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Worlds of Paper: A Natural History of Early Modern Writing Technologies

23


Worlds of Paper: An Introduction

Isabelle Charmantier

The Linnean Society of London

Staffan Müller-Wille

University of Exeter*


In a twelfth-century manuscript, preserved at Durham University Library, Laurence, prior of Durham from 1149 to 1154, is depicted as a scribe (See Figure 1). In his left hand he holds a knife, with which he pins down an open page, while in his right hand is a pen with which he prepares to write on the facing piece of parchment. [Figure 1 will be placed here with caption; question: any acknowledgement to copyright owner of image necessary?\

Numerous other images of monks, who were also scribes, contain the same elements: the parchment (in the shape of a book), the pen and the knife.1 Fast forward to our early twenty-first century, and the typical scholar benefits from having a plethora of such tools at his or her disposal. From post-its, calendars and note-books of various formats to the smart-phone and the desk-top computer, which still takes pride of place with its word processors correcting syntax and eliminating spelling mistakes, its databases that allow for the easy input of data and its subsequent analysis, its point of entry into the World Wide Web, and the vast quantities of information that can thus be accessed at a few clicks of the mouse.

How information technologies developed from the medieval scribe’s rudimentary tools to our computing age is a story that has been told before, and of which we need only provide a brief outline here, before looking more specifically at the case of information technology in natural history and medicine.2 In this storyline, the early modern period holds a place of paramount importance for the development and sophistication of writing technologies. Although anachronistic, the term “information technology” provides a good umbrella term to designate the instruments and practices of storing, retrieving and translating knowledge in a material form. The aim of this publication is to re-imagine a time and place where scholarly research was undertaken in a very different way than today, due largely to the restriction of information technologies to paper-and-ink-based techniques of writing and reading, and to understand how these techniques not only provided support for preserving and transmitting existing knowledge, but in some cases also began to generate new forms of research. Before the advent of machines, which enabled the researcher to create many time- and labour-saving shortcuts, early modern scholars had to rely on a few selected things: their memory, first and foremost, but also practically, their pen and paper.

The impulse behind this present volume is the work the editors have carried out on the writing technologies of the eighteenth-century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Throughout his career, Linnaeus both deplored what has been called “information overload” (a theme to which we will return), and yet continually contributed to it by repeatedly issuing amended and enlarged editions of his works on botany, zoology, pharmacology and medicine. From his student days onwards, Linnaeus used well-established working practices to take notes and memorise other naturalists’ classifications of the natural world, notably through the use of commonplace notebooks. As he developed his own systems of classification – both through his artificial sexual system and through his search for a natural system – he also worked out various ways of collecting and classifying the actual specimens and information on plants and animals he was collecting and receiving from numerous correspondents. From commonplace books, Linnaeus quickly moved on to allocating designated space to plant genera and species in notebooks, then to loose sheets and filing systems, and finally, at the end of his career, to the use of paper slips that look very much like index cards. At the same time, he adopted the humanist practice of interleaving books and applied it to his own publication strategy, filling the blank pages of each interleaved copy of the latest edition with more information to be added to the next edition. Linnaeus thus strove throughout his life to find ever more astute ways of annotating, collecting, and retrieving data on the natural world. While doing so, he came to rely more and more on the concept of the genus as a centre to his classificatory theory and practice. This had far-reaching implications for the way in which he framed his so-called “natural system” of plant and animal species.3

That so much can be said of Linnaeus’s writing practices and how they evolved throughout his career is due to the great wealth of manuscripts and printed books the Swedish naturalist left behind, most of which are now housed at the Linnean Society of London. Many naturalists’ and physicians’ papers have been studied and analysed, and current historiography is coming to grips with the practical ways in which their authors worked on a day-to-day basis.4 The practices of assembling information on natural objects and their medicinal properties can be glimpsed through the numerous marginalia, commonplace books, notebooks, files and slips that humanist scholars, naturalists, physicians and apothecaries have left behind. The aim of this volume is to look in detail at this evidence, in order to see how much the methods these scholars and practitioners employed may have varied, both synchronically and diachronically, and which impact they had on conceptions of the order of nature during the early modern period.


Memory and Writing Technologies

Since Frances Yates’s seminal study The Art of Memory, the role of memory in medieval and early modern scholarship is well understood.5 Medieval scholars strove to understand how memory worked, what its role was in scholarly research, and how to develop it.6 Hugh de Saint Victor (c. 1096-1141), in his Didascalicon, wrote:

Concerning memory I do not think one should fail to say here that just as aptitude investigates and discovers through analysis (dividendo), so memory retains through gathering (colligendo). The things which we have analysed in the course of learning and which we must commit to memory, we ought, therefore, to gather.7


