Wesleyan University The Honors College

Archives of Nature: Revisiting Aldrovandi’s Studio

by

Isabel Sara Steckel Class of 2019

A thesis submitted to the faculty of Wesleyan University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors from the College of Letters and with Departmental Honors in Italian Studies

Middletown, Connecticut April, 2019

1 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ______3

LIST OF FIGURES ______5

INTRODUCTION ______6

A Methodological Note______13

CHAPTER ONE: A Language of Nature: The Linguistic Traces of Sixteenth-Century Historia Naturalis______17

I. Epistemological Decorum: Performing Natural History ______22

II. The Bolognese Aristotle in Translation______25

III. The Emergence of a Disciplinary Community______29

CHAPTER TWO: Monstrous Flowers Hiding Under the Bed: Tracing European Colonialism in Aldrovandi’s Cabinet of Curiosities______37

I. The Pliny of His Time ______39

II. Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Colonialism ______45

III. Curiosity in The Monstrorum Historia: Margins, Context, and Power______50

CHAPTER THREE: Structures of Knowledge: The (De)Spatialization of l’Archivio Aldrovandi ______58

I. The Politics of Space: From Studio to Galleria______60

II. Ordering Codes and Exclusions: The Eighteenth-Century Episteme ______66

III. Digital Architecture: The Space of No Space ______72

IV. A Technoscientific Collection: Constructing the Modest Witness______78

V. Hopeful Disunity: Realigning the Technical and the Political______85

CONCLUSION______88

BIBLIOGRAPHY ______90

2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to extend my first thanks to my advisor, Professor Joseph Fitzpatrick, who was an indispensable mentor through every step of this project. I always left our meetings with far more questions than answers, which in this context, was an amazing and empowering thing.

To my loving family, Mom, Dad, and Halle – thank you for making Berkeley a home that I always want to return to.

To all of my wonderful and supportive friends who have never hesitated to offer a hug or an escape from writing. And to my housemates of 77 Home, thank you for creating a space of laughter even amidst the stress.

I am grateful for the College of Letters faculty and students for providing an environment where creative, unconstrained thinking is rigorously encouraged and facilitated. And, for the department of Italian Studies, thank you for fostering my passion for Italian.

This project would not have taken shape as smoothly as it did if not for the resources provided by the College of Letters’ Lankford Memorial Fund and the Center for the Humanities whose support allowed me to travel to Bologna over my winter break to explore Aldrovandi’s archives first-hand. Also, to the accommodating Italian librarians at the Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna and the Archiginnasio, thank you for your endless patience and invaluable knowledge of the archive.

And lastly, thank you to the countless scholars and professors whose interests and articulations have guided me to my own.

3

To my grandfather, Marty Steckel, For teaching me the value of intellectual curiosity.

4 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Frontispiece of the Ornithologiae______18

Figure 2: Giardino dei Semplici______49

Figure 3: Antonietta Gonzales from the Monstrorum historia______56

Figure 4: Plan for Aldrovandi’s studio______63

Figure 5: Plan for the Palazzo Poggi ______71

Figure 6: BRAHMS Venn diagram ______74

Figure 7: L’archivio Aldrovandi on BRAHMS online______77

5 INTRODUCTION

The International Center for Photography's 2008 exhibition Archive Fever:

Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art offers a way of thinking about the idea of

“the archive.” In the words of the prolific curator, Okwui Enwezor, the ICP exhibit was organized to spotlight the “the archival impulse as a way of shaping and constructing the meaning of images.”1 Many works in the exhibition call attention to the techniques of arrangement and selection, of inclusion and exclusion, that govern archival aesthetics and practices. As an archive of archival representations, the exhibit functions as a self-referential exploration into “the ways in which artists have appropriated, interpreted, reconfigured, and interrogated archival structures and materials.”2 The gallery walls have been covered with sheets of plain industrial plywood. The exhibition space looks like the interior of a storage shed or a shipping container packed with displays that take many forms: physical archives arranged by unusual cataloguing methods, imagined biographies of fictitious persons, collections of found and anonymous photographs, and film versions of historic photographic albums. A group of pictures called “The Fae Richards Photo Archive” (1993-1996), produced by Zoe Leonard in collaboration with the filmmaker Cheryl Dunye, professes to document the life of an African-American actress from her childhood during the civil rights era. The substance of the narrative seems to ring true; but Fae

Richards herself never existed. Her life was staged for the contemporary camera.

Genuineness and forgery are deliberately confused, thereby putting pressure on the

1 Okwui Enwezor, media release of Archive Fever, Steidl Publication, 2008, https://www.icp.org/files/exhibition/credits/sites/default/files/exhibition_pdfs/Archive_PRESS.PDF. 2 Ibid.

6 historical authenticity that is typically expected from archival collections. In another piece, Christian Boltanski's Reserve-Detective III (1987) stages an installation of cardboard boxes of various sizes with black-and-white photographic portraits clipped to them, labeled with handwritten dates and stacked on shelves. The piece approximates the archetypal physical arrangement of an archive – that old, dusty collection space where one expects to uncover the legendary, primordial secrets of historical documents. And yet, the installation’s caption discloses the installation’s many forgeries: the boxes are empty, the photographs, though found archival documents, have no material association with this particular archive, the labels are pure semantics with no corresponding substance within the box. The standard idea of the archive holds only as long as you don’t expect to find anything in the box. By simply choosing, repositioning, and titling the materials, Boltanksi foregrounds the archivist’s active role – through appraisal, accessioning, selection, and description – in constructing the archive. These works consider the archive a living thing that is formed by its localized context, by the impressions associated with it.

While Archive Fever is concerned with the uses of archival documents in contemporary art collections, the project employs and displays the organizing logics of archival practice more generally. In other words, artistic manipulations of the archive suggest not only a serious interest in the archival form as attributed to photographic and filmic media, but also a larger meditation on the changing and unstable nature of archives more broadly. In The Order of Things, Foucault argues that an archive is not a physical storehouse or collection of documents and objects; rather, it makes up “the law of what can be said, the system that governs the

7 appearance of statements as unique events.”3 An archive, in this sense, is intangible and invisible, a taxonomic abstraction that both bounds and orders the collected products of culture. Archives are thus continually reordered and restructured according to whichever systems of knowledge hold power in a given moment.

This thesis attends to the life and afterlives of the archive of polymath Ulisse

Aldrovandi (1522-1605) – an early modern Italian naturalist, the first professor of natural history appointed in Italy, and “the Father of natural history studies.”4 His fame and authority were linked to his museum of natural curiosities, which was open to the learned and curious men of Europe. Aldrovandi’s accumulation of natural artifacts produced an archival history of a sixteenth-century naturalist’s world view.

Towards the end of his life, Aldrovandi dedicated much of his time to cataloguing the contents of his encyclopedic collection. By 1595, he could write: “Today in my microcosm, you can see more than 18,000 different things, among which 7,000 in fifteen volumes, dried and pasted, 3,000 of which I had painted as if alive.”5 From his fragments, Aldrovandi managed to shed light on nature’s mysteries by bringing together what he understood to be all of nature, proudly proclaiming his collection an

“eighth wonder of the world.”6 The purpose of the studio was to display all of nature in one space, to collect the wonders of the world as a means to possess and know them. While Aldrovandi was not unique in his encyclopedic aims, this discursive

3 Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Pantheon Books, 1971, p. 129. 4 Aldrovandi is known by this title in many writings from Linnaeus and Buffon, two prominent naturalists and historians of science, see Linnaeus, Systema Naturae, 1735. 5 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750, 1998, p. 154 6 BAV, Vat. lat. 6192, II, f. 657r.

8 formation of authorized knowledge and the accrued changes to the mode of its production have been the source for many aesthetic and conceptual challenges today.

My first introduction to Ulisse Aldrovandi was about two years ago. While studying abroad in Bologna during my sophomore Spring, I stumbled upon the

Museo di Palazzo Poggi on via Zamboni in the university district. Just a few doors down from Piazza Verdi, where undergraduates still spend the majority of their free- time between lectures, lies a dark, dusty entrance to the museum, hidden and unimposing as if just another administrative building or lecture hall. But, upon stepping in, I found a spectacular microcosm of early modern science set against the backdrop of sweeping Renaissance frescoes in quadri riportati as well as a hint into the many layers of knowledge, myth, and politics that surround Aldrovandi’s exhibition and archive.

Housed in this museum is Aldrovandi’s curious natural history collection: the main Sala di Ulisse is crowded with huge glass cabinets of the most wonderful and strange naturalia from rare stones to taxidermic birds and mammals labeled in both

Italian and English to accommodate tourists; a display of reproductions in painted terracotta of the fetus at the time of childbirth; rich stacks of vellum manuscripts and printed editions of natural histories ranging from his inventory of botanical Simples to his history of “monsters.” An entire room with bespoke lighting showcases

Aldrovandi’s archives of fish fossils, each identified by their Linnaean taxonomy; another hall amazes visitors with framed specimens of crocodiles, butterflies, and snakes along with the corresponding woodblock tablets that reveal Aldrovandi’s study and circulation of this knowledge of nature.

9 I hope to paint the philosophical, historical, scientific, and sociological portrait of Aldrovandi’s knowledge production some five-hundred years after his birth. The archive requires us to inhabit historical time – the sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present, and the future are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather are simultaneous and mutually-constitutive. By starting my analysis with a focus on the sixteenth century, I demonstrate the complexities, logics, and politics of knowledge production at a moment that is thought of simply as a paradigm shift towards modern science. I turn to the past as a way to get a clearer view of the social and political forces that gather around the promise of an objective knowledge of nature – forces that are effectively obscured in contemporary discourses, representations, and practices of science. I apply theoretical frameworks proposed by Donna Haraway in feminist science studies and Michel Foucault in the history of representation and, at the same time, remain deeply committed to my own questions of reading, interpretation, and representation. I present a situated articulation of ideas in order to expose the incongruous, discontinuous, or contingent histories that are often left out of hegemonic narrative structures. Theory provides the building blocks to think more critically about localized histories. To facilitate the presentation of what is at stake with archives of nature, I have divided my thesis in to three parts.

The first chapter considers the linguistic, philosophical, and social matrices that gave the discipline of natural history its precise intellectual and spatial configuration, at least in the form that it took in its Italian emergence.7 I am interested

7 In my primary source research, I marked the emerging disciplinary status of natural history by the use of terms such as facoltà (faculty) to describe its purpose in the university curriculum and professione

10 in how and why the study of nature was revived and revised in the intellectual networks of early modern Italy. Paula Findlen, a leading feminist science studies scholar who focuses on cultures of collecting, has put forward a useful framework for this analysis. Italian naturalists, Findlen writes in her Possessing Nature, relied on the

“reinvention of the old rather than the formation of the new.”8 Classical authority, especially Aristotelian natural philosophy and Plinian natural history, served as the benchmark to which early modern naturalists measured their observations and achievements. The early modern approach to studying nature therefore stands at a crossroads of two epistemic networks: one foot in the future of public, objective, and experimental attitudes, but the other in the past domain of Aristotelian dicta and the model of the solitary man who inventories nature’s wonders in his private laboratory.

The new practice and ancient authority were not necessarily at odds; often times, the modes of representing nature’s particulars displayed a mix of the two orders so as to effectively accommodate the unstable and growing field of scientific knowledge.9

In the second chapter, I complicate my own genealogical account of natural history to inspect the role of colonialism in the construction of Aldrovandi’s archive.

By adding localized description and texture to the history of the cabinets of curiosity,

I hope to avoid romanticizing Aldrovandi’s project. The way that sixteenth-century production of knowledge privileged capacious description and seemingly-endless

(profession) to identify the community of participants, of which Aldrovandi would be assigned a leading role at his eulogy. 8 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. University of California Press, 1994, p. 5. 9 Giuseppe Olmi reinforces this point in his “Osservazione della natura e raffigurazione in Ulisse Aldrovandi,” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, vol. 3, 1977. He explains that ancient texts exerted a powerful authority on naturalists, but also precise observation of natural phenomena was fast becoming the basis for the accumulation of new, scientific knowledge about the world.

11 acquisition of New World things reveals a colonial gesture that, in its desire to legitimate only some forms of knowledge, is always invested in power relations. The audacious separation of humanity from nature performed a special kind of work for the early modern world. I interrogate the category of wonder through an analysis of early modern botany and representations of “monsters” to argue that Aldrovandi’s cabinet of curiosities must be contextualized as a strategy rooted in the ideologies of

European colonial expansion.

In the third chapter, I jump to present digital configuration of Aldrovandi’s plant collection as a way to look at the changes to his archive over the past four centuries. As of 2018, over five thousand specimens from Aldrovandi’s plant tables have been photographed and encoded for a digital database with the intention of making his plant collection more accessible to contemporary historians and botanists.

Unlike the material space of the early modern museum, this despatialized digital platform enacts new productions of knowledge. I highlight how these transformations have set up a narrative about objective, true knowledge that continues to get in the way of a more adequate, self-critical, suspicious technoscience committed to situated knowledges.10 My theorization of the digital archive through situated knowledges is an attempt to address the mixed literacies and narratives that haunt contemporary digital humanities. My project strikes neither an optimistic nor pessimistic note.

Rather, it is rooted in the belief that there are infinite amounts of hope that we have

10 I am applying Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges from “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599.

12 yet to apprehend if we recognize the ways in which power and knowledge have always been intermingled both productively and violently in the study of nature.

