scholarly journals Planting dwelling thinking. Natural history and philosophy in sixteenth-century European dried gardens

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-19
Author(s):  
María M. Carrión
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Design And Development ◽  
Recycled Paper ◽  
Modern Natural

Abstract European dried gardens from the 16th century have been traditionally associated with the emergence of early modern botany and its relation to the traditional genre of pharmacopeias. This study reviews a sample of the 37 known exemplars of these bound collections and argues that the design and development of these herbaria or dried gardens (orti sicci), as they were also known, reveal a broader set of questions on nature and about the relationships of humans with the natural world than the ones with which they have been linked. Based on the evidence of a diverse corpus of dried gardens—some richly bound, others composed over recycled paper, some with copious annotations, others with a seemingly random layout and distribution of plants—, this paper argues for a comparative reading of these books as a corpus that contributed significantly to early modern natural history and philosophy.

scholarly journals “None of Them Could Say They Ever Had Seen Them, but Only Had It from Others”: Encounters with Animals in Eighteenth-Century Natural Histories of Greenland

Animals ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (11) ◽  
pp. 2024
Author(s):  
Helen Parish
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
Nuanced Understanding ◽  
Natural Histories

The pages of early modern natural histories expose the plasticity of the natural world, and the variegated nature of the encounter between human and animal in this period. Descriptions of the flora and fauna reflect this kind of negotiated encounter between the world that is seen, that which is heard about, and that which is constructed from the language of the sacred text of scripture. The natural histories of Greenland that form the basis of this analysis exemplify the complexity of human–animal encounters in this period, and the intersections that existed between natural and unnatural, written authority and personal testimony, and culture, belief, and ethnography in natural histories. They invite a more nuanced understanding of the ways in which animals and people interact in the making of culture, and demonstrate the contribution made by such texts to the study of animal encounters, cultures, and concepts. This article explores the intersection between natural history and the work of Christian mission in the eighteenth century, and the connections between personal encounter, ethnography, history, and oral and written tradition. The analysis demonstrates that European natural histories continued to be anthropocentric in content and tone, the product of what was believed, as much as what was seen.

scholarly journals Assembling the dodo in early modern natural history

2015 ◽  
Vol 48 (3) ◽  
pp. 387-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
NATALIE LAWRENCE
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Dramatic Shift ◽  
Popular Subject ◽  
Abrupt Shifts

AbstractThis paper explores the assimilation of the flightless dodo into early modern natural history. The dodo was first described by Dutch sailors landing on Mauritius in 1598, and became extinct in the 1680s or 1690s. Despite this brief period of encounter, the bird was a popular subject in natural-history works and a range of other genres. The dodo will be used here as a counterexample to the historical narratives of taxonomic crisis and abrupt shifts in natural history caused by exotic creatures coming to Europe. Though this bird had a bizarre form, early modern naturalists integrated the dodo and other flightless birds through several levels of conceptual categorization, including the geographical, morphological and symbolic. Naturalists such as Charles L'Ecluse produced a set of typical descriptive tropes that helped make up the European dodo. These long-lived images were used for a variety of symbolic purposes, demonstrated by the depiction of the Dutch East India enterprise in Willem Piso's 1658 publication. The case of the dodo shows that, far from there being a dramatic shift away from emblematics in the seventeenth century, the implicit symbolic roles attributed to exotic beasts by naturalists constructing them from scant information and specimens remained integral to natural history.

scholarly journals Truth and the Transunto: a copy of the Holy Shroud in Sixteenth-Century Bologna

2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (18 N.S.) ◽  
pp. 59-80
Author(s):  
Samantha L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Practice ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Of Christ ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Visual Evidence ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Nuanced Understanding

