120 Harrison
Topsell thus announces on his title page that “the story of euery Beast is
amplifi ed with Narrations out of Scriptures, Fathers, Phylosophers, Physi-
cians, and Poets.”^5
Natural historians of this period made few claims to originality. On the
contrary, for most of its practitioners, natural history was an attempt to re-
construct an ancient body of knowledge. Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605),
professor of medicine (“physic”) and curator of the botanical gardens at
Bologna, saw as his task the revival of a natural history that had been
“buried for so many hundreds of years in the gloom of ignorance and
silence.”^6 Conrad Gesner (1516–1565), the foremost natural historian of
his time and chief source for Topsell’s Historie, also spoke about “renew-
ing old and ancient things which were forgotten.” The task of the natural
historian, he suggested, was “to restore things from Death, or ruine which
were sould thereto and to restore the names of things, and things by their
names.”^7 The assumption of humanist scholars was that a more- or- less
complete knowledge of nature could be found in ancient texts: Aristotle
(384–322 BCE) on animals, his disciple Theophrastus (ca. 371–286 BCE)
on plants and stones, and the physician Dioscorides (ca. 40–80 CE) on
plants. To these must be added the thirty- seven books of Naturalis Historia
of the Latin encyclopedist Pliny the Elder (23 / 4–79 CE).^8 The expression
“natural history” itself can be traced back to the Greeks, for whom histo-
ria carried the broad sense of “an enquiry into something remarkable.”^9
Aristotle’s works on animals had been known in Latin translation from
the thirteenth century, and Pliny had been available in piecemeal form in
the two distinct generations of medieval encyclopedias—those of Isidore
of Seville (ca. 560–636 CE) and the Venerable Bede (ca. 673–735 CE),
and the relatively more recent works of Vincent of Beauvais (ca.1194–
1264 CE), Bartholomew Anglicus (fl. 1220–1240 CE), and Albert the Great
(d. 1280 CE).^10
Claims about the existence of a coherent ancient science that had
once been universally revered need to be treated with some caution. There
is a sense in which ancient natural history was actually the construction
of Renaissance scholars who sought to legitimate their own activities by
associating them with an ancient practice.^11 In fact, Renaissance works
drew upon an enormous number of ancient sources that share few com-
mon disciplinary characteristics. In addition to Aristotle and Pliny, whose
writings are separated by several centuries and already display disparate
methods and motives, natural historians drew upon the allegorizing col-
lections of animal lore to be found in the medieval bestiaries and books
of birds, which for the most part were based on the Physiologus, a work