‘Veritie and not tales’: Gesner, Topsell, and Early Modern Zoological Illustration

Katherine Acheson

[This is the point at which I wondered if we could have a bit more of an introduction to Gesner

and Fuchs and how they were pioneers of what has retrospectively been seen as the beginnings

of scientific natural history and all that. This would strengthen the contrast you make with the

way in which Gasener’s image was later reused in other contexts. I felt this was more important

here than the issue of their ambivalence over pictures (to which in any case you return on p. 6.)]

Historians of print and historians of science agree that the circulation of pictures and diagrams,

especially in books, was fundamental to changes in science in the early modern period.

Cosmological, anatomical, botanical, and zoological illustrations depended on illustrations,

which greatly aided identification and standardization (Gmelig-Nijboer 24). These images

constituted substantive and material knowledge gained by what Alix Cooper calls ‘new kinds of

attention’ (9) to the natural world. The reproduction of illustrations that print allowed encouraged

comparative and collaborative research, which Elizabeth Eisenstein argues were the most

distinctive methodological innovations of the time [footnote Eisenstein].i Images in these books

were ‘the backbone of the exchange between distinct bodies of practical and theoretical

knowledge’ (Büttner et al, 4) and thereby bridged the gap between abstract and applied science.

The role of natural historical books (both image and text) in moving knowledge from theory to

practice was particularly important in medicine, in which knowledge of anatomy, botany, and

zoology enhanced treatment, while the empirical, comparative, and collaborative methods they

endorsed and promoted supported a paradigm shift in the arts of diagnosis (Pomata?). But all of

the images in all scientific genres contributed to what we might call a critical mass of knowledge

and an essential density in the networks of its exchange that supported what we usually call the

early modern scientific revolution.

In addition to allowing for collaboration between scientists, the production and

reproduction of images in natural historical texts, among other sorts, promoted the exchange of

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knowledge between artists and scientists. I mean here not just the artists who were employed by

scientists and publishers to create the woodblocks for the printed texts,ii and the scientists who

learned to draw to preserve observations made in the field or anatomy theatre, but artists and

scientists in general, even those who never consciously practiced the skills or thought about the

principles of the other discipline. There are many recognized examples of the use of scientific

illustrations as sources for decorative arts, and thousands more that have yet to be – or may never

be – pinpointed, as the task of tracing and documenting the movement of these images between

media and genres is enormous in both material and intellectual terms. The examples that have

been traced are instructive: William B. Ashworth has tracked several instances of images that

moved from literary works into scientific texts (and sometimes back again), and demonstrated

that the existence of available examples often overrode the watchwords of direct observation and

empirical theory. Martin Kemp and Samuel K. Edgerton have documented many instances in

which artistic practice, particularly in the representation of perspective, influenced scientific

theories about natural phenomena (according to Edgerton, in Galileo's illustrations we have "a

clear case of cause and effect between the practice of Italian Renaissance art and the

development of modern experimental science" (Edgerton 225)) and their representation within

scientific treatises. This research has shown that what we might call the intimacy of shared

purpose between artists and scientists in the early modern period enriched their inventiveness,

enhanced their skills, and bolstered the professional status and collective ethos of each (see

Smith). [As Allan Ellenius writes, the ‘cross-fertilisation of art and scientific ambitions was

wedded to the idea of progress. The search for truth introduced a new dynamics which at times

made older formulae obsolete; by making dimostrazioni, artists proved their skill in solving new

and often intricate problems of composition, movement and action.’iii] It also proves that the

images, along with the disciplinary values of both naturalistic art and empirical science, were

widely dispersed in the societies in which they were produced: they became, that is, part of the

general, fluid, circulation of signs, marked but not necessarily determined by their origins in

theory or practice.

The consequences of this dispersal to the value and cogency of illustrations in scientific

works – the subject of this essay – have not been examined in any detail. Here I will concentrate

on zoological images, because both their wide dissemination and their persistence were

exceptional. As Brian Ogilvie writes, while illustrations in botanical treatises diminished in

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number and importance over the course of the early modern period, illustrations remained a key

part of zoological works. Conrad Gesner’s four-volume Historia animalium, published between

1551-1555, was the premier work in its field of the era, and it “remained a zoological reference

for the next two hundred years” (Ogilvie, Science 44). But the illustrations in Gesner’s works

were not just zoological reference points: they were one of the principal sources for animal

images in a wide range of fine and decorative arts, across the European continent. At the same

time they continued to be copied into other zoological texts, even in – especially in – works that

emphasize direct observation, material evidence, and empirical procedures, values that are

certainly reflected in the verbal content of the works. The wide dispersal of these zoological

images in popular culture, coupled with their persistence within scientific works, raises questions

about the truth-value of zoological illustrations and their function as components of the

dissemination of new scientific knowledge. It is possible, for instance, that just as artists

imported the values of scientists (naturalism and materialism) into their works, so too did science

import traditional artistic values, such as aesthetic integrity and the role that normative forms and

iconic representations can play in securing the attention, interest, and trust of the reader. MOVE

TO END: “But for Konrad Gesner and several of his contemporaries, the artistic representation

of animal and plant species…came to be regarded as a welcome means that assisted them in

communicating precise botanical or zoological data as well as serving to arouse in their readers a

sense of the wonderful variety, beauty, and purpose of divine creation. Thus, ideally, art, science,

and the advancing technology of the printing trade went hand in hand, and sometimes this ideal

was accomplished” (Hoeniger, “How Plants and Animals Were Studied” (146). In The Nature of

the Book, Adrian Johns asks, “Were images to be trusted as truthful representations of the world?

On what basis?” (Johns, The Nature of the Book. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 1998.

434). The present essay will not answer those questions, but will divide and complicate them in

what I hope is a useful manner for those interested in the rhetoric of visual images in the history

of the natural sciences.i The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 7. With regard to natural historical illustrations, and the works of Conrad Gesner in particular, see Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 51-53. ii For example, Hans Weiditz, a pupil of Albrecht Dürer’s, who prepared the illustrations for Otto von Brunfells’s herbal, Herbarum Vivae Eicones (1530); see Dickenson, p. 51.iii Allan Ellenius, ‘Notes on the Function of Early Zoological Imagery,’ in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, ed. by Wolfgang Lefèvre et al, pp. 167-181 (p. 167).

