ABSTRACT
During the Middle Ages there was no genre of writing which can properly be called ‘natural history’. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia circulated as fragments or abridgements, and discourse on nature was spread over various sorts of literary genres, such as the Physiologus with its religious overtones, the Aristotelian commentaries written in the universities, the encyclopaedias on the nature of things, the manuals for preachers with stories about animals to enliven the sermons, the herbals, the lapidaries, the treatises on hunting and hawking and others. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century made possible a new approach to the production of works about the natural world. The Ortus sanitatis, one of the first incunabula, was a herbal with much of a medieval outlook, but also with small woodcuts illustrating the three kingdoms of nature. The publication of the works of the medical botanists Brunfels, Fuchs and Boeck in the course of the sixteenth century proved to be momentous, for it made fully manifest the powerful association of texts and pictures.1 While the transformations of botanical writing came from authors committed to Reform, like those mentioned, the new works on animals originated for the most part in Catholic France and Italy with Belon, Rondelet and Salviani.2 Their works, specialized in a given kind of animal (birds, fish), were richly illustrated with woodcuts which were also printed separately as independent collections with short explanatory commentaries. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Zurich bibliographer and erudite Konrad Gesner wrote a monumental Historia animalium which set the pattern of what could be called the ‘philological’ discourse on animals. About that time the mathematician and physician Girolamo Cardano published his works on natural philosophy. Gesner’s enterprise was of an altogether different kind from Cardano’s; it was a massive encyclopaedia on
animals with hundreds of woodcuts and hundreds of pages. A second attempt at this kind of writing was that of the Italian physician and naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi. His work was written and edited posthumously during the second half of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century and was an even more comprehensive survey which engulfed many genres of writing that had evolved during the late Renaissance. The ultimate representative of this tradition was John Jonston, a Scottish physician active in Poland who wrote during the seventeenth century the last of the great encyclopaedias on animals. Working half a century after Aldrovandi, Jonston drew upon the major works on American nature written by Markgraf and Nieremberg. In the first part of this chapter we shall consider how each of these authors dealt with the animals coming from the New World and afterwards discuss the role played by the fauna of America in the programmes about natural history conceived by authors associated with the Royal Society.
