Wrestling with Nature From Omens to Science

Natural History 143

cieties dedicated to conservation, and the crowds of children who pack
the dinosaur halls in museums of natural history are testament to the fact
that traditional natural history fl ourishes in some form, even if as Francis
Bacon had feared in the seventeenth century, it is more often than not as
entertainment for the curious.

NOTES

1. Wolfgang Franz, The History of Brutes (London, 1672), 1. English translation of
   Animalium Historia sacra (Amstelodami, 1653).


2. David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of
   Chicago Press, 1992), 348.


3. Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure- footed Beastes (London, 1607), title page.


4. Ibid., 456–87.


5. Ibid., title page.


6. Paula Findlen, “Courting Nature,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas
   Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
   1996), 57.


7. Topsell, The Historie of Foure- footed Beastes, sig. 3v.


8. On natural history in antiquity see G. E. R. Lloyd, Science, Folklore, and Ideology:
   Studies in the Life Sciences of Ancient Greece (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
   1983); Roger French, Ancient Natural History (London: Routledge, 1994); Sorcha Carey,
   Pliny’s Catalogue of Culture: Art and Empire in the “Natural History” (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
   versity Press, 2003); Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s “Natural History”: The Empire in the
   Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).


9. C. W. Fornara, The Nature of History in Ancient Greece and Rome (Berkeley: Univer-
   sity of California Press, 1983), 15.


10. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (1220–44); Thomas of Cantimpré, De
    natura rerum (ca. 1228–44); Albertus Magnus, De vegetabilibus et plantis, De animalibus
    (1258–62).


11. For the claim that natural history was actually the “invention” of the Renais-
    sance period, see Brian Ogilvie, “The Humanist Invention of Natural History,” in
    The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of
    Chicago Press, 2006), 87–138.


12. Physiologus, trans. by Michael Curley (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979);
    Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science, 348–53.


13. For examples, see Brian Copenhaver, “A Tale of Two Fishes: Magical Objects in
    Natural History from Antiquity through the Scientifi c Revolution,” Journal of the History
    of Ideas 52 (1991): 389; Jerry Stannard, “Medieval Herbals and their Development,” Clio
    Medica 9 (1974): 27.


14. Allan Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
    sity Press, 1978), 35.


15. William Turner, preface to A New Herbal (London, 1568); F. D. and J. F. M.