Speculative Taxidermy

A NATURAL HISTORY PANOPTICON83

the manual reproduction of bestiaries around Europe, the newly ac-
quired visibility of animals defined a new epistemological spatializa-
tion. There, animals acquired visibility in a double bind of words and
pictorial form.

THE FLATTENING OF NATURE

By the second half of the thirteenth century, bestiaries had consolidated the
epistemic spatialization of the book page as a flat surface upon which ani-
mals were most regularly made to materialize. And it is this very spatial
structuring that early natural history books appropriated. One of the most
widely circulated early natural history books that included illustrations was
Historiae animalium by Conrad Gesner, published between 1551 and 1558
(fig. 2.2).^36 Aristotle’s and Pliny’s texts did not originally feature images.
Therefore, Gesner’s book represented an important moment of rupture in
the tradition of scientific inquiry. Another notable innovation lay in the re-
moval of some animal semantics originally included in the bestiaries. This
collection was organized alphabetically, but Gesner’s optics still engaged in
the construction of an emblematic natural history in which animals
were relatively caught up in an intricate network of symbols, emblems,
and metaphors.^37 As Ashworth notes in his discussion of Historiae
animalium:

To know the peacock, as Gesner wanted to know it, one must know not

only what the peacock looks like but what its name means, in every lan-

guage; what kind of proverbial associations it has; what it symbolizes to

both pagans and Christians; what other animals it has sympathies or af-

finities with; and any other possible connection it might have with stars,

plants, minerals, numbers, coins, or whatever.^38

Although in Gesner’s book the theological teachings that defined the
representations of the Physiologus and the Bestiarium were no longer so
prominent, Historiae animalium still featured unicorns and griffins,
along with some “monsters.” But despite still being grounded in an
emblematic approach to natural history that owed much to medieval