engraving showing a shark, armadillo, polar bear, spoon-
bill, and assorted smaller birds, fish, and reptiles displayed
amid minerals and items of anthropological interest.
Further reading: Daniel Hahn, The Tower Menagerie:
Being the Amazing True Story of the Royal Collection of Wild
and Ferocious Beasts (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003).
zoology Considerable zoological knowledge was col-
lected by Aristotle and presented in his Historia animalium
and other works, but the Aristotelian tradition, technical,
detailed, and pedestrian, held little appeal for medieval
scholars. In its place two more imaginative approaches
flourished. One, typified by Solinus (fl. 200 CE) and his
Collecteana rerum memorabilium, concentrated almost ex-
clusively on such wonders as men with dog’s heads or ants
as large as lions which guarded the gold of India. An al-
ternative tradition, clearly seen in the medieval bestiaries,
looked on nature as a source of moral inspiration; thus the
phoenix inevitably is a reminder of Christ, and the fox, be-
cause of its skill in entrapping its victims, recalls the devil.
Both traditions persisted throughout much of the Renais-
sance.
Although the leading Renaissance zoologists, Ulisse
ALDROVANDIand Konrad GESNER, devoted much less space
to moralistic or mythological themes, neither they nor
their disciples were entirely free from such preoccupa-
tions. Much less gullible than Solinus, they still found
space for dragons, unicorns, basilisks, and the phoenix.
Nor were their works restricted to specifically zoological
data; their encyclopedic scope embraced all facts, whether
linguistic, mythological, historical, or gastronomic. Al-
drovandi, for example, after devoting a page or two to the
various breeds of chicken, went on to present a further
300 pages on folklore about the bird. A clear example of
the literary nature of Renaissance zoology is provided by
Ermolao Barbaro’s Castigationes Pliniae (1492) in which
he sought to do no more than identify the numerous er-
rors of the Roman author Pliny. When genuinely zoologi-
cal issues were tackled they tended to be dealt with in
an unambitiously Aristotelian manner. Classification at
higher levels depended, accordingly, on whether the ani-
mals were oviparous or viviparous, and became trivially
alphabetical at the level of species.
One area in which zoology did advance was in the
field of experimental embryology. Volcher Coiter (1534–
c. 1576) made a detailed study of the development of em-
bryonic chickens. Further advances were made by Gi-
ralomo FABRICIUS, whose De formato foetu (1600), the first
modern work on comparative embryology, described the
development of man, various domestic animals, the dog-
fish, and the viper.
The Renaissance also saw the emergence of the zoo-
logical monograph. Some, such as the work of Jacob
Bondt (1592–1631) on the East Indies, were regional
studies, others, such as the De omni rerum fossilium genere
(1565) of Gesner, were restricted to a single topic. Works
of this kind tended to be more singleminded in their pur-
suit of zoological issues than the better known encyclope-
dic collections. Missing completely, however, from
Renaissance zoology are any of the great theoretical issues
that would puzzle scientists of a later period. For the Re-
naissance zoologist, animals had been created by God aszzoooollooggyy 551111ZoologyThis illustration of a whale sinking a ship, taken from Gesner’s Historiae animalium, owes more to the medieval bestiary
tradition than to personal observation.