1 Sonderdruck aus 2 3 4 5 6 7 Kaspar von Greyerz / Silvia Flubacher / 8 Philipp Senn (Hg.) 9 10 11 12 Wissenschaftsgeschichte und 13 14 Geschichte des Wissens im Dialog – 15 Connecting Science and Knowledge 16 17 18 19 20 Schauplätze der Forschung – Scenes of Research 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 V&R unipress 39 40 ISBN 978-3-8471-0171-0 41 ISBN 978-3-8470-0171-3 (E-Book) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 Inhalt
Vorwort...... 7
Kaspar von Greyerz, Silvia Flubacher, Philipp Senn Einführung. Schauplätze wissensgeschichtlicher Forschung ...... 9
Experten, Laien und die Neue Wissenschaft – Experts, lay people and the new science Emma C. Spary Kennerschaft versus chemische Expertise. Was es im Paris des 18. Jahrhunderts über Nahrungsmittel zu wissen gab ...... 35
Andrew Wear Popular Medicine and the New Science in England. Cross Roads or Merging Lanes? ...... 61
Anne-Charlott Trepp Die „Lust“ am Gewöhnlichen. Emotionen als Scharnier laienhafter und wissenschaftlicher Wissenskulturen ...... 85
Marion Baumann Heimweh – eine Frage des Luftdrucks? Zur wissenschaftlichen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Heimweh bei Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) ...... 99
“Epistemische Genres”: Populäre und gelehrte Wissensformate – “Epistemic genres”: Popular and learned forms of knowledge Gianna Pomata The Recipe and the Case. Epistemic Genres and the Dynamics of Cognitive Practices ...... 131 6 Inhalt
Flemming Schock Enzyklopädie, Kalender, Wochenblatt. Wissenspopularisierung und Medienwandel im 17. Jahrhundert ...... 155
Simona Boscani Leoni Queries and Questionnaires. Collecting Local and Popular Knowledge in 17th and 18th Century Europe ...... 187
Bäderkunde – Balneology Frank Fürbeth Adaptationen gelehrten Wissens für laikale Zwecke in der Bäderheilkunde der frühen Neuzeit ...... 211
Ute Lotz-Heumann Finding a Cure. Representations of Holy Wells and Healing Waters in Early Modern Germany ...... 233
Philipp Senn Forscher vor Ort. Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733), Bündner Gönner und die Balneologie ...... 255
Tierkunde – Animal Worlds Brian W. Ogilvie Beasts, Birds, and Insects. Folkbiology and Early Modern Classification of Insects ...... 295
Fabian Krämer Why There Was No Centaur in Eighteenth-Century London. The Vulgar As a Cognitive Category in Enlightenment Europe ...... 317
Silvia Flubacher Alpen-Tiere. Lokale Wissenswelten in der schweizerischen Naturgeschichtsschreibung ...... 347
Autorenverzeichnis ...... 375
Personenregister ...... 383 Tierkunde – Animal Worlds
Brian W. Ogilvie
Beasts, Birds, and Insects. Folkbiology and Early Modern Classification of Insects
Introduction
European scholars first took serious interest in most insects in the sixteenth century.1 The first books devoted entirely to insects appeared in the seventeenth century, based on sixteenth-century scholars’ work: Thomas Moffett’s Theater of Insects, published in 1634 but compiled toward the end of the previous century, and Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Seven Books on Insect Animals, which appeared in 1602.2 As both writers observed, their works contained far more on insects than could be found in the ancients. The study of insects shows clear parallels with that of botany: as a result of serious, systematic study, Renaissance naturalists came to appreciate that the ancients had described only a small fraction of the plant species in the world; by the middle of the sixteenth century, many herbalists had decided that their main task was no longer to identify the plants used in ancient medical recipes but,
1 No adequate history of entomology exists, but for an introduction to the subject, see Friedrich S. Bodenheimer: Materialien zur Geschichte der Entomologie bis Linn . Berlin 1928, and Jacques d’Aguilar: Histoire de l’entomologie. Paris 2006. For a brief overview of developments from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, see Brian W. Ogilvie: Nature’s Bible: Insects in Seventeenth-century European Art and Science. In: Tidsskrift for kulturforskning 7 (2008), pp. 5–21. On the new interest in insects taken by Renaissance naturalists and artists, see Marcel Dicke: Insects in Western Art. In: American Entomologist 46 (2000), pp. 228–37; Yves Cambefort: Artistes, m decins et curieux aux origines de l’entomologie moderne (1450– 1650). In: Bulletin d’Histoire et d’ pist mologie des Sciences de la Vie 11 (2004), pp. 3–29; Eric Jorink: Between Emblematics and the ‘Argument from Design’: The Representation of Insects in the Dutch Republic. In: Karl A. E. Enenkel, Paul J. Smith (eds.): Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts. Leiden, Boston 2007, pp. 1: 147–175; Eric Jorink: Reading the Book of Nature in the Dutch Golden Age, 1575–1715. Leiden 2010 and Janice Neri: The Insect and the Image. Minneapolis 2011. 2 Thomas Moffett: Insectorum sive minimorum animalium theatrum: Olim ab Edoardo Wottono, Conrado Gesnero, Thomaque Pennio inchoatum: tandem Tho. Moufeti Londinatis opera sumptibusq; maximis concinnabum, auctum, perfectum. London 1634; Ulisse Al- drovandi: De animalibus insectis libri septem […], Bologna 1602. 296 Brian W. Ogilvie instead, to discover and describe new species.3 Naturalists interested in insects, too, emphasized novelty and variety. Yet there are significant differences between Renaissance botany and proto- entomology.4 Over the course of the sixteenth century, medical botany had been established in several universities; the study of insects remained the province of a small number of amateurs (including artists and collectors). Much of the knowledge that was expressed in Moffett’s and Aldrovandi’s works was folk knowledge: everyday knowledge possessed by common people that these writers systematized. For that reason, it seems productive to analyze Renaissance works on insects from the perspective of folkbiology—the study of pre-scientific classifications and conceptions of living creatures. This paper presents the results of a folkbiological investigation of insects in Renaissance natural history. I argue that the very concept of “insect” as an animal life form—one of the basic folkbiological divisions of the animal king- dom—emerged in the sixteenth century, as the result of Europeans’ engagement with both the classical heritage in natural history and the natural diversity of their environment. I begin with a brief overview of folkbiological theory. I will then discuss late medieval classifications of insects, before “insect” was a folk taxon, with a focus on the animal life-forms in which they were placed and on the kinds of insects described in late medieval sources. With this baseline estab- lished, I will then examine how the learned tradition of ancient natural history, reprised in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, contributed to establishing the category of “insect” as an animal life form, while at the same time the activities of Renaissance naturalists and collectors led to a much deeper understanding of the diversity of insect life. Finally, I will conclude with a few thoughts on how vernacular knowledge helped create the preconditions for the development of scientific classifications in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
3 I have traced this history in Brian W. Ogilvie: The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago 2006. 4 The word “entomologia” appears to have been coined by Johann Heinrich Alsted in 1630, but it came into widespread use only in the wake of Linnaeus’s Systema naturae. Johann Heinrich Alsted: Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta. Herborn 1630, pp. 794, 796. The first book to use the word in its title was Giovanni Antonio Scopoli: Entomologia carniolica exhibens insecta Carnioliae indigena et distributa in ordines, genera, species, varietates methodo Linnæana, Wien 1763. Hence I refer to “proto-entomology” to identify the pre-disciplinary period of the study of insects. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 297
The Folkbiological Perspective