Improved mnemonic techniques which would allow a scholar to remember more, thereby increasing his knowledge, were much sought after and reflected upon in the Middle Ages. The key to Boncompagno da Signa’s (c. 1165/1175-after 1240) ordo memorandi, for instance, was hierarchy, whether logical, natural, political, or ecclesiastical. In the case of the animal kingdom, one began with a division into higher genera, and descended along the scale of nature to individual members, or species. Hence one would start with the lion as the king of beasts, and with the eagle as queen of birds, and descend from there to less perfect species within each of the two genera. Da Signa thus mixed logic with natural hierarchy, and a basic logical skill served at the same time as a mnemonic and organisational device.8

Memory was cultivated and heightened by the use of paper tools and writing technologies. The use of raw materials, such as ink, parchment, or paper from the fifteenth century onwards, and of tools such as a desk, a lamp, a pen or quill, and a knife, quite patently justifies looking at writing as a technique.9 These techniques, moreover, can be employed in a variety of ways to produce texts of varying formats and designs, often interspersed with diagrams and drawings, each adapted to the solution of a particular problem. Viewed from this perspective, working with ink and paper to produce texts can be conceived as a veritable technology, and one which greatly evolved throughout the Middle Ages.10 A good example is provided by the relinquishment of the scroll (volumen) by scholars in favour of the book (codex). This material change has been compared in its magnitude to the invention of print.11 Paper technologies are primarily geared towards compilation, but compilation, as Jacques Le Goff has emphasized, has to be seen as “a fundamental exercise of intellectual activity and not simply of the diffusion but also of the invention of ideas.”12 As such, the paper technologies practiced and developed by medieval scholars were part and parcel of their intellectual work.

Throughout the Middle Ages, and through a series of innovations, the book gradually emerged as a popular instrument of learning. Indeed, Le Goff talks of a “revolution” which was occurring during the thirteenth century in the technique of the book, “a revolution whose theatre was the university workshop.”13 Coinciding with the development of lay urban economy and culture, writing evolved from minuscule to cursive in the thirteenth century; the reed was replaced by the quill pen; a growing number of abbreviations were introduced to allow for faster copying; and last but not least, information retrieval techniques were developed. Techniques such as the use of running titles, analytic tables of contents, and glosses made the structure and packaging of a text more apparent and easy to access.14 The first alphabetical indexes that accompanied manuscripts simultaneously appeared in French Cistercian abbeys and at the universities of Paris and Oxford in the mid-thirteenth century. By the early fourteenth century, the index had become much more standardised, with professionals paid to build indexes.15 As the book became an essential part of the university curriculum and as professional copyists produced cheap copies of lectures, which were then sold by booksellers, ornamentations and illuminations became rarer in manuscripts.16 These manuscripts were written and laid out in ways which allowed efficient consultation and information retrieval by students. At the dawn of the Renaissance, when the printing “revolution” occurred, many important paper-based information technologies were thus already in place.


Early Modern Information Explosion

Whether or not the birth of print can be considered revolutionary has been the object of much discussion. Elizabeth Eisenstein instigated this debate when she qualified the invention of print as truly revolutionary.17 For her, the advent of the printed book gave rise to the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and ultimately the Enlightenment. It transformed institutions, ways of thinking and the entire cultural and economic dynamics of late fifteenth-century Europe. By contrast, Adrian Johns argues that, while printing was undoubtedly an innovation, it was by no means revolutionary, as no really new features were introduced by printing in comparison with what was already there in manuscript culture. As such, print in no way transformed the intellectual landscape of Europe to the extent that Eisenstein maintained. For Johns, the concept (or “construct”) of a print revolution only took root in the nineteenth century.18 The question of the significance of print is important for our volume. As we shall see, books were at the basis of the work of natural historians and physicians: they were both the source and the end result of their research. Indeed, as Vera Keller shows in this volume, in the case of lost species, they were the sole source of information. Laurent Pinon arrived at the nuanced conclusion that the standardisation, which occurred in the description of plants and animals throughout the early modern period, could not have taken place without a similar standardisation of the printed book, which allowed for the transmission of identical texts and images.19

What is undeniable is that within a century of the appearance of print, Europe was flooded with printed books, ironically accompanied by an avalanche of manuscript notes and books which contained extracts from, and even entire copies of printed volumes.20 The amount of knowledge which was suddenly made available – both in print and manuscript form – was such that it constituted a veritable “information explosion,” to use another anachronistic term. In addition to the advent of print, new worlds were being discovered, and ancient texts rediscovered, which soon found their way into the new medium of print. Nowhere was this information explosion more pronounced than in the fields of natural history and medicine. Added to the effects of the proliferation of printed books and the discovery of new texts, naturalists and physicians had to deal with the discovery of the New World, populated as it was with hitherto unknown species of plants, animals and minerals. “Natural history had changed radically: from a closed world it had become an almost infinite universe,” as Brian Ogilvie put it, alluding to the title of Alexandre Koyré’s famous account of the Copernican Revolution.21