A Methodological Note: A History of the Present

I return over and over again to the work Michel Foucault, considering his genealogical approach as central to my own methodology. Foucault’s “Nietzsche,

Genealogy, and History” formulates his genealogical project by contrasting it with the linearity of traditional historical narratives.11 In other words, Foucault argues that traditional historians try to remove their work from its grounding in a particular time and place in order to posit a pure chronology of events with the purpose of teaching a certain, universal knowledge in the present. Against this traditional historical method,

Foucault presents his genealogy, which consciously recognizes its partiality as an interpretation that is always committed on some level to knowledge. As such, it serves as a more honest and effective approach to documenting historical events.

Moreover, the genealogical project makes visible how “the assimilation of the particular into the universal leaves its trace, an unassimilable remainder, which renders universality ghostly to itself.”12 Genealogy thus operates as the first step in a robust form of critique. On the one hand, the genealogist continually questions those things that appear as universal or timeless truths to unmask the particularities secretly in them. On the other hand, the methods of genealogy prove that exposing the particularity of a perspective is not to deny the possibility of its validity but, rather, to

11 Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion The New Press: New York. 12 Judith, Butler, et al. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso, 2000.

13 open a space for reviewing what has been overlooked, forgotten, or left out. Thus, the genealogist must repeatedly question the consequences of their own narratives and accept that the genealogical stance is just one of multiple interpretations with its own historical context, not an objective will to truth. By clarifying and intensifying these hybrid networks, genealogy also enables us to adopt a more reflective and scrutinizing relationship with the problems in which we already find ourselves entangled. As Foucault puts it, genealogy provides us with a “history of the present.”13

While scholars have accepted Foucault’s injunction to treat universality as a contested site, they have not consistently considered the meaning and promise of that contestation. Throughout this thesis I have therefore taken seriously the things that seemed strange to me and resisted the all-too-tempting urge to assimilate the archival evidence into established categories or assumptions of early modern natural history.

We must be careful, I think, not to mold historical inquiry into a search for the answers that fit the present-day need for origin stories or to look for things that match present arrangements of scientific knowledge production. We must enliven our practical, critical imagination about these ideas and thereby frustrate the acceptance of ingrained cultural discourses as exempt from questioning.

In each chapter, I have worked with feminist science studies to foreground situated knowledges. My main interlocuters are Donna Haraway, Paula Findlen, Ann

Blair, Lorraine Daston, and Katharine Park. In faithful conversation with their articulations and methodologies, it is crucial to account for my research methods with

13 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1979, p. 31.

14 the objects of Aldrovandi’s archive and my creation of this very narrative.14 My interpretation and representation of the Museo di Palazzo Poggi and l’archivio

Aldrovandi intersects with many important and familiar narratives in the history of early modern science: the rise of universities, the age of European exploration, the course of the scientific revolution. I am inside this historiographic world and not in any way a neutral observer. Knowledge emerges from the world it represents and is enmeshed in it, being in this sense situated. Given that representations are social facts, we cannot get rid of them: it does not matter if they are true or false; what matters is, rather, how they work, and why. That said, I hope to use the space of my thesis to practice situated knowledges, to show the embedded knowledge that is affected by the history, language, and values of the person knowing it.

A pivotal understanding undergirding this study is that the past is not a fixed and immutable object that we can reconstruct in our present imagination through disciplinary and methodological rigor. Rather, we must take seriously the heterogenous, accidental, and contingent narratives that pop up in our mythologies, narratives, and epistemologies. We must recognize that this tension is embedded in the nature of thinking and writing about the past. Modern conceptions of science rarely map directly onto the early modern practices. When symbols are unclear or practices strange, there arises a temptation to filter observations into a tidy narrative that suits a preferential way of understanding the archive or the production of knowledge. However, I hope that by confronting the questions that Aldrovandi’s

14 I analyzed many print documents including museum inventories and catalogues, university and academy archives, correspondence between naturalists, travel journals, and the publications resulting from the collection of nature. I also visited the sala Aldrovandi in the Palazzo Poggi numerous times.

15 natural history archive and museum evoke through various perspectives and methodologies, the readers of this thesis will better grasp the ontological tensions we must confront when we, as observers, ascribe stories and explanations to past practices, that is, giving them a being in the present archive.

By particularizing our characterizations of early modern science through closer attention to context as well as content, to the connections between social status, intellectual identity, and colonial power, we can begin to rethink how we define the knowledge of nature. The challenge for us, as the technoscientifically literate citizens that Haraway would like us to become, is to courageously dwell in Aldrovandi’s strangely fascinating material-semiotic universe. It is to this tangled intersection of patrician values, scientific aspirations, and ordering practices that we now turn.

16 CHAPTER ONE: A Language of Nature: The Linguistic Traces of Sixteenth-Century Historia Naturalis

In the Biblioteca comunale dell'Archiginnasio in Bologna sits the 1610 edition of Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historiae, libri XII. Its frontispiece (see fig. 1 on following page) has an ornate engraving that depicts the

Bolognese naturalist at the wise age of seventy-four. He is accompanied by a teeming array of birds, butterflies, and mammals, which, although not exhaustive, allude to his prolific career dedicated to studying the natural world. The birds are perched atop the ornamental ribbon that braids around the naturalist, hinting at his celebrated ability to possess and control, and therefore miraculously understand, the things of nature (le cose di natura).

The modern reader might be confused by the eclecticism of the representational modes in the frontispiece below. The natural and the artificial, the empirical and the symbolic, even the epistemic and the mythic, are not merely juxtaposed, but are always interlaced; realistically rendered birds grip their talons on a purely decorative artificial crest. This elaborate frame symbiotically hosts living branches that weave in and out of its inorganic matter. Front and center, we see the mimetic portrait of Aldrovandi surrounded by six naturalistic sketches of animals.

The realistic portrayal of these animals speaks to Aldrovandi’s expertise in heuristic practices: both the long tail feathers with eyelike markings of the peacock and the large forward-facing eyes of the owl are true to life. This use of photo-realistic representation emphasizes that the reader can also trust the mimetic quality of the

Ornithologiae’s subsequent content.

17

Figure 1: Frontispiece of the Ornithologiae

18 But, at the same time, the inscription below Aldrovandi’s portrait undercuts the assumed transparency of these images. The Latin lettering reads, “Non tua,

Aristoteles, haec est, sed Ulyssis imago dissimiles vultus, par tamen ingenium” or

“this image is not yours, Aristotle, but Ulisse’s; different faces, but equal talent.”

Aldrovandi confidently proposes that his work is analogous to a major ancient authority who had also studied nature. However, this inscription also recognizes that the reader might mistake the bust of Aldrovandi for that of Aristotle. The portrait does not depict the physical characteristics of Aristotle’s face, but the function of the bust does genuinely resemble Aristotelian talent and thus Aristotelian authority. Put differently, though this mistake is literally false, the impression that it imparts is metonymically true. The other elements of the woodcut worry away at how to represent Aldrovandi’s identity. No matter how realistically rendered an image is it cannot ever be perfectly reliable in representing the thing itself. Due to this anxiety, the frontispiece signifies Aldrovandi’s authority in various and repeated ways. At the top of the frontispiece there is a fully symbolic coat of arms, which typifies his

Aldrovandian family heritage. At the bottom, there is yet another naturalistic bird, but this rooster signifies differently than the owl or the peacock. Although empirically accurate, the rooster floats on an emblematic landscape and carries the goddess

Minerva’s olive branch to symbolize Aldrovandi’s wisdom; the rooster serves an allegorical function as a traditional impresa, a personal emblematic form, presumably for the Aldrovandi family. In a mode of representation typical of many sixteenth- century Italian woodcuts, Aldrovandi combined both allegorical and empirical

19 registers. The reader is deluged with heterogenous representational modes as a way to repeatedly assert Aldrovandi’s authority.

The traditional historiography of early modern natural history has posited a way to explain this apparent proliferation and multiplicity. Just as the representations on the frontispiece seem to be signifying both a medieval, allegorical mode and a modern, naturalistic one, so too is Aldrovandi placed at the cusp of a historical and philosophical turning point. Aldrovandi is repeatedly described as possessing a

“double-outlook:” facing forward towards empirical observation and backwards towards classical authority at the same time.15 As such, he is regarded as a transitional figure, working partly as the medieval scholars did and partly as early modern scientists did; he engaged with Aristotle and Pliny as classical textual authorities, but also endorsed the gathering of empirical data. It is important to note that this historiography hinges on the modern acceptance of the Scientific Revolution as a paradigm shift that transformed the views of society about nature.16 But, this periodization can also be seen as a myth about the inevitable rise of Western global dominance as a result of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century breakthroughs in

Scientia. And, this contemporary assumption reinforces an intellectual edifice that makes it difficult to articulate or recognize the intertwined trajectories of language, science, and politics in the sixteenth-century study of nature.

In this chapter, I will offer my revision to this conventional view of early modern natural history. Through Paula Findlen’s theoretical framework of the

15 Andrea Baucon, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605): The Study of Trace Fossils During the Renaissance, Ichnos, 2009, pp. 245-256. 16 For the process and progress via revolutions, see Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

20 sociology of natural history in early modern Italy, I argue that the discipline known as historia naturalis emerged by way of gradual transformations in interpretation and a diverse intellectual community of naturalists working to revise their practice. It would be misleading to reduce this composite narrative into a single historical event or paradigm shift. We must resist the urge to dichotomize the allegorical and the empirical but instead recognize how early modern natural history relied on multiple overlapping modes of representation to make its claims. When not bogged down by the presumptions of traditional historiography of early modern science, we can begin to give Aldrovandi’s natural history the proper attention. The motto surrounding the frontispiece’s impresa reads “Sensibus haec imis, res est non parva reponas” (Vergil,

Eclogues, III: 54), meaning “give this your best attention [or deepest consideration]; it is no trifling matter.” Aldrovandi, like other sixteenth-century thinkers, did not differentiate between allegorical and empirical techniques of meaning-making, but rather, added them together: the more the merrier. Aldrovandi’s system is self- reflexively extravagant in its insistent deployment of sundry symbols. Eclectic visual and textual information was central to confirm Aldrovandi’s status. Thus, the intermingling of allegorical and naturalistic styles that seem nonsensical to a twenty- first century eye would have been easily legible within the symbolic conventions of

Aldrovandi’s early modern elite readership.17 In fact, Aldrovandi’s persona is authenticated via the dialogue between the historical particularities of realism and the legendary forms of symbols. The interactions on the Ornithologiae’s frontispiece

17 Aldrovandi’s work is often called “confused” or “undisciplined.” For instance, one scholar grumbles that “rather than making each category large and essential enough to include all possible aberrations, Montalbani-Aldrovandi appear to have created a new category for each aberration.” See David Freedberg, Ferrari on the Classification of Oranges and Lemons, p. 2.

21 between language and things, between the allegorical and the empirical, situate

Aldrovandi within the multiplicity of discourses that were indispensable in the organization of natural history in the sixteenth-century.

I. Epistemological Decorum: Performing Natural History

To expose the heterogeneous realities of sixteenth-century practices reveals how early modern natural history was rooted in its own social structure and localized vocabulary. In what follows, I examine the disciplinary emergence of a knowledge of nature in the sixteenth-century through its sociological and linguistic traces. I analyze its community of interpreters, commentators, and translators that used the classical texts as their prototype for disputation (quaestio) to create a new form of natural history based on experiments and experience. In this way of looking at knowledge production, the practice of erudition revealed itself to be a powerful vehicle to call ancient authorities into question. The discipline of natural history, thus, was developed and sustained through performances of socially and historically specific knowledge-making practices.

It has been well established that throughout the Renaissance, the learned

(male) elite became increasingly preoccupied with accumulating and managing information. Ann Blair has argued that early modern naturalists, confronted with the influx of new species, new objects, and new texts called up in the age of exploration, responded with what she has dubbed “info-lust.”18 When faced with the task of documenting the history of animals or plants, that is, of spatializing acquired

18 Ann Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age. Yale University Press, 2010, p. 11-61.

22 knowledge, these sixteenth century naturalists prioritized all-inclusive histories. They were motivated not only with desire to possess new things but also with the cultural attitude to fit these novelties within established frameworks for evaluation. As such, their projects are often hinged to an additive principle, which to a modern uncritical eye seems to lack the necessary exclusions, but for the sixteenth-century naturalists was on par with the characteristic impulse to add information together. The work of

Aldrovandi, for instance, contained a mixture of exact descriptions, reported quotations, fables with or without commentary, and remarks dealing indifferently with habitat, anatomy, or mythological values. And indeed, the chapter “On the eagle in general” in the Ornithologiae is arranged under the following headings: equivocations (which lists all the meanings of the word eagle in various contexts), synonyms and etymologies, form and description, nature and habits, coitus, voice, death of eagles, modes of capture, temperament, mythology, fables, hieroglyphics, uses in medicine, uses for poisons, signs, mysteries, and more. The arrangement of knowledge in the sixteenth century was linked to the activity of gathering together all the constellations of forms from which the animal or plant derived their value as signs. Aldrovandi signified the exhaustive framework of his authority, where no possible declension of eagle morphology or mythology was left unidentified. As

Foucault explains, “Aldrovandi was neither a better nor worse observer than Buffon; he was neither more credulous than he, nor less attached to the faithfulness of the observing eye or to the rationality of things.”19 The activity of natural philosophy must be understood within its sixteenth-century episteme, more linked to other

19 Michel, Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Pantheon Books, 1971, p. 40

23 contemporaneous socio-epistemological practices than to similar discourses taking place in different epistemes.20 Aldrovandi’s approach must not be too easily dismissed as inadequately rigorous. Though in the early stages of becoming what we consider a precursor to modern science, natural history was assisted by, even derived from, unscientific plays of resemblance, legend, and interpretation.