The theoretical perspective I am adopting for my analysis of Renaissance names and descriptions of insects is that of folkbiology, a subdiscipline within cognitive anthropology.5 As I have argued in my book The Science of Describing, Renais- sance natural history is, in important respects, pre-scientific; its fundamental categories derive not from theoretical analysis but from common human cog- nitive patterns.6 Even if some Renaissance thinkers, such as Andrea Cesalpino, developed sophisticated theoretical analyses of biological concepts such as species, those analyses started from common-sense categories of thought. As Scott Atran has demonstrated, the transition to scientific taxonomy—that is, to a classification that was not based on common-sense categories—occurred in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.7 From a folkbiological perspective, living kinds are divided into three fun- damental taxonomic ranks: kingdom, life form, and folk genus. (The termi- nology varies somewhat; I am following Atran’s 1990 scheme as modified by Berlin 1992.)8 Each of these levels is in principle exhaustive: every living creature can be assigned to a taxon at each level, though sometimes this is through the use of residual categories, taxa that contain folk genera that do not fit into any other taxa at higher ranks. Many folk, especially experts, can identify two further, optional taxonomic ranks: (1) the folk species, a more precise differentiation of the folk genus, and (2) family fragments, which are often “covert,” i.e. recog-
5 Important works on folkbiology include Cecil H. Brown: Folk Zoological Life-forms: Their Universality and Growth. In: American Anthropologist 81 (1979), pp. 791–817; Cecil H. Brown: Folk Zoological Life-forms and Linguistic Marking. In: Journal of Ethnobiology 2 (1982) pp. 95–112; Cecil H. Brown: Language and Living Things: Uniformities in Folk Classification and Naming. New Brunswick, NJ 1984; Scott Atran: Origin of the Species and Genus Concepts: An Anthropological Perspective. In: Journal of the History of Biology 20 (1987), pp. 195–279; Scott Atran: Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science. Cambridge 1990; Brent Berlin: Ethnobiological Classification: Principles of Categorization of Plants and Animals in Traditional Societies. Princeton 1992; Scott Atran: Folk Biology and the Anthropology of Science: Cognitive Universals and Cultural particulars [with comments from 29 colleagues and author’s response]. In: Behavioral and Brain Sciences 21.4 (1998), pp. 547–609; Douglas L. Medin, Scott Atran: Introduction. In: Douglas L. Medin, Scott Atran (eds.): Folkbiology. Cambridge, MA London 1999, pp. 1–15; Earl R. Anderson: Folk-taxonomies in Early English. Madison and Teaneck, NJ 2003, chap. 11; and Scott Atran, Douglas L. Medin: The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature. Cambridge, MA 2008. 6 These patterns were noted long before folkbiological theory was elaborated: see Edward Lee Greene: Landmarks of Botanical History. Stanford 1983, a work originally written in the early 20th century and partially published in 1909. 7 Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, 1990. 8 Ibid., chap. 2; Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification, 1992, chap. 2–3. 298 Brian W. Ogilvie nized without necessarily having a name.9 However, neither of these ranks is necessary or exhaustive: that is, not every folk genus can be divided into folk species or placed in a family fragment. To illustrate folkbiological classification, take the example of the wolf. To contemporary Anglophones, it belongs to the folk kingdom of animals, and to the life form of mammals. Its folk genus is wolf. Folk experts can name different folk species of wolf, such as the gray wolf, tundra wolf, arctic wolf, etc. Finally, the wolf belongs to a family fragment which includes the domestic dog, the coyote, the fox, and other members of the scientific family of Canidae. Mutatis mutan- dis, the same applies to the contemporary Francophone or Germanophone classification of wolves. Though the terms used to analyze folkbiological classification are derived from scientific taxonomy, there is no necessary correspondence between taxo- nomic ranks in folk and scientific classifications. Wolf/loup is a folk genus but a Linnaean species (Canis lupus). Modern taxonomists consider the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) to be a subspecies of the gray wolf (Canis lupus), but wolf/loup and dog/Hund/chien are distinct folk species. Bat/Fledermaus/chauve- souris, on the other hand, is a folk genus but a Linnaean order. (Though the vernacular German and French names for bat involve the word mouse,no competent native speaker of those languages would consider a bat to be a kind of mouse.) If creatures are not very relevant to a culture, or if they are difficult to perceive due to their size or their habits, the folk taxa to which they belong will represent greater scientific diversity. The folk genus beetle, for instance, like bat, corresponds to a Linnaean order. The hierarchy of folktaxonomic ranks, from kingdom to folk species, appears to be a human cognitive universal; at the very least, it has been found in every human society that folkbiologists have examined.10 The actual taxa at each rank, on the other hand, result from the interaction between cognition, history, and culture. This is as true of nonbiological folktaxonomies as it is of biological ones. Old English, for instance, named only two seasons, summer and winter.11 Cognitive anthropologists have also discovered regular patterns for differ- entiating colors.12 However, cross-cultural studies have revealed that the broad division of living creatures into two kingdoms, plants and animals, is universal, though this is
9 Edward Lee Greene noted this characteristic of Hieronymus Bock’s classification of plants: Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History. Vol. 1. Stanford 1983, pp. 330–47. 10 Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification, 1992, chap. 11, pp. 9–26. 11 Anderson, Folk-taxonomies, 2003, pp. 219 ff. 12 Brent Berlin, Paul Kay: Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley 1969, summarized with additions and revisions in Anderson, Folk-taxonomies, 2003, pp. 82–88. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 299 often linguistically unmarked.13 Furthermore, though folk genera and species are determined by the actual flora and fauna with which folk come into contact, there is a distinct pattern in the order in which folk taxonomies introduce new life form taxa. Based on study of 144 folk taxonomies, Cecil Brown has proposed the following multiple stage model of the development of words designating animal life forms. In the first stage (designated 0), no life forms are lexicalized. Folk refer to folk genera and species, but do not locate them in any life form that has a name. In the first through third stages, life forms names are found for fish, bird, and snake, in any order: some languages have words for only one, others for two, and still others for all three of those life forms. However, all of those life forms appear before either “wug” (a portmanteau word for “worm and bug”) or “mammal,” which in turn appear in the fourth and fifth stages, in either order.14 The only exceptions are found in cultures that have limited or no exposure to certain life forms, such as highland peoples in New Guinea who have not lexicalized “fish” because they do not encounter fish in everyday life.15 We can leave arguments over the cognitive foundations of this recurring pattern to folkbiologists and other anthropologists; further research is required to distinguish cognitive universals from cultural patterns.16 For present pur- poses, what is important is that medieval western European classifications of animals fit the folk taxonomic pattern: division of the living world into plant and animal kingdoms, division of the animal kingdom into a small number of life forms, and enumeration of a large number of folk genera, sometimes divided into folk species. In the Latin encyclopedias of Isidore of Seville, Thomas of Cantimpr , Albertus Magnus, and others, as well as in the vernacular works of Konrad von Megenberg and the Gart der Gesundheit tradition, we find five or six animal life forms. These do not include “insect,” and as we shall see, the life form of “worm,” present in some of these sources, does not necessarily include in- sects. Rather, they are divided among many different life forms, indicating that medieval European folk (including learned encyclopedists) did not see “insects” as a self-evident category of living beings.