In the traditional historiography, it is as a result of these new (re)discoveries that naturalists felt the need to find new ways to collect, observe, describe and classify both new and old entities.22 Yet, as Ogilvie and Ann Blair have pointed out, the new writing and reading technologies that humanist scholars employed did not simply arise from the early modern information explosion, but rather came to feed it. Turning the traditional argument on its head, they suggest that the information explosion in natural history (and elsewhere) was not solely a consequence of the discovery of new worlds and of printing, but also a result of the implementation of more precise methods of description.23 As a result, naturalists were able to distinguish a greater number of species of plants and animals than ever before, even among the flora and fauna that were previously known and documented. One of the first printed natural history of birds, William Turner’s Avium praecipuarum quarum apud Plinium et Aristotelem mentio est, brevis et succincta historia (1544), contained 133 species of birds. Ulisse Aldrovandi’s three-volume Ornithologia (1599-1603) contained around 390 species, even though relatively few of Aldrovandi’s birds were exotic ones.24 A typical mid-sixteenth-century naturalist, Turner was essentially concerned with identifying the birds he observed with the species described by Aristotle and Pliny (along with imparting the ornithological knowledge he acquired from his own observations). Aldrovandi’s aim, conversely, was to compile a real encyclopaedia of all that was known about birds, thereby adding much literary and cultural information to the usual etymological and more “zoological” material.

The techniques early modern scholars relied on helped them not only to memorise facts and data but also to store and categorise them in ways which made them easily retrieved for future analysis. The basic human faculty of memory was still of paramount importance, therefore, but the demands placed on powers of retention and recall were different from those of previous generations and dictated new methods of compiling, cataloguing, and note-taking, which would complement the mnemonic exercises.25 Renaissance scholars, steeped in humanism, had at their disposal the writing techniques developed by manuscript scribes and which fifteenth-century scriptoria and printing had gradually standardised.26 A practising physician, the Swiss Conrad Gessner (1516-1565), researched and wrote on philology, bibliography and natural history. Gessner was the quintessential humanist scholar, interested and knowledgeable in many subjects, avid to collect ever more information through reading but also through his own observations and copious correspondence with other scholars. In order to help him deal with the material collected he devised organisational techniques based on slips and notebooks. Of particular interest for this volume is the fact that Gessner wrote explicitly and extensively on writing technologies. He advised his readers on how to take notes, lift extracts from books, and organise one’s notes. Gessner’s working practices and writing technologies, the subject of previous studies, were a model for many sixteenth-century naturalists, amongst whom Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522-1605).27 Renaissance scholarship meant to encompass all knowledge – only by accumulating an abundance of information, or copia, could knowledge progress. This positive concept of copia, or copiousness, emanated from humanist rhetoric, which endorsed fluency of speech and a cornucopian knowledge of vocabulary. Such a concept was at the heart of Desiderius Erasmus’s De duplici copia verborum ac rerum (1512), for example.28 Students were encouraged to collect as many words as possible and organise them by themes in their commonplace books. The idea of copia was very much present in the works of early modern naturalists, appearing in numerous titles and book frontispieces which refer to the “cornucopia” or abundance of both nature and scholarship.29 Blair has qualified the attitude of Renaissance scholars as “’infolust’ or information obsession”: scholars were endlessly seeking to accumulate information on an unprecedented scale.30 With this purpose in mind, commonplace books became one of the most successful note-taking methods of early modern Europe.31 Structured around loci, commonplace books were kept to enable scholars as well as students to manage their data as well as to impose some order on their memory. They were successfully used by naturalists and physicians throughout the sixteenth century and beyond.32 Gessner, for example, did not hesitate to play around with paper, famously inciting his readers to cut through books in order to glue relevant extracts in their commonplace books.33

Natural history throughout the sixteenth century was first and foremost a science of describing and encyclopaedism particularly suited Renaissance humanists and physicians.34 Gessner and Aldrovandi are both representatives of sixteenth-century naturalists who produced great tomes meant to contain the sum of all knowledge of the natural world. Pinon has qualified Gessner’s exhaustive work as the Noah’s Ark of the Renaissance.35 Like Gessner’s, many of Aldrovandi’s manuscripts have survived, helping to piece together how the Italian naturalist managed a team of secretaries who read and copied extracts for him, and helped him to create some of the weightiest volumes of natural history ever written.36 Indeed, the three-volume ornithology is merely the tip of the iceberg, Aldrovandi having published works on insects, quadrupeds, fishes, snakes and dragons, as well as a detailed description of his museum, or “teatro della natura.”37 Such ambitious enterprises necessitated well-honed organisation skills and writing technologies. In this volume, Fabian Krämer concentrates on Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon, a massive collection of loci communes, consisting of 83 folios filled with scraps of paper. Through the study of one of his subject of study, the hermaphrodite, Krämer examines in detail the process from initial slip of paper to printed material.