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Conrad Gesneriv (1516-1565) is the most important author to consider in the matter of

early modern zoological illustration. Gesner was a Swiss polymath whose range and output was

extraordinary, even in an era rich in prolific intellectuals with broad interests. His first major

publication was Bibliotheca universalis (four volumes, 1545-49), a bibliography of printed books

that included 1800 authors and about 10,000 titles gathered from visits to Italian and German

libraries. A professor of Greek, doctor of medicine, and lecturer in physics, he was a natural

scientist in his spare time. While his botanical research was known to his peers in his wide

network of correspondents, most of it was not published during his lifetime. The most significant

of Gesner’s natural historical works that was published in his lifetime were the four volumes of

his Historiae animalium (between 1551 and 1558, volumes on live-born quadrupeds, egg-born

quadrupeds, birds, and fish and marine animals; a fifth volume, on serpents, was published

posthumously in 1587). Comprising nearly 4,000 pages in the four volumes, the Historiae

animalium drew from more than 250 Greek and Latin sourcesv (all carefully listed in the

paratexts) and from the dozens of other scientists with whom Gesner exchanged letters, including

the Frenchmen Pierre Belon and Guillaume Rondelet, and the Englishman John Caius. The

lengthy (for instance, the account of the “caprica” or goat is 60 pages) entries for each animal

generally follow a pattern: after the woodcut illustration, Gesner lists the names of the creature in

various languages; its geographical range; its food, physiology, and habits; its character; and its

uses to man, which include medicine, food, and clothing.vi Much of this information was new,

and what was not original had never been gathered together and compared on such a scale. As

Ogilvie says, the work (originally in Latin, translated in full into German, and in abbreviated

forms into other European languages) remained a reference for the next two centuries, because it

offered so much new information, gathered, arranged, and presented according to the principals

of empirical science and humanistic understanding that Gesner so paradigmatically represents.

Gesner offers exemplary proof of Eisenstein’s point, because his work as a zoologist – both the

iv This is the most common spelling of his name in English, but his biographer Hans Wellisch argues for the Germanic “Gessner,” and his first name is often spelled “Konrad.” See Conrad Gessner: A Bio-bibliography (Zug, Switzerland: IDC, 1984), p. 1.v Peter Harrison, “Reading Vital Signs: Animals and the Experimental Philosophy,” in Renaissance Beasts, ed. by Erica Fudge (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 2004), p. 189. vi F. David Hoeniger, “Konrad Gesner (1516-65) as a Student of Animals and Plants,” in Familiar Colloquy: Essays Presented to Arthur Edward Barker, ed. by Patricia Bruckmann (Canada: Oberon Press, 1978), p. 89.

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comparison of ancient and newer texts that he undertook, and the circulation of masses of

material to his contemporaries and their audiences – would have been impossible without print or

some other mechanism for the wide dispersion of similar or near-identical copies of present and

past knowledge.

The pictures of animals in Gesner’s HA form a significant portion of the printed material: at a rough guess, there are about 1,500 illustrations in four main volumes of the Historiae animalium (the majority in the fishes volume). There were three sources for them: some were copied from drawings provided by Gesner’s correspondents, some were by artists hired by Gesner,vii and some were by Gesner himself, who ‘trained himself in drawing and watercolouring.’viii These illustrations are examples, therefore, of the results of artists and scientists sharing their modes of seeing and their techniques of production and reproduction. But the illustrations in the HA were also marketed as sources for the reproduction of images of animals outside of the realm of scientific naturalism. Very soon after the first publication of the first volumes of the HA, Gesner and/or his publishers began to release versions of the work which redacted the text but retained the illustrations. In 1553, for example, Froschover, Gesner’s Zurich publisher, issued Icones animalium quadrupedum viviparorum et oviparorum, quae in Historia animaliumix which was 64 pages long (about 7% of the number of pages of the original first volume of the HA), and included only the illustrations, with captions in Italian, French, and German. The same sort of book was published of the bird illustrations in 1555, taking up 127 pages, and both of these works were re-issued in 1560; a similar volume of the marine animal illustrations was printed in 1560. Other redactions included more of the original text, and were evidently still intended as part of an instructional and scientific enterprise: Nomenclator aquitilium animatium (1560), for example, is nearly 400 pages long, about 40% of the original of the second volume of the HA, although it actually contains more images than that volume. In addition to edited versions of the original texts, Nomenclator re-organizes the images so that comparison of similar creatures is made possible (BEAVER AND OTTER), suggesting the continued importance of the illustrations to field naturalists and others with intellectual and theoretical interests in the world of animals. But the less text these books had, the more likely they were to be used as pattern books for craftspersons working on decorative art. Gavin D. R. Bridson and James J. White tell us that there were no formal pattern books for artists prior to the seventeenth century, but list Gesner’s Icones and Nomenclator as books that were intended to be used by artists for work in various media, “such as embroidery, jewellery, metalwork, etc.” According to Bridson and White, artists (even those who espoused the values of naturalism and realism in their work) were accustomed to copy and recopy images from a wide range of sources:x the exponential growth of

vii Sachiko Kusukawa, “Illustrating Nature,” in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000), p. 92. viii F. David Hoeniger, “How Plants and Animals Were Studied in the Mid-Sixteenth Century,” in Science and the Arts in the Renaissance, ed. by John W. Shirley and F. David Hoeniger (Washington: The Folger Shakespeare Library; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985), p. 131. ix “Pictures of four-footed live-born and egg-born animals that were in the Historia animalium.” x Plant, Animal & Anatomical Illustration in Art & Science. A bibliographical guide from the 16th

century to the present day (Winchester: St. Paul's Bibliographies in association with the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation; Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), p. xvii.

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the number of printed books in the sixteenth century made many more sources available, and allowed artists – like scientists – to compare and contrast “specimens.” “They become, in fact, emblems of first-hand observation” (Victoria Dickenson, Drawn from

Life: Science and Art in the Portrayal of the New World (Toronto: University of Toronto P,

1998), p. 44).

“The sixteenth century witnessed an explosion of natural history images” (Ogilvie, “Image and Text” 141).

“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” (Ogilvie, “Image and Text” 141). Eisenstein – comparing images. Gmelig-Nijboer, Caroline Aleid. Conrad Gessner’s “Historia Animalium”: An Inventory of Renaissance Zoology. Druk: Krips Repro B.V., Meppel, 1977.

“Much 16th century work in natural history (e.g. Vesalius’ anatomy, Gessner’s zoology, or Fuchs’ botany) depended for its effect primarily on illustrations, which enormously aided identification as well as standardization. Accurate illustrations could only be produced in quantity through printing” (Gmelig-Nijboer 24). “Gessner’s Historia animalium remained a useful reference work for over a century, but botanical books had to be updated or fade away” (Ogilvie, Science 38).

