Who was Eleanor Glanville?

  • Photograph of a collection of butterflies. multicoloured

Lady Eleanor Glanville (1654-1709) was the first lady of British Natural History – a 17th / early 18th Century entomologist. Married to a Lincolnshire landowner, she discovered the Lincolnshire Fritillary in the Lincolnshire Wolds – later renamed the Glanville Fritillary ─ one of only two native British butterflies named after British entomologists

Photo credit: Oxford University Museum of Natural History

  • The Glanville Fritillary

The Glanville Fritillary

In pursuit of Butterflies

Eleanor Glanville and the Culture of Collecting Insects

By Michele Pflug, a doctoral candidate in the Department of History, University of Oregon in the U.S

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Lady of the Butterflies

"The years of Lady Eleanor Glanville's life encompasses a time of great change, instability and conflict in England. When Eleanor was born the country had been torn apart by a bloody civil war, Cromwell ruled the land as Lord Protector and Christmas was forbidden...

Science & Superstition
The intellectual changes which occurred during the second half of the Seventeenth Century have become known as the Scientific Revolution. The Royal Society was founded in 1662 and 'natural philosophers' gathered to discuss astronomy, physics, alchemy and mathematics. Country mansions were filled with 'curios' and there was a great desire to collect, categorise and catalogue and bring order out of the chaos of the natural world... and a woman who dared to forsake domesticity in favour of learning and science and what were considered 'masculine' pursuits', was especially prey to ridicule and superstition...."

Fiona Mountain
 

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