Natural History 121written in the early Christian period.^12 These works were actually aids
to the allegorical interpretation of scripture and acted as a repository of
the symbolic moral and theological meanings of the creatures. Numerous
other sources—poets, philosophers, theologians, and historians—were
also utilized. Topsell’s entry “Lyon” is fairly typical in that it relies heavily
upon Aristotle and Pliny, but also makes use of a variety of other authori-
ties: the Physiologus and a biblical commentary of Ambrose of Milan from
the Patristic period, the thirteenth- century De animalibus of Albert the
Great (itself a commentary on Aristotle), more recent authors such as Gi-
rolamo Cardano (1501–1576), and others. A further indication of the scale
of the more ambitious of these projects can be gauged from the range and
number of Conrad Gesner’s sources. The preface to Gesner’s fi ve- volume
Historiae animalium (1551–1587) provides the reader with an impressive
inventory of sources that is testament to the author’s monumental energy
and linguistic facility: 4 Hebrew texts, 82 Greek authors, no fewer than
175 Latin authors, and several works by contemporary German, Italian,
and French naturalists. Gesner’s work epitomizes the scholarly approach
of the Renaissance humanists to natural history.
Part of the task of the Renaissance natural historian was to correct er-
rors of transmission through philological research and the comparison of
extant texts. Through such labors these scholars were able to excise many
of the errors and confl ations that had crept into works on plants and ani-
mals.^13 In addition to these grammatical labors, humanist scholars could
also harmonize accounts in the various sources under consideration. In
his Castigationes plinanae (1493–1493), a work devoted to correcting the
errors of Pliny, humanist scholar Ermolao Barbaro reduced the life span
of the elephant, given by Pliny as two to three hundred years, to one
hundred and twenty, the fi gure that Aristotle had provided.^14 Renaissance
natural historians were thus not mere copyists, as some of their critics
alleged, and although they dealt primarily with texts their efforts led to
considerable improvements in knowledge of the natural world. Inevitably
however, the enterprise of natural history moved beyond text- based ac-
tivities. One reason for this lay in the problem faced by scholars in identi-
fying unknown species from written accounts and unfamiliar names. On
encountering an unknown Greek name in a text, a scholar could simply
transliterate the name, as many medieval Arab translators had done, or
attempt to fi nd a known species that matched the description. The un-
satisfactory practice of transliteration had led to the very confl ations and
confusions that the humanists sought to avoid, and hence the most sat-
isfactory way to resolve the diffi culty was to go to the fi eld to identify the