13 Berlin, Ethnobiological Classification, 1992, pp. 190. 14 Brown, Language and Living Things, 1984, pp. 24–25; Anderson, Folk-taxonomies, 2003, pp. 405–407. 15 Brown, Language and Living Things, 1984, pp. 31–32. 16 See David Herman, Susan Moss: Plant Names and Folk Taxonomies: Frameworks for Eth- nosemiotic Inquiry. In: Semiotica 167 (2007), pp. 1–11., and Matthias Urban: Terms for the Unique Beginner: Cross-linguistic and Cross-cultural Perspectives. In: Journal of Ethno- biology 30 (2010), pp. 203–230. 300 Brian W. Ogilvie
Folk Life-Form Taxa in Medieval Latin Encyclopedias
The life-form word “insect,” adopted from the Latin animal insectum, is lexi- calized in French and English in the sixteenth century: 1542 in French and only 1586 in English.17 In German, it first appears only in the seventeenth century.18 As we will see, this is clearly due to the influence of the ancient tradition of natural history. For the moment, though, I mention it in order to underscore the alterity of pre-modern folkbiological classifications of those creatures that we lump together as insects. If we are to understand how speakers of early modern ver- naculars thought about insects, we must first undo the very category of “insect” itself. Of course, the term insectum, used either as an adjective to qualify the noun animal, or by itself as a substantive, is classical. Pliny the Elder used it in Book 11 of his Natural History to translate Aristotle’s 5mtolom, meaning incised.19 Pliny’s encyclopedia was widely circulated throughout the European Middle Ages, though often in excerpted form, not as a complete work.20 It ensured that the word insectum remained part of the Latin heritage. But medieval Latin writers did not use it. In his Etymologiae, compiled in the early seventh century, Isidore of Seville ignored it, employing instead the categories of “minuta animantia” (small animals), “vermes” (worms), and “minuta volatilia” (small flying things) to describe the animals that Aristotle and Pliny had grouped together as in- sects.21 Moreover, Isidore included not only insects but also other creatures in those categories: mice, hedgehogs, moles, crickets, and ants were “small ani- mals,” and sparrows “small flying things.” The closest Isidore came to sepa- rating insects from other animals as a distinct category was in his distinction between serpentes and vermes: the former have a stiff spine, while the latter do
17 Dictionnaire alphab tique et analogique de la langue franÅaise [“Le petit Robert 1“]. Paris 1984, s. v. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the date of the first citation as 1589, but I have found a 1586 usage in a polemical work by William Charke. See Oxford English Dictionary Online,
22 Seville, Etymologiarum, 1911, 12.3, 12.7.68, 12.5.19. 23 For an overview of encyclopedic works and a discussion of their functions, see Christian Hünemörder: Antike und mittelalterliche Enzyklopädien und die Popularisierung natur- kundlichen Wissens. In: Sudhoffs Archiv 65 (1981), pp. 339–365. 24 Bodenheimer, Entomologie, 1928, pp. 119–121, pp. 123–24. 25 Franz Pfeiffer: Einleitung. In: Konrad von Megenberg: Das Buch der Natur von Konrad von Megenberg: Die erste Naturgeschichte in deutscher Sprache, ed. by Franz Pfeiffer. Hildes- heim 1962, pp. x–lii, at pp. xxxiv–xv. 26 Konrad von Megenberg: Buch der Natur: e.g. the scorpion is “ain slang” (282), while bees, spiders, toads, silkworms, glow-worms, caterpillars, ants, moths, etc. are “würm” (pp. 286 ff.). On the context and use of vernacular translations of Thomas’s work, see Traude- Marie Nischik: Das volkssprachliche Naturbuch im späten Mittelalter: Sachkunde und Dinginterpretation bei Jacob van Maerlant und Konrad von Megenberg. Tübingen 1986. Gerold Hayer has argued that the extant manuscripts of Konrad’s work suggest that it appealed largely to a lay audience with some knowledge of Latin and an interest in medicine: Gerold Hayer: Zu Kontextüberlieferung und Gebrauchsfunktion von Konrads von Megen- berg “Buch der Natur“, in Latein und Volkssprache im deutschen Mittelalter, 1100–1500. In: Nikolaus Henkel, Nigel F. Palmer (eds.): Regensburger Colloquium 1988. Tübingen: 1992, pp. 62–73, and, more generally, Gerold Hayer: Konrad von Megenberg “Das Buch der Natur“: Untersuchungen zu seiner Text- und Überlieferungsgeschichte. Tübingen 1998. 27 On Albertus Magnus’ biological works, see in addition to the works cited below, Miguel J. C. De Asffla: The Organization of Discourse on Animals in the Thirteenth Century: Peter of Spain, Albert the Great, and the Commentaries on ‘De animalibus’. Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1991, and the bibliography in Irven M. Resnick, Kenneth F. Kitchell: Albert the Great: A Selectively Annotated Bibliography, 1900–2000. Tempe Ariz. 2004. 28 Heinrich Balss: Albertus Magnus als Biologe: Werk und Ursprung. Stuttgart 1947; Christian 302 Brian W. Ogilvie taxa of gressibilia, volatilia, natatilia, and reptilia; “et in fine complebimus scientiam totam in consideratione vermium et anulosorum secundum omnes suas quae nobis notae sunt diversitates.”29 In other words, worms and insects were residual categories for creatures who could not be placed in one of the first four life forms. In using the substantive anulosum for these creatures, Albertus was following his source text: Michael Scot’s translation of Aristotle’s zoology books. However, he deviated from his source to a degree, for Scot had rendered 5mtolom as animal anulosi corporis, not as anulosum or insectum.30 (William of Moerbeke transliterated the word as entomon.)31 In book 4, tractate 1, Albertus discussed the diversity of insects, depending in the first instance on whether the rings that defined the group circled the creature’s entire body or were found only on the dorsal or ventral side.32 Albertus’s examples of anulosa, including ants, bees, wasps, cicadas, locusts, caterpillars, earthworms, centipedes, flies, beetles, and the like, leave no doubt that he is using it in the full Aristotelean sense that would later be revived by Renaissance naturalists.33 But Albertus used anulosa as a life form taxon only when following Aristotle’s text. He still thought in terms of the life forms that were familiar to Isidore, Hrabanus Maurus, and Hildegard. In one instance of his commentary, he slip- ped, referring to flying insects as “birds with rings”: “Aves autem anulosae quae volant in comitatu et habitant simul civiliter, quatuor habent ales et sunt levis corporis sicut apes et sibi similia…. Igitur quod ex istis animalibus est parvum, habet duas alas tantum sicut muscarum.”34 The clearest indication of Albertus’s way of thinking, however, is in the brief descriptions of individual animals (i.e., folk genera) that occupy books 22–26 of De animalibus. Book 22 describes man, followed by “quadrupeds” listed in alphabetical order. Book 23 is devoted to birds (aves), while book 24 contains aquatic animals. Serpents (including liz- ards) are the subject of book 25. The final book is devoted to “worms” (vermes), a category we have seen in Isidore. Aristotle did leave a deep impression: Al-
Hünemörder: Die Zoologie des Albertus Magnus. In: Gerbert Meyer, Albert Zimmermann (eds.): Albertus Magnus, Doctor Universalis, 1280/1980. Mainz 1980, pp. 235–48. For the Latin text, see Albertus Magnus: De animalibus libri xxvi nach der Cölner Urschrift. Münster 1916; an annotated English translation is available in Albertus Magnus: On animals: A medieval Summa zoologica, trans. and ed. by Kenneth F. Kitchell, Irven M. Resnick. 2 vols. Baltimore, London 1999. 29 Magnus, De animalibus, 1916, p. 4. 30 See Aristotle, De animalibus: Michael Scot’s Arabic-Latin translation, ed. by Aafke M. K. van Oppenraajj, vol. 3, Leiden, New York, Köln 1992, here books xv–xix: Generation of animals, sect. 715b2. 31 Aristotle: Guilelmi Moerbekensis translatio commentationis Aristotelicae, ed. by Leonhard Dittmeyer, Dillingen 1914, here chap. De generatione animalium, p. 8. 32 Magnus, De animalibus, 1916, p. 359. 33 Ibid., pp. 359–360, pp. 387–389. 34 Ibid., pp. 951–952. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 303 bertus defined the animals in this book negatively, by their lack of blood.35 And he placed the bee here, not among the birds.36 But the life form appears to be residual, including not only invertebrates but also frogs and toads.37