Later he says it “remained a zoological reference for the next two hundred years” (Ogilvie, Science 44)Early modern naturalists were well aware that images and text had different ways of conveying

meaning. Leonhart Fuchs and Conrad Gesner both expressed dissatisfaction, for example, with

the illustrations in their works, and with illustration in natural histories in general, mostly on the

bases [grounds?] that the illustration could only convey the appearance of one specimen, and

could not express the differentiae that distinguished that species from other species. But it is

clear from the subsequent use of these illustrations, which diverge quite dramatically from the

purposes the naturalists conceived of for them, that these concerns were somewhat arcane and

pedantic. Despite the intentions of the authors of zoological treatises, these illustrations were not

commonly used in the field to identify animals, and neither were their descriptive details taken

up by later naturalists as matter for argument or improvement. While the verbal accounts of the

animals and their environments changed over the years, the illustrations were duplicated, without

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much adjustment or improvement, for decades, if not centuries. In addition to appearing in later

works of natural history (including those that claim to be based on firsthand observation and the

new empiricism), the outlines and features of the images of animals in works by and derived

from Conrad Gesner appear over and over again in what seem to be the strangest places, such as

books about monsters, instructional works about drawing and painting, and examples of

embroidery, decorative painting, and plasterwork.xi While certain of the texts that these

illustrations accompany are justly seen as the beginning of empiricism in natural history, the

illustrations may be seen as the beginning of something else: the entry into popular culture of the

image of the animal, which carries with it little factual information about the creature or its

environment with it, but instead serves as an icon of the domesticated stranger [?], or the exotic.

The formal [very?] characteristics of the illustrations, which early modern naturalists thought of

as better able to display information, ironically enable the transition of these images from

scientific records to popular culture.

Edward Topsell's The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, published in 1607, is the second

English illustrated work of zoology [Mention insects/serpents book here (see p. 6): is that the

first such work? If not, should you say what is?]. As is well-known, it was digested from the

works of Conrad Gesner, especially the first volume of the Historiae animalium, De

quadripedibus (1551). Gesner and Topsell had very different purposes in producing their

volumes. Gesner was a distinguished naturalist who corresponded with dozens of other

xi Anthony Wells-Cole's marvelous book, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England: The Influence of Continental Prints, 1558-1625 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997), shows the extent to which decorative art in early modern England was based on motifs provided by prints. The difference between the hundreds of examples cited by Wells-Cole and the few I will mention here is that the prints themselves were presumed to have decorative value, and assumed to have potential as sources for other forms of decorative art. Gesner's and Topsell's works were neither intended to be decorative, nor to provide sources for decorative work. To the contrary, they were supposed to be informative, whether their primary function was seen to be scientific (Gesner) or moral (Topsell).

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contemporary naturalists and synthesized his source materials, while adding significant material

from his own and others' observations; in consequence, Gesner's work is a near-encyclopedic

compendium of new and old information. Topsell was not an expert in natural history, but a

clergyman who also published moralizing works with titles such as The Reward of Religion

(1596) and The Householder, or, the Perfect Man (1610).

In Foure-Footed Beastes Topsell leans towards the attitude maintained in medieval

bestiaries, in which animals provide instructive examples for improving moral conduct in human

beings and society. In his dedicatory epistle, Topsell asks:

Who is so unnaturall and unthankefull to his parents, but by reading how the young Storkes and

Wood-peckers do in their parents olde age feed and nourish them, will not repent, amend his

folly, and bee more naturall? What man is so void of compassion, that hearing the bounty of the

Bone-breaker Birde to the young Eagles, will not become more liberall? Where is there such a

sluggard and drone, that considereth the labours, paines, and trauels of the Emmet, Little-bee,

Field-mouse, Squirrel, and such other that will not learne for shame to be more industrious, and

set his fingers to worke?xii

This is juxtaposed with Gesner’s, first epistle dedicatory, in the translation included in Topsell's

text, who believes on the other hand, believes that information about animals is of scientific,

rather than social or moral value: it will help us understand both things that we cannot study

directly, and those we can. In his first epistle dedicatory, in the translation included in Topsell's

xii Edward Topsell, ‘To the reverend and right worshipfull Richard Neile, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London: William Jaggard, 1607), sig. a5r.

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text, he says that we should study natural philosophy: [I thought it would clearer if you changed

the order in something like this way]

First of all, because there may bee had of those things a more true & certain knowledge then of

unperfect or mixed bodies or Meteours, and certaine other things, too learned or curious or far

removed from sence, or such like, that a man can never hope for any sufficient knowledge of

them, by any reason or sence. Afterwardes because their knowledge and contemplation did not

onely pertaine to phisick, but also to minister and to governe every thing peculiar...xiii

Topsell, on the other hand, recommends the work for those who wish to ‘passe away the

Sabbaoths in heavenly meditations upon earthly creatures’. [Again, I thought this reordering

might make things clearer] Topsell writes of the differences between his intentions and Gesner's

as follows: ‘his purpose was to gather all that had beene written of every beast, & to leave the

same (as he professeth) like a Dictionary, for the private use of learned men, but... my purpose

was, to shew to every plaine and honest man, the wonderfull workes of God in every beast in his

vulgar toongue’.xiv Topsell, on the other hand, recommends the work for those who wish to

‘passe away the Sabbaoths in heavenly meditations upon earthly creatures’.xv

Foure-Footed Beastes contains all of Gesner’s illustrations from the first volume of the

Historiae animalium, and adds some images from the second volume and its appendix, resulting

in a density of illustration to text that is much higher [in Topsell: is this needed?] than in Gesner,

and juxtapositions between text and image that are not found in Topsell’s source. To focus on

one example, I would like to look now at the account of the beaver in Foure-Footed Beastes,

xiii ‘Conradus Gesnerus to the Reader,’ sig. ¶1r. xiv ‘To the learned readers,’ A1r. xv ‘To the reverend and right worshipfull Richard Neile,’ sig. a5r.

