| Natural history is often neglected by historians of early modern science because it does not fit into the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution. This dissertation argues that the primary interest of natural history in the sixteenth century lies not in its content but in the practices which naturalists developed to experience nature and reproduce that experience in their texts.;Ancient and medieval naturalists were careful observers who recognized the importance of experiencing nature firsthand. But they were for the most part, isolated individuals; knowledge about nature in this period was largely practical. Medieval scholars urged the study of universals, not particulars. In contrast, fifteenth-century humanists delighted in the precise observation of plants and animals. The late fifteenth-century controversy over Pliny the Elder's Natural history reveals how humanist physicians used firsthand experience to criticize ancient errors.;The sixteenth century saw the formation of a community of naturalists considered natural history as a collective activity within the framework of the humanist Republic of Letters. In the early part of the century, naturalists attempted to identify ancient plant descriptions with modern species; their successors, instead, were concerned with finding and describing new species. To aid their studies, they adapted elements of the culture around them to form botanical gardens, herbaria, and cabinets of natural objects. In the later sixteenth century, there was increasing tension between scholars who saw such resources as instruments for producing knowledge and collectors whose self-identity was bound up in collecting and displaying curiosities.;Natural history texts in this period display increasingly detailed descriptions, corresponding to a more nuanced sense of differences between species and the universalization of local knowledge made possible by correspondence and exchange. Illustrations and descriptions allowed widely-separated naturalists to make their own experiences of nature available to others. When they turned to reports from outside Europe, their techniques for experiencing nature turned out to be inadequate when confronted with scanty, contradictory evidence, and they turned to humanist critical methods. Their seventeenth-century successors, by restricting natural history to description made at first hand, vindicated the techniques developed by late Renaissance naturalists. |