Folk Life Form Taxa in the Vernacular Hortus Sanitatis Tradition
As late as the end of the fifteenth century, “insect” was not used as a folk life form taxon. We can see this in the sections on animals and birds in the Hortus sani- tatis, a Latin herbal first published in 1491, and its vernacular translations into French, German, and English. The textual history of this work is complicated. The Latin Hortus was published 1491 by Jakob Meydenbach, inspired by success of the Gart der Gesundheit (1485) compiled by Johann Wonnecke von Kaub (Cuba).38 The preface to the Hortus was “largely stole[n] from the Gart der Gesundheit.“ But the text of the Hortus goes back to an anonymous MS herbal (the Ur-hortus) c. 1450, itself largely based on Matthaeus Sylvaticus’s Pandectae (1317) and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum naturale.39 The original German Gart der Gesundheit did not initially contain a description of animals, birds, and fishes, but the 1508–09 edition published by Johann Prüß of Strasbourg did contain those sections, translated from the Latin Hortus. A French translation had appeared c. 1500, and Dutch and English versions were published in 1520 and 1527 respectively, both by the Antwerp publisher Jan van Doesborch.40 From a folkbiological perspective, even a glance at the Hortus and its ver- nacular versions reveals that the life forms of northern Europeans in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are still those of Isidore and the thir- teenth-century encyclopedists. The principal life forms used to divide the animal
35 Ibid., p. 1578. 36 Ibid., p. 1580. 37 Ibid., pp. 1583, 1590., and see Kenneth F. Kitchell, Irven M. Resnick: Introduction. In Al- bertus Magnus, On Animals, vol. 1, p. xxxiii. 38 I consulted the incunable: Hortus sanitatis, Ortus sanitatis, Mainz 1491, Bodleian Library, Ms Douce 260, and Johannes von Cuba: Ortus Sanitatis De Herbis et Plantis. De Animalibus et Reptilibus. De Auibus et Volatilibus. De Piscibus et Natabilibus. De Lapidibus et in terre venis nascentibus. Urinis et earum speciebus. Straßburg 1517. 39 Luuk A. J. R. Houwen: The Noble Lyfe: An Early English Version of the Hortus Sanitatis. In: Alasdair A. MacDonald, Michael W. Twomey (eds.): Schooling and Society: The Ordering and Reordering of Knowledge in the Western Middle Ages. Leuven 2004, p. 63. 40 I consulted the following vernacular editions: Johannes von Cuba: Gart der gesuntheit, zu latin Ortus sanitatis. von allerley Thieren/Vögeln/Vischen oder Mörwundern/und Edlem gstein. Straßburg 1529; Johannes von Cuba: Le jardin de sante translate de latin en francoys. Paris 1539, and Lawrence Andrew: The noble lyfe and natures of man of bestes, serpentys, fowles and fisshes that be moste knowen. Antwerp 1527. 304 Brian W. Ogilvie kingdom are, in Latin, French, German, and English (I was not able to consult the Dutch translation):
“1. Animalia/reptilia. Bestes. Thiere. Bestes/serpentys. 2. Aves/volatilia. Oiseaux. Vögel. Fowles. 3. Pisces/natatilia. Poissons. Vische. Fisshes.”41
These three life forms are the basis of the zoological section’s division into three “tractates,” one for each. The Latin Hortus uses word pairs for these life forms, the second part of which refers to a mode of locomotion, and by implication, the environment in which they live. It is worth noting that the Latin animalia does not designate in this instance a folkbiological kingdom, as it did in medieval translations of Aristotle’s Peri ton zoon historia and in Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium (1551–58). Rather, it designates a life form equivalent to the French bÞte, English beast, and German Tier, and distinct from bird and fish. Tier has the same restricted sense. Turning to the text, however, the Hortus, in Latin and the vernaculars, we find the two further life forms used by Thomas of Cantimpr : 4. Serpens. Serpent. Schlang. Serpent.42 The English translation emphasizes this life form, placing it on the title page along with beasts, fowl, and fishes, but in the work’s division they are placed in the same tractate as the beasts. 5. Vermis. Ver. Wurm. Worm.43 In Old English this term extended to snakes (compare the German Wurm).44 The lexicalization of a new life form, serpent, in Middle English led to its use as a residual category for small legless (or seemingly legless) creatures. The English translation of the Hortus uses “worm” more consistently than the French or German translations, suggesting its greater sa- lience as a life form for late medieval English speakers (though further research would be necessary to establish this point). Folkbiological theory suggests that perceptually marginal creatures that do not possess their own life form taxon, especially those with little salience to everyday life, will be relegated to a residual life form taxon, and possibly to be assigned indifferently or hesitatingly to multiple life form taxa. This is, in fact, what happens to small invertebrates in the vernacular Hortus translations. Here are a few examples from the approximately fifty terrestrial invertebrates dis- cussed in the Hortus:
41 Cuba, Ortus sanitatis, 1529, sig. [I viii]r; Cuba, Jardin de sante, 1539, sig. [a i]r; Cuba, Gart der gesuntheit, 1529, t. p.; Andrew, The Noble lyfe, 1527, t.p.. 42 See Cuba, Ortus sanitatis, 1529, sig. K iiii v; Cuba, Jardin de sante, 1539, sig. b[i]r; Cuba, Gart der gesuntheit, 1529, sig. b[i]r; Andrew, The Noble lyfe, 1527, t.p.. 43 See Cuba, Ortus sanitatis,1529, sig. [Kv]v; Cuba, Jardin de sante, 1539, sig. b ii r; Cuba, Gart der gesuntheit, 1529, sig. b ii v; Andrew, The Noble lyfe, 1527, sig. C i v. 44 Anderson, Folk-taxonomies, 2003, p. 446. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 305
1. Insects are often placed in the life form of worms.45 “Bombex is a worme that spynnes silk.” “Bombex. Ein seiden wurm.” “Bombex est ung ver qui croist es branches des arbres.” “The Tode is a poyson worme.” The cicada is “a worme of the erth.” “Antees or pismers be very lytell wormes and they be very wyse.” “Cicendula is a flyenge worme.” “Papiliones be flyenge wormes.” 2. Insects are also referred to as beasts. “The haye sprynger is a beste wt .iiij. fete hauyn+ge a greate hede.” “Locusta ist ein vierfiessig thier/klein wie ein kefer.” “Locusta/ cest a dire en francois saulterelle est une beste qui a quatre piedz et est petite presque de la manie [sic] dung connin.” “Locusta est animal quadrupes parvum ad cuniculi fere modum.” (It is curious to note that the translators all kept the erroneous number of feet found in the Latin original.) “Scorpio is a beste semynge humble.” “Formi est une petite beste soliciteuse.” 3. Occasionally, the life forms are conflated: for example, “Cantarides be lytell bestes & wormes.” 4. Insects are rarely placed in the life form of birds. The bee is the best example of that. In the Latin, French, and German texts, which begin with a definition quoted from Aristotle, the bee is simply an animal. But in English, where the translator Lawrence Andrew has deviated from that text (not sure about Dutch), the bee is described as a “lytell byrde.” Most of the time, however, Andrew treats flying insects as “flying wormes.” In many cases the scholastic Latin animal is translated differently by ver- naculars: the ant, an “animal parvum” in the Latin Hortus, becomes a worm in English but a beste in French, while the German renders it as Thierlin. I would like to emphasize that while in modern French, bestiole is often used as a syn- onym of insect, in the Hortus tradition Thierlin, litell beste, petite beste has a broader denotation: it includes, for example, not only insects and arachnids but also small four-footed creatures such as the mongoose (enidros).46 The varying translations for Latin animal provides strong evidence that the translators of the vernacular Hortus were not mechanically rendering Latin into the target lan- guage; rather, they were interpreting the word in terms of the life forms that structured their engagement with the animal kingdom.
