118 Harrison
Franz’s observations convey to the modern- day reader something of
the unfamiliar boundaries of the disciplines as they were conceived in
the early- modern period, and of their perplexing relationships with other
areas of study. Franz speaks of a history of animals sometimes referred to
as “zoographia” and which is part of “physicks.” He also allows that there
are those who believe that the history of animals ought to be included in
medicine but states that it more properly belongs in “philosophy.” This
attempt to situate the history of animals serves as a salient reminder of the
alien character of the disciplines as they were conceived a little over three
hundred years ago. Franz took it for granted that readers of his history of
animals would recognize it as part of the genre of “natural history,” an
area of scholarship that included the additional categories of histories of
plants and stones. “History,” like “physics” and “philosophy,” thus had a
somewhat broader meaning than that which we are familiar.
A reading of other natural histories from this period brings additional
surprises: justifi cations for the study of nature were markedly different
from those of our own era, the practice of natural history called for pro-
cedures utterly unlike those that we commonly associate with the natu-
ral sciences, and the very object of study—“nature”—was conceptualized
differently. Finally, if we consider the career of natural history, from its
revival in the sixteenth century to its decline in the nineteenth, in each
of these aspects—its relation to other disciplines, its motivations and jus-
tifi cations, its methods, its subject matter—the enterprise of natural his-
tory underwent signifi cant change. In short, the natural history of these
earlier historical periods bears only a remote resemblance to any currently
practiced discipline.THE REVIVAL OF ANCIENT LEARNING
A typical Renaissance natural history dealt with one of the three catego-
ries: animal, vegetable, or mineral. Further divisions were often observed
within these broad categories. Four- footed animals were usually distin-
guished from the rest of the animal kingdom. Some writers separated vi-
viparous (bearing live young) from oviparous (egg- laying) quadrupeds;
some treated fi sh and “aquatic animals” together. “Insects” was a rather
broad category that encompassed most of the invertebrate species, includ-
ing the “imperfect” creatures, those thought to generate spontaneously.
Plants, “God’s vegetable creatures” as one author called them, were the
other major concern of natural historians. Histories of plants were more