Initially, as is well known, Renaissance naturalists relied heavily on ancient texts, most particularly those of Aristotle and Pliny, and the tried and tested techniques of commentators and antiquarians. Vera Keller’s “Nero and the Last Stalk of Silphium: Lost Things and the Idea of Extinction in Early Modern Europe” provides a particularly intriguing example of naturalists treating ancient authorities as guides to the natural world. Here, she delves into the unusual subject of extinction and lost species in early modern natural history. Keller focuses on silphium, a lost spice and medicine, and one of Pliny’s most evocative lost species. Not much was known about this species, of course, but scholars like Frederico Cesi, in his Tabulae phytophysicae (printed 1651), managed to gauge their value and place in the world by employing Ramist diagrams.38 Through a detailed study of both plants’ diagrammatic and iconographical treatment, Keller shows how the Linceans participated both in the study of antiquity, and in the exploration of the New World.

Early sixteenth-century natural history was therefore part of the wider movement of Renaissance humanism. Its practitioners were erudite scholars who participated in many other activities and aspects of learning, be it antiquarianism, medicine, or commerce. The broad sweep of their interests has been shown in the studies of their cabinets of curiosities, which included natural historical objects, as well as coins, medals, paintings and human artefacts.39 Sixteenth-century naturalists were often physicians, for example. Philippe Glardon usefully qualifies most naturalists of the sixteenth century as “médicins naturalistes” (naturalist physicians).40 This was the case for two of the most famous naturalists of the sixteenth century, Gessner and Aldrovandi. Aldrovandi was a late-comer to natural history and medicine. As Krämer points out, he was initially apprenticed to merchants as a young man. He then studied law to become a notary. Finally, he obtained his medical degree in 1553 although he never practiced.41 These formative experiences may have influenced some of his paper technologies. The broad definition given to the term “natural history” and the association of natural history with medicine are conscious decisions on the editors’ part, and derive from the fact that most naturalists of the early modern period were also physicians. The study of both practices in parallel therefore might tell us whether the writing practices that physicians used in their medical work echoed those they put in place for studying the natural world. Understanding the extent to which the two disciplines intersect is important for an overall understanding of early modern epistemic techniques. It is however undeniable that natural history slowly emerged as its own discipline from the middle of the sixteenth century and throughout the seventeenth century, a discipline distinct from and often pursued separately from medicine and other activities such as commerce.42


From Explosion to Overload

What one scholar produced in an attempt at the ultimate encyclopaedia of knowledge only grew into an endless cycle the volume of information available to other scholars. Krämer’s paper emphasises the fact that the overabundance of material, about which naturalists routinely complained, was unavoidably the product of their own collecting activities and publications. While naturalists aimed to control the copia of publications by resorting to paper technologies and note-taking, the publication or circulation of these notes also resulted in the amplification of the existing abundance. Historians have referred to this phenomenon as “information overload,” a concept which expresses a present-day concern, and yet which is not by any means new, as Blair has demonstrated.43 Early modern information overload was felt very keenly by early modern scholars, who are often found to be complaining about the increased production of books, and about the poor quality of the majority of newly published books. Gessner, for example, referred in his Bibliotheca universalis (1545) to the “silliness of useless writings in our time” and to the “harmful and confusing abundance of books.”44 A century and a half later, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz expressed much the same concern in his paper “Precepts for Advancing the Sciences and Arts” (1680), addressed to Louis XIV, when he wrote about “that horrible mass of books which keeps on growing,” expressing the fear that “the disorder will become nearly insurmountable.”45

At the same time, scholars went out of their way to try and procure the latest publications. While today’s scholars can read or buy, preview or read reviews of a new publication at the simple click of a button, early modern scholars often found it hard to get hold of books, let alone identify which texts were worth reading amidst all the “useless writings.” Acquiring a new book could take months, especially if one did not live at the centre of things, in a capital city like Paris or London. Scholars frequently exchanged news of publications and, in addition to seeds and other natural historical specimens, also sent each other books in their attempts to overcome these difficulties. On 14 October 1740, for example, Johan Frederik Gronovius wrote to Linnaeus to let him know that he was sending 50 copies of his catalogue of minerals, together with a copy of Jean François Séguier’s Bibliotheca botanica, and Johannes Burman’s Thesaurus Zeylanicus. The letter is full of publishing news, mentioning another five new publications, with details of their subscription.46 One other obstacle was the price of books, and Linnaeus bitterly complained about the increasing price of richly illustrated books.47 Hence naturalists and physicians were at the same time bemoaning the abundance of books and the difficulties to get hold of these books.