45 The quotations come from the editions cited above. Because the books are not paginated or foliated, and because they are arranged alphabetically within each tractate, I will not give individual references to the signatures; my references may be easily found by referring to the proper tractate (beast, bird, or fish) and the animal’s name. 46 Cuba, Ortus sanitatis, 1529; Cuba, Jardin de sante, 1539; Cuba, Gart der gesuntheit, 1529; Andrew, The Noble lyfe, 1527, s. v. enidros. 306 Brian W. Ogilvie
Further Evidence: Sixteenth-Century Latin-Vernacular Dictionaries
The vernacular Hortus sanitatis tradition suggests strongly that “insect” was not established as a life form taxon in early sixteenth-century European vernaculars. Moreover, the life form taxon worm was not an equivalent: many small in- vertebrates were placed in the life form taxon beast, and some were occasionally placed in the taxon bird. However, the translations’ dependence on a Latin original, itself derived from thirteenth-century sources, might lead one to wonder how well the translations reflect vernacular usage in the early sixteenth century. We have already seen that Albertus Magnus used one life form taxon, anulosa, when following Aristotle’s zoological work, while setting it aside in his alphabetical list of animals. Other vernacular sources allow us to confirm what the Hortus tradition suggests. Bilingual Latin-vernacular dictionaries are among the most useful such sources. A new interest in Pliny’s Naturalis historia had reintroduced in- sectum to learned discourse, leaving dictionary writers with the task of providing a vernacular equivalent. When they did, they resorted to definitions that gave a life form taxon followed by several examples. In 1538, Sir Thomas Elyot defined Insecta as “all flyes and wormes, that be diuided in their bodies, the heed and breaste from the bealy and tayle, as bees, waspes, emotes, or pismeres, and suche lyke.”47 Five years later, in 1543, Robert Estienne glossed “Animalia insecta” as “generalement toutes bestes qui ont plusieurs coupures, comme entre la teste & la poitrine, ou entre la poitrine & le ventre, tenant l’ung a l’autre tant seulement par petis tuyaulx, comme sont mousches, mousches a miel, mouschens guespes, grillons, cantharides, & toutes semblables.”48 Petrus Dasypodius, too, in the 1540s, defined the Latin insecta (under the headword Entoma) as “Mucken/ immen/ würm/ etc. und der gleichen thier/ den das haupt oder anders vom ubringen leib zerteilt ist.”49 A similar description is found in the 1541 dictionary by the Swiss writers Petrus Cholinus and Joannes Frisius, who defined “Ani- malia insecta. Allerley thier so by nach alls abgeschnitten/ oder durchschnitten zind zwäschend dem haupt unnd brust/ oder zwäschend der brust und bauch so nun an eim [sic] kleinen an einanderen hangend/ als fliegen/ bynle/ wäspe/
47 Thomas Elyot: The dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght. London 1538, s. v. 48 Robert Estienne: Dictionarium Latinogallicum, Thesauro nostro ita ex adverso respondens, ut extra pauca quaedam aut obsoleta, aut minus in usu necessaria vocabula, & quas consulto praetermisimus, authorum appellationes, in hoc eadem sint omnia, eodem ordine, sermone patrio explicata. Paris 1543, s. v. 49 Petrus Dasypodius: Dictionarium latinogermanicum et vice versa Germanicolatinum, ex optimis Latinae linguae scriptoribus concinnatum. Straßburg 1547, s. v. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 307 käfer/ gügen/ etc.” In case this wasn’t clear, they added a final word: “Un- gezyfer.”50 In all these definitions, we see the common pattern: a life form taxon (worm, beste, Tier) followed by the restriction that the creatures are divided (derived from the etymology of insectum) and then several examples: bees, wasps, ants, crickets, beetles, and so forth. Meanwhile, insect did not appear in German lexica. Josua Maaler’s 1561 German-Latin dictionary omits “insect,” jumping from Innßbrugk to Insel to Instruction. Under “Thierlin” we find the Latin definition “bestiola,” but the precision “catuli” for “yetlich jung Thierlin” in- dicates that it refers to any small creature. “Ungeziffer” is defined as Insecta, insectorum.51 Yet in contemporary usage, Ungeziffer meant any kind of vermin. Indeed, the trilingual dictionary of Richard Huloet, published in 1572, blurred the line between vermin and insects too, defining “Vermyn. Vermes, mium. m. ge. vel potius Insecta animalia. Vermine.”52
Vernacular Folk Genera
Evidently, there was no folk life form taxon insect in late medieval and early sixteenth-century French, German, or English. Of course, this does not mean that insects went unnoticed. Folkbiological theory suggests that in the absence of a clearly defined life form for insect, there should be a relative abundance of specific folk genera: the absence of a general category suggests intimate knowledge of specific instances.53 We can observe this phenomenon in late medieval vernaculars. Depending on the edition, German, English, and French translations of the Hortus name and describe a wide range of invertebrate ani- mals: approximately fifty, depending on the edition, ranging from the spider, caterpillar, ant, cricket, locust, grasshopper, and silkworm to pests like intestinal worms, fleas, lice, and moths; and (because the tradition draws from learned encyclopedias) some less well defined creatures like the spoliator colubri,a “worme” that attacks snakes.54 These latter aside, the folk genera in the Hortus tradition can be ordered into three large groups:
50 Petrus Cholinus, Joannes Frisius: Dictionarium latinogermanum. Zürich 1541, s. v. 51 Josua Maaler: Die Teütsch spraach: Dictionarium Germanicolatinum novum. Hildesheim, New York 1971. 52 Richard Huloet: Huloets dictionarie newelye corrected, amended, set in order and enlarged. Also the Frenche therevnto annexed. London 1572. 53 Brown, Folk Zoological Life-forms, 1979; Brown, Folk Zoological Life-forms and Linguistic Marking, 1982. 54 Andrew, The Noble lyfe, 1527, sig. i ii r. 308 Brian W. Ogilvie
1. Those that, for good or ill, affect human life: for example, bees, wasps, fleas, lice, clothes moths, locusts, and caterpillars. 2. Those that are frequently found around or near human habitations, such as spiders, ants, flies, gnats. 3. Those that are particularly salient due to size, coloration, or behavior: above all, butterflies, hawk moths, and large or brightly colored beetles, in- cluding the stag beetle. The Oxford English Dictionary includes more than fifty folk genera or species of insects attested before 1500, roughly the same number mentioned in the vernacular Hortus.55 Leaving aside those like “buprestis” and “gagrill” that come from the learned tradition, they again fall into the same three categories: wasps, silkworms, bees, caterpillars, midges, flesh-flies, and other harmful or beneficial insects; spiders (or “attercops”), ants, flies, gnats, and other domestic insects; and butterflies, beetles, glow-worms, and other striking or attention-getting insects. Other European vernaculars had similar numbers of folk genera by the six- teenth century. Helmut Carl’s list of names found in Old High German includes Ameise, Biene, Falter, Fliege, Floh, Grille, Heimchen, Hornisse, Hummel, Imme, Käfer, Laus, Made, Milbe, Motte, Mücke, Raupe, Schabe, Schnake, Skorpion, Spinne, and Wespe.56 He added a handful of further folk genera added to the German vocabulary in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: Kakerlak, Maikäfer, and Schmetterling. The list is far from complete; as Carl noted, no history had been written of German animal names (nor, to my knowledge, has one been written since).57 Once more, we see the same pattern: useful insects (the bee), insect pests (the hornet, the wasp, the louse), insects found in or around human dwellings (the ant, the spider, the cricket), and insects that are particularly salient or beautiful (the butterfly, the beetle) are those that have folk generic names in the medieval vernacular. Folk species, meanwhile, could have a dizzying variety of local names. The seven-spot ladybird (Coccinella septempunctata L.), known throughout medi-
55 Oxford English Dictionary Online,