Paula Findlen, too, traces the ways in which early modern science was a product of varying social and political circumstances, institutional matrices, and the cultural expectations of the courtly elite during the sixteenth-century episteme. In order to codify and standardize their practice, this community of scholars relied on social and intellectual networks to determine what counted as fact. In the early modern period, especially prior to the formation of scientific institutions that controlled the flow of new information, scientific communities depended on what

Steven Shapin has astutely called “epistemological decorum.”21 While these two words do not seem to fit together, the composite phrase forces the reader to recognize how the expansion of factual knowledge engendered a demand to police and manage these discoveries. What the term “decorum” so accurately captures is the extent to which meaning-making was a social construct, dependent on the particular, changing context and the agreed-upon set of norms and practices by the practitioners participating in this early modern scientific community. As Shapin articulates:

The work of prying open the inherited box of plausibility and restocking it with new things and

20 I borrow Michel Foucault’s use of the term episteme to identify the conditions that determine what counts as knowledge. He writes: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (Foucault, The Order of Things, 168). 21 Shapin, A Social History of Truth, esp. chap. 5: “Epistemological Decorum: The Practical Management of Factual Testimony,” pp. 193-242.

24 phenomena was fundamental to the emergence of new intellectual practices. In the process, new and modified forms for the making and warranting of empirical truth had to be proposed and put in place. 22

The conventions governing this community were not yet institutionalized in writing.

They were based instead on trial and error, on sustained communication between those who had power and resources (both tangible in the sense of money, or intellectual, in terms of status or reputation) to assert their voice and convince others of their claims. The terms of discourse were not yet solidified or pinned down; rather, the codes of epistemic practice were importantly kept in motion, swerving towards new and different possible empirical truths in order to remain relevant and productive, to syncretize new particulars with the universal schema provided by classical authorities.

II. The Bolognese Aristotle in Translation

Aldrovandi’s nickname as the Bolognese Aristotle from the Ornithologiae’s frontispiece becomes intelligible within this localized, historical metanarrative. Such an adulatory title both credited Aldrovandi’s scholarship as well as situated him, arguably the most important and influential Italian naturalist of his period, intimately among the epistemological concerns of knowledge production. To invoke Aristotle was not to posit a pure symbol from high above attached to the individual ancient

Greek philosopher, but to mark a contested site, a metonym for authority, that could change meaning depending on the context in which it is used.

22 Ibid., p. 195.

25 It is significant that Aldrovandi was known as the Bolognese Aristotle by his colleagues (and not just by himself!) in this emerging disciplinary community.

Although a label does not reveal the entire story, it is indicative of the reputation

Aldrovandi was able to cultivate among his contemporaries, which certainly measured his success as a naturalist. Numerous peers voiced their awe at

Aldrovandi’s possession and organization of so many natural objects in his studio. A

Milanese correspondent wrote in 1598 about Signor Contestabile’s experience at

Aldrovandi’s cabinet: “He told me that he had seen so many and various things in your studio that he remained stupefied. One can believe that there is no studio similar in all of Europe.”23 Pier Andrea Mattioli, an erudite naturalist and active member of the community of scientific practitioners, also expressed that Aldrovandi’s museum was the most extensive microcosm of nature of its time. “Thus, I remain always with heart aflutter and with bated breath until I see all the samples you have collected,” proclaimed Mattioli in 1553, “and really I would like to come to Bologna only for this end, when I can.”24 While some noblemen visited the museum simply to admire the marvels in Aldrovandi’s cabinet of curiosities, others like Mattioli wished to examine the natural materials for their own research to write new and improved natural histories. The fact that elite members of Europe could brush shoulders and mingle with prestigious naturalists and scholars only added to the museum’s distinction.

Cultivated as part of the civilizing process that shaped the culture of the Italian nobility of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, collecting presented a venue to articulate social difference through material possessions. For early modern naturalists

23 BUB, Aldrovandi, ms.136, XXVII, c 198r (Milan, 22 September 1598). 24 Fantuzzi, p.156 (Goritia, 12 July 1553).

26 participating in the formation of a new “scientific culture,” the possession of nature and the material objects necessary to its proper study (books, manuscripts, illustrations, and instruments) signified their entry into civil society.25 The studio was therefore shaped as a social paradigm that acknowledged the performative (both social and linguistic) enterprise of natural history: a practice that requires the ability to curate nature and control its many representations through calculated description.

The first hint to understand why Aldrovandi’s byname, the Bolognese

Aristotle, carried the power and complexity it did comes from investigating the university curriculum shared by this emerging patrician community. As institutionalized in medieval universities, formal education in natural philosophy consisted primarily in both written and verbal commentary on Aristotle’s libri naturales.26 By the mid-thirteenth century, Aristotle’s emphasis on deductive logic had become the centerpiece of the curriculum for a bachelor’s degree in natural philosophy at major universities such as the University of Paris or Alma Mater

Studiorum in Bologna. Most students would have studied Aristotelian logic before they continued on to a higher faculty such as law, medicine, or theology.27 This typical course of study, derived from the canonical authority of Aristotle, remained

25 I borrow Paula Findlen’s use of the terminology, scientific culture, for two important reasons. First, it hopefully does not fall into the anachronism of referring to early modern scientific practices under our modern definition of (techno)science. Second, the term helps to actively broaden the activities that we consider under the category of science into new arenas: the court, the academy, the piazza, the museum, the pharmacy, etc. This approach reveals how the sixteenth-century scientific community held different classifications of knowledge and professional divisions of labor. 26 This collection of books on the study of natural bodies included Aristotle’s Physics, On the Heavens, Meteorology, On the Soul, On Generation and Corruption, the History, and Parts of Animals, which were shorter works known collectively as the parva naturalia. 27 David Lines, “Beyond Latin in Renaissance Philosophy: A Plea for New Critical Perspectives.” Intellectual History Review, vol. 25, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1–17.

27 the standard practice in European universities until the end of the seventeenth century.

The long history of teaching Aristotelian natural philosophy resulted in a range of editions, translations, and commentaries. This complicated trajectory of editing and translating the Aristotelian corpus, that had begun in the Middle Ages, transformed the meaning of Aristotle’s authority into a stratified, sedimented thing, made up of layer after layer of interpretation that inform the basis of the Renaissance experience of his texts. Historian of science Edward Grant explores these layered readings of Aristotle. He explains that “flexibility” was a central feature of the sixteenth-century Aristotelian corpus. 28 The system of Aristotelian natural philosophy had expanded and changed to accommodate various interpretations – the readings of Thomas Aquinas, the views of Augustine and the Neo-Platonists, as well as the twelfth-century commentaries from the Islamic scholar Averroës – into its doctrines by the sixteenth century. Furthermore, these layerings of interpretations rescued Aristotle’s own philosophical model from any internal inconsistences, encouraging instead a multiplicity of viable arguments and solutions. These salvaged versions could even adapt to changing interests in the culture of science, the philosophy of nature, and theology. In fact, these new interpretations were integrated into Aristotle’s corpus through the iterative processes of translations and retranslation. These revised versions were attractive to early modern thinkers who profited from the translations’ adaptability to enunciate new types of explanations.

28 Edward Grant, “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View.” History of Science, vol. 16, no. 2, 1978, pp. 93–106. The varied origins of sixteenth-century Aristotelian natural philosophy have led Charles B. Schmitt to talk of the Aristotelian corpus even as a plurality of “Aristotelianisms.” See Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance, Cambridge, MA, 1983.

28 Renaissance naturalists favored translations from the Greek original into elegant Ciceronian Latin, fostering the study of this “new Aristotle” based on recent

Latin translations, such as those of Leonardo Bruni (1369-1444) and Theodore Gaza

(1400-1476).29 By vehicle of translation and selective circulation, the Aristotle with whom Aldrovandi and his colleagues were familiar was in a lot of ways a Latin,

Christianized philosopher. To call Aldrovandi the Bolognese Aristotle, then, did not necessarily signify a monolithic, pure invocation of the actual historical figure of

Aristotle, at least not the ancient Greek philosopher we learn about in modern-day textbooks. Rather, this identification reflects how classical authority was idealized and repurposed in the flexible scientific culture of early modern Italy.

III. The Emergence of a Disciplinary Community

Now I wish to let my argument be suspended in this localized early modern moment as my own performance of situated knowledges, of seeing how the enactment of representational practices and the early modern belief in these particular practices was contingent on a certain set of historical and cultural variables. Through meticulously contemplating a nature that was written, sixteenth-century scientific practitioners were on the verge of writing a new history of nature that would have both intellectual and practical ramifications. As Ann Blair explains, this system did not emerge out of nowhere, but rather was an approach already built into the medieval culture of reading and commenting on Aristotelian natural philosophy left

29 My evidence for this claim comes from my archival research, looking specifically at the politics of citation and bibliography: most humanist naturalists, including Aldrovandi and those with whom he was in conversation, most often cite these Latin translations in their notes and encyclopedic references.

29 as a legacy in the Catholic textbooks that these humanists knew verbatim.30 But, this early modern scientific culture worked with methods of knowledge production that the philosopher Aristotle would not even have known about. The textbooks portrayed

Aristotle’s corpus as it was circulated in a medieval form: to work with Aristotle’s framework was actually to utilize Thomas Aquinas’s methodology. Thus, the canonized form of the knowledge of nature matched the medieval practice of the quaestio, a method for interpretation and disputation. Within this systematic and curated presentation of knowledge, scholars gathered arguments and objections in order to reach new conclusion.”31 Early modern commentaries on classical authorities appropriated the logic of the quaestio because this existing model gave the sixteenth- century philosophers and naturalists a recognized venue for innovation. Its technique permitted, even encouraged, digressive discussions that could stray from the initial passage or opinion at issue. Where the authors of the medieval quaestio tended to minimize their modifications, the early modern authors were much more upfront in their addition of new (and in their minds, improved) ideas. Even as they transmitted the ideas of the past, this form of communication offered opportunities to update the tradition.32

Within the Cinquecento’s courtly community of lettered naturalists, physicians, and princes, the technique of the quaestio transformed into a collaborative, productive project. The lingering medieval culture of disputation meant

30 Blair in Lindberg, David C., et al, The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 368. 31 Ibid., p. 369. For other examples of this format, see the work of Domingo de Soto or Franciscus Piccolomini. 32 This practice also included citations from less canonical sources, explains Schmitt in Aristotle and the Renaissance.

30 that the early modern knowledge of nature was even more polyphonic than Aristotle’s project ever was. The resources and voices of an entire community were necessary to establish the limits of what was known. This exchange of opinions gradually became known and eventually institutionalized as the “Republic of Letters.”33 Although the sixteenth-century world of Letters was largely immaterial, its intellectual networks set the stage for the successes of later naturalists by enacting a way to transform natural knowledge from an ancient form of learning and reading into the beginnings of scientific inquiry.

To delineate what forms of knowledge had power, early modern naturalists relied, quite consciously, on localized knowledge relayed through the capillaries of the Republic of Letters. This network established its own organizing schema which were separate from any specific institutional framework. This structure of knowledge production allowed scientific practitioners to “bypass the university’s once solid monopoly on scientific discourse.”34 Discussions often arose as a result of the increased circulation of ancient books or visits to private collections of New World naturalia, which demanded closer scrutiny in order to be known. In other words, there was a mutually constitutive relationship between those with new knowledge and those who managed and controlled a form of knowledge that had its origins in a traditional authority. On the one hand, studying classical texts inspired early modern

33 Harris describes the “Republic” as loose confederation of weak social associations, most often held together by the dedication and scholarship of a select group of intelligencers. He points to the funding of the postal service, overseas travel, and printing as the mundane but crucial components of regular and reliable circulation of correspondences. Participation in this correspondence circle was voluntary, information, and inconsistent, but social suasion and civility encouraged the energy from many practitioners, all actors in the performance of staging and studying nature. The Republic of Letters solidified in the eighteenth-century to foster communication between the French philosophes through the circulation of hand-written letters. 34 Ann Blair in The Cambridge History of Science, p. 385.

31 naturalists to collect more so that they could live up to projected sense of what nature could contain. But, on the other hand, the new discoveries also prompted translators and commentators to revise the contents of these texts.

Paula Findlen helpfully explores the history of the Sienese physician Pier

Andrea Mattioli’s translation of and commentary on the Greek Padanius Dioscorides’

De materia media (ca. 50-70 CE) as a compelling example for how one especially influential and well-off naturalist portrayed the scholarly community of his day.

Looking more closely at his project, we can track several intellectual transformations in the sixteenth-century episteme. The sustained and dynamic process of revising ancient content reflected not only the developments in empirical knowledge, but also the shifting parameters of an emerging scholarly, perhaps even scientific, community.35 Mattioli’s version of the De materia medica, a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants (Simples) and the medicines that can be obtained from them, had become one of the most well-read scientific books in the sixteenth-century.36 While there were other translations of the De materia medica, Mattioli’s became the definitive interpretation. Findlen notes that between 1554 and 1557 Mattioli’s

Dioscorides emerged as the “undisputed” natural history of its day.37 He achieved a title of “author” that outshined other Renaissance physicians and philologists who had

35 This process of interfacing with texts is also explored in Anthony Grafton, Commerce with the Classics: Ancient Books and Renaissance Readers, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997. 36 Paula Findlen in Grafton and Siraisi, Natural Particulars: Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, MIT Press, 1999, p.373. Mattioli’s Dioscorides was first published in volgare in 1544, and its success only exploded once it was translated in Latin in 1554, followed by editions in German, French, Spanish, and Czech. It continued to be published throughout the eighteenth-century. As a result, the text existed for the entire evolution of early modern period, traveling to Syria, Persia, Egypt, and perhaps even translated into a Hebrew manuscript. 37 Ibid., p. 377. Mattioli proudly states in the preface to the 1568 Italian edition to have sold over 30,000 copies, of course not fully anticipating its ongoing demand after his death. See Pier Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi d. M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli sanese (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1568), vol. 1.

