A quick note for the weekend. The Vatican Observatory has posted a brief book review of a children’s book about Maria Sibylla Merian, The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman (HMH Books for Young Readers; Illustrated edition, 2018). Unfortunately, it contains two sentences that awoke the HISTSCI_HULK from his summer slumbers:
An artist at a time when women weren’t allowed to be.
A scientist before there were scientists.
Although in a minority, women were very much allowed to be artists, most of them were, like Merian, daughters of professional artists. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717) was part of the part of the Swiss/German Merian family of engravers and artists. She was a daughter of the engraver and printer-publisher Matthäus Merian der Ältere (1593–1650) and was trained to paint by her stepfather Jacob Marrel (1613–1681) a professional still life painter.
Portrait of Maria Sibylla Merian by her stepfather Jacob Marrel, 1679 Source: Wikimedia commons
Her husband was another of Marrel’s apprentices, Johann Andreas Graff (1637–1701). She was by no means the only female artist in that period. There were, for example, the Dutch painters Margaretha de Heer (1603–1665), and Rachel Ruysch (1664–1750), daughter of the botanist and anatomist, Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731).
Merian was not a scientist, the term would be anachronistic if applied to her, but she was a acknowledged natural historian and they had been around since antiquity.
The simple statement that the history of science is global history is for me and, I assume, for every reasonably well-informed historian of science a rather trivial truism. So, I feel that James Poskett and the publishers Viking are presenting something of a strawman with the sensational claims for Poskett’s new book, Horizons: A Global History of Science[1]; claims that are made prominently by a series of pop science celebrities on the cover of the book.
“Hugely Important,” Jim al-Khalili, really?
“Revolutionary and revelatory,” Alice Roberts what’s so revolutionary about it?
“This treasure trove of a book puts the case persuasively and compellingly that modern science did not develop solely in Europe,” Jim al-Khalili, I don’t know any sane historian of science, who would claim it did.
“Horizons is a remarkable book that challenges almost everything we know about science in the West. [Poskett brings to light an extraordinary array of material to change our thinking on virtually every great scientific breakthrough in the last 500 years… An explosive book that truly broadens our global scientific horizons, past and present.”] Jerry Brotton (The bit in square brackets is on the publisher’s website not on the book cover) I find this particularly fascinating as Brotton’s own The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2006) very much emphasises what is purportedly the main thesis of Horizons that science, in Brotton’s case the Renaissance, is not a purely Western or European phenomenon.
On June 22, Canadian historian Ted McCormick tweeted the following:
It’s not unusual for popular history to present as radical what has been scholarly consensus for a generation. If this bridges the gap between scholarship and public perception, then it is understandable. But what happens when the authors who do this are scholars who know better?
This is exactly what we have with Poskett’s book, he attempts to present in a popular format the actually stand amongst historian of science on the development of science over the last approximately five hundred years. I know Viking are only trying to drum up sales for the book, but I personally find it wrong that they use misleading hyperbole to do so.
Having complained about the publisher’s pitch, let’s take a look at what Poskett is actually trying to sell to his readers and how he goes about doing so. Central to his message is that claims that science is a European invention/discovery[2] are false and that it is actually a global phenomenon. To back up his stand that such claims exist he reproduces a series of rather dated quotes making that claim. I would contend that very, very few historians of science actually believe that claim nowadays. He also proposes, what he sees as a new approach to the history of science of the last five hundred years, in that he divides the period into four epochs or eras, in which he sees science external factors during each era as the defining or driving force behind the scientific development in that era. Each is split into two central themes: Part One: Scientific Revolution, c. 1450–1700 1. New Worlds 2. Heaven and Earth, Part Two: Empire and Enlightenment, c. 1650–1800 3. Newton’s Slaves 4. Economy of Nature, Part Three: Capitalism and Conflict, c. 1790–1914 5. Struggle for Existence 6. Industrial Experiments, Part Four: Ideology and Aftermath, c. 1914–200 7. Faster Than Light 8. Genetic States.
I must sadly report that Part One, the area in which I claim a modicum of knowledge, is as appears recently oft to be the case strewn with factual errors and misleading statements and would have benefited from some basic fact checking.
New Worlds starts with a description of the palace of Emperor Moctezuma II and presents right away the first misleading claim. Poskett write:
Each morning he would take a walk around the royal botanical garden. Roses and vanilla flowers lined the paths, whilst hundreds of Aztec gardeners tended to rows of medicinal plants. Built in 1467, this Aztec botanical garden predated European examples by almost a century.[3]
Here Poskett is taking the university botanical gardens as his measure, the first of which was establish in Pisa in 1544, that is 77 years after Moctezuma’s Garden. However, there were herbal gardens, on which the university botanical gardens were modelled, in the European monasteries dating back to at least the ninth century. Matthaeus Silvaticus (c.1280–c. 1342) created a botanical garden at Salerno in 1334. Pope Nicholas V established a botanical garden in the Vatican in 1544.
This is not as trivial as it might a first appear, as Poskett uses the discovery of South America to make a much bigger claim. First, he sets up a cardboard cut out image of the medieval university in the fifteenth century, he writes:
Surprisingly as it may sound today, the idea of making observations or preforming experiments was largely unknown to medieval thinkers. Instead, students at medieval universities in Europe spent their time reading, reciting, and discussing the works of Greek and Roman authors. This was a tradition known as scholasticism. Commonly read texts included Aristotle’s Physics, written in the fourth century BCE, and Pliny the Elder’s NaturalHistory, written in the first century CE. The same approach was common to medicine. Studying medicine at medieval university in Europe involved almost no contact with actual human bodies. There was certainly no dissections or experiments on the working of particular organs. Instead, medieval medical students read and recited the works of the ancient Greek physician Galen. Why, then, sometime between 1500 and 1700, did European scholars turn away from investigating the natural world for themselves?[4]
His answer:
The answer has a lot to do with colonization of the New World alongside the accompanying appropriation of Aztec and Aztec and Inca knowledge, something that traditional histories of science fail to account for.[5]
Addressing European, medieval, medical education first, the practical turn to dissection began in the fourteenth century and by 1400 public dissections were part of the curriculum of nearly all European universities. The introduction of a practical materia medica education on a practical basis began towards the end of the fifteenth century. Both of these practical changes to an empirical approach to teaching medicine at the medieval university well before any possible influence from the New World. In general, the turn to empiricism in the European Renaissance took place before any such influence, which is not to say that that process was not accelerated by the discovery of a whole New World not covered by the authors of antiquity. However, it was not triggered by it, as Poskett would have us believe.
Poskett’s next example to bolster his thesis is quite frankly bizarre. He tells the story of José de Acosta (c. 1539–1600), the Jesuit missionary who travelled and worked in South America and published his account of what he experienced, Natural and Moral History of the Indies in 1590. Poskett tells us:
The young priest was anxious about the journey, not least because of what ancient authorities said about the equator. According to Aristotle, the world was divided into three climatic zones. The north and south poles were characterized by extreme cold and known as the ‘frigid zone’. Around the equator was the ‘torrid zone’, a region of burning dry heat. Finally, between the two extremes, at around the same latitudes as Europe, was the ‘temperate zone’. Crucially, Aristotle argued that life, particularly human life, could only be sustained in the ‘temperate zone’. Everywhere else was either too hot nor too cold.
Poskett pp. 17-18
Poskett goes on to quote Acosta:
I must confess I laughed and jeered at Aristotle’s meteorological theories and his philosophy, seeing that in the very place where, according to his rules, everything must be burning and on fire, I and all my companions were cold.
Poskett p. 18
Instead of commenting on Acosta’s ignorance or naivety, Aristotle’s myth of the ‘torrid zone’ had been busted decades earlier, at the very latest when Bartolomeu Dias (c. 1450–1500) had rounded the southern tip of Africa fifty-two years before Acosta was born and eight-two year before he travelled to Peru, Poskett sees this as some sort of great anti-Aristotelian revelation. He writes:
This was certainly a blow to classical authority. If Aristotle had been mistaken about the climate zones, what else might he have been wrong about?
Poskett p.18
This is all part of Poskett’s fake narrative that the breakdown of the scholastic system was first provoked by the contact with the new world. We have Poskett making this claim directly:
It was this commercial attitude towards the New World that really transformed the study of natural history. Merchants and doctors tended to place much greater emphasis on collecting and experimentation over classical authority.[6]
This transformation had begun in Europe well before any scholar set foot in the New World and was well established before any reports on the natural history of the New World had become known in Europe. The discovery of the New World accelerated the process but it in no way initiated it as Poskett would have his readers believe. Poskett once again paints a totally misleading picture a few pages on:
This new approach to natural history was also reflected in the increasing use of images. Whereas ancient texts on natural history tended not to be illustrated, the new natural histories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were full of drawings and engravings, many of which were hand-coloured. This was partly a reaction to the novelty of what had been discovered. How else would those in Europe know what a vanilla plant or a hummingbird looked like?
Poskett pp.29-30
Firstly, both ancient and medieval natural history texts were illustrated, I refer Mr Proskett, for example, to the lavishly illustrated Vienna Dioscorides from 512 CE. Secondly, the introduction of heavily illustrated, printed herbals began in the sixteenth century before any illustrated natural history books or manuscripts from the New World had arrived in Europe. For example, Otto Brunfels’ Herbariumvivae eicones three volumes 1530-1536 or the second edition of Hieronymus Bock’s Neu Kreütterbuch in 1546 and finally the truly lavishly illustrated De Historia Stirpium Commentarii by Leonhard Fuchs published in 1542. The later inclusion of illustrations plants and animals from the New World in such books was the continuation of an already established tradition.
Poskett moves on from natural history to cartography and produced what I can only call a train wreck. He tells us:
The basic problem, which was now more pressing [following the discovery of the New World], stemmed from the fact that the world is round, but a map is flat. What then was the best way to represent a three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional plane? Ptolemy had used what is known as a ‘conic’ projection, in which the world is divided into arcs radiating out from the north pole, rather like a fan. This worked well for depicting one hemisphere, but not both. It also made it difficult for navigators to follow compass bearings, as the lines spread outwards the further one got from the north pole. In the sixteenth century, European cartographers started experimenting with new projections. In 1569, the Flemish cartographer Gerardus Mercator produced an influential map he titled ‘New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation’. Mercator effectively stretched the earth at the poles and shrunk it in the middle. This allowed him to produce a map of the world in which the lines of latitude are always at right angles to one another. This was particularly useful for sailors, as it allowed them to follow compass bearings as straight lines.
Poskett p. 39
Where to begin? First off, the discovery of the New World is almost contemporaneous with the development of the printed terrestrial globe, Waldseemüller 1507 and more significantly Johannes Schöner 1515. So, it became fairly common in the sixteenth century to represent the three-dimensional world three-dimensionally as a globe. In fact, Mercator, the only Early Modern cartographer mentioned here, was in his time the premium globe maker in Europe. Secondly, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mariners did not even attempt to use a Ptolemaic projection on the marine charts, instead they used portulan charts–which first emerged in the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century–to navigate in the Atlantic, and which used an equiangular or plane chart projection that ignores the curvature of the earth. Thirdly between the re-emergence of Ptolemy’s Geographia in 1406 and Mercator’s world map of 1569, Johannes Werner published Johannes Stabius’ cordiform projection in 1514, which can be used to depict two hemispheres and in fact Mercator used a pair of cordiform maps to do just that in his world map from 1538. In 1508, Francesco Rosselli published his oval projection, which can be used to display two hemispheres and was used by Abraham Ortelius for his world map from 1564. Fourthly, stereographic projection, known at least since the second century CE and used in astrolabes, can be used in pairs to depict two hemispheres, as was demonstrated by Mercator’s son Rumold in his version of his father’s world map in 1587. Fifthly, the Mercator projection if based on the equator, as it normally is, does not shrink the earth in the middle. Lastly, far from being influential, Mercator’s ‘New and More Complete Representation of the Terrestrial Globe Properly Adapted for Use in Navigation’, even in the improved version of Edward Wright from 1599 had very little influence on practical navigation in the first century after it first was published.
After this abuse of the history of cartography Poskett introduces something, which is actually very interesting. He describes how the Spanish crown went about creating a map of their newly won territories in the New World. The authorities sent out questionnaires to each province asking the local governors or mayors to describe their province. Poskett notes quite correctly that a lot of the information gathered by this method came from the indigenous population. However, he once again displays his ignorance of the history of European cartography. He writes:
A questionnaire might seem like an obvious way to collect geographical information, but in the sixteenth century this idea was entirely novel. It represented a new way of doing geography, one that – like science more generally in this period – relied less and less on ancient Greek and Roman authority.
Poskett p. 41
It would appear that Poskett has never heard of Sebastian Münster and his Cosmographia, published in 1544, probably the biggest selling book of the sixteenth century. An atlas of the entire world it was compiled by Münster from the contributions from over one hundred scholars from all over Europe, who provided maps and texts on various topics for inclusion in what was effectively an encyclopaedia. Münster, who was not a political authority did not send out a questionnaire but appealed for contributions both in publications and with personal letters. Whilst not exactly the same, the methodology is very similar to that used later in 1577 by the Spanish authorities.
In his conclusion to the section on the New World Poskett repeats his misleading summation of the development of science in the sixteenth century:
Prior to the sixteenth century, European scholars relied almost exclusively on ancient Greek and Roman authorities. For natural history they read Pliny for geography they read Ptolemy. However, following the colonization of the Americas, a new generation of thinkers started to place a greater emphasis on experience as the main source of scientific knowledge. They conducted experiments, collected specimens, and organised geographical surveys. This might seem an obvious way to do science to us today, but at the time it was a revelation. This new emphasis on experience was in part a response to the fact that the Americas were completely unknown to the ancients.
Poskett p. 44
Poskett’s claim simply ignores the fact that the turn to empirical science had already begun in the latter part of the fifteenth century and by the time Europeans began to investigate the Americas was well established, those investigators carrying the new methods with them rather than developing them in situ.
Following on from the New World, Poskett takes us into the age of Renaissance astronomy serving up a well worn and well know story of non-European contributions to the Early Modern history of the discipline which has been well represented in basic texts for decades. Nothing ‘revolutionary and revelatory’ here, to quote Alice Roberts. However, despite the fact that everything he in presenting in this section is well documented he still manages to include some errors. To start with he attributes all of the mechanics of Ptolemy’s geocentric astronomy–deferent, eccentric, epicycle, equant–to Ptolemy, whereas in fact they were largely developed by other astronomers–Hipparchus, Apollonius–and merely taken over by Ptolemy.
Next up we get the so-called twelfth century “scientific Renaissance” dealt with in one paragraph. Poskett tells us the Gerard of Cremona translated Ptolemy from Arabic into Latin in 1175, completely ignoring the fact that it was translated from Greek into Latin in Sicily at around the same time. This is a lead into the Humanist Renaissance, which Poskett presents with the totally outdated thesis that it was the result of the fall of Constantinople, which he rather confusingly calls Istanbul, in 1453, evoking images of Christians fleeing across the Adriatic with armfuls of books; the Humanist Renaissance had been in full swing for about a century by that point.
Following the introduction of Georg of Trebizond and his translation of the Almagest from Greek, not the first as already noted above as Poskett seems to imply, up next is a very mangled account of the connections between Bessarion, Regiomontanus, and Peuerbach and Bessarion’s request that Peuerbach produce a new translation of the Almagest from the Greek because of the deficiencies in Trebizond’s translation. Poskett completely misses the fact that Peuerbach couldn’t read Greek and the Epitome, the Peuerbach-Regiomontanus Almagest, started as a compendium of his extensive knowledge of the existing Latin translations. Poskett then sends Regiomontanus off the Italy for ten years collecting manuscripts to improve his translation. In fact, Regiomontanus only spent four years in Italy in the service of Bessarion collecting manuscripts for Bessarion’s library, whilst also making copies for himself, and learning Greek to finish the Epitome.
Poskett correctly points out that the Epitome was an improved, modernised version of the Almagest drawing on Greek, Latin and Arabic sources. Poskett now claims that Regiomontanus introduced an innovation borrowed from the Islamic astronomer, Ali Qushji, that deferent and epicycles could be replaced by the eccentric. Poskett supports this argument by the fact that Regiomontanus uses Ali Qushji diagram to illustrate this possibility. The argument is not original to Poskett but is taken from the work of historian of astronomy, F. Jamil Ragip. Like Ragip, Poskett now argues thus:
In short, Ali Qushji argued that the motion of all the planets could be modelled simply by imagining that the centre of their orbits was at a point other than the Earth. Neither he nor Regiomontanus went as far as to suggest this point might in fact be the Sun. By dispensing with Ptolemy’s notion of the epicycle, Ali Qushji opened the door for a much more radical version of the structure of the cosmos.[7]
This is Ragip theory of what motivated Copernicus to adopt a heliocentric model of the cosmos. The question of Copernicus’s motivation remains open and there are numerous theories. This theory, as presented, however, has several problems. That the planetary models can be presented either with the deferent-epicycle model or the eccentric model goes back to Apollonius and is actually included in the Almagest by Ptolemy as Apollonius’ theorem (Almagest, Book XII, first two paragraphs), so this is neither an innovation from Ali Qushji nor from Regiomontanus. In Copernicus’ work the Sun is not actually at the centre of the planetary orbits but slightly offset, as has been pointed out his system is not actually heliocentric but more accurately heliostatic. Lastly, Copernicus in his heliostatic system continues to use the deferent-epicycle model to describe planetary orbits.
Poskett is presenting Ragip’s disputed theory to bolster his presentation of Copernicus’ dependency on Arabic sources, somewhat unnecessary as no historian of astronomy would dispute that dependency. Poskett continues along this line, when introducing Copernicus and De revolutionibus. After a highly inaccurate half paragraph biography of Copernicus–for example he has the good Nicolaus appointed canon of Frombork Cathedral after he had finished his studies in Italy, whereas he was actually appointed before he began his studies, he introduces us to De revolutionibus. He emphasis the wide range of international sources on which the book is based, and then presents Ragip’s high speculative hypothesis, for which there is very little supporting evidence, as fact:
Copernicus suggested that all these problems could be solved if we imagined the Sun was at the centre of the universe. In making this move he was directly inspired by the Epitome of the Almagest. Regiomontanus, drawing on Ali Qushji, had shown it was possible to imagine that the centre of all the orbits of the planets was somewhere other than the Earth. Copernicus took the final step, arguing that that this point was in fact the Sun.[8]
We simply do not know what inspired Copernicus to adopt a heliocentric model and to present a speculative hypothesis, one of a number, as the factual answer to this problem in a popular book is in my opinion irresponsible and not something a historian should be doing.