The Latin Tradition and Insect as a Late Renaissance Life Form
In the early twentieth century, the American botanist Edward Lee Greene ob- served that the naming patterns used in Renaissance botanical treatises were paralleled by folk taxonomies.59 Rather than being precursors to the Linnaean binomial of genus and species, Renaissance botanist’s Latin names invoked a general type (i.e., a folk genus) with a qualifying description, sometimes one word but often a descriptive phrase, that specified the folk species. In a pene- trating study of “the cognitive foundations of natural history,” Scott Atran has shown that scientific classifications—classifications that required rejecting folkbiological perceptions of similarity—emerged in the late seventeenth cen- tury. Earlier taxonomies were still folk taxonomies. However, Renaissance classifications were a peculiar form of folk taxonomy.60 Most folk taxonomies are produced by cultures that are limited in time and space and that rely on oral transmission. The folk taxonomies of Renaissance natu- ralists were characterized, on the other hand, by two distinctive characteristics. First, they engaged with a long, polyglot tradition, going back to the “three languages” of Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and drawing on such diverse sources as Jewish scriptures, Greek natural philosophy, Roman encyclopedias, and a wide range of literary texts.61 Second, they confronted a large range of rare and per-
58 Ellen Mooijman: Het lieveheersbeestje in de Germaanse talen: Een bijdrage tot het onder- zoek naar benoemingsmotieven van Coccinella septempunctata. In: Taal en tongval 39 (1987), pp. 23–25. 59 Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History, 1983. 60 Atran, Cognitive Foundations of Natural History, 1990, pp. 135–138. 61 F. David Hoeniger: How plants and Animals Were Studied in the Mid-sixteenth Century. In: John W. Shirley, F. David Hoeniger id. (eds.): Science and the Arts in the Renaissance. Washington D.C, London, Toronto 1985. 310 Brian W. Ogilvie ceptually marginal invertebrates, driven by the culture of collecting and curi- osity that characterized the period from c. 1550 onwards. As with botany, this confrontation involved bringing local folk knowledge into contact with folk knowledge from other places—“universalizing” it, in a certain sense. The quest for novelty also encouraged naturalists to pay attention to fine distinctions between species, multiplying their number at a dizzying rate.62 Both of these characteristics played a role in reintroducing and establishing the category of “insect” as a basic life form. The sustained engagement with the ancient tradition in natural history that began in fifteenth-century Europe revived the Aristotelian-Plinian notion of the “insect” as a basic life form. Aristotle had defined 5mtola in terms of their incised bodies; Pliny referred to this group as “animals of immense subtle- ty…which are all justly referred to as insects from their incisions.”63 This Latin usage became increasingly familiar over the course of the sixteenth century. Elyot’s and Estienne’s dictionaries presumed that readers would want to know what “animalia insecta” were, even as each writer defined them in terms of the familiar life forms of worms and beasts, respectively. And vernacular writers were incorporating the Latin insectum in their texts. In his Greene Forest, or a naturall Historie of 1567, John Maplet referred to “those small and siely Wormes be, who haue imperfection in their Nature as Waspes, Bees, Emites and such like, which by Latin worde are called Insecta.”64 A decade later, the chronicler Raphael Holinshed offered a translation of the Latin, referring to “The cut wasted, for so I Englishe the worde Insecta are the Hornettes, Waspes, B es, and such lyke whereof w e haue great store,” but he distinguished them from flies and places them under the general category of “beasts or wormes.”65 Elyot, Maplet, and Holinshed, though, assimilated the Insecta to existing life forms: beasts or worms, as did a 1595 English edition of the Problems of Aris-
62 Andr Cailleux: Progression du nombre d’espces de plantes d crites de 1500 à nos jours. In: Revue d’Histoire des Sciences 6 (1953) pp. 42–49. 63 Pliny, Naturalis historia 11.1: “immensae subtilitatis animalia…iure omnia insecta appellata ab incisuris”; cf. Pliny the Elder: The historie of the world: Commonly called the natural historie of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. by Philemon Holland. London 1601, p. 310. 64 John Maplet: A greene forest, or A naturall historie vvherein may bee seene first the most sufferaigne vertues in all the whole kinde of stones & mettals: next of plants, as of herbes, trees, [and] shrubs, lastly of brute beastes, foules, fishes, creeping wormes [and] serpents, and that alphabetically: so that a table shall not neede. London 1569, f. 28v. 65 Raphael Holinshed: The first [and laste] volume of the chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande London 1577), f. 111r. In the 1587 edition Holinshed (or the continuator: Holinshed died in 1580) clarified that he was referring to the “cut or girt wasted”: Raphael Holinshed: The first and second volumes of Chronicles comprising, 1 The description and historie of England, 2 The description and historie of Ireland, 3 The description and historie of Scot- land. London 1587, pp. 227–228. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 311 totle, which refers to “those beasts which are called Insecta.”66 “Insect” became an English word first in the 1580s. The earliest citation in the Oxford English Dictionary dates from 1589, in George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie: “So also is the Ante or pismire, and they be but little creeping things, not perfect beasts, but insects, or wormes.”67 I have turned up an earlier use of the word, in an anti-Catholic polemic by William Charke published in 1586, in which the word locust is explained as being either a plant or “the insect or flying ver- mine.”68 In both cases the authors are at pains to gloss the term by placing in apposition a more familiar one: “worm” or “vermin.” By the time Philemon Holland rendered Pliny in English in 1601, he felt he could use the word “insects” without any gloss.69 Yet the word took a while to establish as a life-form. Sir William Cornwallis, in an essay published in the same year as Holland’s Pliny translation, stuck with the Latin, referring to the ant as “a seely creature, made by Nature without candle-light, imperfect, among those whom the Philosophers call Insecta Animalia.”70 This double character of the word “insect,” referring both to a new folktaxonomic life form and to a scientific taxon, would remain with it to the present. “Insect” was slowly becoming a life form taxon in other European languages as well, though it continued to compete with other life forms. Aldrovandi noted that the Italians said “insetti,” preserving the Latin, but the word had not yet established itself elsewhere: the Germans, for instance, said “Ungeziffer,” and the Spanish “cennidos,” while there were no fewer than four words used in Bohemia (though Aldrovandi confessed that he was using a dictionary).71 The slow spread of “insect” can be seen in book title pages and even in their ty- pography. Moffett’s Theatrum, finally published in 1634, glossed “insecta” as “minima animalia.”72 Even later in the 17th century Jan Swammerdam’s Historia generalis insectorum used the Dutch “bloedelose Dierkens” to translate “in- sectum.”73 By the 18th century the term was firmly established: for example, in R aumur’s M moires pour servir l’histoire des insectes.74 And though some
66 The problemes of Aristotle with other philosophers and phisitions: Wherein are contayned diuers questions, with their answers, touching the estate of mans bodie. Edinburgh 1595, sig. I3r. 67 Art. Insect. In: Oxford English Dictionary Online,
German publications continued to set “Insect” in Roman type, underscoring its foreign origins, by the 1740s it appeared in black letter in the title and text of August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof’s Monatlich herausgegebene Insecten-Be- lustigung.75 Insects had arrived for good.