32 similarly attempted to make a career out of translating those same words, out of correcting the errors of the past and the present within the same five books on the history and faculty of Simples.

Although the members of this early modern scientific community perceived themselves as invested in only the most practical aspects of natural history – classifying naturalia, identifying uses of plants, collecting exotic materials – the project and its distribution relied primarily on practices of translation and representation. Mattioli’s goal was to transliterate the ancient Greek names of plants into their Roman characters, as well as provide an in-depth commentary on their herbal properties in volgare. Gradually, Mattioli’s work garnered a monopoly over the authentic reading practices of early modern naturalists. Though never standardized, there was an epistemological decorum, an unspoken social structure, to the proper interaction with Mattioli’s living text. Scholars would describe objects, often dried plant materials, and send their commentary to each other along with reference to a specific illustration or description found in Mattioli’s commentaries. In

1555, Ambrosio Mariano wrote to Aldrovandi: “I saw that plant that Mattioli calls androsaces… I am certain that I did not see it among your plants when I was with you. This [specimen] conforms properly to Mattioli’s picture.”38 With these observations, Mattioli would expand upon Dioscorides’ original text, treating it as a mere framework around which Mattioli’s findings could be printed and contextualized. To give credit where credit was due, Mattioli repeatedly identified in print the participants in the Italian project of understanding the natural world; by

38 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Aldrovandi MS 382, I, c. 260 (Macerata, 25 May 1555).

33 describing them as a community that collaborated around his book, Mattioli acknowledged that role of the Republic of Letters for the publication of his

Dioscorides. Although Mattioli was the translator, the content of his text was indebted to a community of naturalists engaged in a circular practice of knowledge production: the publication of traditional natural histories inspiring collection practices and the possession of nature, in turn, reforming classical texts.

Everyone waited eagerly for Mattioli to release his newest (re)translation that codified their rightful place in the paper Republic of Letters which Mattioli fabricated every time he rewrote his acknowledgments or updated a description. The acknowledgements in Mattioli’s Dioscorides fashioned a record of the widespread collaboration from all the naturalists who interpreted Mattioli’s interpretations, thereby adding to the field of knowledge.39 Although the emerging hierarchy of naturalists would ultimately determine whose critiques merited attention, both the corrections and misidentifications were archived through the accumulation of material versions which were stored in Mattioli’s library (and today, in the Biblioteca

Universitria di Bologna). This literal holding-adjacent of past and present knowledge, memorialized too by the exchange of written letters among practitioners, marked the dialectic of ancient authority and developing practices of careful description of the thing-in-itself through systematic classification. The ability to know, critique, and contribute to Mattioli’s Dioscorides became a defining feature of this sixteenth- century scholarly community. As such, the experience of reading and perfecting

39 Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 40.

34 Mattioli’s Dioscorides actively shaped the emerging disciplinary community of naturalists at large.

The margins of this imagined community remain contested in the scholarship to this day partially due to the instability of the term discipline. It is unclear if

Mattioli himself would have seen his work as part of a disciplinary community, and in many ways, Aldrovandi, in his Discorso Naturale, proves to be more self- reflectively engaged with the methodological questions of a faithful study of natural history and the appropriate representation of that knowledge. Aldrovandi explains his hands-on approach: “non iscrivendo cosa alcuna che co’ propri occhi io non habbi veduto e con le mani toccato et fattone l’anatomia,” or “writing only about what I have seen with my own eyes and touched with my own hands.”40 Yet, Mattioli’s project set the precedent for a kind of scientific inquiry that drew from the power and resources of an entire community to establish what was known, “to discover the truth for the benefit of the Republic.”41

Let’s return to the christening of a Bolognese Aristotle. By analogy, this nickname locates Ulisse Aldrovandi amidst the linguistic, philosophical, and social stakes of experience and experiments in sixteenth-century natural philosophy. This insistence on the comparison of Aldrovandi to Aristotle reflects not only the height of

Aldrovandi’s prestige as on par with that of the Philosopher but also how his ability to accommodate new empirical practices granted him authority in the Bolognese

40 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Discorso Naturale, 1572. Sandra Pattaro argues in her Metodo e sistema that the Discorso lays out Aldrovandi’s critical position toward classical authors and how he felt it necessary to ascertain the truthfulness of their data through experimental research. Yet, Aldrovandi often fails to comply with his own method: he grounds many of his observations on the “auctores canonici” and intermingles scientific observations with encyclopedism and pure erudition. 41 Pier Andrea Mattioli, I discorsi di M. Pietro Andrea Mattioli (Venice: Vincenzo Valgrisi, 1581).

35 composition of the knowledge of nature. Yet, there is a tension inherent in the frontispiece’s inscription. With the apostrophe (tua), the calling out to an unattainable reader, Aldrovandi declares that he is – figuratively – in conversation with Aristotle because he is contributing to the same body of natural knowledge as the classical authority did. But, we must recognize that when Aldrovandi literally invokes

Aristotle he is also metaphorically in dialogue with the same community of naturalists who participated the revisions of Mattioli’s Dioscorides. As a metonym, the sign

“Aristotle” is a diffuse and floating signifier; it represents the palimpsest knowledge of this early modern moment, determined not by any single harmony of effects, but by gaps, discontinuities, and breakages between representation and the thing itself.

36 CHAPTER TWO: Monstrous Flowers Hiding Under the Bed: Tracing European Colonialism in Aldrovandi’s Cabinet of Curiosities

“As socially and culturally salient entities, objects change in defiance of their material stability. The category to which a thing belongs, the emotion and judgment it prompts. And the narrative it recalls, are all historically refigured.” – Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects

To tell the history of the study of nature from the standpoint of wonder is to re-historicize the order of nature and thereby raise new questions about how and why one system of knowledge production holds power and presents itself as self-evident.

Wonder, as it were, has never been a neutral category. Science studies scholars

Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park argue in their book, Wonders and the Order of

Nature, that wonder established a principle of inclusion and exclusion in natural history, “setting the limits of the natural, the limits of the known.”42 Wonders represented the margins, delineating both the center and the end of the world.

Stressing the structural function of wonder discloses how sixteenth-century natural history reinforced European domination through power and control over nature.

It was the case that from its beginning stages that natural knowledge was both

European’s expansion precondition and its constantly developing product. The economic exploitation of colonialism and the production of scientific knowledge intersected at the site of wonder. This wonder consisted in both the New World wonders (objects) and the feeling that these objects evoked in Europe. Studying and collecting these natural marvels fashioned a praxis to accommodate both the commonplace and the unusual, the real and the probable. Most early modern

42 Lorraine Daston, and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. Zone Books; Distributed by the MIT Press, 1998, p. 13.

37 naturalists aspired to be natural philosophers, a standing that allowed them to work across the emerging disciplinary boundaries between medicine and natural history; in short, to be qualified to comment on all domains of this growing base of scientific knowledge. While early modern naturalists came to the study of nature for a variety of reasons, this category of wonder cut across all of their projects. While the study of

New World wonders helped naturalists to produce better medicines and to complete the Aristotelian project of classifying the natural world, this early modern expansion of knowledge relied on colonial gestures for its production and circulation.

Assembling medical knowledge (materia medica) from the limits of European dominion, Aldrovandi organized his botanical garden and manuscript archive so as to display its contents for a European courtly elite, as a textual and visual embodiment of Nature known and ruled.43 In this chapter, I will trace the way his medical studies profited from and contributed to the concurrent European colonial project. By re- historicizing the objects displayed in Aldrovandi’s cabinet of curiosities I attend to the underlying attitudes towards nature, order, and cultural hierarchy in the sixteenth- century episteme. First, I argue that Aldrovandi’s botany functioned according to the logic of expropriation, in which the New World's wealth was pillaged for European use. New facts were made objective and exchangeable on European terms, overwriting and obscuring the extra-European origins. Second, I explore how

Aldrovandi’s natural history of “monsters,” the Monstrorum historia, documented

43 The idea of Nature and Humanity in the uppercase connotes the mythic separation of ecologies without humans and human relations without ecologies. The symbolic, material, and bodily violence of this binary has made and remade nature as a passive substrate for the profit of only some humans. See Jason Moore, A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. University of California Press, 2017.

38 and classified humans who were understood to be diseased or abnormal. Though useful for identifying diagnoses, the printed collection operated through a logic of domination in which the humans of the New World are reduced to a part of nature that can be controlled and cultivated. These case studies attempt to illuminate

Aldrovandi’s mission; he sought to objectify knowledge in order to stabilize the boundaries of the natural and the known on European terms.

I. The Pliny of His Time

This story begins much earlier than the biography of Aldrovandi himself. An emphasis on wonder and the desire to understand the whole of nature is a legacy of

Pliny the Elder’s first century encyclopedism. Since Aldrovandi himself was often referred to as “the Pliny of his time” (in addition to being compared to a modern

Bolognese Aristotle), this parallel to Pliny’s work proves especially instructive.44 I hope to articulate the imperial basis of Pliny’s natural history as the springboard for my exploration of the problematics of Aldrovandi’s inherited fascination with wonder. Many historians of science argue that Pliny’s Natural History set a precedent for early modern naturalists, Renaissance humanists, and subsequent eras for how the diversity of multiple cultures, traditions, and discourses could be reassembled, under imperial rule, within a single all-encompassing text: the encyclopedic project is an

44 Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano annesso a quello del Famoso Ulisse Aldrovandi e donato alla sua patria dall’illustrissimo Signor Ferdinando Cospi (Bologna, 1677), p. 8. Although I find this comparison useful, I do not mean to suggest that all aspects of Plinian encyclopedism can be mapped onto Aldrovandi’s archive. Sixteenth-century naturalist revered authority and subsumed their philosophical speculations within a highly Christianized framework, that is to say, in a way quite different than the secular venture of Pliny as Roman statesman. The naturalists also regarded nature through the reactivation of the metaphor of the book which connects their work more strongly to medieval encyclopedism. I self-reflexively use the connection to Pliny, though, in order to draw out the colonial underpinnings of Aldrovandi’s natural history that are otherwise overlooked.

39 approach to consolidate nature in all its multiplicity into a single object. The conceptual framework of Aldrovandi and other early modern collectors’ descriptive enterprises rested directly on the Natural History’s vision of the entirety and unity of nature. The extension of the Plinian encyclopedic project by early modern natural histories to Africa, Asia, and the Americas was, in the words of Mary Louise Pratt, “a

European project of a new kind, a new form of what one might call planetary consciousness among Europeans,” that produced “the rest of the world” for European readerships at particular points in Europe’s expansionist process. 45 In Pliny’s, as in

Aldrovandi’s time, continued imperial domination and colonial trade into ever farther territories supplied natural objects to be refined into knowledge, subsuming what had once belonged to others into the symbolic and economic systems of their conquerors.

Trevor Murphy’s foundational work, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The

Empire in the Encyclopedia, discusses at length the imperial roots of natural history.

His book centers around a historical and philosophical characterization of Pliny, the first-century Roman writer and statesman who tried to collect all knowledge about

Nature. On this point, Murphy maintains that even ostensibly innocent descriptions of natural phenomena like rivers and mountains are full of references to Roman generals who arrived at extreme borders, who explored areas that had not been penetrated before, who expanded the empire until the edge of the world, and so on. Scientific inquiry was thought of by the Romans as a “largely collective enterprise that served to validate existing structures of power.”46 In many cases, reaffirming Roman power

45 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992, p. 29. 46 Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press, 2004, p. 197.

40 structures required making sense of the other cultures at the limits of Roman imperialism. Pliny himself was fascinated, I believe problematically, with non-Roman people; he writes of other cultures:

These and similar varieties of the human race have been made by the ingenuity of nature as toys for herself and marvels [miracula] for us. And indeed, who could possibility recount the various things she does every day and almost every hour? Let it suffice for the discourse of her power to have included whole races of mankind among her marvels.47

By labeling these people as part of nature, objectified as “toys” and “marvels for us,”

Pliny delineates who could and could not be fully human along Roman lines of civilization. This identification was not simply applied to a pre-existing concept of

Nature, but rather functioned to produce an imperial Roman sense of the natural world as an object of domination – an object that was made (and remade over and over again) specifically to be claimed, marveled at, and recounted by those in power.

Murphy’s argument extends at pivotal moments beyond the particular world of Pliny and the Romans. He alternates this history of natural encyclopedism in the

Roman empire with an even more persuasive narrative about the afterlife of the

Natural History in the early modern period and its influence on eighteenth-century empirical science. As a result, Murphy effectively shows how politics have always been tied to the history of Nature. The conclusion of Murphy’s book asks the reader to think about the connections between Pliny and Aldrovandi’s projects, noting specifically that Aldrovandi literally took the Natural History as a challenge to collect as many facts of nature as possible. For Pliny, the sustained tendency to create what

47 Pliny, Natural History, 7.2.32, 10 vol., Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935-63 (trans. H. Rackham), p. 527.

41 Murphy calls “harmonious antitheses” (antithetical assemblages) not only marked difference but also drew attention to similarities on either side of the division.

Likewise for the sixteenth-century episteme, Foucault notes that, “in this natural container, the world, adjacency is not an exterior relation between things, but the sign of a relationship, obscure though it may be.”48 In this respect, Pliny’s encyclopedia is comparable to the work of Aldrovandi for whom the doctrine of convenientia, the meaningful juxtaposition of dissimilar terms, was a technique to recognize the true logic of the universe.