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which comprises a text of about 6.5 [six and a half?] folio pages, and two illustrations. All of this

material is drawn from the first volume of the Historiae animalium (De quadripedibus), in which

the beaver is treated as a land mammal, and the fourth (De aquatilibus), in which the beaver is

treated as a marine creature. Topsell's verbal account abridges and re-arranges about 13 dense

folio pages in Gesner's two reports, reducing Gesner’s text about two-thirds. Both versions

reflect Gesner’s conception of the scientific project, in which detailed, realistic, observation of

the particulars of a species is interlaced with information about its place in nature, considered as

a system of interlocking and interdependent parts, and its history within culture, considered as a

set of stories that are weighed against evidence and probability. Realistic forms of evidence

(observations from the material world) about the beaver include the detailed catalogue of its

physical features, including teeth, fur, feet, tail, ears, size, whiskers (p. 45), and ‘cods’ (p. 46), its

food sources and eating habits (p. 47), and its appearance and habits in comparison to other,

similar, animals (the badger, the otter, the dog):

Their quantitie is not much bigger than a countrey Dog, their head short, their ears very small

and round, their teeth very long, the under teethe standing out beyond their lips three fingers

breadth, and the upper about halfe a finger, being very broade, crooked, strong and sharpe,

standing or growing double verie deep in their mouth, bending compasse like the edge of an Axe,

and their colour yellowish red, and will gnaw insunder trees as big as a mans thigh: they have

also grinding teeth very sharpe, wherein are certaine wrinckles or foldes, so that they seeme to be

made for grinding some hard substance, for with they eate the rindes or barke of trees. (p. 45)

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But the beaver’s place in the system of nature is also important: the beaver is described in its

environment, ‘both in the water and on the land’ (p. 45), building dams and shelters, eating its

favourite foods (p. 47), and interacting with other animals within its habitat (such as the otter,

who ‘the Beuer holdeth...in subjection’ (p. 45)). Its relationship to man, or what we might call

the beaver's relationship to culture, is also important: ‘They are taken for their skins, tailes, and

cods, and that manie waies’ (p. 47). Nearly half of the account is devoted to the medicinal

‘vertues’ (p. 47) of the skin, urine, gall, and ‘castoreum,’ or what we would call the musk oil,

which can be used to treat a range of conditions, from megrim to palsy to menstrual cramps. The

recommended methods of capturing and killing beavers are also given in considerable detail (p.

47). Like the bestiary beaver [?], Gesner’s beaver can also provide instructive examples for

human beings, although both Gesner (and Topsell) assertively dismiss earlier tales. [Do you

think you should make Gesner primary and Topsell derivative here?] In Gesner’s (and Topsell’s)

accounts, the lessons that the beaver can offer man are not through analogy and correspondence

but by technological example: ‘And as the husbandmen of Egypt doe observe the buildings of

the Crocodile, so do the inhabitants of the countrey where they breed, observe the Beavers, that

when they build high, they may expect an inundation and sowe on the Mountaines, and when

they build lowe, they looke for a calme or drought, and plow the valleys’ (p. 46). In summary,

Gesner’s text, and Topsell’s redaction, are exemplary models of early modern scientific writing:

they combine classificatory information with descriptions of the creature's place in the systems

of nature (conceived of as a set of interactions between the animal, other creatures, and facets of

the environment) and of culture (conceived of as a set of interactions between men, other

creatures, and facets of the environment).

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As we know, the relationship between illustrations and text in early modern printed

natural histories is complex. The way that books got made challenges our ability to make [come

to clear?] conclusions about particular instances: Topsell, for instance, assembled illustrations

from a variety of works for his books on insects and serpents, and even in Foure-Footed Beastes

he used several of Gesner's texts as sources [which?]. Gesner himself had several sources for

illustrations. In the period, naturalists debated the status and success of images in their work.

Sachiko Kusukawa says that Gesner was dissatisfied with the results of his commissions:

‘Gesner...complained that pictures were not drawn to a uniform scale, and that a comparison of

the relative sizes of animals and insects was therefore impossible from his book.’xvi Kusukawa’s

discussion of concerns expressed by Leonhart Fuchs about the credibility and utility of

illustrations in botanical works (even though he was confident that ‘nature was fashioned in such

a way that everything may be grasped by us in a picture’xvii) points to the fundamental problems

with the credibility and utility of illustrations in these works. By definition, for example, an

illustration of one instance of an animal or plant could not represent both the universal

characteristics that defined the group of specimens belonging to that classification, and the

particular qualities of each of those specimens, which are different from those possessed by any

other individual example [this is a tiny bit repetitious of p. 1]. Brian Ogilvie writes (with regard

to Gesner's editing of Valerius Cordus’ posthumous botanical works (1561)) that ‘Gesner

implied that pictures could convey much more forcefully and successfully certain elements

which were difficult to understand from a verbal description. On the other hand, they were

useless for conveying subtle differences...These differentiae could be conveyed adequately only

in words...Thus, for Gesner, the two forms of description were complementary, and each was

required to complete the history of a plant’xviii – or, presumably, an animal.

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The principal illustration of the beaver in Foure-Footed Beastes (and in Gesner's De

quadripedibus) (Figure 1) is an excellent example of the approach taken by most early modern

natural historians to the problem of images: it represents the salient physical details described in

the text, those that distinguish the animal from others it resembles, such as the large, protruding

teeth, the webbed back feet, and the flat, textured, ovoid, tail. This illustration asserts the

classificatory features of the animal, and depicts the type through the representation of details

that belong only to the type. It is universalizing, in that it expresses one look for the beaver, but it

is realistic, in that it carefully asserts the distinguishing features of the species. What it doesn’t

do that the text does is depict the natural or cultural systems to which the beaver belongs.

Gesner's images are distinctive in this respect: while other images of the beaver give no sense of

its role in culture, they do usually offer it a bit of land to stand on, or indicate its environment

with elements of landscape. Pierre Belon's version of the beaver (in De aquatilibus),xix the figure

of which is copied from Gesner, stands on some earth and grass, as does the beaver in Joannes

Jonstonus’s 1678 publication, A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts;xx other

creatures on the same page in Jonstonus’s work are shown engaged in activities which express

their relationship to other elements within the natural system, whether or not those are realistic

actions. In Laurence Andrew's 1527 version of a work originally Dutch, illustrated with very

xvi Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Illustrating Nature’, in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. by Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 90-113 9p. 97).xvii Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58(1997), 403-427 (p. 411).xviii Brian Ogilvie, ‘Image and Text in Natural History, 1500-1700,’ in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, ed. by Wolfgang Lefèvre, Jürgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2003), 141-166 (p. 156).xix Pierre Belon, De aquatilibus, Libri duo (Paris: Colum Stephanum, 1553), p. 30. xx Joannes Jonstonus, A Description of the Nature of Four-Footed Beasts with Their Figures En[graven in Brass] (Amsterdam: Printed for the widow of John Jacobsen Schipper, and Stephen Swart, 1678), Table LXVIII. This work was translated from Gesner into Dutch and published in 1652 before the English translation in 1678.