Curiosity and New Folk Genera in the Written Tradition
If a closer engagement with the ancient Greek and Latin tradition was respon- sible for introducing Insect as a life form to late Renaissance Europe, that en- gagement took its motivation from the culture of collecting and curiosity that emerged in the second half of the sixteenth century.76 Insects were of increasing interest to artists, naturalists, and collectors.77 Though the first major pub- lications devoted entirely to insects, Aldrovandi’s De animalibus insectis libri septem (1602) and Thomas Moffett’s Theatrum insectorum sive minimorum animalium (1634), appeared in the seventeenth century, they were the result of investigations conducted in the second half of the previous century: Aldrovandi was in his eightieth year when his book was published, while Moffett assembled and edited notes that had been written by Edward Wotton, Conrad Gessner, and Thomas Penny.78 These sixteenth-century naturalists would be succeeded by many others in
75 August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof: Der monatlich herausgegebenen Insecten-Belustigung erster[-vierter] Theil. Nürnberg 1746; cf. Johann Leonhard Frisch: Beschreibung von allerley Insecten in Teutschland, nebst nützlichen Anmerckungen und nöthigen Abbildungen von diesem kriechenden und fliegenden inländischen Gewürme, zur Bestätigung und Fort- setzung der gründlichen Entdeckung, so einige von der Natur dieser Creaturen heraus gegeben, und zur Ergänzung und Verbesserung der andern. Berlin 1720, which sets “in- secten” in Roman type, whereas the 1766 reprint of the first part uses black letter. 76 Among the burgeoning literature on curiosity, curiosities, and collecting, I have found the following works most useful: Krzysztof Pomian: Collectionneurs, Amateurs et Curieux: Paris, Venise, XVIe–XVIIIe sicle. Paris 1987; Antoine Schnapper: Le g ant, la licorne et la tulipe: Collections et collectionneurs dans la France du XVIIe sicle. Paris 1988; Joy Kenseth (ed.): The Age of the Marvelous. Hanover 1991; Giuseppe Olmi: L’inventario del mondo: Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna. Bologna 1992; Paula Findlen: Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley, Los Angeles 1994; Lorraine Daston: Curiosity in Early Modern Science. In: Word & Image 11 (1995), pp. 391–404; Barbara M. Benedict: Curiosity : A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry. Chicago, London 2001; R. J. W. Evans, Alexander Marr (eds.): Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Burlington, VT 2005. 77 Thea Vignau-Wilberg: In minimis maxima conspicua. Insektendarstellungen um 1600 und die Anfänge der Entomologie. In: Karl A. E. Enenkel, Paul J. Smith (eds.): Early Modern Zoology: The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts. Vol. 1. Leiden, Boston 2007, pp. 217–243. 78 On Moffett’s book, see Charles E. Raven: English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray: A Study of the Making of the Modern World. Cambridge 1947. Beasts, Birds, and Insects 313 the seventeenth century, especially after 1650.79 But naturalists were not alone; they participated in a broader movement of curiosity about insects, expressed in both the visual arts and in collections of curiosities. In a quantitative study of insects in western art, the entomologist Marcel Dicke noted a peak of interest in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the Netherlands, when still life paintings might contain dozens, or even over 100, different insects.80 Southern European floral still lives of the period, and later still lives, have far fewer insects than these northern productions; the interest in insects was not equally shared across Europe. Nonetheless, the evidence is clear that many artists—not only those like Joris Hoefnagel, Jan Goedaert, and Maria Sibylla Merian, who spe- cialized in the study of insects—took a close interest in them. As naturalists exchanged information and specimens with collectors, and as they studied the works of artists or commissioned them to make illustrations, they brought vernacular knowledge into their natural histories. The dragonfly (French libelle, German Libelle, Italian perla) is an example. Though it is a well- known folk genus, it is not found in ancient natural history groups, as Ulisse Aldrovandi observed with puzzlement: “Perlarum multa sunt genera, ut mirum plane sit veteres non meminisse tam frequentium, & vulgo notissimorum ani- mantium.”81 Dragonflies were clearly known in the ancient world; some Minoan ring engravings and at least one painting show stylized dragonflies.82 Yet they did not make their way into ancient natural history books. Nor are they found in medieval natural histories. Therefore, Aldrovandi Latinized a common Italian name to give the folk genus a place in his history. Moffett included the creature among the flies, but in notes that might come from Wottonor, more likely, Penny, he gave names that clearly indicate that the creature was a folk genus in six- teenth-century England: “In English they are called Adders’ Boults, Dragon-flies, and Water butterflies; because they are seldome seen on land, but alwaies about waters, as rivers, or fens.”83 Aldrovandi, in a passage reprised by Moffett, gives the northern Italian name of cevettoni and the Dutch name rombouct, also clues that dragonflies constituted a folk genus. The dragonfly is an exception. Aldrovandi and Moffett were able to find classical antecedents for most of their insects. But their reporting of vernacular names indicates that sixteenth-century European folk were well aware of these creatures. The woodlouse (a terrestrial crustacean of the suborder Oniscidea,
79 See the texts in Bodenheimer, Entomologie, 1928. 80 Dicke, Insects in Western Art, 2000 pp. 231–232. 81 Aldrovandi, De animalibus insectis, 1602, p. 302. 82 Nanno Marinatos: The Character of Minoan Epiphanies. In: Illinois Classical Studies 29 (2004), pp. 36–38. 83 Edward Topsell: The history of four-footed beasts and serpents.; whereunto is now added, The theater of insects, or, Lesser living creatures.by T. Muffet. London 1658, p. 939. 314 Brian W. Ogilvie considered an insect by early modern naturalists) was called sow and Tylers lowse (tailor’s louse) by the English; Esel, Eselgen, and Holzwentle by the Ger- mans, and cloporte by the French, Moffett reports, giving additional names in Greek, Italian, Spanish, Arabic, and Flemish.84 Other insects show the same pattern: the learned tradition of the Renaissance was absorbing folk knowledge of insects and transforming it into learned Latin encyclopedias. While it is beyond my scope to give a thorough analysis of folk species in early modern languages, the evidence suggests that late medieval and Renaissance Europeans were generally content to refer to insects with the name of their folk genus: dragonfly, butterfly, beetle, and the like; only in particular instances, such as the ladybird or cockchafer, did they descend to the taxonomic level of folk species. Aldrovandi, for instance, enumerated 117 different butterflies and moths, some of them males and females of the same dimorphic species, but most of them separate species.85 But he did not name them. It is likely that they did not yet have vernacular names. The English common name “Admiral,” for a par- ticularly striking butterfly, is attested first in 1699.86 In his Monatlich her- ausgebebene Insecten-Belustigung, published from 1740 to the late 1750s, August Johann Rösel von Rosenhof gave vernacular names to butterflies and other insects that were simply descriptions, beginning his work with “the big, social thorn caterpillar with gold-red spots.”87 Though the research remains to be done, I suspect that most vernacular names for folk insect species were devel- oped by collectors, beginning in the seventeenth century, in parallel with the development of scientific taxonomy.
