Brian W. Ogilvie

The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload

Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this problem of information overload.

Image and Text in Natural History, 1500–1700

The sixteenth century witnessed an explosion of natural history images. From the publication of the Herbarum vivae eicones in 1532 to that of Carolus Clusius’ Rariorum plantarum historia in 1601, European presses churned out thousands of copies of hundreds of illustrated botanical books. While fewer zoological titles flowed from the presses, they too were lavishly illustrated. The Renaissance naturalists who wrote these books had at their disposal new graphic techniques, woodcut and engraving, that permitted the easy reproduction of identical pictorial images (Ivins [1953]). Woodcut in particular allowed writers and publishers to easily juxtapose text and image, presenting both written descriptions and artists’ renditions of strange and familiar flora and fauna (fig. 1). By the end of the century, both image and text were necessary components of a marketable natural history book.

Stoics, Neoplatonists, Atheists, Politicians: Sources and Uses of Early Modern Jesuit Natural Theology

After graduate school Residential Fellowship, Institut d’Études Avancées – Paris, January-June 2012 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 2003 (fellowship period 2004-05) Fellow, Columbia University Institute for Scholars at Reid Hall, Paris, affiliated with the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2004-05 Research Stipend, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin, June 2003 American Philosophical Society General Research Grant, 1999 University of Massachusetts Amherst Faculty Research Grant, 1999-2001

Scientific Archives in the Age of Digitization.

Historians are increasingly working with material that is not only digital but has been digitized. Early digitization projects aimed to encode data for systematic analysis; more recent projects have sought to reproduce unique archival material in a manner that allows for open-ended historical inquiry without the need to travel to archives and manipulate physical objects. Such projects have undeniable benefits for the preservation of documents and access to them. Yet historians must be aware of the scope of digitization, the reasons why material is chosen to be digitized, and limitations on the dissemination of digitized sources. Furthermore, some physical aspects of sources, and of collections of sources, are lost in their digital simulacra. Nonetheless, digitization and the standardization of metadata offer significant possibilities for future archival research and documentation.

Book Review: Emblematic monsters: unnatural conceptions and deformed births in early modern Europe.

In this engaging book, Alan W Bates surveys monstrous births in Europe between 1500 and 1700. The book has two central arguments. First, based on internal evidence and modern knowledge of birth defects, Bates argues that the accounts of monstrous births in early modern broadsheets, sermons, tracts, and learned journals describe real cases and that their authors strove to be as accurate as possible. Second, these monstrous births were interpreted in the framework of the emblem tradition that was all the rage in early modern Europe. In turning monstrous births into emblems, early modern Europeans interpreted them as signs or portents. They did not invent monsters to make a point, but they believed that God did so.