Poskett now follows on with the next misleading statement. Having, a couple of pages earlier, introduced the Persian astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi and the so-called Tusi couple, a mathematical device that allows linear motion to be reproduced geometrically with circles, Poskett now turns to Copernicus’ use of the Tusi couple. He writes:
The diagram in On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres shows the Tusi couple in action. Copernicus used this idea to solve exactly the same problem as al-Tusi. He wanted a way to generate an oscillating circular movement without sacrificing a commitment to uniform circular motion. He used the Tusi couple to model planetary motion around the Sun rather than the Earth. This mathematical tool, invented in thirteenth-century Persia, found its way into the most important work in the history of European astronomy. Without it, Copernicus would not have been able to place the Sun at the centre of the universe.[9] [my emphasis]
As my alter-ego the HISTSCI_HULK would say the emphasised sentence is pure and utter bullshit!
The bizarre claims continue, Poskett writes:
The publication of On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres in 1543 has long been considered the starting point for the scientific revolution. However, what is less often recognised is that Nicolaus Copernicus was in fact building on a much longer Islamic tradition.[10]
When I first read the second sentence here, I had a truly WTF! moment. There was a time in the past when it was claimed that the Islamic astronomers merely conserved ancient Greek astronomy, adding nothing new to it before passing it on to the Europeans in the High Middle Ages. However, this myth was exploded long ago. All the general histories of astronomy, the histories of Early Modern and Renaissance astronomy, and the histories of Copernicus, his De revolutionibus and its reception that I have on my bookshelf emphasise quite clearly and in detail the influence that Islamic astronomy had on the development of astronomy in Europe in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Early Modern period. Either Poskett is ignorant of the true facts, which I don’t believe, or he is presenting a false picture to support his own incorrect thesis.
Having botched European Renaissance astronomy, Poskett turns his attention to the Ottoman Empire and the Istanbul observatory of Taqi al-Din with a couple of pages that are OK, but he does indulge in a bit of hype when talking about al-Din’s use of a clock in an observatory, whilst quietly ignoring Jost Bürgi’s far more advanced clocks used in the observatories of Wilhelm IV of Hessen-Kassel and Tycho Brahe contemporaneously.
This is followed by a brief section on astronomy in North Africa in the same period, which is basically an extension of Islamic astronomy with a bit of local colouration. Travelling around the globe we land in China and, of course, the Jesuits. Nothing really to complain about here but Poskett does allow himself another clangour on the subject of calendar reform. Having correctly discussed the Chinese obsession with calendar reform and the Jesuit missionaries’ involvement in it in the seventeenth century Poskett add an aside about the Gregorian Calendar reform in Europe. He writes:
The problem was not unique to China. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII had asked the Jesuits to help reform the Christian Calendar back in Europe. As both leading astronomers and Catholic servants, the Jesuits proved an ideal group to undertake such a task. Christoph Clavius, Ricci’s tutor at the Roman College [Ricci had featured prominently in the section on the Jesuits in China], led the reforms. He integrated the latest mathematical methods alongside data taken from Copernicus’s astronomical tables. The result was the Gregorian calendar, still in use today throughout many parts of the world.[11]
I have no idea what source Poskett used for this brief account, but he has managed to get almost everything wrong that one can get wrong. The process of calendar reform didn’t start in 1582, that’s the year in which the finished calendar reform was announced in the papal bull Inter gravissimas. The whole process had begun many years before when the Vatican issued two appeals for suggestion on how to reform the Julian calendar which was now ten days out of sync with the solar year. Eventually, the suggestion of the physician Luigi Lilio was adopted for consideration and a committee was set up to do just that. We don’t actually know how long the committee deliberated but it was at least ten years. We also don’t know, who sat in that committee over those years; we only know the nine members who signed the final report. Clavius was not the leader of the reform, in fact he was the least important member of the committee, the leader being naturally a cardinal. You can read all of the details in this earlier blog post. At the time there were not a lot of Jesuit astronomers, that development came later and data from Copernicus’ astronomical tables were not used for the reform. Just for those who don’t want to read my blog post, Clavius only became associated with the reform after the fact, when he was commissioned by the pope to defend it against its numerous detractors. I do feel that a bit of fact checking might prevent Poskett and Viking from filling the world with false information about what is after all a major historical event.
The section Heaven and Earth closes with an account of Jai Singh’s observatories in India in the eighteenth century, the spectacular instruments of the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur still stand today.
Readers of this review need not worry that I’m going to go on at such length about the other three quarters of Poskett’s book. I’m not for two reasons. Firstly, he appears to be on territory where he knows his way around better than in the Early Modern period, which was dealt with in the first quarter Secondly, my knowledge of the periods and sciences he now deals with are severely limited so I might not necessarily have seen any errors.
There are however a couple more train wrecks before we reach the end and the biggest one of all comes at the beginning of the second quarter in the section titled Newton’s Slaves. I’ll start with a series of partial quote, then analyse them:
(a) Where did Newton get this idea [theory of gravity] from? Contrary to popular belief, Newton did not make his great discovery after an apple fell on his head. Instead in a key passage in the Principia, Newton cited the experiments of a French astronomer named Jean Richer. In 1672, Richer had travelled to the French colony of Cayenne in South America. The voyage was sponsored by King Louis XIV through the Royal Academy of Science in Paris.
[…]
(b) Once in Cayenne, Richer made a series of astronomical observations, focusing on the movements of the planets and cataloguing stars close to the equator.
[…]
(c) Whilst in Cayenne, Richer also undertook a number of experiments with a pendulum clock.
[…]
(d) In particular, a pendulum with a length of just one metre makes a complete swing, left to right, every second. This became known as a ‘seconds pendulum’…
[…]
(e) In Cayenne, Richer noticed that his carefully calibrated pendulum was running slow, taking longer than a second to complete each swing.
[…]
(f) [On a second voyage] Richer found that, on both Gorée and Guadeloupe, he needed to shorten the pendulum by about four millimetres to keep it running on time.
[…]
(g) What could explain this variation?
[…]
(h) Newton, however, quickly realised the implications the implications of what Richer had observed. Writing in the Principia, Newton argued that the force of gravity varied across the surface of the planet.
[…]
(i) This was a radical suggestion, one which seemed to go against common sense. But Newton did the calculations and showed how his equations for the gravitational force matched exactly Richer’s results from Cayenne and Gorée. Gravity really was weaker nearer the equator.
[…]
(j) All this implied a second, even more controversial, conclusion. If gravity was variable, then the Earth could not be a perfect sphere. Instead, Newton argued, the Earth must be a ‘spheroid’, flattened at the poles rather like a pumpkin.
[…]
(k) Today, it is easy to see the Principia as a scientific masterpiece, the validity of which nobody could deny. But at the time, Newton’s ideas were incredibly controversial.
[…]
(l) Many preferred the mechanical philosophy of the French mathematician René Descartes. Writing in his Principles of Philosophy (1644), Descartes denied the possibility of any kind of invisible force like gravity, instead arguing that force was only transferred through direct contact. Descartes also suggested that, according to his own theory of matter, the Earth should be stretched the other way, elongated like an egg rather than squashed like a pumpkin.
[…]
(m) These differences were not simply a case of national rivalry or scientific ignorance. When Newton published the Principia in 1687, his theories were in fact incomplete. Two major problems remained to be solved. First, there were the aforementioned conflicting reports of the shape of the Earth. And if Newton was wrong about the shape of the Earth, then he was wrong about gravity.[12]
To begin at the beginning: (a) The suggestion or implication that Newton got the idea of the theory of gravity from Richer’s second pendulum experiments is quite simply grotesque. The concept of a force holding the solar system together and propelling the planets in their orbits evolved throughout the seventeenth century beginning with Kepler. The inverse square law of gravity was first hypothesised by Ismaël Boulliau, although he didn’t believe it existed. Newton made his first attempt to show that the force causing an object to fall to the Earth, an apple for example, and the force that held the Moon in its orbit and prevented it shooting off at a tangent as the law of inertia required, before Richer even went to Cayenne.
(c)–(g) It is probable that Richer didn’t make the discovery of the difference in length between a second pendulum in Northern Europe and the equatorial region, this had already ben observed earlier. What he did was to carry out systematic experiments to determine the size of the difference.
(l) Descartes did not suggest, according to his own theory of matter, that the Earth was an elongated spheroid. In fact, using Descartes theories Huygens arrived at the same shape for the Earth as Newton. This suggestion was first made by Jean-Dominique Cassini and his son Jacques long after Descartes death. Their reasoning was based on the difference in the length of one degree of latitude as measured by Willebrord Snel in The Netherlands in 1615 and by Jean Picard in France in 1670.
This is all a prelude for the main train wreck, which I will now elucidate. In the middle of the eighteenth century, to solve the dispute on the shape of the Earth, Huygens & Newton vs the Cassinis, the French Academy of Science organised two expeditions, one to Lapland and one to Peru in order to determine as accurately as possible the length of one degree of latitude at each location. Re-enter Poskett, who almost completely ignoring the Lapland expedition, now gives his account of the French expedition to Peru. He tells us:
The basic technique for conducting a survey [triangulation] of this kind had been pioneered in France in the seventeenth century. To begin the team needed to construct what was known as a ‘baseline’. This was a perfectly straight trench, only a few inches deep, but at least a couple of miles long.[13]
Triangulation was not first pioneered in France in the seventeenth century. First described in print in the sixteenth century by Gemma Frisius, it was pioneered in the sixteenth century by Mercator when he surveyed the Duchy of Lorraine, and also used by Tycho Brahe to map his island of Hven. To determine the length of one degree of latitude it was pioneered, as already stated, by Willebrord Snell. However, although wrong this is not what most disturbed me about this quote. One of my major interests is the history of triangulation and its use in surveying the Earth and determining its shape and I have never come across any reference to digging a trench to lay out a baseline. Clearing the undergrowth and levelling the surface, yes, but a trench? Uncertain, I consulted the book that Poskett references for this section of his book, Larrie D Ferreiro’s Measure of the Earth: The Enlightenment Expedition that Reshaped the World (Basic Books, 2011), which I have on my bookshelf. Mr Ferreiro make no mention of a baseline trench. Still uncertain and not wishing to do Poskett wrong I consulter Professor Matthew Edney, a leading expert on the history of surveying by triangulation, his answer:
This is the first I’ve heard of digging a trench for a baseline. It makes little sense. The key is to have a flat surface (flat within the tolerance dictated by the quality of the instruments being used, which wasn’t great before 1770). Natural forces (erosion) and human forces (road building) can construct a sufficiently level surface; digging a trench would only increase irregularities.[14]
The problems don’t end here, Poskett writes:
La Condamine did not build the baseline himself. The backbreaking work of digging a seven-mile trench was left to the local Peruvian Indians.[15]
This is contradicted by Ferreiro who write:
Just as the three men completed the alignment for the baseline, the rest of the expedition arrived on the scene, in time for the most difficult phase of the operation. In order to create a baseline, an absolutely straight path, seven miles long and just eighteen inches wide, had to be dug into, ripped up from, and scraped out of the landscape. For the scientists, who had been accustomed to a largely sedentary life back in Europe, this would involve eight days of back breaking labour and struggling for breath in the rarefied air. “We worked at felling trees,” Bouguer explained in his letter to Bignon, “breaking through walls and filling in ravines to align [a baseline] of more than two leagues.” They employed several Indians to help transport equipment, though Bouguer felt it necessary that someone “keep an eye on them.”[16]
Poskett includes this whole story of the Peruvian Indians not digging a non-existent baseline trench because he wants to draw a parallel between the baseline and the Nazca Lines, a group of geoglyphs made in the soil of the Nazca desert in southern Peru that were created between 500 BCE and 500 CE. He writes:
The Peruvian Indians who built the baseline must have believed that La Condamine wanted to construct his own ritual line much like the earlier Inca rulers.[17]
Also:
Intriguingly some are simply long straight lines. They carry on for miles, dead straight, crossing hills and valleys. Whilst their exact function is still unclear, many historians now believe they were used to align astronomical observations, exactly as La Condamine intended with his baseline.[18]
The Nazca lines are of course pre-Inca. The ‘many historians’ is a bit of a giveaway, which historians? Who? Even if the straight Nazca lines are astronomically aligned, they by no means serve the same function as La Condamine’s triangulation baseline, which is terrestrial not celestial.
To be fair to Poskett, without turning the baseline into a trench and without having the Indians dig it, Ferreiro draws the same parallel but without the astronomical component:
For their part, the Indians were also observing the scientists, but to them “all was confusion” regarding the scientists’ motives for this arduous work. The long straight baseline the had scratched out of the ground certainly resembled the sacred linear pathways that Peruvian cultures since long before the Incas, had been constructing.[19]
Poskett’s conclusion to this section, in my opinion, contains a piece of pure bullshit.
By January 1742, the results were in. La Condamine calculated that the distance between Quito and Cuenca was exactly 344,856 metres. From observations made of the stars at both ends of the survey, La Condamine also found that the difference in latitude between Quit and Cuenca was a little over three degrees. Dividing the two, La Condamine concluded that the length of a degree of latitude at the equator was 110,613 metres. This was over 1,000 metres less than the result found by the Lapland expedition, which had recently returned to Paris. The French, unwittingly relying on Indigenous Andean science [my emphasis] had discovered the true shape of the Earth. It was an ‘oblate spheroid’, squashed at the poles and bulging at the equator. Newton was right.[20]
Sorry, but just because Poskett thinks that a triangulation survey baseline looks like an ancient, straight line, Peruvian geoglyph doesn’t in anyway make the French triangulation survey in anyway dependent on Indigenous Andean science. As I said, pure bullshit.
The next section deals with the reliance of European navigators of interaction with indigenous navigators throughout the eighteenth century and is OK. This is followed by the history of eighteenth-century natural history outside of Europe and is also OK.
At the beginning of the third quarter, we again run into a significant problem. The chapter Struggle for Existence open with the story of Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, a natural historian, who having taken part in Napoleon’s Egypt expedition, compared mummified ancient Egyptian ibises with contemporary ones in order to detect traces of evolutions but because the time span was too short, he found nothing. His work was published in France 1818, but Poskett argues that his earliest work was published in Egyptian at the start of the century and so, “In order to understand the history of evolution, we therefore need to begin with Geoffroy and the French army in North Africa.” I’m not a historian of evolution but really? Ignoring all the claims for evolutionary thought in earlier history, Poskett completely blends out the evolutionary theories of Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1751), James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, (between 1767 and 1792) and above all Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, who published his theory of evolution in his Zoonomia (1794–1796). So why do we need to begin with Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire?
Having dealt briefly with Charles Darwin, Poskett takes us on a tour of the contributions to evolutionary theory made in Russia, Japan, and China in the nineteenth century, whilst ignoring the European contributions.
Up next in Industrial Experiments Poskett takes us on a tour of the contributions to the physical sciences outside of Europe in the nineteenth century. Here we have one brief WTF statement. Poskett writes:
Since the early nineteenth century, scientists had known that the magnetic field of the Earth varies across the planet. This means that the direction of the north pole (‘true north’) and the direction that the compass needle points (‘magnetic north’) are not necessarily identical, depending on where you are.[21]
Magnetic declination, to give the technical name, had been known and documented since before the seventeenth century, having been first measured accurately for Rome by Georg Hartmann in 1510, it was even known that it varies over time for a given location. Edmund Halley even mapped the magnetic declination of the Atlantic Ocean at the end of the seventeenth century in the hope that it would provide a solution to the longitude problem.
In the final quarter we move into the twentieth century. The first half deals with modern physics up till WWII, and the second with genetic research following WWII, in each case documenting the contribution from outside of Europe. Faster than Light, the modern physics section, move through Revolutionary Russia, China, Japan, and India; here Poskett connects the individual contributions to the various revolutionary political movements in these countries. Genetic States moves from the US, setting the background, through Mexico, India, China, and Israel. I have two minor quibbles about what is presented in these two sections.
Firstly, in both sections, instead of a chronological narrative of the science under discussion we have a series of biographical essays of the figures in the different countries who made the contribution, which, of course, also outlines their individual contributions. I have no objections to this, but something became obvious to me reading through this collection of biographies. They all have the same muster. X was born in Y, became interested in topic Z, began their studies at some comparatively local institute of higher education, and then went off to Heidelberg/Berlin/Paris/London/Cambridge/Edinburg… to study with some famous European authority, and acquire a PhD. Then off to a different European or US university to research, or teach or both, before to returning home to a professorship in their mother country. This does seem to suggest that opposed to Poskett’s central thesis of the global development of science, a central and dominant role for Europe.
My second quibble concerns only the genetics section. One of Poskett’s central theses is that science in a given epoch is driven by an external to the science cultural, social, or political factor. For this section he claims that the external driving force was the Cold War. Reading through this section my impression was that every time he evoked the Cold War he could just have easily written ‘post Second World War’ or even ‘second half of the twentieth century’ and it would have made absolutely no difference to his narrative. In my opinion he fails to actually connect the Cold War to the scientific developments he is describing.
The book closes with a look into the future and what Poskett thinks will be the force driving science there. Not surprisingly he chooses AI and being a sceptic what all such attempts at crystal ball gazing are concerned I won’t comment here.
The book has very extensive end notes, which are largely references to a vast array of primary and mostly secondary literature, which confirms what I said at the beginning that Poskett in merely presenting in semi-popular form the current stand in the history of science of the last half millennium. There is no separate bibliography, which is a pain if you didn’t look to see something the first time it was end noted, as in subsequent notes it just becomes Smith, 2003, sending you off on an oft hopeless search for that all important first mention in the notes. There are occasional grey scale illustrations and two blocks, one of thirteen and one of sixteen, colour plates. There is also an extensive index.
So, after all the negative comments, what do I really think about James Poskett, highly praised volume. I find the concept excellent, and the intention is to be applauded. A general popular overview of the development of the sciences since the Renaissance is an important contribution to the history of science book market. Poskett’s book has much to recommend it, and I personally learnt a lot reading it. However, as a notorious history of science pedant, I cannot ignore or excuse the errors than I have outlined in my review, some of which are in my opinion far from minor. The various sections of the book should have been fact checked by other historians, expert in the topic of the section, and this has very obviously not been done. It is to be hoped that this will take place before a second edition is published.
Would I recommend it? Perhaps surprisingly, yes. James Poskett is a good writer and there is much to be gained from reading this book but, of course, with the caveat that it also contains things that are simply wrong.
[1] James Poskett, Horizons: A Global History of Science, Viking, 2022
[2] Take your pick according to your personal philosophy of science.
