ABSTRACT
We might do worse, in seeking the intellectual roots of Pseudodoxia and its place in seventeenth-century culture, than look to Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century bishop and the pre-eminent Patristic authority in Renaissance thought. Augustine muses in De Doctrina Christiana on the need to compile an encyclopaedic account of the quotidian objects of scripture. In a statement that might be seen as the generative root of the sprawling commentary practices that occupy European thought till the seventeenth century, Augustine says:
For Augustine, understanding the complex nature of ‘objects’ is crucial to reading the Bible. Their multivalent scientific and cultural connotations are not, by any means, either self-evident or over-worldly topics of study. They are, on the contrary, central to exegesis. ‘Ignorance of things’, he explains, ‘makes figurative expressions unclear when we are ignorant of the qualities of stone or plants or other things mentioned in scripture’ and he give the example of Jesus’ injunction to be wise as serpents (Matt. 10:16).2 To interpret this correctly demands both knowledge of other scriptural serpents and a comprehensive natural history of snake lore, to determine what aspect of the animal might be at stake in its figurative use. Augustine continues: ‘The same is true of stones, herbs and anything that has roots’. This presumption of the exegetical value of the natural world underlies much of its study over the following millennium and beyond and was deemed, if nothing else, as a plausible organisational principle by which knowledge might accrue, as an adjunct to understanding the scriptures.3 Pseudodoxia, in its breadth, emerges from such traditions, a multifaceted encyclopaedia, in which knowledge
is continually tuned to the possibility of explicating the Bible, without being constrained to cease its investigation of the natural world once the text is clarified. Augustine’s imagined biblical margins are essayistic, even monographic, rather than functional.