Where Aristotelian insistence on universal truths began to clash with many of the “discoveries” in the New World, the Plinian framework, in its desire to catalogue all of nature, could better accommodate the increase in natural knowledge.49 As Pliny outlined in the preface to his monumental Natural History:

It is not books but store-houses (thesaurus) that are needed; consequently by perusing about 2,000 volumes, very few of which, owing to the abstruseness of their contents are ever handled by students, we have collected in 36 volumes 20,000 noteworthy facts obtained from one hundred authors that we have explored, with a great number of other facts in addition that were either ignored by our predecessors or have been discovered by subsequent experience.50

By the early modern period, the number of “noteworthy facts” had increased exponentially from Pliny’s original estimate of 20,000. Still, early modern naturalists read the preface of the Natural History almost as if it were a dare: if Pliny could surpass the ancients, then a worthy humanist ambition should be able to out-collect

48 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 18. 49 Throughout this thesis, I use scare quotes around the concept of discoveries to signify that while these objects and landscapes were new to the European consciousness, somebody was already here… 50 Pliny, Natural History, H. Rackham, trans. (Cambridge, MA, 1938), Vol. I, p. 13 (preface, 17-18).

42 the best Roman encyclopedist. Like Pliny, Aldrovandi was obsessed with boasting about the growing size of his collection. Multiple documents remain in which

Aldrovandi recounts the number of “facts,” incorporating even Pliny’s lexicon, in his cabinet of curiosities: in 1577, he possessed about 13,000 things; in 1595, 18,000; at the turn of the sixteenth century, eclipsing 20,000.51

Aldrovandi did not understand himself as doing something new but, rather, as working within this Plinian methodology. His cabinet of curiosities recalled Pliny’s natural history in its undertaking of the lofty encyclopedic goal to encapsulate that which has once seemed unknowable: Nature and the vastness of non-European topographies. Reading Pliny reminded early modern naturalists just how expansive the category of natural history could be in its ability to encompass all of nature. As

Aldrovandi described:

There is nothing under the sun that cannot be reduced to one of the three genera, that is, inanimate things and fossils, extracted from the bowels of the earth, plants, or animals. Even artificial things may be included in one of these three genus according to the materials [of their composition].52

In this way, the real and the imaginary, the ordinary and the extraordinary, all found their place in his encyclopedic pursuit. While Pliny’s project was primarily text- based, Aldrovandi was inspired by the Natural History to collect, catalogue, and

51 It’s important to take into consideration that this practice relied on a circuit of naturalists and physicians, all of whom were consumed by the desire to possess all the facts of nature. Aldrovandi expressed that he wanted to visit the collection of Alfonso Pancio, physician to the d’Este family in Ferrara, “not ever being sated by the learning of new things;” he wrote in a letter from 1577 that “not a week passes – I will not say a day – in which I am not sent something special. Nor is it to be wondered at, because this science of nature is as infinite as our knowledge.” 52 BAV, Vat. Lat. 6192, Vol, II, f. 656v in Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 62. Translation slightly modified.

43 display nature in all-embracing cabinets and encyclopedic texts.53 Building on Pliny’s encyclopedic definition of nature as everything in the world worthy of memory, collectors and naturalists brought nature into their cabinets. Through the possession of objects, one physically acquired knowledge, and through their display, one symbolically earned the honor and reputation that all learned men aspired to cultivate.

The alleged remains of legendary creatures – giants, unicorns, hermaphrodites, satyrs

– were placed comfortably next to things that a modern viewer would describe as natural objects: real but puzzling phenomena such as fossils, models of impregnated uteri, and zoophytes; previously unknown species such as the bird of paradise, the cashew, the pineapple; and a wide array of ordinary artifacts that hoped to fill the gaps, to explain the paradoxes. Ranging from “the imaginary to the exotic to the ordinary,” the cabinet – an aesthetic flirtation with chaos – was strategically designed to represent Nature as a comprehensible continuum.54

The creation of these cabinets of curiosities seems to be an attempt to manage the empirical explosion of materials that the printing boom of ancient texts, increased colonial travel, and more systematic forms of communication had produced.55 This surge of Plinian curiosity in response to New World “discoveries” fundamentally redefined the European world view, making Europeans aware of new kinds of

53 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. University of California Press, 1994, p. 62-70. 54 Ibid., p. 65. 55 Other scholars interpret the sense of wonder, the striving at etcetera, differently. In a conversation at the Center for Humanities, Christopher D. Johnson argued that lists are able to resist hierarchical relations in their copiousness and self-reflexive finitude. I contend, instead, that Aldrovandi’s work ultimately seems arborescent, not rhizomic. Though it appears non-linear looking back, the flexible structure of legend was precisely in line with production of knowledge that was valued by those in power at his time. We must not give Aldrovandi’s hyperbolic, encyclopedic description too much credit by assuming he was naïve to the power in possessing nature in order to know it.

44 otherness that put pressure on the European sense of self. Collecting and reporting helped preserve some degree of control over the natural world. If knowledge of the world could no longer be contained in a set of canonical texts, then it could be displayed spectacularly in a cabinet. Two sides of knowledge – objective fact and subjective sensibility – thus effectively produce the early modern natural world as an object that could be known, possessed, and dominated.

II. Collecting Naturalia in the Shadow of Colonialism

This epistemological interworking of objective observation and subjective judgement can be situated historically. In 1492, Europeans marveled at an epochal event that would expand the visibility of new plants and new wonders, both inside and outside the discipline of medicine. When Christopher Columbus arrived at what he mistook to be the eastern reaches of Asia, he wrote a travel journal for his royal patrons that used the language of wonder to chronicle the New World marvels and topography. His entry for October 21st revitalizes the long tradition of writing on natural wonders as had been standard in the work of ancient writers like Pliny or

Solinus:56

If the [other islands] already seen are very beautiful and green and fertile, this is much more so, with large and very green groves of trees. Here there are some very big lakes, and over and around them the groves are marvelous [en maravilla]. And here and in all of the island the groves are all green and the verdure like that in April of Andalusia… And [there are] flocks of parrots that obscure the sun; and there are birds of so many kinds and sizes, and so different from outs, that it is a marvel [maravilla]… I am the most sorrowful man

56 Gaius Julius Solinus was the author of De mirabilibus mundi (The Wonders of the World), from the 3rd century CE.

45 in the world, not being acquainted with them. I am quite certain that all are things of value, and I am bringing samples of them and likewise of the plants.57

Nature, according to Columbus, is a landscape filled with wonder – a vista for the novelty of natural things. The constellation of images, words, and associations in this passage has less to do with a set of geographical or topological elements than with a set of psychological and emotional reactions to this new landscape. The topography’s value is derived from Columbus’ ability to associate its luscious green marvels with the European acquaintance to a southern Spanish spring. His language is hyperbolic: the flock of birds so great it fills the entire sky and considering himself the most miserable of all men. As a rhetorical performance apt to call attention to its overshooting, the passage plays with the gap between the literal nature he observes and the figurative experience of wonder he feels. This exaggeration, not meant to be taken fully seriously, allows Columbus to merge his task of objective inventory with his subjective wonder – all without transgressing the decorum of credible travel testimony. The “discovery” of the land that came to be known as America not only yielded a host of exotic new naturalia, but also prompted a reconsideration of how nature might best be explored at the limits of knowledge. I will caution that this curiosity was never innocent, and in what follows I will take seriously how the representations of and narratives around these wonders were used to perceive

Europe’s own culture in relation to others at the outer limits of Europe's colonial expansion.

57 Christopher Columbus, The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, 1492-1493, ed. and trans. Oliver Dunn and James E. Kelley (Jr.), Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1989, p. 104-107. On the history of this rhetoric of wonder and romance, see Campbell, Witness, p. 172-87; Greenblatt, Possessions, p. 52-85; and Flint, Imaginative Landscape, p. 115-46.

46 The observation of nature occurred not only in the course of travel but also in the university botanical gardens, where plants from all corners of the earth were gathered for analysis by medical students taking the new courses in materia medica, the medicinal understanding of nature. Ulisse Aldrovandi and other prominent Italian naturalists praised, above all, the Grand Duke Cosimo I for being “the first to have a public garden of Simples constructed… to whom all scholars of these beautiful things are indebted.”58 On Aldrovandi’s 1568 initiative, the University of Bologna founded its own botanical gardens in the Palazzo Pubblico, modeled after the newly planted gardens in Pisa, Padua, and Florence. Botanists transferred plants from garden to garden around the world, building inventories and stocks of natural goods and thus facilitating the study, cultivation, and experimentation with profitable plants from all parts of the globe. Using the materials planted in the botanical gardens, naturalists reinforced the importance of demonstration and direct observation in studying the intersections of nature and medicine. This pedagogical practice would enable medical students “to observe [plant specimens] directly in all their parts, stems, leaves, flowers, fruits and roots, and to depict them correctly from the living specimens (al vivo) in their original colors.”59

Yes, these botanical gardens were sites of medical study and curiosity. But this is not to say that Aldrovandi’s pursuit to observe and depict nature took place in a vacuum. Recent studies in the last fifty years recognize the ways in which early modern botanical practices intersected with colonialism. The growth of botanical

58 Aldrovandi, Vita, p. 27. 59 “contemplare ogni minima parte di quelle, sì come, per esempio, cauli, fiori, foglie, frutti e loro radici, et senza errore alcuno fargli dipingere al vivo con suoi nativi colori” in Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, MS Aldcrovandi. 91, c. 536. My translation.

47 knowledge emerged alongside Europe’s territorial and commercial expansion.60 In his seminal book, Nature and Empire, Roy MacLeod calls for a history of colonial science that begins to sketch “the process of multiple engagements – between

Europeans at home and abroad, between European and indigenous peoples, and between Western and non-Western science.”61 Europeans' efforts to capture the order of nature for educational and medicinal use coincided with large-scale alteration of nature by European global botanical, economic, and colonial operations.62 The story of colonial botany is as much a story of transplanting nature as it is of transforming certain knowledge. Epistolary networks grew stronger in the long sixteenth century and mapped new associations between new places, including the botanical garden, the medical anatomical theater, and the museum collection, each with their individual, but never neutral, relationship to colonial and commercial enterprises.

Under Aldrovandi’s supervision, the governing board of the Orto Botanico dell’Università di Bologna invested both time and money into its growing Giardino dei Semplici (garden of Simples) as a medical resource for students.63 The economic and educational success of the garden required the extraction of New World plants and the subsequent writing-over of non-European knowledge to assimilate these new

60 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. University of California Press, 1994; Stephen Harris, “Colonial Botany. Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World.” Journal of the History of Collections, vol. 18, no. 1, 2006, pp. 101–102; Roy MacLeod, Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise. University of Chicago Press, 2000; Nicholas Jardine and Emma Spary, Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge University Press, 1996. 61 MacLeod, ed., Nature and Empire, p. 6. 62 To see a relationship between the progress of science and the expansion of Europe resists the naturalized separation between the history of science and the history of colonialism, the first assumed to be objective, even ahistorical, and the latter to be part of political history, the history of military conquest and trade. 63 David Lines, “Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: The University of Bologna and the Beginnings of Specialization.” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 6, no. 4, 2001, pp. 267–323.

48 plants into European paradigms of pomology and medical botany. Professors used the site of the garden to perform ostenciones, the practical demonstrations about how to use the herbs, which included many species of non-native plants. In the 1586 layout for the Orto Botanico (see fig. 2), the plants are highly regimented, practically quarantined, into separate beds, where species were clustered according to European classification systems, not around their extra-European provenances. This distribution therefore did not correspond to the plant’s origin or the most suitable growing conditions for each plant specimen; rather the beds were organized in order to maximize the efficiency and clarity of the ostenciones. Through this process of

“objectification” by which the extra-European plants were wiped clean of their complexities, Aldrovandi was able to expropriate exotic specimens for lucrative medical study.64 This layout overlooked the histories and particularities of the non-European ecologies from which many of these plants were raided, paring the information down only to the material that was required to benefit the university curriculum.

Figure 2: Giardino dei Semplici

64 Harold J. Cook, “Global Economies and Local Knowledge in the East Indies: Jacobus Learns the Facts of Nature.

49

III. Curiosity in The Monstrorum Historia: Margins, Bodies, and Power

In an extreme form of Renaissance humanism, the organizing principle for the

Orto Botanico was the abnormal human body. Plants were cultivated because they were useful to treat human illnesses. In Aldrovandi’s Monstrorum historia, the early modern inclination towards heterogeneity and eclecticism – which function to signal the total availability and the total objectification of what is known – turned to this ordering of human bodies. The book details nature’s strange and rare humanoid phenomena as seen through the wonder-filled eyes of the sixteenth-century naturalist.

The pages of Aldrovandi’s printed book are heavily illustrated with depictions of humans who strayed from the European perceptions of normality. These vary from the fantastic – satyrs, Cyclopes, and half-human/half-animal hybrids – to humans with congenital disorders and physical disabilities that might have been familiar to

Aldrovandi’s readers. Even though these so-called “monsters” were often treated as curiosities of nature and even valued for their rarity, we can recognize the colonial impulse inherent in the ordering of some humans as “monsters.” Their presentation was at once repellant and attractive, evoking amazement toward these non-normative human bodies as Nature’s own marvels while still reifying the hierarchies of power both at the limits of the European frontier and at home within the Renaissance courts.