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early woodcuts (from a German work published in 1485), the beaver is shown leaning up against

a tree that he is biting at, showing something of its environment and a distinguishing activity

(Figure 2).xxi In contrast, the Gesner beaver is not depicted as part of an environment, and is not

engaged in activities within that environment. The illustration is not so much ‘complementary’ as

Gesner intends it to be: rather, it is partial, in that it shows the ‘real’ beaver, but not the ‘natural’

one, and certainly not the ‘cultural’ one.

The other picture of the beaver in Topsell's text (Figure 3) presents us with yet another

type of illustration. It shows a beaver on its back, apparently with no skin, his splayed legs

revealing his valuable gonads, and his staring eyes framed by pronounced eyelashes. The

original for this illustration, from Gesner's fourth volume of the Historiae animalium, depicts a

swimming beaver.xxii We know this from the context, from the fact that ‘de aquatilibus’ is the

running head for the page, from the information about the beaver as ‘amphibian’ below; because

of these features surrounding the illustration, we note the salient characteristics of the beaver as a

swimmer, the webbed hindfeet and the rudder-like tail. But in Topsell the image is rotated and

removed from this context; the lines of the woodcut have been simplified and straightened. There

are no other swimming animals depicted or discussed in Topsell’s more than 700 pages.

Topsell’s audience may have seen this as a swimming beaver, but in its world, it is more likely

that a skinned beaver came to mind. The verbal account speaks of the value of the skin, for

medicine, and for clothing: ‘His skin is pretious in Polonia either for garment or for gloves, but

xxi Laurence Andrew, The Noble Lyfe a[nd] Natures of Man of Bestes, Serpentys, Fowls a[nd] Fisshes [that] be moste knowen (Antwerp: Emprented by me Joh[a]n of Doesborowe, [1527?]), sig. d2r. xxii The same image of the beaver appears in Guillaume Rondelet's L'Histoire entiere des poissons (Lyons: 1558), vol. 2, p. 177. In Gesner’s Nomenclator aquatilium animantium (Zurich: Froschoverus, 1560) (p. 83), this image is said to be copied from Rondelet’s. Even though Rondelet’s first publication of this image is seven years after Gesner’s, Rondelet must have provided Gesner with the original drawing.

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not so pretious as an Otters, yet is it used for the edging of all other fur-garments making the best

shew and enduring longest; they are best that are blackest, and of the bellies which are like felt

wooll, they make caps and stockings, against raine and foule weather’ (p. 48). But by the time of

Gesner’s books the European beaver was virtually extinct. Although there are records of the sale

of Scottish beaver skins as late as 1350, by that time they were so rare that the pelt cost up to a

hundred and twenty times as much as a lambskin,xxiii and by the mid-1500s ‘only the remote

reaches of Siberia and Scandanavia had ponds still abundant in beavers’.xxiv In the early sixteenth

century Europeans began to trade for North American beaver pelts with native peoples. In the

early seventeenth century, when Foure-Footed Beastes was published, beaver skins were

imported into England by French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and colonial English traders,

supporting the rising fashion of beaver hats. In 1638 Charles I incorporated the guild of ‘bever-

makers’ and prohibited the importation of hats, in order to support the domestic felting industry.

We are reminded that Gesner worked from dead specimens and may even have been inspired by

them: ‘It is quite likely that Gessner’s [sic] lifelong interest in zoology originated in his father’s

workshop where he must have seen the carcasses of fur-bearing animals which were prepared by

furriers.’xxv [Worth citing Wellisch by name in text?] François-Marc Gagnon remarks that the

elongation of Gesner’s first beaver is characteristic of a corpse and not a live creature (which is

habitually rounded, much as the form of a live rat or rabbit), and says, ‘un castor mort est un

castor utile’xxvi. [Translate: this may seem unnecessary, but I think we should be consistent] For

the European reader of Gesner's work the beaver skin was a valuable commodity, probably

unavailable; for the English reader of Topsell’s work, the beaver pelt may have been available,

xxiii Alice Outwater, Water: A Natural History (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1997), p. 5.xxiv Outwater, p. 6. xxv Hans Wellisch, Conrad Gessner: A Bio-bibliography (Zug, Switzerland: IDC, 1984), p. 1. xxvi François-Marc Gagnon, Images du castor canadien, XVIe - XVIIIe Siècles (Sillery, QC: Septentrion, 1994), p. 16.

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although it was still rare and expensive. For both readers, however, the beaver did not belong to a

nature that was familiar and normal, but rather to a distant and unknown land and climate,

sparsely inhabited by peoples of alien cultures. If the first illustration emphasized the real

beaver, but elided the natural and cultural ones, the second illustration, taken out of its watery

context by Topsell or his printer, carried this further – displaced from nature or culture, the abject

and apparently skinless beaver ‘floats on the page, a pure sign detached from its object,

expressing all its meaning on its surface’ (in my artless translation of Gagnon’s artful words

describing this illustration). xxvii [Translate in text and put French in note]

Images of this period that ‘express all their meanings on their surfaces’ – that show the

particular and salient components of an object, without inserting it within a natural or cultural

environment – usually depict methods and procedures (such as surveying, cooking, or military

strategy) or technology (such as new kinds of fireballs and the like, or instrumentation for

navigation). These illustrations typically have no context for the thing they represent, little depth

(except where it matters to the depiction of the object), and no point for the source of

illumination, except inasmuch as shading suggests the relationships of planes to other planes. In

Reading Images, Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen say that this set of characteristics

belongs to what they call a ‘technological coding orientation’ that offers a blueprint, the function

of which is to give the means by which the object can be analyzed, used, or re-createdxxviii. That

the animal is increasingly seen in terms of utility in the early modern period has been

persuasively argued first by Keith Thomas, and more recently by Erika Fudge, Katherine Perry,

and Peter Harrison,xxix and certainly the use function of the beaver is one of the express points of

the text. The illustrations in Gesner and Topsell do a nice job of showing its culturally-valuable

xxvii ‘Il flotte dans la page, pur signe renvoyant à son objet et épuisant toute sa signification dans son aspect extérieur,’ p. 18.

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components, and therefore its use-value to the audience. But the way the images are drawn and

presented also suggests that the illustration itself has a use-value, separate from the use-value of

the thing that is illustrated.