Whilst not necessarily to the extent that modern botany was formed by the Renaissance, the three disciplines of palaeontology, mineralogy, and geology also began to gradually emerge during the Renaissance.
As with the other areas of natural history the Renaissance interest in things out of the earth begins with the recently published books from antiquity. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) wrote about the properties of minerals in terms of his general four element theory of all known substances. Theophrastus (370–285 BCE), Aristotle’s pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic school, followed Aristotle in dividing minerals into two categories–those affected by heat and those affected by dampness–in his De Mineralibus. Theophrastus’ knowledge of a wide range of substances was quite extensive. He knew that both amber and magnetite had powers of attraction, that pearls came from shellfish, and that coral comes from India. He also knew about coal and the metal ores, and that pumice stone is volcanic in origin. He knew about the practical use of various minerals in production of glass, pigments, and plaster. He also describes precious stones. He is aware that minerals often come from mines and discusses gold, silver, and copper mines. He apparently also wrote a separate work OnMining, which is lost.
As is almost always the case, Theophrastus’ wide-ranging work on minerals is overshadowed by the much more extensive writings of Pliny (23/24–79 CE) in his Naturalis Historia in which books 33 to 37 in volumes IX and X are devoted to mining and mineralogy, especially as applied to life and art, work in gold and silver, statuary in bronze, art, modelling, sculpture in marble, precious stones, and gems. He describes many more minerals than Theophrastus, discussing their properties and applications. He was the first to recognise the correct origin of amber.
Book I of Biringuccio’s Pirotechnica is titled Every Kind of Mineral in General and deals with the location of metal ores and deals separately with the ores of gold, silver, copper, lead, tin, and iron. Book II continues the theme with what Biringuccio calls the semi-minerals an extensive conglomeration of all sorts of things that we wouldn’t necessarily call minerals. Starting with quicksilver he moves on to sulphur then antimony, marcasite (which includes all the sulphide minerals with a metallic lustre), vitriol, rock alum, arsenic, orpiment, and realgar. This is followed by common salt obtained from mine or water and various other salts in general then calamine Zaffre and manganese. As with Theophrastus he also, under minerals, deals with loadstone, Theophrastus’ magnetite.
In Book I of De re metallica, Agricola deals with the industry of mining and ore smelting, moving on to finding minerals and metal ores in Book II. Book III discusses mineral veins and seams. After several books which discuss the smelting of various metal ores, the final Book XII, discusses salts, solvents, precipitates, and glass.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Biringuccio, who only discussed minerals in the context of his book on mining, Agricola wrote and published several other works on minerals. His earliest publication on mining Bermannus sive de re metallica dialogue (1530) also contained much on mineralogy, as did his De animantibus subterraneis (1549).
However, his major work was his De natura fossilium published in 1546; here the word fossil is used in the sense of things out of the earth. In the ten books of this work, he combined the extensive knowledge about fossils, minerals, and gemstones passed down from antiquity and the Middle Ages with the oral, vernacular, practical, traditional experience of the mineworkers, smelters, and stone masons about the occurrence, exploitation, appearance, structure, properties, and uses of those things found underground.
Title page of De natura fossilium Source: Wikimedia Commons
Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632), who we met as the curator of the cabinet of curiosities of Rudolf II in Prague, was as a natural historian principally interested in cataloguing all know stones and mineral, a task to which he devoted a large part of his life.
Engraved Portrait of Anselmus Boetius De Boodt by Egidius Sadele Source: Wikimedia Commons
The results of his endeavours were published in Latin in his Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia (The History ofGems and Stones), the first edition, dedicated to Rudolf, appearing in Hanau in 1609. Two further editions appearing in Leiden in 1636 and 1647.
Title page of the Gemmarum et Lapidum Historia Source: Wikimedia Commons
The third and final edition of 576 pages was in two parts. The first part gave the various causes of minerals, heavily influenced by the Work of Aristotle and Theophrastus but nevertheless giving providing unique accounts of how minerals are formed. The second part catalogues methodically hundreds of specific minerals, describing in detail their various identifying and curative properties.
Another specialist for minerals and fossils, who we met as curator of a cabinet of curiosities was Michele Mercati (1541–1593), who served the pope in this function as well as directing the Vatican botanical garden.
Portrait of Michele Mercati, artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
The emphasis of his collection lay in stones, minerals, and fossils. Based on his work, he wrote his Metallothica. Opus postumum, auctoritate et munificentia Clementis undecimi pontificis maximi e tenebris in lucem eductum; opera autem et studio Joannis Mariae Lancisii archiatri pontificii illustratum, which, however, was first published in Rome in 1717. Mercati was one of the first to recognise that the chipped flints in his collection were not, as believed at the time, produced by lightning but were tools produced by humans.
Engraving made by Antonio Eisenhot between 1572 and 1581, but published in 1717, representing the Vatican mineral collection as organized by Michele Mercati Source: Wikimedia Commons
The sixteenth century’s perhaps greatest natural historian, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), also had a very substantial collection of minerals, fossils, and stones in his teatro di natura (theatre of nature), and he of course wrote about them, although his text on the topic was one of those unpublished at the time of his death and the eventual late publication of his monumental Musæum Metallicum in 1648, certainly affected its reception, giving it not the attention it deserved. Already in his will in 1605, Aldrovandi was the first to use the word giologia (geology) in the modern sense, although his introduction had little impact, the usage first becoming widespread in the eighteenth century. Previously the word geologia had been used to distinguish earthly philosophy from theology.
Body fossils pictured in the Musaeum Metallicum. A. Aldrovandi describes this specimen as a ” rock pregnant with a shell. ” Aldrovandi considers most fossils to be of inorganic origin made in imitation of living beings. B. Although Aldrovandi believes that fossils are not of organic origin, he often compares them to existing animals. He calls this structure ” Rhombites, ” meaning a ” (stone) resembling a fish of the Rhombus kind. ” C. Detail from the plate entitled ” belemnitarum septem differentiae ” (seven varieties of ” belemnites ” ). D. Aldrovandi calls shark teeth ” glossopetrae, ” or ” tongue-like stones. ” This specimen is given the attribute ” Gesneri, ” or ” Gesner’s ” : naturalist Konrad Gesner (Gesner, 1565) had already described shark teeth as ” Glossopetre ” in 1565. E. Aldrovandi often calls echinoderm fossils ” astroitis, ” a word that comes from the Latin ” aster, ” meaning star. The ” star-echinoderm ” comparison is most likely based on echinoderms’ pentameral symmetry, resembling the stylized figure of a star. The comparison was already made by Gesner (1565) in his description of fossil crinoids similar to those depicted by Aldrovandi and shown here. F. Aldrovandi frequently uses the term ” ophiomorphites, ” or ” snake-like stones, ” in his descriptions of ammonites. G, H. Fossil sea urchins, presented as ” astroitis ” (see E). I. When describing this mammoth tooth, Aldrovandi speaks of ” petrifaction. ” See also Vai and Cavazza (2006, fig. 14) J. Fossil coral, also presented as ” astroitis ” (star-stone), presumably because of the polyps’ stellate morphology. K. Aldrovandi distinguishes two main types of ” glossopetre ” : dentate (as in D) and nondentate (as in K). Source
In his Musæum Metallicum, rather than simply listing the minerals etc, Aldrovandi attempts to apply a systematic classification to the objects under examination. He appears to be clearly aware of the organic original of fossils; Aristotle had claimed that fossils were stones that grew in the ground and only imitated organic forms. Aldrovandi was the first to recognise and describe microscopic fossils on the surface of a calcareous marble-like block: He almost certainly used a magnifying lens to do so. Aldrovandi’s work was in many senses highly innovative but had little impact, his various discoveries being remade by later researchers.
The other mega Renaissance natural historian, Conrad Gessner (1515–1565), also, as already noted above, also wrote and published a substantial work in the year of his death, his De Rerum Fossilium, Lapid um et Gemmarum maxime, figuris et similitudinibus Liber: non solum Medicis, sed omnibus rerum Naturae ac Philogiae studiosis, utilis et juncundus futurus, usually simple referred to as Fossils, Gems, and Stones. Although, he didn’t recognise the true origin of fossils, he did realise that their unusual appearance deserved recognition, and his book contains the earliest extensive collection of fossil illustrations.
Fossil illustrations from ‘De omni rerum fossilium’, showing shark’s teeth Source: Welcome images via Wikimedia Commons ( you can read more about Gessner’s fossil book with more illustrations including that pencil, here)
Gessner was not the first to published illustration of fossils, that honour goes to the German Lutheran rector Christoph Entzelt (1517–1583), who published a De Re Metallica: Hoc Est, De Origine, Varietate, & Natura Corporum Metallicorum, Lapidum, Gemmarum, atq[ue] aliarum, quae ex fodinis eruuntur, rerum, ad Medicinae usum deseruientium, Libri III, under the name Chistophorus Encelius, in 1557, which contains illustrations of four fossils. I have been unable to find out any more about Entzelt or his book.
Like Aldrovandi, Gessner tried to systemise his presentation of the objects describe in his book by dividing them up into fifteen classes. However, his classifications were, by modern standards, trivial and or illogical and had very little influence on the developments within the disciplines of mineralogy, geology, or palaeontology.
In their books on the mining industry both Biringuccio and Agricola drew attention to stratigraphy, the layers under the surface of the earth playing a significant role in the practice of mining. Whilst discussing the types of layers that would potentially lead to fruitful seams of whatever was being mined in a given situation, they gave no thought as to how they various layers came into existence. The first scholar to do so was the Danish anatomist, palaeontologist, and geologist Niels Steensen (1638–1686), more generally known by the Latin version of his name as Steno.
Portrait of Niels Steensen (1666–1677). Unsigned but attributed to court painter Justus Sustermans. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Born in Copenhagen, he studied medicine at Copenhagen University. After graduating he travelled first to Rostock and then on to Amsterdam and further to Leiden, where he studied anatomy together with Jan Swammerdam (1637–1680), Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), Reinier de Graaf (1641–1673), and Franciscus de le Boe Sylvius (1614–1672). As an atomist he made important discoveries and contributions.
After travelling through France, he settled in Italy where he became a member of the Accademia del Cimento. Here, he first made a major contribution to palaeontology and then one to geology. In 1666, he dissected a female shark’s head and recognised the similarity between the shark’s teeth and the fossils known as glossopetrae or ‘tongue stones.’ Steno published his theories that fossils are organic material turned into stone in his Canis carchariae dissectum caput in 1667.
Elementorum myologiae specimen: Illustration from Steensen’s 1667 paper comparing the teeth of a shark head with a fossil tooth. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Previously, the Italian naturalist and botanist Fabio Colonna (1567–1640) had in his investigations found evidence that glossopetrae had organic origins, which he published in his De glossopetris dissertatio in 1616.
Portrait of Colonna 1572 artist unknown Source: Wikimedia CommonsSource:
Whilst walking along the coast in Northern Italy Steno began to take interest in the exposed layers in the earth. He developed theories of stratigraphy defining four laws or principles of how the layers came into being, which he published in his De solido intra solidum naturaliter contento dissertationis prodromus (Preliminary discourse to a dissertation on a solid body naturally contained within a solid) in 1669.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Steensen, in his Dissertationis prodromus of 1669 is credited with four of the defining principles of the science of stratigraphy. His words were:
The law of superposition: “At the time when a given stratum was being formed, there was beneath it another substance which prevented the further descent of the comminuted matter and so at the time when the lowest stratum was being formed either another solid substance was beneath it, or if some fluid existed there, then it was not only of a different character from the upper fluid, but also heavier than the solid sediment of the upper fluid.”
The principle of original horizontality: “At the time when one of the upper strata was being formed, the lower stratum had already gained the consistency of a solid.”
The principle of lateral continuity: “At the time when any given stratum was being formed it was either encompassed on its sides by another solid substance, or it covered the entire spherical surface of the earth. Hence it follows that in whatever place the bared sides of the strata are seen, either a continuation of the same strata must be sought, or another solid substance must be found which kept the matter of the strata from dispersion.”
The principle of cross-cutting relationships: “If a body or discontinuity cuts across a stratum, it must have formed after that stratum.”
(Taken from Wikipedia)
Somewhat bizarrely Steno converted from the Lutheran Protestantism of his birth to Catholicism in 1667. He was ordained a priest in 1675. He was consecrated bishop in 1677 and went off to Lutheran North Germany as a missionary. Living in poverty he died in 1686 after severe illness. In 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II.
Portrait of Steno as bishop (1868) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although, the full development of palaeontology, geology, and minerology didn’t take place until the eighteenth century, during the Renaissance the first steps were taken in separating and defining the three as individual disciplines.
As we have seen in previous episodes, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) was one of the leading natural historians of the sixteenth century. The first ever professor for natural history at the University of Bologna.
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605). attributed to Ludovico Carracci. Source: Wikimedia Commons
He created the university’s botanical garden, one of the oldest still in existence. Collected about 4760 specimens in his herbarium on 4117 sheets in sixteen volumes, which are still preserved in the university and wrote extensively on almost all aspects of natural history, although much of his writing remained unpublished at his death. However, despite all these other achievements in the discipline of natural history, visitors to Bologna during his lifetime came to see his teatro di natura (theatre of nature), also known as his natural historical collection or museum. This was housed in the palatial country villa that he built with the money he received from the dowry of Francesca Fontana, his wife, when he married her. His theatre contained some 18,000 specimens of the diversità di cose naturali (diverse objects of nature). These included flora and fauna, as well as mineral and geological specimens. He wrote a description or catalogue of his collection in 1595.
In 1603, after negotiation with the Senate, Aldrovandi arranged for his teatro di natura to be donated to the city of Bologna after his death in exchange for the promise that they would continue to edit and publish his vast convolute of unpublished papers. This duly took place, and his collection became a public museum in the Palazzo Poggi, the headquarters of the university, opening in 1617, as the first public science museum.
As with all of his natural history undertakings, Aldrovandi’s natural history museum was not the first, there being already ones in the botanical gardens of the universities of Pisa, Padua, and Florence but none of them approached the scope of Aldrovand’s magnificent collection. Also, later, the University of Montpelier had its own natural history collection. However, it wasn’t just institutions that created these early natural history museums. Individual apothecaries and physicians also set about collecting flora and fauna.
The apothecary Francesco Calzolari (1522–1609) had an impressive Theatrum Naturae in Verona with 450 species on display.
Source: Wikimedia CommonsFrancesco Calzolari’s Cabinet of curiosities. From “Musaeum Calceolarium” (Verona, 1622) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Likewise, the papal physician, Michele Mercati (1541–1593), who was superintendent of the Vatican Botanical Garden, had a notable collection concentrating on minerology, geology, and palaeontology in Rome
Source: Wikimedia CommonsEngraving made by Antonio Eisenhot between 1572 and 1581, but published in 1717, representing the Vatican mineral collection as organized by Michele Mercati Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Neapolitan apothecary Ferrante Imperato (1523–1620?) published Dell’Historia Naturale in Naples in 1599, which was based on his own extensive natural history collection and containing the first printed illustration of such a collection.
Portrait of Ferrante Imperato by Tanzio da Varallo Source: Wikimedia CommonsTitle page of Dell’ historia naturale, Napoli, 1599, by Ferrante Imperato (1550-1625). Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University via Wikimedia CommonsEngraving from Dell’ historia naturale, Napoli, 1599, by Ferrante Imperato (1550-1625). Source: Houghton Library, Harvard University via Wikimedia Commons
In the sixteenth century it became very fashionable for rulers to create cabinets of curiosities also know by the German terms as Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer. These were not new and had existed in the two previous centuries but in the Renaissance took on a whole new dimension. These contained not only natural history objects but also sculptures and paintings, as well curious items from home and abroad, with those from abroad taking on a special emphasis as Europe began to make contact with the rest of the world.
The curiosity cabinet is a vast topic, and I don’t intend to attempt to cover it in this blog post, also it is only tangentially relevant to the central topic of this blog post series. I will, however, sketch some aspect that are relevant. Although they covered much material that wasn’t scientific, they were fairly obviously inspired by various aspects of the increasingly empirical view of the world that scholars had been developing throughout the Renaissance. We don’t just go out and actually observe the world for ourselves, we also bring the world into our dwellings so that all can observe it there. They represent a world view created by the merging of history, art, nature, and science. Although principally the province of the rich and powerful, for whom they became a status symbol, some notable Wunderkammer were created by scholars and scholars from the various scientific disciplines were often employed to search out, collect, and then curate the object preserved in the cabinets.
Some of these cabinets created by the Renaissance rulers also had sections for scientific instruments and their owner commissioned instruments from the leading instrument makers of the era. These are not the average instruments created for everyday use but top of the range instruments designed to demonstrate the instrument makers skill and not just instruments but also works of art. As such they were never really intended to be used and many survive in pristine condition down to the present day. One such collection is that which was initially created by Elector August of Saxony (1526–1586), can be viewed in the Mathematish-Physikalischer Salon in the Zwinger in Dresden.
Portrait of the Elector August of Saxony by Lucas Cranach Source: Wikimedia CommonsPlanetenlaufuhr, 1563-1568 Eberhard Baldewein et al., Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon
Equally impressive is the collection initially created by Wilhelm IV, Landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, (1532-1592), who ran a major observational astronomy programme, which can be viewed today in the Astronomisch-Physikalische Kabinett
Portrait of Wilhelm IV. von Hessen-Kassel by Kaspar van der Borcht († 1610) Source: Wikimedia CommonsEquation clock, made for Landgrave William IV of Hesse-Kassel by Jost Burgi and Hans Jacob Emck, Germany, Kassel, 1591, gilt brass, silver, iron Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City via Wikimedia Commons
Not surprisingly Cosimo I de’ Medici Grand Duke of Tuscany (1519–1574)
Agnolo Bronzino, Porträt von Cosimo I de’ Medici in Rüstung, 1545, Source: Uffizien via Wikimedia Commons
had his cabinet of curiosities, the Guardoroba Nuova, in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, designed by the artist and historian of Renaissance art Giorgi Vasari (1511–1574), who, as I have documented in an earlier post, in turn commissioned the artist, mathematician, astronomer and cartographer, Egnatio Danti (1536–1586), to decorate the doors of the carved walnut cabinets, containing the collected treasures, with mural maps depicting the whole world. Danti also designed the rooms centre piece, a large terrestrial globe.
Source: Fiorani The Marvel of Maps p. 57
The alternative name Wunderkammer became common parlance because various German emperors and other rulers somewhat dominated the field of curiosity cabinet construction. Probably the largest and most spectacular Wunderkammer was that of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (1552–1612).
