuwenhoek – the publishing history of
the Leeuwenhoek Committee (1931 – 2023)
Douglas Anderson and Huib Zuidervaart, Editors of the Collected Letters,
Netherlands; Guest researchers Huygens Institute
Portraying micro-life with seventeenth-century microscopes
Wim van Egmond, Visual Artist, Netherlands
5pm Close