'Truth and the transunto' investigates the use of a hand-painted copy of the Holy Shroud which found its way to Bologna in the late sixteenth century. Used by the archbishop of Bologna, Alfonso Paleotti (1531-1610), this copy was the source of observations of the body of Christ, in the manner of an autopsy and is presented in Paleotti's book Esplicatione del Lenzuolo [...]. Early modern copies of the Holy Shroud are not however accurate copies, but present seemingly simplified replicas of the original. This article explores how such information, and indeed, level of trust, can come from these copies, which, to the modern eye, seem fallible. Previous studies have excused the strange appearance of these Shroud copies by considering them solely devotional instruments yet as the article shows, Paleotti's use of such an object shows that the copies might be better understood in the context of early modern natural historical studies and illustrations. The article draws on scholarship which discusses the emerging interest for visual evidence in early scientific practice and shows how certain types of images and image-making practices were able to evoke the idea of presence and clarify the indecipherable. Demonstrating that Paleotti's copy of the Holy Shroud was not just a religious tool, but also an epistemic image, this article shows how Paleotti's use of the term 'transunto' could be used as a valuable tool in gaining a more nuanced understanding of the concept 'copy' in Early Modern Europe.   On cover:ANNIBALE CARRACCI (BOLOGNA 1560 - ROME 1609), An Allegory of Truth and Time c. 1584-1585.Oil on canvas | 130,0 x 169,6 cm. (support, canvas/panel/str external) | RCIN 404770Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2021.

Francis Bacon's Natural History and the Senecan Natural Histories of Early Modern Europe

2012 ◽  
Vol 17 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 197-229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Jalobeanu
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Philosophical Background ◽  
Modern Europe ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
Experimental History

AbstractAt various stages in his career, Francis Bacon claimed to have reformed and changed traditional natural history in such a way that his new “natural and experimental history” was unlike any of its ancient or humanist predecessors. Surprisingly, such claims have gone largely unquestioned in Baconian scholarship. Contextual readings of Bacon's natural history have compared it, so far, only with Plinian or humanist natural history. This paper investigates a different form of natural history, very popular among Bacon's contemporaries, but yet unexplored by contemporary students of Bacon's works. I have provisionally called this form of natural history 'Senecan' natural history, partly because it took shape in the Neo-Stoic revival of the sixteenth-century, partly because it originates in a particular cosmographical reading of Seneca's Naturales quaestiones. I discuss in this paper two examples of Senecan natural history: the encyclopedic and cosmographical projects of Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546–1619) and Samuel Purchas (1577–1626). I highlight a number of similarities between these two projects and Francis Bacon's natural history, and argue that Senecan natural history forms an important aspect in the historical and philosophical background that needs to be taken into consideration if we want to understand the extent to which Bacon's project to reform natural history can be said to be new.

scholarly journals New Raw Materials from the New World: Transfer of Knowledge to Polish Pharmacies

ORGANON ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 31-46
Author(s):  
Iwona Arabas
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
New World ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Raw Materials ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Natural Sciences ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Transfer Of Knowledge ◽  
Nature Literature ◽  
Therapeutic Possibilities

Cataloguing of the natural world was started by the 16th–century scholar Ulisses Aldrovandi, who was inspired by overseas expeditions. Collectors of specimens, among whom were many doctors of medicine and pharmacists, noticed the possibilities for using exotic plants and animals in medicine. The first pharmacopoeias, however, contained very few of the previously unknown raw materials and they did not have a great impact on the contemporary therapeutic possibilities. In the Polish territories, the raw materials from the New World had already been recorded in Jan Woyna’s Krakow Pharmacopoeia of 1683, in which five American species were identified. By contrast, in the 18th–century Jesuit pharmacies, 30 such materials were already used, although they were not pharmacopoeial. In the 18th century, in the Polish lands, an important role was played by duchess Anna Jabłonowska (1728–1800), who gathered one of the richest natural history collections in Europe in Siemiatycze in Podlasie. Thanks to her support, the Polish nature literature was enriched with numerous works that were of importance for the development of the natural sciences.

Quest for Permanence in the Tropics: Portuguese Bioprospecting in Asia (16th-18th Centuries)

2014 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 511-548 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ines G. Županov ◽  
Ângela Barreto Xavier
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Portuguese Empire ◽  
The People ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
British Experience ◽  
The Tropics

The history of agricultural, botanical, pharmacological, and medical exchanges is one of the most fascinating chapters in early modern natural history. Until recently, however, historiography has been dominated by the British experience from the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, with Kew Gardens at the center of the “green imperialism.” In this article we address the hard-won knowledge acquired by those who participated in early modern Portuguese imperial bioprospecting in Asia. The Portuguese were the first to transplant important economic plants from one continent to another, on their imposing colonial chessboard. In spite of this, the history of Portuguese bioprospecting is still fragmentary, especially with respect to India and the Indian Ocean. We argue not only that the Portuguese—imperial officials, missionaries, and the people connected with them, all living and working under the banner of the Portuguese empire—were interested in gathering knowledge but also that the results of their endeavors were relevant for the development of natural history in the early modern period and that they were important actors within the larger community of naturalists.

