Connecting Science and Knowledge

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, mdecins et curieux aux origines de l’entomologie moderne (1450– 1650). In: Bulletin d’Histoire et d’pistmologie 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 kingdom—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 established, 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 cognitive 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 fundamental 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

Load more