In order to deal with the information overload that they were at the same time helping to create, naturalists and physicians developed increasingly idiosyncratic ways of keeping track of their observations and notes, just as a variety of systems classifying the natural world began to emerge in the course of the seventeenth century. The techniques used for studying the natural world changed as the discipline of natural history came to be more narrowly defined in the seventeenth century while retaining its close connection with medicine.48 In particular, from the seventeenth century, the discipline of natural history was more strictly defined by Francis Bacon in England, in a number of works, including the Novum Organum, and its appended Parasceve ad historiam naturalem, et experimentalem (1620). For Bacon, his new “natural and experimental history” was at the foundation of natural philosophy, and consisted in “seek[ing] out and collect[ing] the abundance and variety of things which alone will do for the constructing of true axioms.”49 Bacon’s natural history defined what the discipline meant for English philosophers for most of the seventeenth century. “Natural histories are vast collections of facts about particular objects or qualities (…) involving many people in its execution,” as Peter Anstey summarized it.50

Within an English context, natural history thus came to have a very confined and focused meaning, with its own set of rules and techniques. The foundation of the Royal Society in 1660 only reinforced these, as its fellows strove to implement Baconian ideals and practices. The seventeenth-century English physician and philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was highly influenced by Baconian natural history, mainly through the work of Robert Boyle.51 He collected seeds and participated in the botanical network and exchanges between the Montpellier, Oxford and Paris botanical gardens.52 Like Gessner a century before, Locke had varied interests, which included a penchant for organising information. Based on Locke’s extant commonplace books, some 50 of which survive, Michael Stolberg’s “John Locke’s ‘New and Easie Method of Common-Placing’ and the Early Modern Medical Tradition” shows how Locke experimented with various paper technologies for his pharmaceutical and medical work. Locke then adapted two of these techniques (the alphabetical approach and the adversaria) to develop his method of commonplacing. Stolberg highlights the many potential uses of commonplacing in early modern natural philosophy, whereby scholars such as Locke combined well-known techniques and used them in very idiosyncratic ways. This, however, took time: it took Locke 25 years to devise his method of commonplacing, indicating that scholars were willing to put much protracted effort into finding adequate ways of collecting and compiling information which suited their field of study and working methods. Locke went one step further and eventually published his Method of a Commonplace Book (1686), which led to printed commonplace books and a certain standardisation of the genre. The case of Locke serves two purposes in this volume: Locke’s method epitomises the lasting success of the Renaissance commonplace book, but it also helps to reiterate the permeability between the two disciplines of natural history and medicine, especially with regard to the paper technologies practitioners of these disciplines employed.

This special issue presents a further example of a naturalist physician grappling with paper technologies in the eighteenth century. François Boissier de Sauvages (1706-1767) used the technology of the commonplace book for both his medical and natural historical work. Volker Hess and Andrew Mendelsohn show that his 1731 Nouvelles classes de maladies was published after many years of playing around with illnesses and their classification in his commonplace books. Rejecting anatomical orderings, Boissier de Sauvages ordered maladies much like botanists classified plants, and the outcome was the first step towards a new framework for sorting medical knowledge. Throughout his career, Boissier de Sauvages continued to both publish and try out new methods of classifications, as his manuscript “Livre de Raison,” which he kept from 1745 to 1765, shows. Persistence and lifelong experimentation with various paper technologies were a trait which the Linnaeus shared with Boissier de Sauvages and many others.

What this example shows reflects what came out of the editors’ study of Linnaeus’s manuscripts: it is that note-taking practices became more personalized and flexible in the eighteenth century.53


Outlook: From Commonplacing to Index Cards

The aim of this collection of essays, spanning in time from Aldrovandi’s cut and paste methods in the mid-sixteenth century, to Boissier de Sauvages’s reworking of the commonplace book, is to provide the reader with snapshots of paper-and-ink practices used by scholars in the fields of natural history and medicine. Through very specific examples, we intend to show both the common threads and the diversity of paper technologies that were developed by naturalists and physicians in the early modern period – the many “worlds of paper” which were created by scholars in the privacy of their studies, and with which they were confronted beyond their own desks. Each paper focuses on one particular item – Aldrovandi’s hermaphrodite, the plant that was silphium -- and analyses the associated practices in great detail. In true Baconian spirit, the study of particulars collected here is one from which we hope will emerge a natural history of early modern writing technologies and which will come to complement and enrich other related studies – histories of natural history and medicine, of the book, and of print and manuscript cultures.

The contributions within this collection show that the early modern period played an essential role in the development of writing and information retrieval practices that we still depend on to this day. While sixteenth-century humanists were instrumental in devising the commonplace book and its reliance on loci, seventeenth and eighteenth-century naturalists and physicians developed their own ways of coping with an ever-increasing amount of data and information through which they needed to sift. Three main conclusions arise from the study of the particular instances of writing natural history we have included in this volume.