Rudolf II portrait by Joseph Heintz the Elder 1594 Source: Wikimedia Commons
He was an avid art collector and patron, but he also collected mechanical automata, ceremonial swords, musical instruments, clocks, water works, compasses, telescopes, and other scientific instruments. His Kunstkammer incorporated the three kingdoms of nature and the works of man. Unusually, Rudolf’s cabinet was systematically arranged in encyclopaedic fashion, and he employed his court physician Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632), a Flemish humanist, minerologist, physician, and naturalist to catalogue it. De Boodt had succeeded Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) as superintendent of Rudolf’s botanical garden.
Rudolf II Kunstkammer
Although it was a private institution, Rudolph allowed selected professional scholars to study his Wunderkammer. In fact, as well as inanimate objects Rudolf also studiously collected some of Europe’s leading scholars. The astronomers Nicolaua Reimers Baer (1551–1600), Tycho Brahe (1546–1601), and Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) all served as imperial mathematicus. The instrument maker, Jost Bürgi came from Kassel to Prague. As already mentioned, Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) and Anselmus de Boodt (1550–1632) both served as superintendent of the imperial botanical gardens. The later also served as personal physician to Rudolf, as did the Czech naturalist, astronomer, and physician Thaddaeus Hagecius ab Hayek (1525–1600). The notorious occultist Edward Kelly (1555-1597) worked for a time in Rudolf’s alchemy laboratory.
When Rudolf died his Wunderkammer was mostly transferred to Vienna by his brother and successor as Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias, where it was gradually dissipated over the years. Although, his was by far the most spectacular Rudolf’s was only one of many cabinets of curiosity created during the Renaissance by the rich and powerful as a status symbol. However, there were also private people who also created them; the most well-known being the Danish, naturalist, antiquary, and physician Ole Worm (1588–1654).
Ole Worm and Dorothea Worm, née Fincke artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Son of Willum Worm a mayor of Aarhus, he inherited substantial wealth from his father. After attending grammar school, he studied theology Marburg and graduated Doctor of Medicine at the University of Basel in 1611. He also graduated MA at the University of Copenhagen in 1618. He spent the rest of his life in Copenhagen, where he taught Latin Greek, physics, and medicine, whilst serving as personal physician to the Danish King, Christian IV (1577–1648). He died of the bubonic plague after staying in the city to treat the sick during an epidemic.
As a physician he contributed to the study of embryology. Other than medicine he took a great interest in Scandinavian ethnography and archaeology. As a naturalist he determined that the unicorn was a mythical beast and that the unicorn horns in circulation were actually narwhal tusks. He produced the first detail drawing of a bird-of-paradise, proving that they, contrary to popular belief, did in fact have feet. He also drew from life the only known illustration of the now extinct great auk.
OLe Worm’s Great Auk Source: Wikimedia Commons
Worm is best known today for his extensive cabinet of curiosity the Museum Wormianum a great collection of curiosities ranging from native artifacts from the New World, to stuffed animals and fossils in which he specialised.
1655 – Frontispiece of Museum Wormiani Historia Source: Wikimedia Commons
As with other cabinets, Worm’s collection consisted of minerals, plants, animals, and man-made objects. Worm complied a catalogue of his collection with engravings and detailed descriptions, which was published posthumously in four books, as Museum Wormianum. The first three books deal respectively with minerals, plants, and animals. The fourth is archaeological and ethnographical items.
Title page Museum Wormianum. Seu historia rerum rariorum, tam naturalium, quam artificialium, tam domesticarum, quam exoticarum, quæ Hafniæ Danorum in œdibus authoris servantur. Adornata ab Olao Worm … Variis & accuratis iconibus illustrata. Source
A private cabinet of curiosity that then became an institutional one was that of the Jesuit polymath, Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680). Kircher referred to variously as the Master of a Hundred Arts and The Last man Who Knew Everything belonged very much to the Renaissance rather than the scientific revolution during which he lived and was active.
Athanasius Kircher engraving by Cornelis Bloemaert Source: Wikimedia Commons
He was author of about forty major works that covered a bewildering range of topics, which ranged from the genuinely scientific to the truly bizarre. Immensely popular and widely read in his own time, he quickly faded into obscurity following his death. Born in Fulda in Germany, one of nine children, he attended a Jesuit college from 1614 till 1618 when he entered the Jesuit Order. Following a very mixed education and career he eventually landed in the Collegio Romano in 1634, where he became professor for mathematics. Here he fulfilled an important function in that he collected astronomical data from Jesuit missionaries throughout the world, which he collated and redistributed to astronomers throughout Europe on both sides of the religious divide.
Given he encyclopaedic interests it was perfectly natural for Kircher to begin to assemble his own private cabinet of curiosities. In 1651, the Roman Senator Alfonso Donnini (d.1651) donated his own substantial cabinet of curiosities to the Collegio, and the authorities decided that it was best placed in the care of Father Kircher. Combining it with his own collection, Kircher established, what became known as the Musæum Kircherianum, which he continued to expand throughout his lifetime.
The museum became very popular and attracted many visitors. Giorgio de Sepibus published a first catalogue in 1678, the only surviving evidence of the original layout. Following Kircher’s death the museum fell into neglect but was revived, following the appointment of Filippo Bonanni (1638–1725), Kercher’s successor as professor of mathematics, as curator in 1698. Bonnani published a new catalogue of the museum in 1709. The museum prospered till 1773 till the suppression of the Jesuit Order led to its gradual dissipation, reestablishment in 1824, and final dispersion in 1913.
As we have seen cabinets of curiosities often evolved into public museums and I will close with brief sketches of two that became famous museums in England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
John Tradescant the Elder (c. 1570–1638) was an English, naturalist, gardener, and collector. He was gardener for a succession of leading English aristocrats culminating in service to George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham. In his duties he travelled widely, particularly with and for Buckingham, visiting the Netherlands, Artic Russia, the Levant, Algiers, and France. Following Buckingham’s assassination in 1628, he was appointed Keeper of the King’s Gardens, Vines and Silkworms at Oatlands Palace in Surrey.
John Tradescant the Elder (portrait attributed to Cornelis de Neve) Source: Wikimedia Commons
On his journeys he collected seeds, plants, bulbs, as well as natural historical and ethnological curiosities. He housed this collection, his cabinet of curiosities, in a large house in Lambeth, The Ark.
Tradescant’s house in Lambeth: The Ark Source: Wikimedia Commons
This was opened to the public as a museum. The collection also included specimens from North America acquired from colonists, including his personal friend John Smith (1580–1631), soldier, explorer, colonial governor, and Admiral of New England.
His son, John Tradescant the Younger (1608–1662) followed his father in becoming a naturalist and a gardener.
John Tradescant the Younger, attributed to Thomas de Critz Source: Wikmedia Commons
Like his father he travelled widely including two trips to Virginia between 1628 and 1637. He added both botanical and other objects extensively to the family collection in The Ark. When his father died, he inherited his position as head gardener to Charles I and Henrietta Maria of France working in the gardens of Queens House in Greenwich. Following the flight of Henrietta Maria in the Civil War, he compiled a catalogue of the family cabinet of curiosities, as Museum Tradescantianum, dedicated to the Royal College of Physicians with whom he was negotiating to transfer the family botanical garden. A second edition of the catalogue was dedicated to Charles II after the restoration.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Around 1650, John Tradescant the Younger became acquainted with the antiquarian, politician, astrologer and alchemist, Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), who might be described as a social climber.
Elias Ashmole by John Riley, c. 1683
Born into a prominent but impoverished family, he managed to qualify as a solicitor with the help of a prominent maternal relative. He married but his wife died in pregnancy, just three years later in 1641. In 1646-47, he began searching for a rich widow to marry. In 1649, he married Mary, Lady Mainwaring, a wealthy thrice widowed woman twenty years older than him. The marriage was not a success and Lady Manwaring filed suit for separation and alimony, but the suit was dismissed by the courts in 1657 and having inherited her first husband’s estate, Ashmole was set up for life to pursue his interests in alchemy and astrology, without having to work.
Ashmole helped Tradescant to catalogue the family collection and financed the publication of the catalogue in 1652 and again in 1656. Ashmole persuaded John Tradescant to deed the collection to him, going over into his possessing upon Tradescant’s death in 1662. Tradescant’s widow, Hester, challenged the deed but the court ruled in Ashmole’s favour. Hester held the collection in trust for Ashmole until her death.
In 1677, Ashmole made a gift of the Tradescant collection together with his own collection to the University of Oxford on the condition that they build a building to house them and make them available to the general public. So, the Ashmolean Museum, the world’s second university museum and Britain’s first public museum, came into existence on 24 May 1683.
The original Ashmolean Museum building on Board Street Oxford now the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford Source: Wikimedia Commons
My second British example is the cabinet of curiosities of Hans Sloane (1660–1753), physician, naturalist, and collector.
Slaughter, Stephen; Sir Hans Sloane, Bt; Source: National Portrait Gallery, London via Wikipedia Commons
Sloane was born into an Anglo-Irish family in Killyleagh a village in County Down, Ulster. Already as a child Sloane began collecting natural history items and curiosities, which led him to the study of medicine. In London, he studied botany, materia medica, surgery, and pharmacy. In 1687, he travelled to Jamaica as personal physician to the new Governor Christopher Monck, 2nd Duke of Albemarle. Albemarle died in the following year, so Sloane was only in Jamaica for eighteen months, however, in this time he collected more than a thousand plant specimens and recorded eight hundred new species of plants, starting a lifetime of collecting.
Sloane married the widow Elizabeth Langley Rose a wealthy owner of Jamaican sugar plantation worked by slaves, making Sloane independently wealthy. There followed a successful career as physician, Secretary of the Royal Society, editor of the Philosophical Transactions, President of the Royal College of Physicians, and finally President of the Royal Society. Throughout his life, Sloane continued to collect. He used his wealth to acquire the natural history collections of Barbadian merchant William Courten (1572–1636), papal nuncio Cardinal Filippo Antonio Gualterio (1660–1728), apothecary James Petiver (c.1665–1718), plant anatomist Nehemiah Grew, botanist Leonard Plukenet (1641–1706), gardener and botanist the Duchess of Beaufort (1630–1715), botanist Adam Buddle (1662–1715), physician and botanist Paul Hermann (1646–1695), botanist and apothecary Franz Kiggelaer (1648–1722), and botanist, chemist, and physician Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738).
When he died Sloane’s collection of over seventy-one thousand items– books manuscripts, drawings, coins and medals, plant specimens and more–was sold to the nation for £20,000, well below its true value. It formed to founding stock of the British Museum and British Library, which opened in 1759.
Montagu House, c. 1715 the original home of the British museum
The natural history collection was split off to found the Natural History Museum, which opened in South Kensington in 1881.
The Natural History Museum. This is a panorama of approximately 5 segments. Taken with a Canon 5D and 17-40mm f/4L. Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Renaissance practice of creating cabinets of curiosities played a significant role in the creation of modern museums in Europe. It also provided scientists with collections of materials on which to conduct their research, an important element in the development of empirical science in the Early Modern Period.
Over a series of episodes, we have followed how the Renaissance Humanists introduced materia medica into the university curriculum developing it from a theoretical subject to a practical empirical field of research and then over time, how the modern scientific study of botany developed out of it. We have also seen how some of the same energy was invested in laying down the beginnings of the modern scientific study of zoology. The beginnings of this evolution at the end of the fifteenth century coincided with the beginnings of the so-called Age of Discovery or Age of Exploration, which as I stated in the first episode on navigation I prefer to refer to as the Contact Period, when Europeans first came into contact with lands and peoples unknown to them, such as the Americas or sub-Saharan Africa, and at the same time vastly increased their knowledge of countries such as India; they also became acquainted with a vast number of new medicinal herbs and other plants as well as animals, which played an increasing role in their studies in these areas.
Exotica out of the plant and animal kingdoms were not unknown to the European scholars, after all Alexander the Great had conquered Persia and Northern India and the Romans Northern Africa. They brought knowledge of these lands and their flora and fauna back into Europe and even imported many of those plants and animals. Famously, Hannibal crossed the Alps with his elephants and the Romans fed Christians to the lions in the Circus Maximus. Some of these exotica were also recorded in the works of Aristotle, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny. Later in the Middle Ages the Islamic forces created an Empire that stretched from China to Spain and the Islamic scholars also recorded much of the flora and fauna of this vast Empire. A lot of that material came into Europe during the twelfth century Scientific Renaissance when large quantities of Arabic material was translated into Latin.
However, this knowledge of natural historical exotica was purely second hand and the European recipients in the Middle Ages and Renaissance had no way of knowing how accurate it was or even if it was true. They had no first-hand empirical verification. Were the accounts of real plants and animals or mythical ones. Just looking at the proto-zoological works of both Conrad Gesner and Ulisse Aldrovandi illustrates this problem. Both of them include many animals that we now know never existed, myths and legends from other times and other cultures. They had no way of differentiating between the real and the mythical, although they both put hesitant question marks behind some of the mythical beasts that they served up for their readers.
The vastly increased voyages of trade and exploration, although one could simply write trade as almost all exploratory voyages where motivated by the hope of trade, during the contact period gave the Renaissance scholars the chance to go and search out and describe the exotica with their own eyes. When talking about Renaissance zoology we saw that the French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517–1564) travelled as a diplomate in Greece, Crete, Asia Minor, Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine between 1546 and 1549 and observed and wrote about natural history there. Under the botanists Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) translated Garcia de Orta’s important materia medica text Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia, into Latin from the original Portuguese and published it in Europe in 1567. He also acquired information about the flora of the Americas by questioning seafarers returning to the Iberian Peninsula from there. Clusius’ interest in the materia medica and natural history of the newly discovered Americas didn’t end with just collecting information from returnees, he also translated and published in Latin. the work of Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588)
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Monardes was born in Seville the son of Nicolosi di Monardis, an Italian bookseller, and Ana de Alfaro, the daughter of a physician. He graduated BA in 1530 and obtaining a first degree in medicine in 1533, began to practice medicine in Seville. He obtained a doctorate in medicine from the University of Alcalá de Henares in 1547. He wrote extensively on the materia medica of the Americas. In 1565, he published his Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales in Seville, which was based on the reports of a wide range of people returning from the Americas. In 1569, he published an extended version, his Dos libros, el uno que trata de todas las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de la medicina, y el otro que trata de la piedra bezaar, y de la yerva escuerçonera. A second volume expanding on the material in the first two books, Segunda parte del libro des las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de la medicina; do se trata del tabaco, y de la sassafras, y del carlo sancto, y de otras muchas yervas y plantas, simientes, y licores que agora nuevamente han venido de aqulellas partes, de grandes virtudes y maravillosos effectos appeared in Saville in 1571. A single edition of all three books, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de neustra Indias Occidentales, que sirven en medicina; Tratado de la piedra bezaar, y dela yerva escuerçonera; Dialogo de las grandezas del hierro, y de sus virtudes medicinales; Tratado de la nieve, y del beuer frio was published in Saville in 1574, with a second edition appearing in 1580.
In 1574, Platin in Antwerp published Clusius first translation De simplicibus medicamentis ex occidentali India delatis quorum in medicina usus est. Plantin published a revised edition, Simplicium medicamentorum ex novo orbe delatorum, quorum in medicina usus est, historia, in 1579. In 1582, Clusius produced a compendium of revised translations of the work of Garcia de Orta, Nicolás Monardes, and Cristóbal Acosta, to who we will return shortly. A further revised edition appeared in 1593 and a last revision in 1605. In 1577, John Frampton, a sixteenth century English merchant, published an English translation of the 1565 Spanish text, Ioyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde, wherein is declared the rare and singular vertues of diuerse and sundrie hearbes, trees, oyles, plantes, and stones, with their applications, as well for phisicke as chirurgerie in London. A new expanded edition based in the 1574 Spanish text appeared in 1580.
Before we turn to Acosta, we need to deal with Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478–1557), who preceded him.
Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés Source: Wikimedia Commons
Oviedo was a Spanish, soldier, historian, writer, botanist, and colonist, who participated in the colonisation of the West Indies already in the 1490s. Born in Madrid, he was educated at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, where he served as a page to the Infanta, Juan de Aragón, until his death in 1497. He then spent three years in Italy before returning to a position as a bureaucrat in the Castilian imperial project. In 1514, he was appointed supervisor of gold smelting in Santo Domingo and in 1523 historian of the West Indies. He travelled five more times to the Americas before his death.
In 1526, he published a short work, La Natural hystoria de las Indias, with few illustrations, in Toledo. It was translated into Italian appearing in Venice in 1534, with French editions beginning in 1545, and English ones beginning in 1555. In 1535, part one of a longer and more fully illustrated Historia general de las Indias was printed in Seville, which contained the announcement of two further parts. He continued to work on a revised version of part one and on parts two and three until his death in 1557, but they were first published in an incomplete edition in 1851 entitled, Natural y General Hystoria de las Indias. English and French editions of the 1535 Seville publication appeared in 1555 and 1556 respectively. The Saville publication is a ragbag of topics but contains quite a lot of both botanical and zoological information.
The Portuguese physician and natural historian, Cristóbal Acosta (c. 1525–c. 1594), whose work was partially included in Clusius’ 1582 compendium, is thought to have been born somewhere in Africa, because he claimed to be African in his publications.
Cristóbal Acosta Source: Wikimedia Commons
He first travelled to the East Indies, as a soldier, in 1550. He returned to Goa with his former captain, Luís de Ataíde, who had been appointed Viceroy of Portuguese India, in 1568, the year Garcia de Orta died. He worked as a physician in India and gained a reputation for collecting botanical specimens. He returned to Europe in 1572 and worked as a physician in Spain. In 1578, he published his Tractado de las drogas y medicinas de las Indias orientales (Treatise of the drugs and medicines of the East Indies). This work included much that was culled from Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e drogas he cousas medicinais da Índia but became better known that Orta’s work. The last entry was a treatise on the Indian Elephant, the first published in Europe. The work was translated into Italian in 1585 by Francesco Ziletti.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Cristóbal Acosta is not to be confused with José de Acosta (c. 1539–1600), the Jesuit missionary and naturalist.