What use could the reader of Foure-Footed Beastes make of the illustrations of the

beaver? Despite the importance of the beaver-hat business in seventeenth-century London, it is

unlikely that readers needed instructions for how to skin a beaver, or indeed that the illustrations

would offer much assistance with this task. Nor could the illustrations be used to identify a

beaver in the wild; a real, live beaver would be more easily identified by a ‘naturalistic’

representation that showed the creature in its environment, even Andrew’s (even a modern

photograph of a beaver in an encyclopedia will show it doing characteristic things, such as

swimming or gnawing, in its environment; the environmental cues, and the activities, are key to

the identification and definition of the animal). As Kusukawa writes, ‘The objects, as depicted in

the works of Fuchs and Vesalius, could never have been encountered as such in nature. The

pictured objects existed on paper, in the learned printed books, showing the objects that were to

be studied in those books in the right way, as the authors would have it.’xxx The reader might be

able to use the Topsell-Gesner illustration to identify a dead beaver, removed from its

environment; he or she might be able to embellish on an account of a beaver-sighting at a

xxviii Gunther Kress, and Theo van Leeuwen, Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), ch. 5.xxix Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England, 1500-1800 (London: A. Lanes, 1983); Erica Fudge, ‘A Left-Handed Blow: Writing the History of Animals,’ in Representing Animals, ed. by Nigel Rothfels (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana UP, 2002), pp. 3-18, and Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern Culture (Houndmills and London: Macmillan Press; New York, NY: St. Martin's P, 2000); Kathryn Perry, ‘Unpicking the Seam: Talking Animals and Reader Pleasure in Early Modern Satire,’ in Renaissance Beasts ed. by Erica Fudge (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois P, 2004), pp. 19-36; and Peter Harrison, ‘Reading Vital Signs: Animals and the Experimental Philosophy,’ also in Renaissance Beasts, pp. 186-207. xxx Kusukawa, ‘Use of pictures,’ p. 91.

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seventeenth-century soirée after a long and arduous journey to the Americas; he or she might be

able to draw a beaver that will be recognized as a beaver. [New para?]

It is this last use that is perhaps most important for us to consider: Gesner’s was the first

European zoological work to include large numbers of high-quality, fine line, woodcut

illustrations, and the enterprise and quality of the images were as much a selling point for the

volume as was the text; in the English context, the same is true of Topsell’s works. Gesner's

compilation of the images of his texts, entitled Icones animminalium, first published in 1553 and

again in 1560, has only 128 pages. It is almost entirely images, and has very little in the way of

text, except captions in Italian, French, and German: for a non-learned audience in particular, the

illustrations were more valuable than the text. And from the subsequent uses of Gesner and

Topsell’s illustrations, it seems that their primary function was in providing the outlines from

which abstracted, iconographic representations of animals, particularly exotic ones, could be

integrated into the domestic life of early modern English gentry families. As Brian Ogilvie

writes, ‘in order to serve their ends, naturalists had to educate artists in a new set of conventions,

conventions that rejected perspective and modeling of an individual object in favour of rendering

clearly and distinctly the individual parts of an idealised specimen:’xxxi these techniques were

readily transformed into templates for the reproduction of the images, in forms suitable to the

generic norms of the place in which they were reproduced.

One place that we expect illustrations from works of natural history will be copied is in

other works of natural history. As early as 1553 we see illustrations from Gesner's De

quadripedibus in other works of natural history: Pierre Belon copied the beaver and the otter in

his De aquatilibus, for instance, in addition to a number of other animals.xxxii After Topsell's,

xxxi Ogilvie, ‘Image and Text,’ p. 148.xxxii Pierre Belon, De aquatilibus, Libri duo (Paris: Colum Stephanum, 1553), p. 30 and p. 32.

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there were other works published in English that copied Gesner's illustrations. For example,

Joannes Jonstonus’s 1678 Four-Footed Beasts contains copies of many of Gesner’s animals,

including the beaver, as I note above. But Jonstonus’s text was a compendium, much as Gesner's

was, supplemented by his scholarly knowledge; importing the illustrations may have made sense

in that context. More interesting are examples in which Gesner's illustrations have been copied

into works of natural history and zoological science that were explicitly or implicitly based on

firsthand observation. For example, the English translation of Claude Perrault's Mémoires pour

servier à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (1671-1676), entitled Memoires for a natural history of

animals being the anatomical descriptions of several animals dissected by the Royal Academy of

Sciences at Paris (1688), documents the dissection of dozens of animals at the French Academy.

The English translation of the account of the dissection of the beaver says, ‘It was so much the

more necessary to observe nicely all the Parts of the Castor, because there has not hitherto been

made an exact Description thereof; the Ancients having been almost wholly silent concerning

this Animal, and the Moderns applying themselves more to speak of its Nature, than to examine

the Structure of its Body.’xxxiii The provenance of the specimen emphasizes the scientific

credibility of the report: ‘That which was dissected at the King's Library was taken in Canada,

about the River of St. Lawrence. It resembled an Otter, but was larger and bigger, and weighted

above Thirty Pounds.’xxxiv The process of the dissection is described in such a way as to produce

the illusion of observation in the reader; as in modern scientific writing, the process, and not just

the product, of the experiment is described: "To inform us of the Truth [with regard to the

xxxiii Claude Perrault, Memoires for a Natural History of Animals Being the Anatomical Descriptions of Several Animals Dissected by the Royal Academy of Sciences at Paris, trans. by Alexander Pitfeild (London: Printed by Joseph Streater, 1688), p. 83. Perrault’s account of the dissection of the beaver was previously published in Description anatomique d’un cameleon, d’un castor, d’un dromadaire, d’un ours, et d’une gazelle (Paris: Ferderic Leonard, 1669). xxxiv Ibid.

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repository of the castoreum], we stript our Beaver of its skin" (Perrault 86). The illustration is an

engraving with anatomical parts (a front paw, the genital and urinary systems, the brain, and part

of the intestine) that sit above an image of the beaver in a landscape. This beaver is copied from

Gesner’s, although the landscape is not – nor is the landscape plausible, as the beaver seems to

live in a mountainous region, out in the open, rather than in the temperate forest as it does in

nature. Perrault’s use of Gesner’s illustration does not in itself bear the quality or type of

knowledge that the text or the dissectional diagrams do. Scientifically inaccurate, and certainly

not the result of firsthand observation, it is instead evocative and iconic. [New para]

Another example of the use of Gesner’s illustrations in a work that seems to present itself

as a record of firsthand observations is in the manuscript sketch-book, known as the Codex

canadiensis,xxxv of Louis Nicolas, sometime Jesuit, who was resident in New France between

1664 and 1675. The Codex contains about 180 splendid coloured drawings, including maps,

pictures of native peoples, shelters, canoes and activities such as fishing, and sets of illustrations

of animals, birds, and fish. At least 12 of the drawings of mammals in the Codex are

recognizably copied from Gesner’s works,xxxvi including the beaver. In addition to this sketch-

book and a grammar of the Algonquin language, Nicolas’s work includes a manuscript natural

history entitled Histoire naturelle des indes occidentales. The account of the ‘castor’ in that work

xxxv I am indebted to Germaine Warkentin for referring me to the Codex, and for information about Fr. Nicolas. The Codex belongs to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK, but the National Library and Archives of Canada has a digital facsimile on display at http://www.collectionscanada.ca/codex/index-e.html. xxxvi Nicolas’s beaver is apparently copied from Nomenclator aquatilium animantium (Zurich: 1560), as he also copies the otter immediately above Gesner’s beaver, in the same position as it appears in that version of the illustrations of these creatures. Gesner himself repeated his illustrations in many different publications, and tracking down specific sources is difficult. Gesner's illustration of the otter and beaver on one page can be viewed on the Wellcome Library website, at http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk/record=b1198824a. My thanks to William Schubach, Iconographic Collections Librarian, Wellcome Library, for help in identifying the source of this image.