When analysing the writing and paper technologies of early modern natural history and medicine, one cannot dissociate print from manuscript cultures. Printed texts were used as support for manuscript commentaries, printed extracts were glued into manuscript commonplace books, notebooks contained copies of printed books, divided and distributed along idiosyncratic themes. The ways in which print and manuscript were closely associated throughout the early modern period is apparent in all the papers presented. Manuscript culture did not disappear with the birth of print, far from it. An examination of early modern paper technologies cannot only concentrate on one or the other, but needs to take into account their intertwined connections.54 Likewise, one cannot separate image from text. Image and text came together both in the practice and in the writing of natural history – in naturalists’ manuscripts and in their printed publications. Both writing and illustrating had very specific but connected cognitive roles to play in the constructing and collecting of natural historical knowledge.55

The second remark concerns the ongoing centralising impetus in early modern scholarship. While most scholars clung on to the bound pages of manuscripts and printed books, more adventurous minds took the step of setting the information loose onto slips, cards, or labels, with often surprising results. But more often than not, early modern naturalists and physicians were very much constrained by the bound volumes of text. Out of all early modern paper technologies, the Renaissance commonplace book was one of the most successful ways of compiling information from a variety of sources according to a preconceived topical order, and had a lasting endurance until well into the eighteenth century. For natural history and medicine, this went hand in hand with the desire to construct an encyclopaedic vision of nature. Yet, this became harder and harder to achieve. At the start of his career, Linnaeus published his Systema Naturae (1735) with each kingdom of the natural world contained within a single table on a double-page spread. The whole volume was 12 pages long. The last, twelfth edition of Systema Naturae (1766-1768) was published in three volumes, the first one of which was published in two parts, amounting to some 2,400 pages in total. Only by setting information “free,” as Linnaeus did towards the end of his life by using paper slips which could be shuffled at will, could one envisage a more flexible way of classifying the natural world.

The third striking conclusion to emerge from this collection of essays on writing technologies is how indeed varied and idiosyncratic they are. Not one naturalist or physician simply followed what others had done before him. Instead, all adapted these techniques to their own needs, research topics, and publication strategies. There was no one standard way of taking notes and collecting data on the natural world and its pharmaceutical and medical applications. Indeed, Linnaeus can be seen as one agent of the changes which occurred in the second half of the eighteenth century. By the success of his succinctly written publications, and his new botanical nomenclature, Linnaeus set an example and standardised the way natural history – and more specifically botany – was practiced and communicated. Standardisation also took place in the medical world in the form of pre-formatted medical case studies, as Hess and Mendelsohn have shown elsewhere.56 Such consistency in the manner of recording information began to emerge in different environments, such as museums and libraries, with the appearance of the first card catalogues.57 The index card that Linnaeus had “invented” for his own, personal use heralded a new way of writing natural history and medicine that would be tied to institutions rather than individuals.



1 See for example the depiction of a scribe (probably Bede), from The Life and Miracles of Saint Cuthbert, British Library, Add 39943 f.2.

2 See John Barnard, David McKitterick, and I. R. Willison, eds., The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (Cambridge, 2014), of which volumes 3, 4 and 5 cover the early modern period; Peter Becker and William Clark, eds., Little Tools of Knowledge. Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Practices, Social History, Popular Culture, and Politics in Germany (Ann Arbor, 2001); Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1994); Roger Chartier, Inscription and Erasure: Literature and the Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia, 2007); Dorothy May Norris, A History of Cataloguing and Cataloguing Methods. 1100-1850: With an Introductory Survey of Ancient Times (London, 1939).

3 Isabelle Charmantier, “Carl Linnaeus and the Visual Representation of Nature,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 41 (2011), 365-404; Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille, “Carl Linnaeus’s Botanical Paper Slips (1763-1774),” Intellectual History Review 24 (2014), 215-238; Matthew D. Eddy, “Tools for Reordering: Commonplacing and the Space of Words in Linnaeus's Philosophia Botanica,” Intellectual History Review 20 (2010), 227-252; Staffan Müller-Wille, “Collection and Collation: Theory and Practice of Linnaean Botany,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 38 (2007), 541-562; Staffan Müller-Wille, “Linnaeus' Herbarium Cabinet: A Piece of Furniture and Its Function,” Endeavour 30 (2006), 60-64; Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, “Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012), 4-15; Staffan Müller-Wille and Sara Scharf, “Indexing Nature: Carl Linnaeus and His Fact-Gathering Strategies,” Svenska Linnesallskapets Arsskrift 2011 (2012), 31-60.

4 One can cite Matthew Hunter, “Robert Hooke Fecit: Making and Knowing in Restoration London” (PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007); Anke te Heesen, “Boxes in Nature,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 31 (2000), 381–403; Richard Yeo, “Loose Notes and Capacious Memory: Robert Boyle’s Note-Taking and Its Rationale,” Intellectual History Review 20 (2010), 335-354; Richard Yeo, Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science (Chicago, 2014).

5 Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966).

6 Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1990); Michael T. Clanchy, From Memory to Written Record in England, 1066-1307 (London, 1979); Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (London, 1982); Kimberly Rivers, “Memory, Division, and the Organisation of Knowledge in the Middle Ages,” in Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts. Proceedings of the Second Comers Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden, 1997), 147-158; Paolo Rossi, Logic and the Art of Memory : The Quest for a Universal Language (London, 2006).