José de Acosta Source: Wikimedia Commons
Born in Medina del Campo, Spain José de Costa joined the Jesuit Order at the age of thirteen. In 1569, he was sent by the Order to Lima, Peru. Ordered to cross the Andes to journey to the Viceroy of Peru, he and his companions suffered altitude sickness; Acosta, as one of the earliest to do so, gave a detailed description of the ailment, attributing it correctly to “air… so thin and so delicate that it is not proportioned to human breathing.” Acosta aided the Viceroy in a five-year tour through the Viceroyalty of Peru, seeing and recording much of what he experienced. He spent the year of 1586 in Mexico studying the culture of the Aztecs. In 1587, he returned to Spain. He published many, mostly theological, works in his lifetime but is best known as the author of De Natura Novi Orbis, De promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum salute (both published in Salamanca in 1588) and above all, the Historia natural y moral de las Indias(published in Savile in 1590).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In his Historia natural y moral de las Indias he presented his observations on the physical geography and natural history of Mexico and Peru as well as the indigenous religions and political structures from a Jesuit standpoint. His book was one of the first detailed and realistic descriptions of the New World. Acosta presented the theory that the indigenous populations must have crossed over from Asia into the Americas. The work was translated into various European languages, appearing in English in 1604 and in French in 1617.
Historia natural y moral de las Indias Source: Wikimedia Commons
It should be noted that just as the early Renaissance natural historians in Europe relied, to a great extent, for their information on plants, herbs and animals on farmers, hunters, foresters, and others who lived and worked on the land, so the Europeans studying the materia medica and natural histories of Asia and the Americas depended very heavily on the information that they received from the indigenous populations. This was particularly the case in the next natural historians that I will briefly present.
Bernardino de Sahagún (c.1499–1590) was born Bernadino de Rivera in Sahagùn in Spain and attended the humanist University of Salamanca and there joined the Franciscan Order, changing his name to that of his birthplace, as was the Franciscan custom, and was probably ordained in 1527. He was recruited in 1529 to join the Franciscan mission to New Spain.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
He helped found the first European school of higher education in the Americas, the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco in 1536. He learnt the Aztec language Nahuatl in order to be able to confer with the indigenous population about materia medica and natural history. In 1558, he was commissioned by the new provincial of New Spain, Fra Francisco de Toral, to formalise his studies of native languages and culture. He spent twenty-five years researching the topic with the last fifteen spent editing, translating, and copying. He was assisted in his research by five graduates of the Collegio, all of whom spoke Nahuatl, Latin, and Spanish, and as well as helping him to interview the elders about the religious rituals and calendar, family, economic and political customs, and natural history, also participated in research and documentation, translation and interpretation, as well as painting the illustrations. In the text he credited them for their work by name.
Out of this research Sahagún created a twelve volume General History of the Things of New Spain, the manuscript was sent to Philip II of Spain. It was never printed, and the manuscript was bought by Ferdinando de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, in 1580. He put it on display in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence and it is generally known as the Florentine Codex. The volume that deals with natural history is titled Earthly Things and is the most heavily illustrated, containing paintings of thirty-nine mammals, one hundred and twenty birds and more than six hundred flowers. The hundreds of New World plants listed in the Florentine Codex are presented according to an Aztec system of taxonomy. The Aztec divided plants up into four main groups: edible, decorative, economic, and medicinal.
Sahagún’s Historia general was not the only book on indigenous materia medica to emerge from the Colegio Imperial de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco. In 1552, a native graduate, Martín de la Cruz wrote a Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis (Little Book of the Medicinal Herbs of the Indians) in Nahuatl, which was translated into Latin by Juan Badianus de la Cruz (1484–later than 1552) an Aztec teacher at the Collegio. The original Nahuatl manuscript no longer exists. The manuscript is a compendium of two hundred and fifty medicinal herbs used by the Aztecs. The Latin manuscript sent to Spain changed hands many times over the years before landing in the Vatican Library. In 1990, it was returned to Mexico, where it now resides in library of the National Institute of Anthropology and History in Mexico City.
Libellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis Source: Wikimedia CommonsLibellus de Medicinalibus Indorum Herbis Source: Wikimedia Commons
In the seventeenth century copies of the manuscript were made by Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657) and Francesco Stelluti (1577–1652), both members of the Accademia dei Lincei. The Dal Pozzo copy in now in the Royal Library at Windsor but the Stelluti copy has disappeared.
For many years, Ulisse Aldrovandi hoped to get a commission from the Spanish Crown to study the natural history of New Spain but in the end, King Philip II sent his personal physician, Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514–1587) there to study the medicinal plants and animals.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Of Jewish extraction, he studied medicine at the University of Alcalá from 1530 to 1536 and was connected with the leading scholars of the period. In the area of botanical studies, he won a good reputation for his study of the medical effectivity of plants and his translation into Spanish of Pliny’s Naturalis historia. In 1570, Francisco Hernández shipped out to the Americas accompanied by his son Juan, and the cosmographer Francisco Domínguez, who had been commissioned by the king to map New Spain.
Like Sahagún he learnt Nahuatl and acquired most of his knowledge by interviewing the indigenous population. He was accompanied in his work by three Aztec painters– baptized Antón, Baltazar Elías, and Pedro Vázquez–who provided the illustrations for his work. His work describes over three thousand plants unknown to Europeans, an incredible number when one considers that Dioscorides’ Materia Medica only contains about five hundred. Hernández sent at least sixteen bound volumes of manuscripts back the Philip before he returned in 1577. Theses were three volumes of twenty-four books on plants, one volume of six treatises on animals, eleven volumes of coloured illustrations, and at least one volume of dried plant specimens, there may have been more.
As with Sahagún, there were problems when it came to the publication of his work. He intended to publish three editions, one in Spanish, one in Latin, and the third in Nahuatl for the indigenous population of New Spain. However, his voluminous material was in a mess, and he was unable to complete the mammoth task that he had undertaken, so the book remained unpublished in his lifetime. Philip II placed the manuscript in the library of the Monasterio y Sitio de El Escorial en Madrid (Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial), where it was destroyed in a fire in 1671.
In 1580, Nardo Antonio Recchi (1540–1594) was appointed Hernández’s successor as Philip’s personal physician and took on the task of trying to bring order into Hernández’s chaos. Recchi produced a four-volume edition of Hernández’s work and Juan de Herrera (1530–1597), the architect of El Escorial began the process of preparing it for publication in 1582. However, by the time of his death in 1587 little progress had been made and the project died with him. However, Recchi had taken a copy of his manuscript back to Naples with him and it became the grail for all of the European natural historians, including, Giovanni della Porta, Ulisse Aldrovandi and Carolus Clusius, were eager to study the treasures that Hernández had brought back from the New World.
Part of Hernández’s work, the Index medicamentorum, an index that lists Mexican plants according to their traditional therapeutic uses, was published in Mexico City; the index was arranged according to body part, and it was ordered from head to toe. A Spanish translation appeared as an appendix to the medical treatises of Juan de Barrios (1562–1645) in 1607.
A Spanish translation of Recchi’s four-volume edition was prepared by Fra Francisco Ximénez with the title, Quatro libros de la naturaleza y virtudes de las plantas y animales and published in Mexico City in 1615.
The Accademia dei Lincei under the leadership of Prince Federico Cesi (1585–1630) took up the task of publishing a Latin edition of Recchi’s work. A partial, heavily redacted edition under the title Francisci Hernandez rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus appeared in print in 1628, however the project was laid on ice when Cesi died in 1630. Finally, a complete Latin edition of Recchi’s four volumes, edited by Johannes Schreck (1576–1630) and Fabio Colonna (1567–1640), was published in Rome, including material from Hernández’s original manuscripts not used by Recchi, with the title, Nova plantarum, animalium et mineralium mexicanorum historia a Francisco Hernández in indis primum compilata, de inde a Nardo Antonio Reccho in volumen digesta (1648–51)
Source:Wikimedia Commons
Of course, what I have sketched above was only the beginning of the European awareness of the natural history of the world outside of Europe and down to the present-day thousands of research expeditions by scientists from all other the world have continued to add to our knowledge of the extraordinary diversity of flora and fauna on our planet.
Over a series of posts, we have followed the emergence of the science of botany out of the Renaissance humanist physicians’ endeavours to integrate materia medica, the study of simples or medical herbs, into the Renaissance university teaching curriculum. By the end of the sixteenth century the books on plants that were being published were definitely works of botany and no longer works of medicine. However, one of the books that helped launch the gradual rise of botany during the century, Pliny’s more than somewhat disputed[1]Naturalis historia was actually encyclopaedic in its scope covering much more than just the flora of antiquity, which only made up sixteen of the thirty-seven books. Four of the other books were devoted to the fauna of antiquity, covering mammals, snakes, marine animals, birds, and insects. Aristotle had also written two books on the fauna his De Partibus Animalium and his Historia Animalium as well as the De Generatione Animalium, which is attributed to him. All three books were well known and published in the Renaissance. Albertus Magnus (c.1200–1280), who digested, interpreted, and systematized the whole of Aristotle’s works in the thirteenth century, also wrote a De animalibus, which was known and read in the Renaissance.
Albertus Magnus De animalibus (c. 1450–1500, cod. fiesolano 67, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana) via Wikimedia Commons
All of this raises the question, was there development of zoology as a discipline during the sixteenth century similar to that of botany? The answer is both yes and no. A much smaller number of authors wrote books on the fauna and the development, at that time, progressed by no means as far as that of botany. However, as we will see two authors in particular stand out and they can and have been labelled the founders of modern zoology, they are the Swiss polymath Conrad Gesner (1516–1565) and the equally polymathic Italian natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605). However, before we look at the work of these two intellectual giants, and it is not an exaggeration to call them that, we will first take a look at the others, who published on fauna in the period and, to begin, briefly discuss why the development of zoology lagged behind that of botany.
When you spell out the reasons why the development of zoology in the Renaissance lagged behind that of botany, they seem pretty obvious, but you first have to think about the problem. Whereas the ongoing botanist could and did send each other, seeds, bulbs, dried plants in the form of herbarium sheets, and even living plants carefully packaged in letters and packages with the post you can’t pop a rhinoceros in an envelope and send it to someone.
My example may seem more than somewhat ridiculous, but it refers to a real, notorious, historical occurrence. Perhaps the most well known of all Renaissance prints is Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros, which we will meet again later. Dürer’s print is based on verbal descriptions of an Indian rhinoceros that was sent, by ship, as a gift to King Manuel I of Portugal in 1515. Manuel actually staged a combat between his rhinoceros and a young elephant to test Pliny’s account that elephants and rhinoceroses were enemies. The young elephant fled, and the rhinoceros was declared the winner. Manual decided to give his rhinoceros to the Medici Pope Leo X, and it embarked one again on a ship across the Mediterranean, but this time did not survive the journey dying in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. Dürer’s print was based on a letter and sketch of the beast sent from Lisbon to Nürnberg. As we shall see, many of the early printed accounts of animals were based on verbal descriptions and sketches rather than actual encounters with the animals themselves. The animal studies of Renaissance artists like Dürer or Leonardo also played a role in stimulating interest in animals amongst the humanist scholars.
Albrecht Dürer’s Rhinoceros woodcut Source: Wikimedia Commons
Another major problem is that if you go out on excursions or field trips to empirically study plants, the plants remain quietly where they are whilst you examine, sketch, or even dig them up to take them home with you. Most animals aren’t as accommodating. In fact, most wild animals will take to their heels and disappear when they hear humans approaching. Proto-zoologists were dependent on the second hand reports of hunters, field workers, or foresters of animals they didn’t get to observe themselves. Putting this all together, it is simply much more difficult to conduct empirical research on animals than on plants. It therefore comes as no surprise that the first zoological publications in the Renaissance were about fishes and birds, animals that humans eat and are thus more accessible to the researcher. It should be noted that in the Early Modern period people ate a much wider range of birds than we do today and that whales were also extensively eaten throughout Europe. In fact, the European whaling industry began in the Middle Ages because the Church classified them as fish, meaning they could be eaten on a Friday, a fast day when eating meat was forbidden.
Before turning to the early Renaissance zoologists, we will take a brief look at the medieval manuscripts of animals, the bestiaries. Unlike the medieval herbals, which served a practical medical function, the bestiaries served a philosophical or religious function. The natural histories and illustrations of the individual beasts were usually accompanied by a moral lesson. The animals served a symbolic function rather than a practical one. The illustrations were mostly copied from earlier ancient Greek sources, the earliest known example is the second century Greek work, the Physiologus, which draws on earlier authors such as Aristotle, Herodotus, Pliny, and others.
Panther, Bern Physiologus, 9th century Source: Wikimedia Commons
The genre was further developed by Isidore of Seville and Saint Ambroise, who added a religious dimension. Bestiaries were very popular in the High Middle Ages, but had little or no influence on the beginnings of zoology in the Renaissance, unlike the influence herbals had with plants.
Detail from the 12th century Aberdeen Bestiary Source: Wikimedia Commons
The earliest zoological text from the sixteenth century was published by the English naturalist William Turner (1509/10–1568), who, as we saw in the episode on herbals, was motivated by his travels and studies in Northern Italy. Before he began publishing his more famous herbal in 1551, he had already published Avium praecipuarum, quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentio est, brevis et succincta historia (The Principal Birds of Aristotle andPliny…), which not only discussed the birds to be found in the two authors from antiquity but contained descriptions of birds based on his own empirical observations.
Title page of Avium Praecipuarum, 1544, by William Turner. This was the first ever printed book devoted wholly to ornithology. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Much more extensive are the zoological works by the French traveller and naturalist, Pierre Belon (1517–1564).
Pierre Belon artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Little is known of his origins, but in the early 1530s he was apprenticed to the apothecary René des Prey. He entered the service of René du Bellay Bishop of Le Man (c. 1500–1546) in the second half of the 1530s, who permitted him to study medicine at the University of Wittenberg under Valerius Cordus (1515–1544).[2] He travelled through Germany with Cordus in 1542, continuing on through Flanders and England alone. He continued his studies in Paris, and then became apothecary to Cardinal François de Tournon (1489–1562) in whose service he undertook diplomatic journeys to Greece, Crete, Asia Minor, Egypt, Arabia, and Palestine between 1546 and 1549. An avid polymath he recorded everything he saw and experienced on his travels. During a Papal conclave, 1549–1550, he met up with Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566), who would be appointed professor for medicine in Montpellier, and the Italian physician Hippolyte Salviani (1514–1572). Returning to Paris he began to sort his notes and publish his zoology texts. In 1557 he undertook another journey to Northern Italy, Savoy, the Dauphiné, and Auvergne. In 1558 he obtained his medical licence and began to practice medicine. He became a favourite of the Kings Henry II (1519–1559) and Charles IX (1550–1574). The latter providing him with lodgings in Château de Madrid in the Bois de Boulogne. His promising career was cut short when he was murdered in 1564.
Between 1551 and 1557 he wrote and published a series of books based on his travel observations. His first book was his L’histoire naturelle des estranges poissons marins, avec la vraie peincture & description du Daulphin, & de plusieurs autres de son espece. Observee par Pierre Belon du Mans published in Paris in 1551.
This is a description of the fish and cetaceans, such as dolphins and porpoises, that he had observed and dissected on his travels. Aristotelean in nature the work contained a classification system for marine fish, including both cetaceans and hippopotami under fishes, although he recognised that cetaceans had mammalian milk glands and were air breathing. Two years later he published a more general book on fish, his De aquatilibus. Libri duo Cum eiconibus ad vivam ipsorum effigiem, Quoad eius fieri potuit, expressis, also in Paris. This contained descriptions of 110 fish species and is a founding text of the discipline of ichthyology. A French edition De aquatilibus. Libri duo Cum eiconibus ad vivam ipsorum effigiem, Quoad eius fieri potuit, expressis was published in Paris in 1555.
In 1553 he also contributed to the botanical literature with his De arboribus Coniferis, Resiniferis aliisque semper virentibus…, a book on confers, pines and evergreen trees. It was published in both Latin and French in the same year. The same year saw the publication of his more general Les obsevations de plusieurs singularitez et choses memorables trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Judée, Egypte, Arabie et autres pays étrangèrsas well as a three-volume work on funerary customs in Antiquity. A revised edition of his Observations was published in 1555 and Clusius translated them into Latin for an international readership in 1559.
In 1555 he turned his attention to birds publishing his Histoire de la nature des oyseaux in Paris. It describes about 200, mostly European, birds. This book is particular notable for its comparison of the skeletons of a bird and a human, one of the earliest examples of comparative anatomy.
A comparison of the skeleton of birds and man in Natural History of Birds, 1555 Source: Wikimedia Commons
He rounded off this burst of publications with his Portraits d’oyseaux, animaux, serpens, herbes, arbres, hommes et femmes, d’Arabie et Egypte, in Paris in 1557.
Portraits d’oyseaux, animaux, serpens, herbes, arbres, hommes et femmes, d’Arabie et Egypte, 1557 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Much of the information in his books on both fishes and birds was obtained by investigating those that came to market in the towns that he visited. On his trip to England, he also met the Venetian humanist scholar and architect, Daniel Barbaro (1514–1570), Palladio’s patron, who had made many drawings of Adriatic fish.
Etching of Daniele Barbaro by Wenzel Hollar Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Italian physician, humanist scholar, and naturalist Hippolyte Salviani (1514–1572), who as we saw above met Belon at the Papal conclave in 1549–1550, was the personal physician to the House of Farnese from 1550 till 1555 and taught at the University of Rome until 1568.
Frontispiece of Hippolyte Salviani’s Aquatilium animalium historiae Source: Wikimedia Commons
Like Belon he wrote and published a work on fish Aquatilium animalium historiae (1554-1558), which depicted about one hundred Mediterranean fish species and some molluscs. He was aware of the difference between cephalopods and fish. This work was based on his own empirical observations, and he was supported financially in his work by Cardinal Marcello Cervini (1501–1555), later Pope Marcellus II. The work was dedicated to Cervini’s successor Gian Carafa (1476–1559), Pope Paul IV. Like Belon most of his fish research was done with fish from the markets.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566), who was also at that Papal conclave, went on to become professor for medicine at the University of Montpellier, where he taught several important natural historians including Charles de l’Écluse (Carolus Clusius) (1526–1609), Matthias de l’Obel (Matthias Lobelius) (1538–1616), Pierre Pena (c. 1530–c. 1600), Jacques Daléchamps (1513–1588), Jean Bauhin (1511–1582), and Felix Platter (1536–1614).
Guillaume Rondelet Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although he was one of the greatest teachers of medicine and natural history in the sixteenth century, he published very little himself. However, like Belon and Salvini, he published a work on marine life, his Libri de piscibus marinis in quibus verae piscium effigies expressae sunt (Lyon, 1554).
Libri de piscibus marinis, 1554 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Although the title refers to fish (piscibus), the book actually deals with all aquatic animals. Rondelet makes no distinction between fish, marine animals such as seals and whales, crustaceans, and other invertebrates. He investigated the difference between fresh water and saltwater fish. His approach was Aristotelean emphasising function. He dissected and illustrated many of his specimens and his anatomical drawings off a sea urchin is the earliest know drawing of an invertebrate. He made anatomical comparisons and found similarities between dolphins, pigs, and humans. The book became a standard reference work for many years and was translated into French in 1558 as L’histoire entière des poissons (The completehistory of fish).