The categorization of “monsters” employs a logic of domination in which a system of binaries represents the non-European other as abnormal and unnatural, while the

European is asserted as the normal and natural antithesis. This ordering of the world enabled Europeans to rationalize their colonial agenda.

50 Some accounts in the Monstrorum historia describe “monstrous” peoples in distant places. A helpful representation of how the logics of expropriation and domination were spliced together is Aldrovandi’s account of the Giants of America

(Gigantes Americae). In this entry, Aldrovandi reproduces the images of “giants nine or ten feet tall, living in a certain region of America which is called Patagonia” that he copies from a map drawn by Cornelius de Jode.65 Since Aldrovandi never produced his own empirical confirmation of these New World “giants,” he depended instead on facts and fictions about them that circulated in the reports of travel writers, explorers, and natural history artists.66 Describing the New World races as “giants” had become something of a topos by the late sixteenth century, as evidenced by de

Jode’s defensive comment that “[he] would not call them giants undeservedly, since scarcely any of the Portuguese reached their waist-band” or Antonio Pigafetta’s observation that the Magellan expedition’s sailors did not even reach the waist of the first “giant” they encountered. To call these people “giants” reflects Europe’s terrified and affective response to interactions with new and different humans, not a valid scientific claim.

That Aldrovandi plagiarized de Jode’s colonial discourse presents a case of ethnographic information travelling from map to book; the process of expropriating material from one genre to another (cartography to natural history, in this case) has serious epistemological and political ramifications. Aldrovandi’s citation – his

65 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, p. 34-5. 66 See Gerard de Jode, Speculum, preceding plate II: “Gigantes non iniuria dixerim, cum Lusitanorum vix aliquis eos aequarit, qua medii cinguntur;” in Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps and Monsters, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 169.

51 reproduction of the same ontology of Patagonian gigantism, this time decontextualized from the map – erases any trace of historical or geographic specificity. This transposition thus generalizes the ontology of all Patagonians as a

“monstrous” people. As such, wonder operates as a totalizing and essentializing technique. Like the “savages” of Pliny’s ethnography, the Giants of America

“embody various kinds of lack;” from their lack of proper names, clothing, or recognizable institutional values, the giants proffer a strangeness that holds the power to excite wonder.67 By means of their absent qualities, the representation of the

“giants” also carves out the negative space between humans and animals, between order and chaos. When Aldrovandi places the Giants of America in this space of non- being, his natural history denies them the ability to be a subject; on the contrary, this appropriated woodcut enables their treatment as objects of nature that should be dominated, not only feared or marveled at, by Europeans. Their gigantism was not considered an individual aberration but, rather, an essential pathology of the entire group. This innate abnormality could therefore be leveraged to legitimize their subjugation by the superior Europeans.

Other entries deal explicitly with the treatment of the “monsters” living within

European society. Many pages attempt to catalogue and inventory the princely retainers who hovered somewhere between subjects and objects in the courts. In

1594, Aldrovandi visited the courtly home of a wealthy friend to study members of the Gonzales family who suffered from a very particular genetic abnormality that had provoked widespread curiosity and conversation among physicians, natural

67 Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia, p. 165.

52 philosophers, and aristocrats across Western Europe. The bodies of Petrus Gonzales and most of his children were covered in hair.68 Aldrovandi was eager to make sense of the family’s “wild” and “monstrous” condition in medical terms.69 Using the

“monster” tag to establish the Gonzales family’s prima facie marginal status,

Aldrovandi’s perverse fascination with their non-normative hairiness reflects the social attitudes of early modern Italian patrician culture: wonder needed to be transcribed into ordered hierarchies that differentiated between normal and abnormal.

Although wonder was the initial response to the Gonzales family, scientific and medical reasoning were used to contain the terrifying power of their difference.

Aldrovandi vouched for the authenticity of their hairiness, that they were not just people wearing bear suits or the product of an artist’s wandering imagination. “This wild kind of man,” Aldrovandi writes “was first seen in Bologna when the most illustrious Marchesa of Soragna… brought with her an eight-year-old hairy girl, the daughter of a fifty-year-old wild man, born in the Canary Islands.”70 The attention to specific detail – proper names, ages, and New Word location – accredits the rigor and depth of Aldrovandi’s research to understand and diagnose their “monstrosity.” With this intent, Aldrovandi objectified the Gonzales family as his test subjects in order to augment the facts of nature that he could add to his book. As objects of knowledge production, the Gonzales family was coded as abnormal while Aldrovandi was

68 This condition is known in contemporary medicine as hypertrichosis universalis. 69 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, p. 16. 70 Ibid. Aldrovandi’s curiosity about the Gonzales’ hairiness as an object for study was not unique. The portraits of the Gonzales family – copied, re-copied, given as gifts, reworked into new portraits – were highly valued for every type of collector. Their hairiness positioned them between animal and human, wild and civilized. They were thus seen as perfect prototypes for cabinets of curiosities that sought to deliberately cross and blend categories.

53 considered normal as well as the expert who could order and reproduce this very binary through his writing of medical accounts.

However, the representation of the daughter Antonietta Gonzales complicates the narrative of how medicine negotiated the margins of European society. In a narrowly medical sense Antonietta was indistinguishable from her father and brothers, but Aldrovandi’s separate representation of her shows how ideologies of gender were fundamental to this emerging scientific discourse. In Aldrovandi’s entry, the male members of the Gonzales family are most often described as “wild,” almost a testament to their strength, power, and masculinity. Aldrovandi linked the male growth of facial hair with an animal-like sexual potency; he comments, thus, that he was not at all surprised that Petrus Gonzales fathered at least seven children.71 The description of Antonietta, on the other hand, is much more extensive and marginalizing. Aldrovandi observes:

The girl’s face was entirely hair on the front, except for the nostrils and her lips around the mouth. The hairs on her forehead were longer and rougher in comparison with those which covered her cheeks, although these are softer to touch than the rest of her body, and she was hairy on the foremost part of her back and bristling with yellow hair up to the beginning of her loins.72

This caption takes every opportunity to point out her strangeness, her “monstrosity.”

The sixteenth-century Italian cleric and scholar Piero Valeriano Bolzani wrote that hair was a sign of masculinity that should be allowed only to male bodies. “Nature,”

71 Ibid. Aldrovandi cites Marcus Antonius Ulmus in this passage. Ulmus was one of Aldrovandi’s close colleagues and had published the Physiologia Barbae Humanae, a three-hundred-page book recorded the opinions of “illustrious doctors and philosophers” from many centuries on hairiness, particularly on beards. 72 Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia, p. 18.

54 Bolzani argued, “has made men rough and full of hair… the vigorous strength of manhood is discerned from the tenderness of women.”73 Thus, when Aldrovandi elaborates on Antonietta’s hairiness he also strips away her femininity. Without this marker of femininity, she is coded as abnormal twice over: first, for her medical condition and second, for her deviation from normative gender.

The corresponding illustration al vivo (see fig. 3 on following page) reinforces the patriarchal claims of Aldrovandi’s entry by figuratively reducing her body to a component of nature. The hair on her face transforms fluidly into trailing vines. The ground beneath her germinates a grass-like plant with fluffy blossoms that mirror her furry, hairy face. Even her gown sprouts floral embellishments, symbolizing her absorption into Nature. To recede into naturalness intensified her otherness and primitiveness. From the perspective of imperial administrators, Antonietta was barely even human at all. She was regarded as part of Nature, along with vines and soils and flowers – and treated accordingly.

As an addendum to this analysis, our historical vantage point reveals

Aldrovandi’s investment in ordering discourses that circulated and recirculated particular hegemonic ideologies in order to fabricate scientific truth claims. I contend that the instrumentalization of these gendered ideologies was not a fundamentally different mode of organizing the world than the scientific distinctions between humans and nature; to recognize these overlapping logics collapses the space between truth and lies and highlights how pure scientific or medical knowledge is always just

73 Bolzani’s’s work appeared in an anonymous English translation, published in London in 1533. The quotations are from f. 10r and f. 17v-18r in Merry E. Wiesner, The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their Worlds. Yale University Press, 2009.

55 a lie (in the Nietzschean sense) that fits certain conventions in order to fabricate truth and retain dominance.74 The European framework of cultural patriarchy – and perhaps the entire colonial undertaking – would break down if these female

“monsters” were seen as humans on equal footing with the male civilizers.

Figure 3: Antonietta Gonzales from the Monstrorum historia

74 Here, I am incorporating Nietzsche’s argument from “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense” Nietzsche describes the establishment of “truth” as a peace pact created between individuals because humans are, by necessity, social creatures. These individuals set conventions of “truth” in order to establish the means of interaction. Therefore, those who adhere to these constraints speak the “truth”, and those who do not are “liars.” However, it is only in forgetting that these designations were made arbitrarily that man can believe himself to possess any notion of truth.

56

We have seen in this chapter how the collection, selection, and control of knowledge about the wonders of nature was also a staging of colonial power that placed the natural world at European disposal and solidified the limits of the known and the normal. Aldrovandi’s cabinet of curiosities, as an encyclopedic inquiry into botany and human nature, can be thought of as a “monument” for communicating the power of its creator.75 Aldrovandi’s collection assembled the domain of empiricity as describable and ordered. Moreover, all of this material has been systematized and authorized in a certain way: it has been subjugated to Aldrovandi’s mode of organization, endorsing truth in a particular version of heterogeneity, and by doing so, excluding from legitimacy other forms of knowledge. In the following chapter, we will attend to Aldrovandi’s monument of natural history in its most recent digital iterations, where knowledge production functions differently than in the sixteenth- century episteme but remains equally enmeshed in power relations.

75 Trevor Morgan Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford University Press, 2004.

57 CHAPTER THREE: Structures of Knowledge: The (De)Spatialization of l’Archivio Aldrovandi

Since 2004, the concerted effort to digitize the fifteen volumes of

Aldrovandi’s plant tables has restructured l’archivio Aldrovandi far beyond anything

Aldrovandi himself could have ever possibly imagined. This project has been pioneered by Annalisa Managlia, the curator of the Bologna herbarium (BOLO), an institute that manages several Italian natural history collections. This particular digitizing platform on the University of Oxford’s database, BRAHMS online, strives to expand Aldrovandi’s early modern collection in order to increase the research possibilities for modern historians and scientists. The developers have successfully photographed, classified, and ordered upwards of half of Aldrovandi’s encyclopedic collection, and they anticipate further publication in the coming years. Though attractive in some ways, the project’s emphasis on scalability ultimately comes at a cost: it imposes into the early modern material the Enlightenment system of Linnaean taxonomy and also isolates each plant specimen as a way to despatialize knowledge, to cultivate a space of neutral and objective natural history. This decontextualized space authorizes the harmful impression that its knowledge – both the natural history as performed by Aldrovandi in the sixteenth century and the current technoscientific reproduction of his materials – is unified and unchangingly pure. As such, the technoscientific archive of natural history appears as a “culture of no culture,” that is, it constructs a community with the shared belief that their common convictions are

58 not in the least cultural but, rather, timeless truths.76 To rearrange Aldrovandi’s archive with the techniques of the Digital Humanities tends to both fetishize the historical archive as the guarantor of knowledge that technology can bring out and superimpose conventional epistemic standards that knowledge can only be achieved by adopting a disinterested, impartial view from nowhere.77 Through this computer- mediated indexing apparatus of display, the architecture of the technical is naturalized, or better rationalized, to seem free of tropes. Its machinery, designed to categorize and exclude, is institutionally supported and reinforced to exert a pressure on other discourses and yet mystifies the very power structures that pervade it.

The two preceding chapters of this thesis have explored the sociological character of scientific practices in the early modern period, revealing how power and natural knowledge are intimately linked. So too, in this third chapter, I hope to explore how even in a fetishized digital form, which our current historical moment seems to find transparent and objective, scientific knowledge is still always from somewhere; the technical is always the political. Moreover, the twenty-first century digitization of Aldrovandi’s archive with the tools of the Digital Huminites did not come out of nowhere: its platform is the current manifestation of contingent turns of history, not the outcome of rationally inevitable trends. With this genealogical approach, the spatial evolution of Aldrovandi’s archive onto BRAHMS online can be traced back initially to the collection’s early modern transformations from studio to galleria and their respective understandings of private and public space. This

76 Reid, Roddey, and Sharon Traweek. Doing Science + Culture. Routledge, 2000. Also borrowed by Haraway in Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 23. 77 T. Nagel, The View from Nowhere, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.

59 remodeling was followed by a systematic reordering of the archive into a permanent collection at the Palazzo Poggi according to eighteenth-century motivations. In this chapter I will show how the digital database is, in fact, the technoscientific progeny, the assemblage, the heterogenous culmination of all these previous changes to the archive’s spatialization.78 Therefore, the configuration of digital space is itself stratified and mixed. Drawing on this unwieldy, provisional narrative enables us to posit questions that the digital archive’s architecture does not broadcast on its own – most importantly, the type of questions that help us to see mixed and differential positions in context as a way to resist the totalizations, myths, and illusions of epistemic stability that suffuse our current technoscientific moment.

I. The Politics of Space: From Studio to Galleria

In the past few decades, historians in many fields – from architectural history, art history, and the history of science – have become increasingly aware of how the spatial dimensions of human experience shed light on the kinds of questions we wish to ask.79 Given this historiographic turn, identifying the relationship between spatialization and society cracks open a space for commentary. Paula Findlen’s work pays special attention to the complicated links between the discursive culture of

78 When I write that the digital database is the offspring of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century alterations to the collection, I am guided by Foucault and Nietzsche’s understanding of lineage. Herkunft denotes a lineage, provenance, heritage, or tradition. Far from identifying simple generic characteristics, the use of Herkunft allows the genealogist to make claims about the impurity and instability of the soul and the self. Foucault’s analysis of descent is positioned not in terms of evolutionary destiny, but within a complex course of the errors, accidents, and deviations. 79 See Paula Findlen, “History of Science: How Buildings Matter.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 65, no. 1, 2006, pp. 7–8; Nancy Stieber, “Introduction.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 65, no. 1, 2006, pp. 5–6.; Adi Ophir, “A Place of Knowledge Recreated: The Library of Michel de Montaigne,” Science in Context 4, 1991, pp. 163-189.