7 Jerome Taylor, ed., The Didascalicon of Hugh of St Victor. A Medieval Guide to the Arts (New York, 1961), 3-11, 93.

8 Rivers, “Memory, Division, and the Organisation of Knowledge,” 153.

9 The introduction of paper into Europe followed a slow course: paper mills were established in the thirteenth century in Spain and Italy, in the mid-fourteenth century in France, in the late fourteenth century in Germany and not before the later fifteenth century in England. See Christopher de Hamel, Scribes and Illuminators (London, 1992), 16.

10 On the concept of paper technologies, see Anke te Heesen, “The Notebook: a Paper-technology,” in Bruno Latour and Peter Weiber, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 582–589; and Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and Paper Technology, 1600-1900,” History of Science 48 (2010), 287-314.

11 Jean Vezin, “La fabrication du manuscrit,” in Roger Chartier and Henri-Jean Martin, eds., Histoire de l’édition française. Le livre conquérant. Du Moyen Age au milieu du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1989), 21.

12 Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, MA, 1993), xvii.

13 Ibid., 84.

14 Ann Blair, “Note Taking as an Art of Transmission,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004), 85-107; Le Goff, Intellectuals; Henri-Jean Martin, Jean Vezin, and Jacques Monfrin, Mise en page et mise en texte du livre manuscrit (Paris, 1990).

15 Mary A. Rouse and Richard H. Rouse, “La naissance des index,” in Henri-Jean Martin, Roger Chartier, and Jean-Pierre Vivet, eds., Histoire de l'édition française. Le livre conquérant. Du Moyen Age au milieu du XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1982), 102-104.

16 Le Goff, Intellectuals, 85-86.

17 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979); Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1996).

18 Adrian Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002), 106-125. See Eisenstein’s response to Johns in Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisisted,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002), 87-105. See also Anthony Grafton, “How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002), 84-86.

19 Laurent Pinon, Livres de zoologie de la Renaissance: une anthologie (1450-1700) (Paris, 1995), 39.

20 On the persistence of manuscript culture see Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes. Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 1998); Julia C. Crick and Alexandra Walsham, The Uses of Script and Print, 1300-1700 (Cambridge, 2003); Harold Love, The Culture and Commerce of Texts. Scribal Publications in Seventeenth-Century England (Boston, 1998); David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830 (Cambridge, 2003); Françoise Weil, “La fonction du manuscrit par rapport à l'imprimé,” in François Moureau, ed., De bonne main. La communication manuscrite au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1993), 17-27.

21 Alexandre André Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore, 1957); Brian W. Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 29-40, 33.

22 See for example Paul Delaunay, La zoologie au seizième siècle (Paris, 1962).

23 Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature.”

24 Aldrovandi, Ornithologiae, hoc est, De avibus historiae libri XII, 3 vols (Bologna, 1599-1603).

25 Eric Garberson, “Libraries, Memory and the Space of Knowledge,” Journal of the History of Collections 18 (2006), 105-136; Claire Richter Sherman, Writing on Hands. Memory and Knowledge in Early Modern Europe (Seattle, 2001); Richard Yeo, “Before Memex: Robert Hooke, John Locke, and Vannevar Bush on External Memory,” Science in Context 20 (2007), 21-47; Yeo, “Loose Notes and Capacious Memory.”

26 See for example Paul Saenger, “Colard Mansion and the Evolution of the Printed Book,” The Library Quarterly 45 (1975), 405-418.

27 Caroline Gmelig-Nijboer, “Conrad Gessner's ‘Historia Animalium’, an Inventory of Renaissance Zoology” (PhD, Utrecht, 1977); Urs B. Leu, Raffael Keller, and Sandra Weidmann, Conrad Gessner's Private Library (Leiden and Boston, 2008); Laurent Pinon, “Conrad Gessner and the Historical Depth of Renaissance Natural History,” in Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., Historia. Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 241-268; Hans H. Wellish, “How to Make an Index - 16th Century Style: Conrad Gessner on Indexes and Catalogs,” International Classification 8 (1981), 10-15.

28 Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford, 1979); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford, 2002).

29 Nils Ekedahl, “Collecting Flowers. Linnaean Method and the Humanist Art of Reading,” Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Symbolae Botanicae Upsalienses. Special Issue: Species Plantarum 250 Years. Proceedings of the Species Plantarum Symposium held in Uppsala August 22-24, 2003, 33 (2005), 51-52.

30 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know. Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age (New Haven, 2010), ENTIRE PAGE RANGE 11-12.

31 Peter Beal, “Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book,” in W. Speed Hill, ed., New Ways of Looking at Old Texts (Binghampton, 1993), 131-147; Lucia Dacome, “Noting the Mind: Commonplace Books and the Pursuit of the Self in Eighteenth Century Britain,” Journal for the History of Ideas 65 (2004), 603-625; Earle Havens, Commonplace Books. A History of Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century (Yale, 2001); Moss, Commonplace-Books; Richard Yeo, “John Locke's 'New Method' of Commonplacing: Managing Memory and Information,” Eighteenth-Century Thought 2 (2004), 1-38.