Extract from Rondelet’s 1554 work De piscibus Source: Wikimedia Commons
Without doubt the most influential text on the road to the discipline of zoology published in the sixteenth century was the more than four-thousand-and-five-hundred-page, five-volume Historia animalia issued by the Swiss polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) between 1551–1558 and 1587 posthumously in Zurich.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
I have written about Gessner in the past, but the short version is, he was the polymath’s polymath. A humanist, encyclopaedist, philologist, bibliographer, zoologist, botanist, alpinist, linguist, and professional physician. He was not only an encyclopaedist but a completist. His Bibliotheca universalis (1554–) was an attempt to list alphabetically all of the books printed and published in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew since the invention of printing with movable type. He followed this with a thematic index to the Bibliotheca universalis, the Pandectarum sive Partitionum universalium Conradi Gesneri Tigurini, medici & philosophiae professoris, libri xxi with thirty thousand entries in 1548.
His approach to the Historia animalia was the same, it was an attempt to provide descriptions of all known animals. The animals were listed alphabetically but divided up in divisions in the style of Aristotle. Volume I Quadrupedes vivipares. 1551 (Live-bearing four-footed animals), Volume II Quadrupedes ovipares. 1554 (Egg-laying quadrupeds, reptiles and amphibia), Volume III Avium natura. (Birds) 1555, Volume IV Piscium & aquatilium animantium natura 1558 (Fish and aquatic animals), Volume V De serpentium natura (Snakes and scorpions).
Tiger and leopard, Book 1:Viviparous Quadrupeds Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1638 a further volume on insects was published from his Nachlass. To write his book, Gessner drew on multiple sources giving credit to their authors. As well as an illustration of each animal, here he famously used Dürer’s rhinoceros, he included vast amounts of information–the animal’s name in all the languages know to him, habitat, description, physiology, diseases, habits, utility, diet, curiosities, all crossed referenced to ancient and modern authorities. Gessner, in has attempt at completeness, also included some mythical creatures, in some cases stating that he didn’t know if they existed or not.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
The Historia animalia was immensely successful and an abbreviated version, the Thierbuch, appeared in German in 1565.
Fantastical creatures in a copy of Historia Animalium in The Portico Library in Manchester, England. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Just as encyclopaedic as Gessner’s work were the volumes on animals put together by the Italian natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605), whose five hundredth birthday we will be celebrating on 11 September.
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605). Ornithologiae, hoc est de avibus historiae libri XII. (De avibus), Bologna, 1599. Source: Wikimedia Commons
He was born in Bologna into a noble family, a nephew of Pope Gregory XII. He father, a lawyer, died when he was seven. In his youth he studied first mathematics and then Latin under prominent private tutors. Following his mother’s wish he studied law but shortly before graduating he switched to philosophy. To complete his philosophy studies, he switched to the University of Padua, where he began to study medicine in 1545. In 1549 he was accused of heresy and had to go to Rome to clear his name. In 1550, he met Guillaume Rondelet, whom he accompanied on his visits to the local fish markets to study fish, which awakened Aldrovandi’s interest in zoology. Returning to Bologna he met Luca Ghini (1490–1556), who played such a central role in the early study of plants, and this awakened his interest in botany. When Ghini returned to Pisa, Aldrovandi followed him to attend his lectures on medical simples. In 1552 he graduated in philosophy at Bologna and a year later in medicine. In 1554 he was appointed lecturer for logic at the university and in 1559 professor for philosophy.
In 1561 he became the first professor of natural history at Bologna, Lectura philosophiae naturalis ordinaria de fossilibus, plantis et animalibus. Aldrovandi devoted the rest of his life to the study and propagation of natural history. He set up the university botanical garden in 1568 and a museum for natural history, which I will look at more closely in a later post. Like Gessner, he spent years collecting material for a Historia Animalia, but didn’t start writing it until he was seventy-seven-years-old. He only managed to publish three of the eventual eleven volumes before he died aged eighty-two. The other eight volumes were published posthumously by Johannes Cornelius Uterverius (1592–1619), Thomas Dempster (1579–1625), and Bartholomäus Ambrosinus. Ornithologiae, hoc est, de avibus historiae libri XII. Agent de avibus rapacibus (1600);
Aldrovandi Owl Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ornithologiae tomus alter de avibus terrestribus, mensae inservientibus et canoris (1600); De aninialibus insectis libri VII (1602);
De animalibus insectis libri septem, cum singulorum iconibus ad vivum expressis, Bologna, 1602. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Ornithologiae tomus tertius ei ultimus de avibus aquaticis et circa quas degentibus (1603); De reliquis animalibus exanguibus, utpote de mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis et zoophytis, libri IV (1606); Quadrupedum omnium bisulcorum historia (1613);
Aldrovandi Red Hartebeest and Blackbuck Source: Wikimedia Commons
De piscibus libri V et de cetis liber unus (1613); De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis libri III, et de quadrupedibus oviparis libri II(1637); Historiae serpentum et draconum libri duo (1640);
Basilisk from Serpentum, et draconum historiae libri duo (1640) Source: Wikimedia Commons
There were also some smaller individual studies published in the sixteenth century. The Cambridge scholar and physician John Caius (1510–1573)
John Caius, Master (1559-1573); Gonville & Caius College, University of Cambridge; artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
was a correspondent of Gessner’s and produced a study of British dogs for him, which Gessner didn’t publish, so he published it himself in 1570, De Canibus Britannicis.
In the same year he also published De Rariorum animalium atque stirpium historia, libellus (Of Some Rare Plants and Animals).
The Bologna senator, Carlo Ruini (1530–1598) wrote a very accurate and comprehensive Anatomia del cavallo, infermità, et suoi rimedii (On the Anatomy and Diseases of the Horse), which was published posthumously in Venice, in 1598.
Finally, the English student of Felix Platter, Thomas Moffet (1533–1604) compiled the Insectorum sive Minimorum Animalium Theatrum (Theatre of Insects) based on his own work and that of Gessner, Edward Wotten (1492–1555) and the physician Thomas Perry (1532–1589).
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Edward Wotten, a graduate of Padua, had earlier published his Aristotelian research on animals De differentiis animalium libri decem, in Paris in 1552.
Edward Wotton an engraving by William Rogers c. 1600 Source: Wikimedia CommonsSource
Although the developments in zoology in the sixteenth century were not as widespread or as progressive as those in botany as we have seen they were not insubstantial and laid foundations that were developed further in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Whether they were introducing materia medica into the medical curriculum at the universities, going out into the countryside to search for and study plants for themselves, leading students on field trips to do the same, establishing and developing botanical gardens, or creating their herbaria, the Renaissance humanist physicians in the first half of the sixteenth century always had their botanical guides from antiquity to hand. Mostly one or other edition of Dioscorides but also Theophrastus on plants, Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, and Galen’s texts on medical simples. The work of all four of these authors concentrated largely on plants growing around the Mediterranean, although they did include some medical herbs from other areas, India for example. The North Italian, Renaissance, medical humanists also started out studying the Mediterranean plants, but soon their field of study widened, as the changes they had initiated spread throughout Europe led to other medical humanists to search for and study the plants of their own local regions. This expansion became even larger as colleagues began to study and compare the plants growing in the newly discovered land in the so-called age of exploration. Reports began coming into Europe of plants growing in the Americas and Asia. These developments meant that Dioscorides et al were no longer adequate guides for the teaching of medical herbal lore and the age of the Early Modern printed herbal began.
As already noted in an earlier episode of this series Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, which is, of course, a herbal, was well known and widely available throughout the Middle Ages, but it was by no means the only medieval herbal. Herbal medicine was widely used throughout the Middle Ages and many monks, apothecaries, and herbalists, who utilised herbal cures, compiled their own herbals, some of which were copied and distributed amongst others. A few of these herbals were printed during the incunabula period in the second half of the fifteenth century. Many printer publishers in this early period were on the lookout for potential money earning publications and herbals certainly fit the mould.
The earliest of these was the De proprietatibus rerum of the Franciscan friar Bartholomeus Anglicus (before 1203–1272), written in the thirteenth century and printed for the first time about 1470, which went through twenty-five editions before the end of the century. This was an encyclopaedia containing a long section on trees and herbs.
De proprietatibus rerum, Lyon 1482, erste Seite (Eisenbibliothek, Schlatt) via Wikipedia Commons
This was followed by the herbal of Apuleius Platonicus, also known as Pseudo-Apuleius, about whom almost nothing is known, but it is assumed he probably wrote his herbal the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici in the fifth century; the oldest known manuscript dates from the sixth century. It is a derivative text based on Dioscorides and Pliny. It is a much shorter and simpler herbal than Dioscorides, but was immensely popular throughout the Middle Ages, existing in many manuscripts. The first printed edition appeared in Rome in 1481.
Shortly after the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici, three other medieval herbals were printed and published in Mainz in Germany. The Latin Herbarius (1484), and the Herbariuszu Teutsch or German Herbarius (1485), which evolved into the Hortus or Ortus sanitates (1491).
Fruits of Paradise. Hortus sanitatis 1491 Source: Wikimedia Commons
These herbals probably date back to the Early Medieval Period but unlike the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici there is no hard proof for this. All three books went through numerous editions under various titles in various languages. In England the first printed herbal was by Rycharde Banckes in which the title page begins Here begynneth a newe mater, the whiche sheweth and treateth of ye vertues and proprytes of herbes, the which is called an Herball, which appeared in 1525.
It had no illustrations. This was followed by the more successful The grete herbal, printed by Peter Treveris in 1526 and then again in 1529. Many of the illustrations were taken from the French Le GrantHerbier,but which originated in the Herbariuszu Teutsch, continuing an old process of copying illustrations from earlier books, which as we will see continued with the new Renaissance herbals to which we now turn.
Whereas the printed medieval herbals were largely derived from the works of Dioscorides and Pliny, the Renaissance humanist physicians produced new printed herbals based on new material, which they and their colleagues had collected on field trips. However, these new herbals were still based in concept on Dioscorides’ De materia medica, were medical in detail, although they gradually led towards botany as an independent discipline throughout the century.
We begin with four Germans, who are often described as “The Fathers of Botany”. The first of these was Otto Brunfels (possibly 1488–1534), a Carthusian monk, who converted to Lutheran Protestantism and became a pastor.
Otto Brunfels portrait by Hans Baldung Grien Source: Wikimedia Common
He was the nominal author of the Herbarumvivae eicones published in three volumes between 1530 and 1536 and the German version of the same, Contrafayt Kräuterbuch published in two volumes between 1532 and 1537. Both publications were published by Hans Schott in Straßburg and were illustrated by Hans Weiditz the Younger (1495–c. 1537). I said nominal author because it is thought that the initiative for the book was Schott’s centred around Weidnitz’s illustrations with Brunfels basically employed to provide the written descriptions of the plants. Weidnitz’s illustrations, drawn from nature, are excellent and set new standards in the illustration of herbals.
Nymphaea alba, also known as the European White Waterlily, White Lotus, or Nenuphar from “Herbarium Vivae Eicones” Hans Weiditz the Younger Source: Wikimedia Commons
They are, however, not matched by Brunfels’ descriptions, which are very poor quality, simply cobbled together from early descriptions.
The second of the so-called “German Fathers of Botany” was Hieronymus Bock (1498–1554), whose Latin texts were published under the name Hieronymus Tragus (Tragus is the Greek for the German bock, a male goat).
David Kandel (1546) – Kreütter Büch, (1546) a Herbal Source: Wikimedia Commons
Like Brunfels he converted from Catholicism to Lutheran Protestantism. His knowledge of plants was acquired empirically on botanical excursions. His first publication was Deherbarum quarundam nomenclaturis, a tract linking Greek and Latin names to local plants, which, interestingly was published in the second volume of Brunfels’ Herbarumvivae eicones. It was also Brunfels who persuaded him to publish his own herbal. This was titled Neu Kreütterbuch and appeared in 1539. Unlike Brunfels book, Bock’s herbal had no illustration, however, his plant descriptions were excellent, setting new standards. In 1546 there was a second expanded edition with illustration by David Kandel (1520–1592).
Neu Kreütterbuch Steinbrech David Kandel Source: Wikimedia Commons
A third expanded edition was published in 1551 of which a Latin translation, De stirpium, maxime earum, quae in Germania nostra nascuntur …, was published in 1552. All these editions were published by Wendel Rihel in Straßburg, who produced an edition without the text in 1553 and several editions after Bock’s death.
The original German edition without illustrations had less impact that Brunfels’ herbal but after the addition of the illustrations and the Latin edition his work became successful. Bock was very innovative in that instead of listing the plants in his book in alphabetical order, he listed them in groups based on what he perceived as their similarities. An early step towards systematic classification.
The third of the German herbal authors Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was the most well-known and successful of the quartet.
Leonhart Fuchs portrait by Heinrich Füllmaurer Source: Wikimedia Commons
He received his doctorate in medicine from the University of Ingolstadt in 1524. After two years of private practice followed by two as professor of medicine in Ingolstadt, he became court physician to George von Brandenburg Margrave of Ansbach. He acquired a very good reputation and was reappointed to the professorship in Ingolstadt in 1533. As a Lutheran, he was prevented from taking up the appointment and became professor for medicine in Tübingen instead in 1535, where he remained until his death despite many offers of other positions. In Tübingen he created the botanical garden. He edited a Greek edition of Galen’s work and translated both Hippocratic and Galenic medical texts. Fuchs became somewhat notorious for his bitter controversies with other medical authors and the sharpness of his invective.
Unlike Brunfels and Bock, whose herbals were based on the own empirical studiers of local German herbs, Fuchs concentrated on identifying the plants described by the classical authors, although when published his herbal included a large number of reports on local plants as well as new plants discovered in the Americas. In 1542 he published his De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes (Notable commentaries on the history of plants) in Latin and Greek, it contained 512 pictures of plants, which are even more spectacular than the illustrations in Brunfels’ Herbarumvivae eicones.
Cannabis plant from ‘De historia stirpivm commentarii insignes … ‘ Source: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
In a rare innovation he named the Illustrators, Heinrich Füllmaurer and Albrecht Meyer along with the woodcutter Veit Rudolph Speckle including portraits of all three.
Portrait of the three engravers of Fuchs’ ‘de Historia….’ Credit: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
A German translation New Kreüterbuch was published in 1543. Alone, during Fuch’s lifetime 39 editions of the book appeared in Dutch, French, German, Latin, and Spanish. Twenty years after his death an English edition was published.
Fuchs influence went further than the editions of his own books. The excellent illustrations in his Historia Stirpium were borrowed/pirated reused in a number of later herbals and botanical books:
The majority of the wood-engravings in Doeden’s Crūÿdeboek (1554), Turner’s New Herbal (1551-68), Lyte’s Nievve Herball (1578), Jean Bauhin’s Historia plantarum universalis (1650/1), and Schinz’s Anleitung (1774), are copied from Fuchs, or even printed from his actual wood-blocks, while use was made of his figures in the herbals of Bock, Egenolph, d’Aléchamps, Tabernaemontanus, Gerard, Nylandt, etc., and in the commentaries on Dioscorides of Amatus Lusitanus and Ruellius. It was not the large woodcuts in De Historia Stirpium (1542) which chiefly served for these borrowings, but the smaller versions of the blocjks, made for Fuchs’ octavo herbal of 1545.[1]
If Fuchs is the most well known of the so-called four German “Fathers of Botany”, then Valeriuis Cordus (1515–1544) is the least well known.
Artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
His father was Euricius Cordus (1486–1535), who published his Botanologican, a guide to the empirical study of plants in 1534. Valerius can be said to have gone into the family business, studying medicine and botany under his father at the University of Marburg from the age of twelve in 1527. He graduated bachelor in 1531 and changed to the University of Leipzig, also working in the apothecary shop of his uncle Johannes Ralla (1509–1560), where he learnt pharmacology. In 1539 he changed to the University of Wittenberg, where he once again studied medicine and botany, and lectured on the De materia medica of Dioscorides. In Wittenberg he continued his studies of pharmacology in the apothecary shop of the painter Lucas Cranach the Elder (c. 1473–1553), where he wrote his Dispensatorium, a pharmacopoeia, a systematic list of medicaments. During a short visit to Nürnberg in 1542, there were strong ties between Wittenberg and Nürnberg, Cordus presented his Dispensatorium to the city council, who awarded him with 100 gulden, paid for it to be printed posthumously in 1546, as the Dispensatorium Norimbergense. It was the first officially government approved pharmacopoeia, Nürnberg being a self-governing city state. It soon became the obligatory standard throughout Germany.
Source: Wellcome Library, London. via Wikimedia Commons
On the last of his many journeys from Wittenberg, Cordus travelled through Italy visiting Padua, Lucca, Florence, and Rome, where he died, aged just twenty-nine in 1544. When he died, he had published almost nothing, his Dispensatorium, as already stated was published posthumously as were two further important books on botany. In 1549, Conrad Gessner published the notes on his Wittenberg lectures on Dioscorides De materia medica, which had collected by his students, as Annotationes in Dioscoridis de materia medica lihros in Straßburg.
Gessner also published his Historiae stirpium libri IV (Straßburg 1561), which was followed in 1563 by his Stirpium descriptionis liber quintus. As with the other German herbals, Cordus’ books were issued in many further editions. Like Brock, Cordus rejected the alphabetic listing of the earlier herbals and in fact went much further down the road of trying to distinguish what we now call species and genus.
Not considered one of the “German Fathers of Botany”, the work of Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534–1598) was also highly influential.
Joachim Camerarius the Younger Engraving by Bartholomaeus Kilian Source: Wikimedia Commons
Son of the famous philologist and the friend and biographer of Philip Melanchthon, Joachim Camerarius the Elder (1500–1574), he studied at Wittenberg and other universities before completing his doctorate in medicine in Bologna in 1562. Following graduation, Camerarius returned to Nürnberg where he set up as a physician practicing there for the rest of his life. Already a lifelong fan of botany, influenced by his time in North Italy he set up a botanical garden in his home city. He was a central figure in the reforms in the practice of medicine in Nürnberg similar to those I outlined in episode XXXII of this series, of which the publication and adoption of Cordus’ Dispensatorium was an important element.[2] Camerarius was also a central figure in the medical-botanical republic of letters that I will deal with in a later episode. As well as his own herbal Hortus Medicus et Philosophicus (Frankfurt/M., 1598), he published an expanded German translation of the Di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo Libri cinque Della historia, et materia medicinale tradotti in lingua volgare italiana (1554 and later editions) of Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–c. 1577), as Kreutterbuch deß hochgelehrten unnd weitberühmten Herrn D. Petri Andreae Matthioli : jetzt widerumb mit viel schönen neuwen Figuren, auch nützlichen Artzeneyen, und andern guten Stücken, zum andern mal auß sonderm Fleiß gemehret und verfertigt (Frankfurt, 1586).