60 natural history and its respective architectural niches in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Italy. Answering Alfonse Dupront’s classic question from his study on the relationship between humanism and space (“If humanism is most characteristic of

Renaissance values where then does one find the humanists?”), Findlen locates the humanists, especially naturalists such as Aldrovandi, in the demarcated setting of the museum.80 She expands her definition of the museum to include the experience of civil and civilizing society that, in all its forms, shaped the social paradigm of curiosity, collecting, and (self-)display.81 This theoretical move towards a material and spatial history of knowledge production recognizes the museum as a communicative site that both enabled and fostered the developing practices of early modern natural history. As Findlen observes: “questions that are internal to buildings and those that are external to them… cannot be so easily separated.”82 The way people use space affects how they organize and interpret their world. A building, monument, or museum is therefore more than just mute walls, an empty receptacle waiting to be filled; the space itself – as both a material and a way of knowing, both an object to explain and an object that does the explaining – has its own independent capacity to mediate social, economic, political, and cultural meaning.

Aldrovandi was also conscious of how the construction and organization of his studio would impact his natural history project and, in turn, the community of scientific practitioners who participated in its fabrication. During Aldrovandi’s

80 Alfonse Dupront, “Espace et humanism,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 1946, p. 8. 81 I play here with the terms display and self-display as a reflexive mode to think about how museum collections both stage material objects and possessions of the naturalists, but also embody the self- conscious display of the naturalist’s prowess through the connections between possession and power. 82 Findlen, “History of Science: How Buildings Matter,” p. 7.

61 lifetime, his collection was housed predominately in one single room of his family’s private palace near Piazza Santo Stefano in Bologna. This collection room was stocked top to bottom with eclectic objects from near and far, printed manuscripts, and synoptic tables that situated specimens from his neighboring botanical garden within the vast fields of wonder and knowledge.83

Aldrovandi’s notes from 1599 and a brief anonymous inventory from 1610

(five years after his death) document the design of his studio as it was organized during the last decade of his life.84 The plan (see fig. 4 below) reveals that visitors entered the studio through a small, narrow vestibule into an antechamber that overlooked a garden. On the right was a room referred to as the “dark room” (camera obscura), while on the left was the museum room, which led to two libraries, called the “first library” (la prima libraria) and the “second library” (la seconda libraria) facing a courtyard. In these early years of his professorial appointment, his museum was small and, though attached to his private studio, remained distinct from the space in which he produced notes and commentaries. While the museum room, which housed Aldrovandi’s natural specimens and objects, was technically the largest room in the studio, the two areas allocated for his books together occupied almost twice as much space. The proximity of the ‘first library’ to the museum and its designation as

‘first’ suggest that this was the original area Aldrovandi dedicated to his books.

83 It is important to clarify that during Aldrovandi’s lifetime, the display was only accessible to an exclusive community of naturalist and patricians, not yet an object for public consumption as will become the case in the following century. 84 Sandra Tugnoli Pattaro, “Inventario et descrittione somaria dello Studio et Museo del già eccell.mo sig.re Ulisse Aldrovandi, per esso lasciato all’Ill.mo Reggimento, descritto nel modo che hora si trova in casa dell’Autore,” in Cristiana Scappini and Maria Pia Torricelli, Lo Studio Aldrovandi in Palazzo Pubblico, 1617–1742, Bologna: CLUEB, 1993, pp. 93–94.

62

Figure 4: Aldrovandi’s studio

This design was derived from the early Renaissance idea of a studio as a private working area which was possessed by “each scholar in all of Christendom.”85 As such, his organization matched the valued sixteenth-century practice of the solitary scholar who had access to a wealth of material possessions for his studies but ultimately crafted his genius in a private context. While the privacy of reading from the Book of Nature was still at the heart of his layout, the effort to publicly display his collection, to make the wonders of nature more accessible, had entered into the practices of early modern naturalists. The courtly elite had begun “pilgrimages” to the notable sites of knowledge, Aldrovandi’s collection included. As a result, Aldrovandi purposefully conflated these two spaces– the studio and the collection room – as a way to forge his authority in this community of exhibition and reception. The spatial

85 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Aldrovandi, ms. 34, Vol. I, c. 6r. My translation. For a more detailed look at who these scholars were see Paula Findlen, “Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Museum,” in The Architecture of Science, ed. by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (London: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 29–57.

63 coincidence of the site of knowledge production and that of knowledge display indicated the reliability of his natural history. This architectural order asserts that

Aldrovandi’s collection had not been corrupted or altered by any intermediary factors.

In 1603, as his collection grew in size and exposure, Aldrovandi eagerly reorganized his space to transform this studio into a galleria.86 This shift meant that the archive was no longer based on the model of the private scholar in his own study room. Rather, the galleria was privileged as a more accessible setting that signaled a new publicity for the activity of private collecting. Although the process of this expansion and new function was not straightforward or unified – and ultimately was not realized according to Aldrovandi’s wishes – the occasion did encourage him to reflect on the use of space in classifying the objects his studio contained. Aldrovandi left instructions to the Senate of Bologna about how his collection ought to be installed and displayed, often with an emphasis on categories that modern science considers inscrutable.87 His intention was to show off the diversity and expansiveness of his archive in such a way that would highlight the vastness of the things of nature.

Within each room, the displayed objects would be juxtaposed according to the principles of heterogeneity and multiplicity. In this construction, he retained the

Wunderkammer structure in part to produce certain affective responses in his viewer.

While Aldrovandi organized his intended galleria with an encyclopedist’s passion for wonder, later inventories of the Aldrovandi’s studio convey a noticeably

86 I see this evolution operating on a linguistic plane as well. While Renaissance collectors labeled their museums as studio, studiolo, stanzino (little room), or occasionally guardaroba (wardrobe), seventeeth- and eighteenth-century collectors preferred terms like tribuna, and referred to the Uffizi Galleries in particular as a galleria. 87 Duroselle-Melish, C., and David A. Lines. “The Library of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1605): Acquiring and Organizing Books in Sixteenth-Century Bologna.” The Library, vol. 16, pp. 133–61.

64 different motivation. The 1696 inventory reveals the political consequences of designating the galleria as a public, secular monument to celebrate the scientific culture of Bologna.88 The politicized ritual site of the Palazzo Pubblico, like many civic buildings throughout Italy, was inescapably connected to the agenda of the inconstant local government. Since the fall of the Bentivoglio family and the absorption of Bologna into the papal state in the early sixteenth century, the Palazzo

Pubblico was occupied by both the gonfaloniere, the civic head of government, and the papal legate, appointed by the Vatican to oversee the civic administration.89 This mixed government, known as a signoria senatoria, used the exhibition of

Aldrovandi’s natural histories to create a spectacle of their own authority.

The cultural pressures put upon this museum space, not to mention the fact that the designers were more interested in propitiating the wealthy politicians than the dead naturalist, inevitably modified Aldrovandi’s original design. These varying social and political circumstances influenced the goals for the archive, orienting the studio more and more toward being a material object for public consumption. The late seventeenth-century curators divided the museum into four connected rooms: the first room included Aldrovandi’s specimens; the second, his library of books; the third, his own manuscripts and woodblocks for engravings; and the fourth, more curiosities, both natural and artificial – presumably to reproduce more faithfully Aldrovandi’s own organization of his cabinet. A grand hallway (passaggio) and staircase were added to facilitate movement among these now decidedly distinct spaces – but also to

88 Bologna, Biblioteca Universitaria, Cod. 394 (408), Busta VI, f. II. 89 I understand this history from an Urban History class I took at the University of Bologna with Professor Ceccarelli. He cites Paolo Colliva, “Bologna dal XIV al XVIII secolo: ‘governo misto’ o signoria senatoria,” in Storia dell Emilia Romagna, Aldo Berselli, Bologna, 1977, pp. 13-34.

65 represent the curator’s wealth. This layout prescribed the type of experience visitors could have in the galleria, often guiding them away from a study of the natural particulars and towards a recognition of the signoria senatoria’s ability to transform

Aldrovandi’s hallowed hall of natural philosophy into an impressive museum of science for virtuosi, senators, the legate, and other naturalists to revel in. Their sociopolitical motivation resulted in changes to the architectural layout of the museum, specifically in alterations that fabricated a more limited experience of the naturalia as objects that prove the signoria senatoria’s curatorial prowess. In other words, the spatial organization became a metonymy for political spectacle.

II. Ordering Codes and Exclusions: The Eighteenth-Century Episteme

The respatializations of the Studio Aldrovandi assumed a new dimension in the eighteenth-century. These changes in both architectural and curatorial intent coincided with shifts in knowledge production that solidified a century after

Aldrovandi’s passing.90 Foucault’s explanation of this this shift is useful: the structure of knowledge evolved (this verb connoting something different from progressed) from an emphasis on resemblances and similitudes in the sixteenth-century episteme to a focus on ordering, identity, and difference that gave rise to the categorization and taxonomy in what he denominates as the eighteenth-century episteme of

Representation.91 Since the beginning of the seventeenth century, sixteenth-century resemblance was excluded from knowledge. In its place came a discourse that was

90 See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1996; Silvio Bendini, “The Evolution of Science Museums,” Technology and Culture, vol. 6, no. 1, 1965, pp. 1–29. 91 Foucault, the Order of Things.

66 capable of representing things only by placing them within a rigid system of difference. In this eighteenth-century epistemic system of representation, “to know

[was] to discriminate.”92 This understanding of knowledge necessitated a system of categories to mark, codify, and distinguish objects. Thus, to be knowable was to be subsumed within a category. The naturalist was neither expected nor encouraged “to dig out the ancient Word from the unknown places where it may be hidden,” but rather, his job was to classify living beings on the web of fixed knowledge that was natural history.93

Fundamentally, the codified terminology of the eighteenth-century discourse of natural history reveals just how much Enlightenment naturalists and curators were unable to comprehend the premise of sixteenth-century natural philosophy. With different taxonomies came a different language for nature, and this language did not offer much room for translation or flexibility. The Cinquecento model was no longer considered a valid system. Buffon’s review of Aldrovandi in the preface to his 1749

Histoire Naturelle shows how Enlightenment naturalists missed the point of early modern natural history:

Aldrovandi, the most hardworking and knowledgeable of all naturalists, after laboring for sixty years, left behind some immense volumes on Natural History, the majority of which were printed successively after his death. One can reduce them to a tenth of their total size by removing all of the useless and strange things in this subject from them. Despite this prolixity, which I confess is nearly overwhelming, his books must be regarded among the best on the whole Natural History;

92 Ibid., p. 55. 93 Ibid., p. 62-63. In these pages of The Order of Things, Foucault implies that representation was deeply intertwined with resemblances, though it works hard to try to separate itself, to seem more neutral or more objective. This point is important to keep in mind when we turn to the agenda of the Digital Humanities.

67 the plan of his work is good, his distributions sensible, his divisions well marked and his descriptions rather exact, monotonous but faithful to the truth. [However] the history is less good. Often fables are interspersed, allowing us to see too much of the author’s penchant for credulity.94

Once again, during the sixteenth century episteme, the inclusion of fables and legends was not a manifestation of naiveté but, rather, a humble acknowledgement of the infinity of nature and the naturalist’s inability to fully classify its entirety even as he actively endeavors to do so. The language of interpretation, commentary, and addition was at the core of credible knowledge production and power/knowledge in the early modern iteration of the Republic of Letters. Also, for the sixteenth-century community of scientific practitioners, the knowledge of wonders was crucial to reconcile classical authority with the developing practices of empirical observation.

But, on Buffon’s view, the additions of legends, philology, etymology were a distraction that rendered the work not rigorous or concise enough: it allowed the reader to “see too much” of the author’s engagement with the natural world.

Reacting against what they perceived to be the Renaissance’s excessively affective engagement (through pleasure, curiosity, and amusement) with the natural world, Enlightenment naturalists adopted an ostensibly more systematic and normative approach to collecting based on Linnaean taxonomy and classification.

Carl Linnaeus’ system codified a hierarchy of categories – kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species – through which all living and natural things could be filtered. He also established the formula for assigning Latin names to species.

94 In Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 404. She uses a translation that can be found in Mario Cermenati “Ulisse Aldrovandi e l’America.”

68 Linnaeus writes in his Systema naturae that the naturalist – whom he calls Historiens naturalis – “distinguishes the parts of natural bodies with his eyes, describes them appropriately according to their number, form, position, and proportion, and he names them”95 As even Linnaeus himself understood, there was a necessary degree of arbitrariness to his system in order to create an “official currency” for those interested in botany.96 Some characteristics must be considered too numerous to be treated together or too few if taken separately, and the naturalist must abide by a standardized system to determine what differences make a difference. For these reasons, the

Enlightenment natural historian was concerned most with the structure of the visible world and its denomination according to characters; not with diverse and compounding interpretations of natural things.