32 Ann Blair, “Annotating and Indexing Natural Philosophy,” in Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine, eds., Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge, 2000); 69-89, Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: The Commonplace Book,” Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992), 541-551; Lotte Mulligan, “Robert Hooke's ‘Memoranda’: Memory and Natural History,” Annals of Science 49 (1992), 47-61; Ogilvie, “The Many Books of Nature”; Richard Yeo, “Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England,” History of Science 45 (2007), 1-46.

33 Ann Blair, “Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-1700,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 11-28, 25-26.

34 Blair, Too Much to Know; Brian W. Ogilvie, “Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany: From Historia to Pinax,” in Peter Binkley, ed., Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts. Proceedings of the Second Comers Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996 (Leiden, 1997), 89-99; Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing. Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006).

35 Pinon, Livres de zoologie, 34.

36 Laurent Pinon, “Entre compilation et observation: l'écriture de l'Ornithologie d'Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Genesis 20 (2003), 53-69.

37 On the place of this museum within Aldrovandi’s encyclopaedic project, see Marie-Elisabeth Boutroue, “Le Cabinet d'Ulisse Aldrovandi et la construction du savoir,” in Pierre Martin and Dominique Moncond'huy, eds., Curiosité et cabinets de curiosités (Neuilly, 2004), 43-63; Giuseppe Olmi, Ulisse Aldrovandi. Scienza e natura nel secondo Cinquecento (Trento, 1976).

38 On diagrams and Ramus, see Howard Hotson, Commonplace Learning: Ramism and Its German Ramifications, 1543-1630 (Oxford, 2007).

39 Boutroue, “Le Cabinet d’Ulisse Aldrovandi”; Paula Findlen, “Inventing Nature. Commerce, Art, Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities ” in Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds., Merchants and Marvels. Commerce, Science and Art in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2002), 297-323.

40 Philippe Glardon, L’histoire naturelle au XVIe siècle. Introduction, étude et édition critique de “La nature et diversité des poissons” de Pierre Belon (1555) (Geneva, 2011), 1 and throughout the Introduction.

41 Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro, La formazione scientifica e il “Discorso naturale” di Ulisse Aldrovandi (Trento, 1977), 29-34.

42 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing, 1.

43 Blair, “Reading Strategies”; Blair, Too Much to Know.

44 Quoted in Blair, Too Much to Know, 56.

45 Quoted in Richard Yeo, Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2001), 87.

46 Johan Frederik Gronovius to Carl Linnaeus, 14 October 1740, The Linnaean Correspondence, linnaeus.c18.net, letter L0407 (consulted 5 October 2012).

47 John Louis Heller, “Linnaeus on Sumptuous Books,” Taxon 25 (1976), 33-52.

48 Ogilvie, The Science of Describing.

49 Francis Bacon, “Parasceve ad historiam naturalem, et experimentalem,” in Graham Rees, ed., The Oxford Francis Bacon. Volume XI. The Instauratio Magna Part II: Novum Organum and Associated Texts (Oxford, 2004).

50 Peter R. Anstey, “Locke, Bacon and Natural History,” Early Science and Medicine 7 (2002), 65-92, 71.

51 Ibid., 73-83

52 Peter R. Anstey and Stephen A. Harris, “Locke and Botany,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 37 (2006), 151-171; Stephen A. Harris and Peter R. Anstey, “John Locke's Seed Lists: A Case Study in Botanical Exchange,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 40 (2009), 256-264.

53 Mary Terrall, “Following Insects Around: Tools and Techniques of Eighteenth-Century Natural History,” The British Journal for the History of Science 43 (2010), 573-588; Elizabeth Yale, “With Slips and Scraps. How Early Modern Naturalists Invented the Archive,” Book History 12 (2009), 1-36; Elisabeth Décultot, ed., Lire, copier, écrire: les bibliothèques manuscrites et leurs usages au XVIIIème siècle (Paris, 2003).

54 Beal, In Praise of Scribes; Gerald L. Bruns, “The Originality of Texts in a Manuscript Culture,” Comparative Literature 32 (1980), 113-129; Crick and Walsham, The Uses of Script and Print; McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order; Weil, “La fonction du manuscrit par rapport à l'imprimé.”

55 See David Topper, “Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustration,” in Brian S. Baigrie, ed., Picturing Knowledge. Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science. (Toronto, 1996), 215-249.

56 Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Case and Series.”

57 Judith Hopkins, “The 1791 French Cataloging Code and the Origins of the Card Catalog,” Libraries and Culture 27 (1992); Markus Krajewski, Paper Machines. About Cards and Catalogs, 1548-1929 (Cambridge, MA and London, 2011).



CONNECTING WORLDS FANTASY ROLEPLAYING GAMES RITUAL ACTS AND THE
CURRICULUM VITAE MICHAEL BOPP PHD FOUR WORLDS CENTRE FOR
DISCOVERING OTHER WORLDS A READER ORIENTED ANALYSIS OF IMAGINARY


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