Conclusion
The history of insects, and of the very idea of “insects,” in the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, reveals that vernacular and classical knowledge cannot be easily disentangled in certain domains. Medieval encyclopedists, from Isidore to Albertus Magnus, and the vernacular writers who imitated or adapted their works, from Konrad von Megenberg to the translators of the vernacular Hortus sanitatis, incorporated classical accounts of invertebrate animals into the folk- taxonomy of their culture, a folktaxonomy that had no place for the recondite scientific taxon of “insect.” Even Albertus Magnus, whose taxon of anulosa drew on Aristotle’s 5mtola, abandoned it in his alphabetical list of animals. Medieval
84 Moffett, Insectorum theatrum, 1634, p. 202. 85 Aldrovandi, De animalibus insectis, 1602, pp. 236–53. 86 Art. Admiral. In: Oxford English Dictionary Online,
Europeans, be they scholars or plowmen, did not single out “insects” as a natural division of the animal world. Their late Renaissance successors did. A revival of interest in Pliny’s Naturalis historia and in new translations of Aristotle’s books on animals reintroduced 5mtola/insecta to scholars and humanistically educated laymen. At first treated as a foreign scientific term that needed to be glossed in terms of more familiar life forms, by the seventeenth century “insect” had been naturalized in many European vernaculars as a life form taxon. The culture of collecting and curiosity that characterized elite Europeans from the middle of the sixteenth century contributed vitally to “insect” becoming a folktaxonomic category, not simply a scientific taxon. Europeans’ interest in perceptually marginal arthropods in the late Renais- sance and afterwards thus had striking effects on vernacular and scientific language. Classical Latin provided a new life form term, “insect,” which was established in European vernaculars, competing with and largely displacing earlier life forms of “beast,” “worm,” and sometimes “bird” in the case of ter- restrial arthropods. At the same time, new folk genera, like the dragonfly, entered learned discourse. And, I have suggested, new folk species were identified by experts who were, at the same time, laying the foundation for a scientific taxonomy of the insect world. However, their terminology was not yet scientific in a strict sense. Rather, it retained the basic emphasis of folktaxonomies on the overall gestalt of organ- isms. Aldrovandi had mentioned Aristotle’s major divisions of bloodless ani- mals, but a careful examination of the distinctions between them and the extent of their diversity would await Lamarck and Cuvier in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.88 For Jan Swammerdam in the seventeenth century, and August Jo- hann Rösel von Rosenhof in the eighteenth, the life form “insect” included not only other arthropods, such as the spider and the crayfish, but also snails, slugs, and hydras. Even within the more limited taxon of arthropods, many modern orders date from Linnaeus and his student Fabricius in the second half of the eighteenth century (Odonata, for example). Scott Atran dates the origins of modern scientific taxonomy to the turn from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century, but he focused on botany; in entomology, the shift occurred sub- stantially later.89 If folkbiology helps us understand significant features of medieval and early modern classifications of insects, the medieval and early modern history of
88 On Linnaeus’s classification of insects, see Mary P. Winsor: The Development of Linnaean Insect Classification. In: Taxon 25 (1976), pp. 57–67; on Lamarck and Cuvier, see Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr: The Spirit of System: Lamarck and Evolutionary Biology. Cambridge, MA 1977, pp. 115–123. 89 Cf. Atran, Origin of the Species and Genus Concepts, 1987. 316 Brian W. Ogilvie
“insect” also calls into question some anthropological truisms about how folktaxonomies develop. Folkbiological research has suggested that life-form taxa multiply as societies become more complex. Cecil Brown has concluded that a positive correlation “holds between the number of named zoological life-forms in languages and the societal complexity of peoples who speak them.” This is “a consequence of the decay of folk biological taxonomies ‘from the bottom up’ (from more specific classes to less specific classes) among peoples whose rela- tionship with the world of plants and animals becomes attenuated as societies become more complex.”90 In other words, the fewer folk genera with which a typical person is familiar, the more often he or she will use a life form taxon to refer indiscriminately to a living creature. This conclusion seems obviously true in the case of twentieth-century urbanized cultures, where the average person may have little contact with ani- mals or plants on a regular basis, outside of domestic pets and a narrow range of plants and wild animals. Douglas Medin and Scott Atran have suggested that North American college students, who tend to have little knowledge of nature, are poor research subjects for uncovering folktaxonomic patterns.91 However, it is far from evident that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century western Europeans were as unfamiliar with the natural world as twentieth-century urbanites. Sev- enteenth- and eighteenth-century Londoners, for example, had regular contact with the countryside and its flora and fauna.92 If we accept my argument that “insect” is not a scientific term for late Renaissance naturalists but, rather, a new folk taxon, we must seek an explanation for its occurrence not in decreased familiarity with the world of animals but, rather, increased familiarity with perceptually marginal creatures that, from ancient times to the middle of the sixteenth century, were largely ignored except when they were useful, harmful, annoying, or beautiful. In the case of insects, folktaxonomy and scientific in- quiry proceeded hand in hand, each enriching the other as they produced a new way of dividing the natural world that, to their twenty-first-century heirs, seems entirely natural. The ambiguous meaning of “insect” – to scientists, a hexapod with head, thorax, and abdomen; to laypeople, any small creature with more than four legs – is itself a consequence of that process.
90 Brown, Folk Zoological Life-forms, 1979, p. 792. 91 Atran, Medin, Native Mind, 2008, pp. 36–39, 52, 89. 92 Owen Davies: Urbanization and the Decline of Witchcraft. In: Journal of Social History 30 (1997), pp. 599 f, 606.