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begins with a statement of the writer’s superior knowledge of the creature, due to his many years

of firsthand observation: ‘Even though the beaver, which we call amik, is a well-known and

much talked about, I am nevertheless able to tell you many things about it which other authors do

not know, that I myself have discovered from studying the beaver a hundred times in its home

and its surroundings.” I am drecorded by other authors – who have never seen one – are untrue,

based on my own observations, more than a hundred times, of the beaver, its home, and its

surroundings.’xxxvii [Put translation in text and move original French to note] The remainder of

Nicolas’s account does differ from previous descriptions of the beaver, and seems indeed to have

been formulated from firsthand observation of the creature. The illustration of the beaver in

Nicolas’s notebook, however, is not based on direct observation; like Perrault’s, Nicolas’s

illustration is not scientifically accurate, nor is it reflective of the scientific methodology

espoused in the text. Finally, while Perrault's illustration may have passed for ‘original’ (given

the addition of the landscape, and the combination of the figure of the beaver with the anatomical

diagrams), Nicolas’s work would likely have been recognized as a copy of the widely-

disseminated works of Gesner. Evidently Nicolas was not concerned that his audience would

challenge the quality of his work as a naturalist on the basis that he had copied an illustration

from a work that must have been produced from a dead specimen by an artist who never saw a

beaver in nature, and that was nearly 150 years old by the time Nicolas’ manuscript was

prepared.

xxxvii ‘Bien que le castor que nous appelons amik soit un animal très connu et que tout le monde en parle, j'ai néanmoins résolu de dire ce que j’en sais et d’en découvrir plusieurs particularités dont les auteurs qui en ont écrit sans l’avoir vu n’ont jamais découvert ce que j’ai moi-même étudié cent fois sur le castor, sur sa cabane et sur ses ouvrages surprenants.’ Louis Nicolas, Histoire naturelle des indes occidentales, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, fr. 24225, ff. 113-118, f. 113.

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In light of the concerns expressed by Gesner and Fuchs about the status of the

illustrations to their work as sources of knowledge, these examples of copies from Gesner’s work

seem cavalier and unsophisticated. Clearly, these authors do not value illustrations as sources of

information or even as records in the same way that the earlier naturalists did; it does not seem to

matter if the illustration were based on observation (as in the case of the organs displayed in

Perrault’s work) or on an earlier image. Given that the works (Perrault’s and Nicolas’s in

particular) explicitly claim to advance knowledge about the animals they describe through the

addition of firsthand observation, we can conclude that the illustrations are no longer considered

to carry that sort of information in a trustworthy or commendable fashion. So, while the

scientific enterprise gained momentum in the course of the seventeenth century -- critical

momentum, which it maintains to this day – the illustrations did not remain a part of that

enterprise. We do not, at this point in time, know what Nicolas intended to do with his

illustrations, although the set is packaged as a presentation manuscript for the French King Louis

XIV. Whatever Nicolas’s plans, it is evident that Gesner’s works are being used as copy-books

from which patterns for the appearance of animals are derived: the use-value of the illustrations,

that is, is taken to be the extent to which they can provide a template for reproduction, rather than

the extent to which they complement or supplement the information provided in the texts they

accompany.

Gesner’s illustrations were also copied widely in an assortment of English works outside

of the realm of natural history. The most outlandish of Gesner's creatures, for example, appear in

the 1581 translation and adaptation of Konrad Lycosthenes’s De prodigiorum ac ostentorum

chronicon.xxxviii Gesner’s otter is copied in to two English works about hunting in the sixteenth

century. In George Gascoigne’s Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting (1575), which is otherwise a

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manual of practical advice, the otter illustration heads up a poem called ‘The Otters Oration’ in

which the creature complains about not being hunted, even though he can provide a tasty meal

and has a good pelt.xxxix In Thomas Cokayne’s Short Treatise of Hunting (1591), which copies

much of its material from Gascoigne, the otter appears above a text, entitled ‘How to hunt the

otter,’ that answers the previous complaint.xl [Will this be quite clear to readers?] The use of

Topsell’s versions of Gesner’s illustrations by John Abbot in his plasterwork pattern book has

been documented by Michael Bath,xli and the use of Topsell's work as a source for embroidery

patterns is refered to by Yvonne Hachenbroch and illustrated in Thomas Trevelyon's

Miscellany.xlii Gesner's illustrations were also used as sources for decorative painting: Lucy Gent

cites an unknown Elizabethan writer instructing a painter to include a panther and a crocodile

‘trewly dran in theyre coloures as gesner descreibeth them’xliii, and there are a number of Topsell

or Gesner animals depicted on the ceilings of Earlshall in Fife, including what appears to be a

version of the beaver.xliv In 1586 a book by the Huguenot painter, Jacques Le Moyne de

Morgues, called La clef des champs pour trouver plusieurs animaux, tant bestes qu'oyseaux,

auec plusieurs fleurs & fruitz, was published in England. According to the epistle dedicatory, the

96 engraved images in this work are intended for students of the arts of painting, engraving,

woodcutting, embroidery, tapestry, and all other ‘Sciences’ for which ‘portraiture is the

beginning.’ Despite the fact that the artist claims the illustrations are ‘le tout après le vif,’ at least

ten of the mammals illustrated are copied from Gesner.xlv As Allan Ellenius writes, illustrations

such as Gesner's were not just about natural history and scientific knowledge, but were equally

about the function of art in relation to truth, reality, and nature: the ‘cross-fertilisation of art and

scientific ambitions was wedded to the idea of progress. The search for truth introduced a new

dynamics which at times made older formulae obsolete; by making dimostrazioni, artists proved

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their skill in solving new and often intricate problems of composition, movement and action.’xlvi

But we must add that very soon after their initial conception, these illustrations lost their value as

bearers of truth and became severed from the empirical project. If the work of sixteenth- and

seventeenth-century naturalists initiated modern scientific methods, the illustrations in works

such as Gesner’s propelled something rather different: the use of animal images in decorative,

domesticated, and simplified forms to represent the distant and unknown creatures of the far-

away kingdom of the animals.