Chimeras

2018 ◽  
pp. 164-190
Author(s):  
Suparna Roychoudhury
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Texts

It was commonly perceived during the Renaissance that imagination could engender monstrous offspring: a mother’s imaginings could deform the fetus in her womb. This chapter notes that the early moderns thought of outlandish phantasms as monsters too, akin to the chimera—an unnatural creature, part lion, serpent, and snake. Ironically, the power of imagination to produce chimeras through combination is unconsciously mimicked by early modern natural history texts, in which exotic beasts are routinely described as assemblages of other animals. Shakespeare in The Tempest challenges the supposed difference between natural and unnatural forms using a motif of “shape”—misshapen Caliban, but also shape-shifting Ariel, and the shapely Miranda and Ferdinand.

Remembering the Elephant: Animal Reason before the Eighteenth Century

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (5) ◽  
pp. 1149-1165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan Alkemeyer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Early Modernity ◽  
Human Exceptionalism ◽  
High Intelligence

Especially before the eighteenth century, many European writers regarded not apes but elephants as the most humanlike animals because of their high intelligence, even rationality. The largely forgotten rational elephant can help us read early modern anthropocentrism against itself and distinguish early modernity from modernity in ways that historicize—and denaturalize—these periods' different speciesisms. Giovanni Battista Gelli's La Circe (1549), for instance, produces a philosophy of human exceptionalism by suppressing the elephant's natural history—whether propagandistically or ironically. Subsequent texts by writers from Montaigne, in the sixteenth century, to Pope, Buffon, and Pennant, in the eighteenth, demonstrate that the rational elephant threatens human exceptionalism even after Descartes's seventeenth-century and Linnaeus's eighteenth-century interventions. Though speciesist itself, the rational elephant reveals a bygone paradigm more capable than the modern one of acknowledging rationality across bodily differences. It also provides a historically grounded vantage point from which the primacy of the primates can be overthrown.

scholarly journals Collecting uncollectables: Joachim Du Bellay

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 23-37
Author(s):  
Gro Bjørnerud Mo
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Creative Thinking ◽  
Ancient World ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Modern Concept ◽  
Roman Architecture ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Lasting Effect ◽  
Classical Models

Lists of wonders have circulated for millennia. Over and over, such inventories of spectacular man made constructions have been rewritten, re-edited and reimagi-ned. Both the wonders and the lists of wonders, preferably of the seven, have had a profound and long-lasting effect, and have been abundantly imitated, copied and reworked. Renaissance creative thinking was obsessed with the seven wonders of the ancient world, and early-modern Europe experienced a surge of visual and verbal depictions of wonders. This article is about a remarkable list of seven wonders, included in one of Joachim Du Bellay’s canonical poems on Roman antiquities (Antiquités de Rome), published in Paris in 1558. Du Bellay shapes his list of wonders by exploring pat-terns of both repetition and mutability. Almost imperceptibly, he starts suggesting connections between 16th-century Rome and distant civilizations. Through the eyes of a fictive traveller and collector, the poet venerates the greatness and la-ments the loss of ancient buildings, sites and works of art, slowly developing a ver-bal, visual and open-ended gallery, creating a collection of crumbling or vanished, mainly Roman, architecture. This poetic display of ruins and dust in the Eternal City is nourished by the attraction of the inevitable destruction of past splendour and beauty. In the sonnets, Du Bellay imitates classical models and patterns. Whi-le compiling powerful images and stories of destruction, he combines techniques associated with both a modern concept of copy and more ancient theories of co-pia. In this context, this article also explores whether Pliny’s Natural History might be a source for the imaginary collection of lost sites and wonders in Du Bellay’s Antiquités.

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