J. Camerarius. Mattiolisches Kräuterbuch Cichorium intybus Source: Wikimedia Commons
As with the introduction of the materia medica into the university medical curriculum, the field trips, the botanical gardens, and the herbaria, which all spread out through Europe from Northern Italy, the new style herbals also spread throughout the continent during the sixteenth century.
In the Netherlands, the printer-publisher and bookseller Christophe Plantin (c. 1520–1589), who I dealt with fairly extensively in an earlier post, contributed much to the dissemination of herbals and other plant books. The first notable Flemish author was the physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens (1517–1585), who published a herbal in Dutch, his Cruydeboeck, with an emphasis on the local flora of the Netherlands, with 715 images, 515 borrowed from the Dutch edition of Fuchs’ herbal, and 200 drawn by Pieter van der Borcht the Elder (c. 1530–1608) with the blocks cut by Arnold Nicolai (fl. 1550–1596), published in Antwerp in 1554 and again in 1563.
Rembert Dodoens portrait by Theodor de Bry Source: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Fuchs, who still listed his herbs alphabetically, Dodoens grouped his herbs according to their properties and reciprocal affinities, making his book as much a pharmacopoeia as a herbal. The Cruydeboeck was translated into French by Charles de l’Ecluse (1526–1609) in 1557, Histoire des Plantes, into English via the l’Ecluse French by Henry Lyte, A new herbal of historie of plants in 1578. Later in 1583, it was translated into Latin Stirpium historiae pemptades sex. Both the French and the Latin translations were commissioned and published by Platin. It is claimed that it was the most translated book after the bible during the late sixteenth century and in its numerous versions it remained a standard text for two hundred years.
Title page of the Crvydt-Boeck (1618 ed.) Source: Wikimedia Commons
Charles de l’Ecluse, better known as Carolus Clusius, was himself a physician and botanist, a student of Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566) at the University of Montpellier, he became one of the leading medical botanists in Europe.
This portrait is the only known painted portrait of Clusius. It was made in 1585 when Clusius was in Vienna. Attributed to Jacob de Monte Source: Wikipedia Commons
Clusius had two great passions languages and botany. He was said to be fluent in Greek. Latin, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Flemish, and German He was also a polymath deeply knowledgeable in law, philosophy, history, cartography, zoology, minerology, numismatics, and epigraphy. In 1573, he was appointed director of the imperial botanical garden in Vienna by Maximillian II (1564–1576) but dismissed again shortly after Maximillian’s death, when Rudolph II (1576–1612) moved the imperial court to Prague. Later in his life, when he was called to the University of Leiden in 1593, he created the university’s first botanical garden. His first botanical publication was his translation into French of Dodoens’ Cruydeboeck.This was followed by a Latin translation from the Portuguese of Garcia de Orta’s Colóquios dos simples e Drogas da India, Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medicamentorum apud Indios nascentium historia (1567) and a Latin translation from Spanish of Nicolás Monardes’ Historia medicinal delas cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven al uso de la medicina, , De simplicibus medicamentis ex occidentali India delatis quorum in medicina usus est (1574), with a second edition (1579), both published by Plantin.His own Rariorum alioquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia: libris duobus expressas (1576), based on an expedition to Spain and Portugal followed. Next up Rariorum aliquot stirpium, per Pannoniam, Austriam, & vicinas quasdam provincias observatarum historia, quatuor libris expressa … (1583). All of these were printed and published by Plantin. His Rariorum plantarum historia: quae accesserint, proxima pagina docebit (1601) was published by Plantin’s son-in-law Jan Moretus, who inherited the Antwerp printing house. Appended to this last publication was a Fungorum historia, the very first publication of this kind. In his publications on plants, Clusius definitely crossed the boundary from materia medica into the discipline of botany qua botany.
Title page, Rariorvm plantarvm historia Source: Wikimedia CommonsChestnuts Source: Wikimedia Commons
The third Platin author, who made major contributions to the herbal literature was another of Guillaume Rondelet’s students from Montpellier, Mathias de l’Obel (1538–1616), a Frenchman from Lille also known as Lobilus.
Matthias de l’Obel by Francis Delaram, print, 1615 Source: Wikimedia Commons
His Stirpium aduersaria noua… (A new notebook of plants) was originally published in London in 1571, but a much-extended edition, Plantarum seu stirpiumhistoria…, with 1, 486 engravings in two volumes was printed and published by Plantin in 1576.
Plantarum, seu, Stirpium historia /Matthiae de l’Obel page 111 Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1581 Plantin also published a Dutch translation of his herbal, Kruydtboek oft beschrÿuinghe van allerleye ghewassen… There is also an anonymous Stirpium seu Plantarum Icones (images of plants) published by Plantin in 1581, with a second edition in 1591, that has been attributed to Loblius but is now thought to have been together by Plantin himself from his extensive stock of plant engravings. Like others already mentioned, de l’Obel abandoned the traditional listing of the plants alphabetically and introduced a system of classification based on the character of their leaves.
The major Italian contributor to the new herbal movement in Europe was Pietro Andrea Gregorio Mattioli (1501–c. 1577),
Pietro Andrea Mattioli portrait by Moretto da Brescia Source: Wikimedia Commons
who, as already mentioned in the episode on the publication of the classical texts as printed books, produced a heavily annotated Italian translation version of Dioscorides’ De materia medica, which included descriptions of one hundred new plants, Commentarii in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, de medica materia, which went through four editions between 1544 and 1550, published by Vincenzo Valgrisi (c. 1490– after 1572) in Venice, and selling thirty-two thousand copies by 1572.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Mattioli’s annotations, or commentaries, were translated into translated into French (Lyon, 1561), Czech (Prague, 1562) and German (Prague, 1563).
Another Italian botanist was Fabio Colonna (1567–1640)
Fabio Colonna artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
who disappointed by the errors that he found in Dioscorides researched and wrote two herbals of his own Phytobasanos (plant touchstone), published in Naples, 1592 and Ekphrasis altera, published in Rome, 1616. Both books display a high standard in the illustrations and in the descriptions of the plants.
Fabio Colonna, Phytobasanos Sive Plantarum Aliquot Historia Source
The main Portuguese contribution was the Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousasmediçinaisda India by Garcia de Orta (1501–1568) published in Goa in 1563, one of the earliest European books printed in India, which as we have seen was translated into Latin by Clusius.
Statue of Garcia de Orta by Martins Correia at the Institute of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Lisbon Source: Wikimedia CommonsTitle page of Colóquio dos Simples de Garcia de Orta. Goa, 1563. Source: Wikimedia Commons
It was the Portuguese, who brought the herbs of Asia into the European herbals in the sixteenth century, those of the newly discovered Americas were brought into Europe by the Spanish, most notably by Nicolás Monrades (1493–1588).
Nicolás Monrades Source: Wikimedia Commons
Monrades learnt about the American herbs and drugs not by visiting the Americas but by collecting information at the docks in Seville. He published the results initially in three separate parts the first two parts in 1569 and 1571 and in complete form in 1574 under the title Primera y Segunda y Tercera partes de la Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales que sirven en Medicina.
Nicolas Monardes, Dos libros, 1565, title page Source: Wikimedia Commons
This is the book that once again Clusius translated into Latin. It was also translated into English by John Frampton, a merchant, who specialised in books on various aspects of exploration, and published under the titles The Three Books of Monardes, 1577, and Joyfull newes out of the new founde worlde, 1580.
Nicolas Monardes, John Frampton translation Joyfull newes out of the new-found world (1596), University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives, SPEC Fraser 567.Source
The most significant herbal produced in Switzerland didn’t become published in the sixteenth century. This was the general history of plants, Historia plantarum compiled by the polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), which was still unfinished when he died.
Conrad Gesner by Tobias Stimme Source: Wikimedia Commons
It was partially published in 1750, with the first full publication being by the Swizz Government at the end of the nineteenth century. The quality of the drawings and the descriptions of the plants would have set new standards in botany if Gessner had published it during his lifetime. A student of Gessner’s, who also went on to study under Fuchs was Jean Bauhin (1541–1613).
Jean Bauhin Source: Wikimedia Commons
As a young man he became an assistant to Gessner and worked with him collecting material for his Historia plantarum. Later he decided to compile his own Historia plantarum universalis. Like his teacher he died before he could complete and publish his work. It was first published in full in three volumes in 1650/1.
Historia plantarum universalis, 1650 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Jeans younger brother Garpard (1560–1624) also set out to produce a complete catalogue of all known plants, but like Jean he never lived to see it published.
Gaspard Bauhin Source: Wikimedia Commons
In fact, unlike Jean’s Historia plantarum universalis, it was not even published posthumously. He did, however, publish sections of it during his life: Phytopinax (1596), Prodromos theatre botanici (1620,) and Pinax theatre botanici (1623). The Pinax contains a complete and methodological concordance of the names of plants, sorting out the confusing tangle of different names awarded by different authors to the same plant.
Caspar Bauhin (1623), Pinax Theatri Botanici, page 291. On this page, a number of Tithymalus species (now Euphorbia) is listed, described and provided with synonyms and references. Bauhin already used binomial names but did not consistently give all species throughout the work binomials. Source: Wikimedia Commons
This was a major step in the development of scientific botany. The work of all three Swiss authors transcends the bounds of the herbal into the science of botany.
The only notable French botanical author of the sixteenth century was Jean Ruel (1474–1537), who produced a Latin translation of Dioscorides in 1516, which served as the basis for Mattioli’s Commentarrii. He also wrote a general botanical treatise on Aristotelian lines, De Natura stirpium, published in 1536.
De natura stirpium Basel 1537. Title page Source: wikimedia Commons
One should, however, remember that the students of Guillaume Rondelet in Montpellier form a veritable who’s who of botanical authors in the sixteenth century.
Turning finally to England the earliest herbal author was William Turner (c. 1509–1568), who during his wanderings through Europe had studied botany at the University of Bologna under Luca Ghini (1490–1556), who, as we saw in the previous episode, had a massive influence on the early development of medical botany in the early sixteenth century. Turner also knew and corresponded with Conrad Gessner and Leonhart Fuchs. Turner’s first work was his Latin, Libellus de re herbari novus (1538). In 1548, he produced his The names of herbes in Greke, Latin, Englishe, Duche, and Frenche with the common names that Herberies and Apotecaries use. His magnum opus was his A new herball, wherin are conteyned the names of herbes… published in three volumes, the first in London 1551, the first and second on Cologne in 1562, and the third together with the first and second in 1568.
llustration of Mandrake plant from William Turner’s Herbal,
It was illustrated with the pictures from Fuchs’ De Historia Stirpium Commentarii Insignes. Henry Lyte (1529?–1607),
Henry Lyte Source: Wikimedia Commons
an antiquary, published an English translation of Dodoens Cruydeboeck, A nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes,…, from the French of Clusius in 1578. This included new material provided by Dodoens himself. Once again the illustration were taken largely from Fuchs.
A page on gillofers (gillyflowers, that is, carnations and pinks), from A niewe Herball by Henry Lyte, 1578. Source: Wikimedia Commons
John Gerrard produced the most successful English herbal, his The Herball or GenerallHistorie of Plantes(1597), which was however, a plagiarism.
John Gerard Frontispiece of 1636 edition of Herball Source: Wikimedia Commons
A Dr Priest had been commissioned by the publisher John North to translate Dodoen’s Stirpium historiae pemptades sex into English, but he died before completing it. Gerrard took the work, completed it, and rearranged the plants according to the scheme of de l’Obel from that of Dodoens, and then published it as his own work.
Gerrard Herball 1579Virginia Potato
As I hope is clear from the above herbals were an important genre of books in the sixteenth century, which over time gradually evolved from books of a medical nature into the earliest works in the science of botany.
[1] Agnes Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670, CUP; 1912, republished Hafner Publishing Company, Darien Conn., 1970, p. 70
[2] This is wonderfully described in Hannah Murphy, A New Order of Medicine: The Rise of Physicians in Reformation Nuremberg, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, 2019, which I reviewed here
The major problem with the big names, big ideas, big books version of the history of science is that it very often overlooks many highly influential figures in the development of a science discipline. A classic example of this is the physician and botanist Luca Ghini (1490–1556). Ghini published almost nothing in his entire career but his influence on the development of the science of botany out of materia medica in the sixteenth century was immense. As we have already seen he began lecturing on simples at Bologna in 1527 and was appointed professor for simples in the academic year 1533-34. When Cosimo reopened the University of Pisa in 1543, he wooed Ghini away from Bologna to hold the chair of simples. The list of important students who received their introduction to botany in his lectures is truly impressive. It was also Ghini, who was the first to introduce the field trip to study herbs in the nature into the university curriculum. He followed this by becoming the head in Pisa of one of the first university botanical gardens. If this was all that he initiated, he would be a major figure in the history of botany but there is more.
Luca Ghini Source: Orto botanico di Pisa – Museum via Wikimedia Commons
The major problem with excursion in nature, field trips, and even botanical gardens is that plants have growth cycles. You cannot observe a plant in bloom all the year round but only for a short period. This of course applies to all the phases of its growth. How do you demonstrate to students the flowering phase of a particular simple in the middle of winter? It seems that once again Ghini was the first to solve this problem with the creation of a herbarium, that is a collection of dried and pressed plants. It appears that before Ghini came up with the idea sometime between 1520 and 1530 nobody had ever built up a collection of dried and pressed plants or at least no earlier ones are known.
Within the historical context it is important to note that in the sixteenth century the term herbarium didn’t refer to a collection of dried and pressed plants, as it does today, but to what we now call a herbal; a book with descriptions of herbs, a topic that I will deal with in a future post in this series. In the Renaissance such collections were known as a Hortus hiemalis or Winter garden, others called them living herbals that is Herbarius vivus or Hortus siccus, a dry garden. The earliest known use of the term herbarium in the modern sense is by the French botanist Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) in his Eléments de botanique, ou Méthode pour reconnaître les Plantes published in 1694.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Portrait by Ambroise Tardieu Source: Wikimedia CommonsSource: Wikimedia Commons
Although various historical herbaria still exist, Ghini’s doesn’t. Around 1551, when he sent dried plants gummed upon paper to Pietro Andrea Gregorio Mattioli (1501–c. 1577) his collection was known to contain around three hundred different plants. However, it must have been in existence well before that date as the oldest extant herbarium is that of his pupil Gherado Cibo (1512–1600), which he began at the latest in 1532. Cibo was an avid botanist, known for his plant illustrations, who like Ghini never published anything, although he kept extensive diaries and notebooks of his botanical studies.
Gherado Cibo Full page painting of lichens and ferns growing on a rock face with a pastoral scene in the background; the date ‘febraro 1584’ is written beneath. Source: British Library
Of interest is that fact that initially there were no publications about herbaria and knowledge of their existence and how to create them seems to have been spread by word of mouth and correspondence by Ghini and his students.
The earliest known printed reference to a herbarium is by the Portuguese, Jewish physician Amatus Lusitanus (1511–1568) in one of his works on Dioscorides in 1553, where he mentions the dried plant collection of the English botanist John Falconer (fl. 1547), who is known to have travelled in Italy and probably learnt how to make a herbarium either from Ghini directly or one of his students.
In the late 1540s, Guillaume Rondelet (1507–1566) travelled with his patron Cardinal François de Touron (1489–1562) around Europe and in Italy got to personally meet and talk with Ghini in Pisa. When he returned to Montpellier in 1551, he took with him the knowledge of how to make a herbarium, which he passed on to his students, including Felix Platter (1536–1614), who graduated in Montpellier in 1557.
Felix Platter portrait by Hans Bock Source: Wikimedia Commons
Platter took that knowledge with him to Basel after graduation. So, spread the knowledge slowly through Europe. Part of Platter’s own herbarium is one of the sixteenth century ones that still exist or at least part of it, totalling 813 specimens.
Plants and Images from Felix Platter’s Herbarium
Information on how to make a herbarium was first published by Adriaan van de Spiegel (1578–1625), who studied medicine in Padua under Girolamo Fabrizio da Acquapendente (c. 1535–1619), in his Isagoge in rem herbariam in (Padua, 1606).
To quote Agnes Arber:
In his Isagoge–a general treatise on botany–he explans the method of pressing between two sheets of good paper, under gradually increasing weights, and notes that the plans must be examined and turned over daily. When they are dry, they are to be laid upon inferior paper (charta ignobilior), and, with brushes of graded sizes, painted with a special gum, for which he gives the recipe. The plants are then to be transferred to sheets of white paper; linen is to be laid over them, and rubbed steadily until they adhere to the paper. Finally the sheets are to be placed between paper, or in a book and subjected to pressure until the gum dries.[1]
Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) was one of the most influential naturalists of the sixteenth century.
Ulisse Aldrovandi portrait by Agostino Carracci Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1533 he obtained a degree in medicine and philosophy and in 1554 he began to teach philosophy in the following year, appointed professor of philosophy in 1561. Already an enthusiast for botany, zoology, and geology he was appointed the first professor of natural philosophy at Bologna in 1561 (lectura philosophiae naturalis ordinaria de fossilibus, plantis et animalibus). Never a student of Ghini, he might better be described as a disciple. Inspired by Ghini’s garden in Pisa he was responsible for the botanical garden in Bologna in 1568. Also inspired by Ghini, he created an extensive herbarium which eventually numbered about 4760 specimens on 4117 sheets in sixteen volumes, which are preserved in the University of Bologna.
Ulisse Aldrovandi Herbarium Source: University of Bologna
Like the botanical garden the herbarium or winter garden survived and developed upto the present. There are large scale herbaria in universities, museums and botanical gardens throughout the world often numbering millions of specimens. The largest in the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris has more than nine million.
[1] Agnes Arber, Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670, CUP; 1912, republished Hafner Publishing Company, Darien Conn., 1970, p. 142
Following the publication of the major natural history texts in the new print technology and the dispute amongst humanists concerning the errors in Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, the next major developments were not driven by a direct interest in botany as botany, but by a desire to reform the teaching and practice of medicine. In their personal dispute Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524) and Pandolfo Collenuccio (1444–1504), although they disagreed on the quality of Pliny’s work, agreed that for the identification of the plants discussed by Pliny, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus a study of the literature was insufficient and needed to be substantiated by a study of the plants growing in the wild.