Adrian Johns writes concerning printed natural histories that ‘We need to know how and

why [printed natural histories]they were made, how they reached their audiences, and how they

were put to use.’xlvii To this I would like to add that we need to know how and why illustrations

in natural histories reached their audiences, and how they were put to different uses than were

the texts they accompanied. By the time that Foure-Footed Beastes was published, the

illustrations from Gesner’s various works of zoology were already ubiquitous in English culture:

they were painted on ceilings and embroidered on tablecloths, and they punctuated tales of

outlandish and apocalyptic goings-on. Their appearance within scientific works of Topsell’s era

and later must be considered within this context. This is not to say that illustrations did not

substantively contribute to the advancement of scientific knowledge in the seventeenth century:

the anatomical diagrams, for instance, in Perrault, or in Samuel Collins' A Systeme of

Anatomy,xlviii or the astounding images in Hooke's Micrographia,xlix attest to the continued

importance of illustration to the dissemination of scientific knowledge. But the type of

illustration that Gesner and Fuchs valued so highly would not retain its ability to convey

scientific knowledge. Ironically, the conventions of the execution and design of Gesner’s

illustrations (salient details, simplified lines, reduction of three-dimensionality, and erasure of

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environment) would make it easier to transport away from the scientific world and into popular

culture, where lions romp with unicorns and ‘young Storkes and Wood-peckers do in their

parents olde age feed and nourish them.’ And within popular culture, animals would retain their

pedagogic and emblematic functions, as attested to by the increasing popularity of Aesop's

Fables in the latter part of the seventeenth century, and the persistence of anthropomorphic

animals in the centuries after that. Many scholars argue, as does William Ashworth, that by the

xxxviii The Gesner-derived animals include the ‘camelopardus’ (p. 15), the ‘Pavion’ (p. 16), the ‘Cercopitaeei’ (p. 17), and the ‘Sui’ (p. 18). These exotic (and fictional) creatures were among the many things the English translator, Steven Batman, predicted for his nation should Elizabeth I marry a Frenchman. Konrad Lykosthenes, The [H] Doome Warning All Men to the Judgemente Wherein are Contayned for the Most Parte All the Straunge Prodigies Hapned in the Worlde, with Divers Secrete Figures of Revelations Tending to Mannes Stayed Conversion Towardes God: in Maner of a Generall Chronicle, Gathered out of Sundrie Approved Authors by St. Batman Professor in Divinite, [trans. Stephen Batman] ([London]: Imprinted by Ralphe Nubery assigned by Henry Bynneman: 1581).xxxix George Gascoigne, The Noble Arte of Venerie or Hunting. Wherein Is Handled and Set Out the Vertues, Nature, and Properties of Fivtene Sundrie Chaces Togither, with the Order and Maner How to Hunte and Kill Every One of Them (London: Imprinted by Henry Bynneman, for Christopher Barker, 1575), pp. 201-203 (mispaginated as 395-7).xl Thomas Cokayne, A Short Treatise of Hunting: Compyled for the Delight of Noble Men and Gentlemen (London: By Thomas Orwin for Thomas Woodcocke, 1591), sig. D2r. xli Michael Bath, ‘The Sources of John Abbott's Pattern Book,’ Architectural History 41(1998), 49-66. xlii Hachenbroch's references to Topsell suggest that his work on insects was published earlier than it was, and that his work on birds was either published or circulated (and that earlier than its presumed date of execution); Yvonne Hackenbroch, English and Other Needlework Tapestries and Textiles in the Irwin Untermyer Collection (London: Thames and Hudson, 1960), p. xvi, and ‘Notes and Comments,’ p. 18. But certainly a number of examples of embroidery included in her text include animals that derive from Gesner, probably through Topsell; the iconic unicorn, lion, stag, and leopard that appear in many borders and some tableau are recognizable. This is also true of the embroidery patterns drawn in Thomas Trevelyon, The Trevelyon miscellany of 1608. A facsimile of Folger Shakespeare Library ms V.b.232, ed. by Heather Wolfe (Washington, DC: Folger Library, 2007) in which many of the zoological motifs derive from Gesner.xliii Lucy Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560-1620 (Leamington Spa: James Hall, 1981), p. 10. xliv M. R. Apted, The Painted Ceilings of Scotland, 1550-1650 (Edinburgh: Her Majesty's Stationery Office, 1966), Plate 33. xlv Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues, La clef des champs pour trouuer plusieurs animaux, tant bestes qu'Oyseaux, auec plusieurs fleurs & fruitz., Anno 1586 (London: T. Vautrollier pour Jaques le Moyne, 1586), ‘A Madame de Sidney.’xlvi Allan Ellenius, ‘Notes on the Function of Early Zoological Imagery,’ in The Power of Images in Early Modern Science, ed. by Wolfgang Lefèvre et al, pp. 167-181 (p. 167).

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mid 17th century, ‘the emblematic view of nature would collapse. Natural history would

suddenly take on a more familiar form, as naturalists abandoned the entire associative framework

and began to focus on description and anatomical investigation, with the ultimate goal of a

natural system of classification.’l This may have been true within scientific community and

discourse, but it was not true in the culture as a whole, and scientific and popular cultures freely

intermingled, as Ashworth’s own work has shown. Topsell’s animal illustrations may have been

the successors to Gesner’s versions, but they were not the predecessors to Hooke’s, Collins’s,

and Perrault’s; rather they are the ancestors of the cartoon animals that dominated popular

culture of the twentieth century, and persist in film, television, and advertising. The professor

may prefer ‘veritie and not tales,’ but the student, it seems, likes both.

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xlvii Adrian Johns, ‘Natural History as Print Culture,’ in Cultures of Natural History, ed. by N. Jardine et al, pp. 106-126 (p. 106). xlviii Samuel Collins, A Systeme of Anatomy, Treating of the Body of Man, Beasts, Birds, Fish, Insects, and Plants, 2 vols. (London: Printed by Thomas Newcomb, 1685).xlix Robert Hooke, Micrographia, or, Some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies Made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries Thereupon (London: Printed by Jo. Martyn and Ja. Allestry, 1665).l William B. Ashworth, Jr., ‘Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,’ in Cultures of Natural History, ed. by N. Jardine et al, pp. 17-37 (p. 35).

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