ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues from an analysis of the printed text that the Theatrum was composed from a commonplace book, a practice of note-taking taught in Renaissance schools and advocated by Bodin himself in his first major work, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. It examines the uses to which Bodin put the method of commonplaces: notably, his unusually eclectic choice and treatment of sources, and his construction of arguments less often from the "demonstrative reasons" that he announces, than from a mix of looser, dialectical arguments characteristic of sixteenth-century legal reasoning –arguments from authority, experience, and religious principle, even from highly idiosyncratic allegorical interpretations. As cultural history, the study of nature is especially influenced by new developments in the history of the book and of reading.