As the Ferrarese professor of medicine and critic of Pliny, Niccolò Leoniceno, queried in 1493, “Why has nature provided us with eyes and other organs of sense but that we might discern, investigate, and of ourselves arrive at knowledge?”[1]
Collenuccio wrote in his Pliniana defensioin 1493:
For fitness to give instruction in botany, it does not suffice that a man read authors, look at plant pictures, and peer into Greek vocabularies … He ought to ask questions of rustics and mountaineers, closely examine the plants themselves, note the distinction between one plant and another; and if need be he should even incur danger in testing the properties of them and ascertaining their remedial value[2]
This awareness of the necessity of empirical study of the plants under discussion kicked off the study of practical botany in the sixteenth century. We will follow this development in future post and here just mention the publication of guides to such a study in the 1530s, by two students of Leoniceno. Euricus Cordus (1486–1535) published his Botanologicon, a discussion on the topic between five participants in 1535 with a second edition appearing in 1551.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
Antonio Musa Brasavola (1500–1555) published his dialogue on the topic, Examen omnium simplicium medicamentorum, quorum in officinis usus est in 1537.
Here I will address Leoniceno’s motivation for his studies and their consequences.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
In his detailed philological study of Pliny, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus, Leoniceno’s concerns were with the medical treatment of patients. He wanted to be certain that when applying the herbal remedies of Dioscorides or Galen that the apothecaries, who produced the medical concoctions had correctly identified the simples to be used. To fulfil this aim, he was of the opinion that medical students should learn the materia medica, as part of their studies. This idea was revolutionary in the medical education on the medieval university. In the Middle Ages the materia medica, the preparation of herbal medicines, was the province of the monks in their hospices and the apothecaries and not the learned professors of medicine. This changed under the urging of Leoniceno and his students.
A chair for simples was established by Pope Leo X in Rome in 1513 with the appointment of Guiliano da Foligno. However, La Sapienza was closed with the sack of Rome in 1527. The chair was re-established in the middle of the century. The first permanent chair for medical simples was established at the University of Padua in 1533. At the University of Bologna Luca Ghini (1490–1556) began lecturing on the topic in 1527 and was appointed professor in the academic year 1533-34.
Luca Ghini Source: Wikimedia Commons
At Ferrara, Leoniceno’s own university, Antonio Musa Brasavola and his student Gaspare Gabrieli (1494–1553)
Antonio Musa Brasavola Source: wikimedia Commons
as well as the Portuguese physician Amato Lusitano (1511–1568), author of a key works on Dioscorides, Index Dioscoridis (1536); Enegemata in Duos Priores Dioscoridis de Arte Medica Libros (Antwerp, 1536); In Dioscorides de Medica materia Librum quinque enarrationis (1556), pushed the study of materia medica.
Statue of Amato Lusitano in his hometown Castelo Branco Source: Wikimedia Commons
In 1543, Grand Duke Cosimo reopened the University of Pisa and wooed Ghini away from Bologna to hold the chair of simples. As the century progressed the smaller universities such as Parma, Pavia, and Siena followed suit.
The study of simples did not remain confined to the Italian universities. When Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566) was appointed professor of medicine at the University of Tübingen he began teaching Dioscorides’ Materia medica.
Portrait of Leonhart Fuchs by Heinrich Füllmaurer Source: Wikimedia Commons
Guillaume Rondelet (1507–166) began to teach Dioscorides at the University of Montpellier, a major centre for the study of medicine, in 1545.
Guillaume Rondelet Source: Wikimedia Commons
When the University of Leiden was founded by William of Orange in 1575, the professors of medicine were almost all graduates of the North Italian universities, who brought the teaching of simples with them.
Having established themselves as authorities in the field of materia medica the medical authorities now applied themselves to establishing that authority over the apothecaries, creating a medical hierarchy with themselves at the top and the apothecaries answerable to them. This was a major change in the field of medicine in the Early Modern Period. Throughout the Middle Ages the various branches offering medical services, university educated physicians, barber-surgeons, apothecaries, midwives, and herbalists existed parallel to each other with differing cliental. The barber-surgeons and the apothecaries served the needs of the physicians but were not beholden to them. If the patient of a physician needed a bloodletting, a barber-surgeon was called in to perform the task. If a physician’s patient required a herbal remedy, then this was supplied by an apothecary. However, the three branches functioned largely independently of each other. This would change during the sixteenth century.
To effect this change, the physician moved away from the medieval system of control through the universities and guilds, setting up colleges of physicians organised and legitimised by the ruling political authorities. These colleges of physicians were responsible for the activities of all physicians within their political domain. The apothecaries mirrored this move by setting up colleges of apothecaries, later the barber-surgeons would do the same. The political authorities in the Italian states also set up the Protomedicato, a board of physicians appointed to oversee the medical provision within the area. The concept of the Protomedicato predated the introduction of the materia medica into the university medical curriculum but the major change was that the apothecaries were now answerable to the Protomedicato, which had the power to control their activities. To check that they were using the correct simples in their recipes, to control the quality simples and so forth. The physicians now also had the power to grant or deny a licence to an apothecary, who wished to open for business within their area of control.
The final act of dominance of the physicians, with their newly won knowledge of materia medica, was the Antidotarium. This was a catalogue of antidotes or remedies issued by the college of physicians that proscribed for the apothecaries how these were to be concocted. Through these various developments the apothecaries had ceased to be independent and were now subservient to the physicians. As with the other developments, this power takeover within the medical professions, whilst it had its roots in Northern Italy was not restricted to it and spread fairly rapidly throughout Europe and the European colonies. Later the barber-surgeons and the midwifes would also become incorporated into this medical hierarchy.
[1] Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, University of California Press, 1994. ppb, p 158
In the last episode of this series, I traced the roots of natural history in Europe in antiquity and through the medieval period. Beginning roughly in the late fifteenth century, over the next one hundred and fifty years those roots were brought together and transformed in a series of stages into the modern science of natural history. Two major factors contributed to the first stage of this process in the fifteenth century, the reinvention of moveable type in Europe and with it the printed book, and the critical intervention of the North Italian Renaissance humanists with their philological analysis of Greek and Latin texts.
Gutenberg printed and published his famous Bible around 1450 and the print technology that he invented spread first throughout Germany and then into the neighbouring countries fairly rapidly. As I wrote in an earlier episode:
The first printer-publishers in Italy were Arnold Pannartz and Conrad Sweynheym, who set up a press in the Benedictine abbey of Subiaco in 1464. Their output was from the beginning humanist orientated. Their first book was by Aelius Donatus a Roman grammarian of which no copies survived. Next, they printed Cicero’s De oratore followed by religious books by Lactantius and Augustinus.
From the very beginning, the new art of book printing was closely associated with the Renaissance Humanists in Italy[1]. In terms of the sources for natural history we looked at in the last episode the works of Aristotle found their way into print fairly early. Individual works found their way into print earlier, but the first edition of his Opera (complete works) in Latin was issued in Venice by Philippus Petri, in 1482. Earlier, his three works on biology, including his De Historia Animalium had been issued separately in Latin also in Venice by Johannes de Colonia and Johannes Manthen in 1476. They reprinted this work in 1492, 1495, and 1498. It was also reissued by the Aldine Press in 1504 and 1513 and by Hieronymus Scotus in 1545.
In 1495, Aldus Manutius published the first volume of a five-volume edition of the opera of Aristotle in Greek, in Venice. The subsequent volumes followed in 1497, volumes two three and four, and 1498, volume five. Reprinted in 1504 by Aldine, in 1513 by Alde, and in Basel in 1534. As well as the works of Aristotle, including, of course, his biological books, it contained works by other notable Greek authors.
Aristotle Opera Aldus Manutus 1495
As we saw earlier the Renaissance Humanist ideal was a back-to-the-roots-movement. Original Latin texts in the classical Latin of Cicero and co and not in the barbaric Latin of the medieval scholastics. Greek manuscripts in the original form, freshly translated into Latin and not corrupted and polluted by translation into and out of Arabic. At the end of the fifteenth century no printer-publisher did more to fulfil this ideal than Aldus Manutius (c.1450–1515) and his Aldine Press. A humanist scholar with close connections to Giovanni Pico (1493–1494), who helped to finance Manutius’ printing venture, he became the first printer publisher to systematically publish original Greek works in Greek and also to publish the new Latin translations of those texts. Manutius printed thirty editio principes of Greek texts.
Aldus Pius Manutius, illustration in Vita di Aldo Pio Manuzio (1759) Source: Wikimedia CommonsImprint of Aldus Manutius Source: Wikimedia Commons
Manutius also laid great value on the unique presentation of his published volumes. The humanists had criticised the scholastic handwriting and they developed a new style of handwriting. In particular Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459) developed a much admired and copied script.
1597 engraving of Poggio Bracciolini Source: Wikimedia CommonsA sample of Poggio’s handwriting Source: Wikimedia Commons
The French type-designer, Nicholas Jenson (c. 1420–1480) created a new type face, Antiqua, based on this script, and Manutius had the type-cutter Francesco Griffo (1450–1518) create a version of it for his Greek publications.
Portrait of Nicholas Jenson Source: Wikipedia CommonsGriffo’s first Antiqua typeface 1495 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Manutius also introduced a series of octavo pocketbook publications, which were very popular, and he had Griffo created the first italic typeface, probably based on the handwriting of Niccolò de’ Niccoli (1364–1437) especially for his pocketbooks.
Sample of Niccoli’s cursive script, which developed into Italic type Source: Wikimedia Commons
These pocketbooks are said to be the forebears of the paperback. However, it should be noted that it is not true that Manutius was the first to print and publish octavo volumes.
Griff’s Italic typeface in Aldus Manutius’ Horace Source: Wikimedia Commons
Under Aldus Manutius, the Aldine Press was the material embodiment of the Renaissance Humanist ideal, and his books remained much sought after and highly prized long after his death and the later demise of his publishing venture.
As another major Greek author, highly regarded during the Middle Ages, Galen’s books received the same major treatment in the age of print, as Aristotle’s. His Opera in Latin was first issued by Philippus Pincius in Venice in 1490. However, this did not include either of his texts on simples. The Greek Opera, which did contain the texts on simples, was first published Ex aedibus Aldi et Andreae Asulani soceri in Venice, in five volumes, in 1525. In 1538, a new edition was published in Basil by Andreas Cratander, edited by Joachim Camerarius, Leonhart Fuchs and Hieronymous Gemusaeus. There had been earlier editions of separate Galen texts in Latin earlier in the fifteenth century but not of his texts on simples.
Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, immensely popular during the Middle Ages, was just as popular during the early age of the printed book. The first printed edition was issued not later than 1469 in Venice by Johann von Spier. At least forty-six editions were printed before 1550. An Italian edition was published by Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1476. The medical sections, De re medica V, which include much of his work on plants, were issued separately in the Collectio edited by Alban Thorer (c. 1489–1550), professor for medicine in Basel, and published by Andreas Cratander in Basel in 1528.
PLINIUS SECUNDUS, Gaius (Pliny the Elder, 23-79). Historia naturalis. Venice: Johannes de Spira, [before 18 September] 1469. Source
Theophrastus is an interesting case, because although his name was known in the Middle Ages, through Pliny amongst others, his work wasn’t. A Greek manuscript 0f his two botanical works were brought to Rome through the offices of Pope Nicholas V (1397–1455), a humanist bibliophile, who initiated the Vatican Apostolic Library, although he didn’t live to see it built. Theodore Gaza (c. 1398–c. 1475), was commissioned by Pope Nicholas to produce the Latin translations of De plantis and De causis plantarum in 1454. The Greek originals were printed by Aldus Manutius in his Opera of the works of Aristotle 1495–1498. The Latin translation were first published as De historia et causis planatarum by Bartholomaeus Confalonerius in Treviso in 1483.
De historia et causis planatarum 2nd edition 1529 Source:
Our last natural history author from antiquity is Dioscorides. His De materia medica rivalled Pliny in its popularity in the early days of print. The first Latin edition, a translation credited to Constantinus Africanus (d. before 1098), was published by Johannes de Medemblick in Colle di Valselsa in 1478. The first Greek edition was issued by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499. Additional texts by other authors were often added to both Greek and Latin editions.
There were at least thirty-two editions of Dioscorides are known to have been published between 1478 and 1550. Three of these were in Greek, one of them an improved text edited by Girolamo Rossi and Francesco Torresani, and published by the Aldine Press in Venice, in 1518. Three editions had both Greek and Latin texts. Nineteen editions were in Latin, ten of them in the new Latin translation of Jean Ruel (1474–1537), which was first published by Henri Estienne in Paris, c. 1516. A German addition by J. Danz van Ast was issued in Frankfurt in 1546.
De materia medica 1554 edition
There were six Italian editions during this period of which the most important were the four editions of the humanist physician and naturalist Pietro Andrea Gregorio Mattioli (1501–c. 1577) issued in 1544, 1548, 1549 and 1550 by Vincenzo Valgrisi (c. 1490– after 1572) in Venice.
Pietro Andrea Mattioli, by Alessandro Bonvicino called il Moretto c. 1533 Source: Wikimedia Commons
Mattioli’s Italian translation was based on Jean Ruel’s Latin translation but was accompanied by lengthy Commentarii (commentaries) of his own. The book also included descriptions of a hundred new plants. In 1554, an edition of Ruel’s Latin translation with the addition of Mattioli’s Commentarii translated into Latin was published in Lyon. The Commentarii were also translated into French (Lyon, 1561), Czech (Prague, 1562) and German (Prague, 1563). The four Italian editions sold thirty-two thousand copies during Valgrisi’s lifetime.
Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577). Commentarii in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, de medica materia. Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1554.Source:
All of the major botanical texts from antiquity had become established printed works by the beginning of the sixteenth century and the number of editions published by 1550 indicated a major interest in the topic of natural history amongst the scholars of that century. The humanists began to apply their philological skills to the study of these texts, and this led to what might be called the Pliny wars. The two main contenders in the humanist disputes about Pliny’s Historia Naturalis were Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493) and Niccolò Leoniceno (1428-1524)
Ermolao Barbaro was a scion of prominent, wealthy, patrician family of Venice with roots back to the ninth century. The family produced many noted church leaders, diplomats, patrons of the arts, military commanders, philosophers, scholars, and scientists. He was a Renaissance Humanist scholar, educated in various places throughout Northern Italy ending in Padua where he was appointed professor of philosophy in 1477. He was elected to the Senate of Venice in 1483. In 1486 he was appointed Venetian ambassador to the Dutchy of Milan and in 1490 ambassador to the Holy See. Embroiled in a political dispute between Venice and the Papacy he was sacked as ambassador and exiled him from Venice. He moved to Rome where he died of plague in 1493. He often complained that his political life interfered with his studies.
Ermolao Barbaro Source: Wikimedia Commons
Barbaro carefully and accurately analysed the first printed edition of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis, and his not very positive conclusions were published in his Castigationes Plinainae et Pomponii Melae by Euchrius Silberin Rome, in 1492. Barbaro claimed to have identified and corrected five thousand errors in the Historia Naturalis. He attributed these errors not to Pliny but to the numerous copyists, who had copied the manuscript down the centuries.
In Caii Plinii Naturalis historiae libros castigationes, 1534 Source: Wikimedia Commons
He also produced a translation of Dioscorides, In Dioscoridem corollariorum libri V., published by Aloysius et Franciscus Barbari in Venice, in 1516.
Dioscorides, version by Barbaro, 1516: title page Source: Wikimedia Commons
Niccolò Leoniceno was a physician and humanist scholar born in Lonigo, Veneto, he graduated at the University of Padua. In 1464, he was appointed to teach mathematics, philosophy, and medicine at the University of Ferrara, where he remained until his death.
Artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Also in 1492, he launched an attack on the Historia Naturalis in his pamphlet, De Plinii et plurium aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus, published by Laurentius de Rubeis and Andreas de Grassis, in Ferrara.
De Plinii, & plurium aliorum medicorum in medicina erroribus opus primum (BEIC) Source: Wikimedia Commons
This was the opening salvo in a dispute over Pliny with Pandolfo Collenuccio (1444–1504) another humanist scholar.
Pandolfo Collenuccio artist unknown Source: Wikimedia Commons
Collenuccio’s response, Pliniana defensio adversus Nicolai Leoniceni accusationem, was published by Andreas Belfortis in Ferrara, in 1493.
Pliniana defensio adversus Nicolai Leoniceni accusationem title page Source: Wikimedia Commons
Unlike Barbaro, Leoniceno did not blame the copyists in his attack on the botanical section of Pliny’s work, but rather Pliny himself. Leoniceno was of the opinion that many of Pliny’s error were produced because his translations from the Greek were defective. Other local humanists, such as the physician Alessandro Benedetti (c. 1450–1512) and the poet and translator Giorgio Merula (1430–1494), also defended Pliny’s honour against Leoniceno’s harsh criticism.
Due to large parts of it having been published in print the discussion over Pliny and the reliability of the natural history in his encyclopaedia spread throughout Europe as a talking point for much of the sixteenth century. However, it is two spin offs from the original debate that were most significant for the future development of natural history during that century. Firstly, the touchstone, the standard by which Pliny’s knowledge of natural history was judged was the works of Theophrastus and Dioscorides. The three areas of the study of natural history, the philosophical (Aristotle and Theophrastus), the medicinal (Dioscorides and Galen), and the encyclopaedical (Pliny), which had always been seen as separate in antiquity and the Middle Ages, now coalesced into a single stream, one topic and no longer three. Secondly, some of the participants in the debate, most notably Leoniceno, realised that to really identify the plants being discussed by Pliny and the others, reading the descriptions in their books was not enough, the scholar had to leave his study and venture out into the world and actually study plants empirically. We shall be following the results of this empirical development in further episodes.
[1] Most of the information on published editions of texts and their dates of publication are taken from Margaret Bingham Stillwell, The Awakening Interest in Science during the First Century of Printing 1450–1550: An annotated Checklist of First Editions viewed from the Angle of their Subject Content, The Bibliographical Society of America, New York, 1970
If your philosophy of [scientific] history claims that the sequence should have been A→B→C, and it is C→A→B, then your philosophy of history is wrong. You have to take the data of history seriously.
John S. Wilkins 30th August 2009
Culture is part of the unholy trinity—culture, chaos, and cock-up—which roam through our versions of history, substituting for traditional theories of causation. – Filipe Fernández–Armesto “Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration”
The Renaissance Mathematicus 