ABSTRACT

I set these passages beside one another to suggest a comparison of two methods for investigating the history of natural history. Ashworth suggests that by asking better questions of the texts associated with Renaissance natural history, we can usefully revise our understanding of the subject. The passage from Foucault suggests a contrasting approach: rather than turning to the “words, texts or records” of natural history, we are to turn instead to the non-textual “spaces,” like gardens, in which its objects and creatures can be found. Foucault’s suggestion is, however, not prescriptive but descriptive. More importantly, he is not, like Ashworth, describing English “Renaissance” natural history, but that of the Baroque period, of what he calls the “Classical” episteme of the seventeenth century, which, he says, decisively breaks with the prior episteme of resemblances. This same break is said to have broken the bonds between res and verba, the things and words so consistently mingled in earlier approaches to what was called the Book of Nature. Spaces and objects, not texts, Foucault says, became the sites of a new history-free (“non-temporal”) natural history, which in turn became the basis of subsequent scientific knowledge. These spaces and objects were, in the ideal of the period as he understands it, “unencumbered” and “stripped” not only of time but of text.