Natural History and the Emblematic World View

Bibliographic Data

ID20054615
AuthorsWilliam B Ashworth (0000-0001-8823-6234, corresponding author)
Year2019
Pages144-158
Publication date2019-07-23
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueGrasping the World (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4324/9780429399671-11
OpenAlexW2982522938
ISBN9780429399671
LanguageEN
Citations received20

This chapter demonstrates the growth of animal emblematics before returning to Ulisse Aldrovandi. The emblematic world view is the single most important factor in determining late Renaissance attitudes towards the natural world, and the contents of their treatises about it. The emblematic view of nature continued to prevail through the first half of the seventeenth century, periodically refreshed by the appearance of additional Aldrovandi zoological volumes. And while Aldrovandi was a major force in its persistence, other zoologists fashioned similar world views, often independently. The dominance of natural history by similitude is so complete in the first half of the seventeenth century that one certainly expects Joannes Jonston's multivolume Natural History of 1650 - which looks for all the world like another Renaissance encyclopedia - to conform to the Aldrovandi model. The union of antiquarianism with literary history fashioned by historians was very similar to the approach of natural philosophers who forged a workable alliance between experiment and authority

Archaeology · Biology · Natural history · Culinary Culture and Tourism · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · History of Science and Medicine · Ecology

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