In 1742, Aldrovandi’s archive was redistributed to reflect this normalized eighteenth-century taxonomy of nature. The Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di

Bologna (The Institute of Sciences) was assigned the task of moving the collection from the Palazzo Pubblico to a university-owned palace, the Palazzo Poggi.97 The idea was to install a public Museum of Natural History that could showcase Italy’s natural resources. Luigi Ferdinando Marsili, the founder of the Institute of Sciences, was in charge of rebuilding the museum in keeping with these modern principals.

“We need to render it less confused,” Marsili wrote to a letter to the last custodian of the Studio Aldrovandi.98 For Marsili, the outmoded organization of the Studio

95 Linnaeus, Systema naturae, p. 215. 96 Linnaeus, Philosophie botanique, section 284; Linnaeus, Systema naturae, section 12. 97 Marta Cavazza, Settecento inquieto. Alle Origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna, Bologna, 1990, pp. 119-148. 98 Giuseppe Gaetano Bolletti, Dell’origine e de’ progressi dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna, Bologna, 1751, p. 25.

69 Aldrovandi was a reminder of Italy’s “backwardness as a center of scientific learning.”99 It is not a surprise, then, that Marsili’s first initiative in the new space of the Palazzo Poggi was to reorganize Aldrovandi’s archive according to new disciplinary divisions of the sciences, converting the collection into Linnaean rather than Plinian knowledge. The possessions from Aldrovandi’s eclectic cabinet were physically separated into different rooms – each matching an emerging subdivision of natural science including botany, paleontology, and zoology – in order to avoid the unsystematic, “overwhelming” connections made by Aldrovandi when he had placed all the artifacts together in one grand cabinet.100

Marsili’s plan for the collection at the Palazzo Poggi rendered Aldrovandi’s project more familiar to an eighteenth-century frame of mind by parading the research and education that gave the University of Bologna its sterling scientific reputation in the modern age. The eighteenth-century respatialization marked a methodological move from the studiosi di natura to the scientific dilettanti, to differentiate the multiple discourses of Renaissance naturalists from the representations of “true”

Enlightenment natural history. This layout of the Palazzo Poggi (see fig. 5 below) precluded any deviation from Marsili’s vision of “true” natural history. While the visitors of Aldrovandi’s sixteenth-century studio were encouraged to move freely among several heterogenous rooms (perhaps staring in wonder at the exhibition of

“hanging whale bones and marine monsters” before choosing whether to look at more natural objects or to explore some of Aldrovandi’s drawings and engravings), the

99 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature, p. 400. 100 Buffon, “Initial Discourse,” in From Natural History to the History of Nature, John Lyon and Phillip Sloane, Notre Dame, IN, 1981.

70 Palazzo Poggi instead channeled visitors’ choices into a single avenue of procession.101 The tour begins in the atrium and then immediately moves into a large central hallway (the curved nuovo passaggio), which requires visitors to walk past several other collections of renowned eighteenth-century Italian naturalists and physicians before arriving at the Sala di Ulisse. In fact, this path is the only way to access Aldrovandi’s collection. As such, the visitors’ reception of Aldrovandi’s collection is molded by the eighteenth-century expectations for doing science which were celebrated in these first few rooms along the hallway. Just as visitors’ physical motions are constrained to one path so too are their interpretations moderated.

Figure 5: Palazzo Poggi

101 From my figure 4 found on p. 64 of this thesis.

71 By dismissing Aldrovandi’s approach as “confused,” Marsili (both consciously or not) dictated what metaphors and tropes of science and nature were authorized to dominate. This architecture that was built around, literally enclosing, the technical and the natural was used to buttress his modern position. Curiosity and wonder were replaced by a limiting order that defined and licensed what could count as natural history through matrices of power. And, the eighteenth-century spatialization of the Aldrovandi’s studio – along with its epistemological legacy – has persisted. In its guise as seemingly more public and accessible, the eighteenth-century transformation of the archive prefigures the topic of the next section: the creation, legitimization, and rationalization of a space of no space through the Digital

Humanities platform, BRAHMS online.102

III. Digital Architecture: The Space of No Space

For enthusiasts, the Digital Humanities are open, collaborative, and committed to making the traditional humanities rethink dated tendencies.103 In its ideal brochure form, these digital archives can give broader access to other collections that already exist but have not necessarily been consolidated in one space. Since there are supposedly many ways that these projects can operate, the Digital Humanities encompass a range of scholarly practices, including literary studies, interactive digital archives, and editing projects. Stemming from this effort to enhance collections of primary source materials as well as manage and organize large-scale scholarly editing

102 With space of no space, I am explicitly riffing off of Sharon Traweek’s conception of a “culture of no culture” in Doing Science + Culture. 103 Patricia Cohen. “Humanities Scholars Embrace Digital Technology.” The New York Times, 16 Nov. 2010. NYTimes.com, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html.

72 projects, many proponents of the Digital Humanities advertise, in an almost utopian language, the field’s purported “commitment to open standards and open resources.”104 Ideally, open access is designed to empower anyone with an internet- enabled device to view a website or read an article without having to pay, as well as share content with the appropriate permissions.105

This romanticized argument of flexibility and accessibility, which has been given by many proponents of the Digital Humanities, reverberates through BRAHMS’ mission statement. BRAHMS online offers the digital infrastructure to efficiently control and structure archives, thereby reifying the eighteenth-century episteme’s value of identity and difference. The BRAHMS project self-identifies as “a scalable management system” that is part of the wider research program at the University of

Oxford to “study and document biodiversity.”106 On the center of its homepage, a chic computer graphic (see fig. 6 below) seeks to convince its user how many possibilities can arise through purchase of the software. The graphic features Silicon

Valley-esque Venn diagrams with overlapping neutral-colored bubbles and plain PT

Sans font; curation and research are paired as the gateway for literature, taxonomic data, surveys and diversity, and more. Although this image uses the scientific form of the Venn diagram to signify the ordering processes of the Enlightenment episteme, the graphic itself does not produce any meaningful scientific knowledge.

104 Marilyn Deegan and Willard McCarty (eds.), Collaborative Research in the Digital Humanities. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, pp. 11–26. 105 We, of course, know that this ideal does not always manifest in reality. Many digital platforms, such as Jstor or ProjectMuse, have corporate profits about which we should remain skeptical. 106 Home Page - BRAHMS Online. http://137.204.21.141/.

73

Figure 6: BRAHMS Venn diagram The text below this diagram advertises that by using the BRAHMS database, one can

“selectively enable and integrate specialised modules for museum collections, botanic gardens, seed banks, surveys, taxonomy, literature and images” as well as “boost the research and curation potential of [their] data both off and online, using powerful tools that manage, explore, analyse, map and report data and images.”107 As if the possibilities were not already clear enough, the homepage also features a bullet-point list of BRAHMS attributes and characteristics. Some of these statements include:

• Seamlessly extend your database structure with custom fields • Develop the taxonomy core with nomenclature, descriptions, common names, conservation codes and more… • Add any category of physical specimen to collection events including material duplicated to multiple institutions • Link image files, media library URLs, PDFs, sound archives, and other documents to any record in your database • Fully international, BRAHMS stores data in any character set with a UI that can be translated into any language

The program highlights its ability to optimize, develop, and extend any database structure seamlessly.108 The repeated use of the adverb “any” reiterates the database’s proclaimed flexibility to accommodate all kinds of projects.

107 Ibid. 108 Ibid. This emphasis is from the text on the homepage.

74 BRAHMS online manages several taxonomic research, botanical garden, and natural history archives from different historical moments. The platform transforms scientific language into historical projects so that the digital archive can be useful to historians in the humanities who want to study past scientific arrangements of the world. To maneuver the interface, the computer architecture has embedded hyperlinks to each of these projects. By clicking on the link for L’Erbario di Ulisse Aldrovandi, we have access to a complete and integrated version of Aldrovandi’s archive that eclipses the scope of his early modern project by transfiguring his plant materials into a digitized, categorized, systematic depository that can be moved around and reordered with the tap of a mouse. This database prides itself on the fact that it contains every single version of every single Aldrovandi manuscript on plants. The

“Che Cosa” tab on L’Erbario di Ulisse Aldrovandi states that: “in 2004, the entire collection [more than 5,000 specimens] has been digitized and published on-line with free access giving the opportunity to researchers from all over the world to study this precious and unique collection.”109 The use, again, of superlatives such as “all over the world” and “precious and unique collection” aggrandizes the database. This hyperbolic language shows a similar excitement on the part of its curators to that of many Digital Humanities advocates, expressing that the web version of the archive, in its movement from analog to digital, can expand the research accessibility of

Aldrovandi’s studio. In principle, the digital archive works to convince us that it is the ideal composite of the perfect studio and the quintessential galleria. Aldrovandi’s studio had grown (due to its Plinian collecting of all noteworthy facts) beyond its

109 Mission statement from BRAHMS’ official website, found at Home Page - BRAHMS Online. http://137.204.21.141/.

75 original bounds into two libraries and, later, into a bigger, public galleria. Now, the studio has been further processed into a despatialized collection in this contemporary configuration. The digital project reverses the overgrowing bounds of the studio by becoming a space with no bounds but, even as such, retains each of these transformations in its stratified, digital form. Thus, the digital platform does not represent one simple or ideal archive but, rather, a repository of the previous processes and ordering systems that have been applied to Aldrovandi’s studio since the Enlightenment.

By overshadowing the natural materials with enhanced technical savviness, the digital archive takes shape as a material-semiotic technoscientific project. The homepage spotlights the database’s high-tech imaging equipment (le attrezzature) as

“basata sulla Camera Eyelike DCS, capace di acquisire immagini in alta risoluzione… grazie anche alla trasmissione dei dati via fibra ottica ad hard disk

LaCie firewire.”110 Before opening the digital archive, the user can find links to a variety of video clips to best make use of the site: to filter genera, to group plant specimens, to map species geographically, etc. Each of these features plays a role in determining the interpretation of the collection. The high-resolution plant images in the digital herbarium are can be located in a search bar with folders coded according to the specimen’s Linnaean taxonomy: Acanthaceae, Aceraceae, Acoraceae,

Adiantaceae, and so on (see fig. 7 below). The meaning of this species search bar is twofold: it reinforces the romanticized impression that BRAHMS is totally open and

110 The photographic setup for the herbarium specimen “used an Eyelike DCS Digital camera, which captures 6000 X 6000 pixels, RGB, 300 dpi images. These data were stored in a LaCie firewire hard disk.” (My translation).

76 flexible, that the user could theoretically find any plant within Aldrovandi’s collection; and yet, this search has already been filtered into alphabetized folders and sub-folders. This filtering method foregrounds the un-mystified nature of a nonhuman computer operating system that organizes information within folder icons.

Figure 7: L’archivio Aldrovandi on BRAHMS online

In an even more critical twist, we can characterize the University of Oxford’s digital archive as a strange, non-sensical conglomeration of different meaning-making systems. BRAHMS online appropriates an already reordered archive and imposes a new order onto it. Ordering structures from different epistemes are sloppily mixed together in a way that does not quite make sense. The alphabetization of the species search bar comes from the eighteenth-century Linnaean system of naming to create hierarchies of species and genera. The folder structure similarly structures information into a hierarchy, but the content of these folders does not deepen the scientific logic of the Linnaean taxonomies. At the same time as BRAHMS online practically shouts at its user about how flexible and accessible the platform can be,

77 the digital archive’s organization of knowledge ignores its own muddled and confused combination of ordering principles.

An overvaluing of the tools and methodology of the Digital Humanities, bolstered with a bad faith belief that the database is somehow capable of giving us unmediated access to the past, does a great disservice to the complex assemblages between humans and nature, to the idiosyncratic interactions of different scientific cultures throughout time. This false objectivity disarms the historical consciousness of the possible self-affirmation derived from reflexive, subjective, and self-critical perspectives – from situated knowledges.

IV. A Technoscientific Collection: Constructing the Modest Witness

Before delineating the high-stakes game of this limited imagination in a supposedly versatile and open computer database, I would like to formally introduce the term “technoscience” which has significant importance for feminist science studies – a central pillar of my theoretical and methodological approach. In the last decade, technoscience has replaced the term “science & technology” in science and technology studies (STS). Originally, the term technoscience was conceived by the

French science studies scholar Bruno Latour to describe the close amalgamation of science and society. According to Latour, technoscience comprises “all the elements which are linked to scientific issues, no matter how dirty, unexpected or foreign they may seem.”111 Latour argues that successful research must involve and mobilize

111 Bruno Latour, Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society, Harvard University Press, 1987, p. 174.

78 powerful allies, from economic and political resources to non-human actors such as organisms or machines.

But Donna Haraway has elaborated the meaning of technoscience further to highlight its cultural and historical dimensions, to remember the connections between the long-standing global human activity of technology combined with the relatively recent scientific method and its modest witness that occurred primarily in Europe during the seventeenth-and eighteenth-centuries.112 This insistence on assemblage is also one of the reasons for the permanent intermingling that Haraway uncovers between Nature and Culture, for the production of hybrids, cyborgs, and chimeras in modern times.113 Especially in her book, Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™:

Feminism and Technoscience, Haraway puts the term technoscience in a broader frame to recognize it as a cultural practice that operationalizes dense nodal alliances of human and nonhuman actors and names “the worldly, materialized, signifying and

112 The terms “modest witness” is from S. Shapin and S. Schaffer in Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. To Haraway, the postulation of such a “modest man” demands even further consideration. How does modesty, a quintessential and embodied feminine virtue of antiquity become a mind-direction, reasoned male one? How does the category of masculinity change with this new testament to honor? On Haraway’s view, by suppressing questions about gender, a false sense of unity emerges, and gender roles become hardened as ready-made or inevitable formations. Thus, even critiques of early modern science (i.e. Latour) can reinscribe the most problematic aspects of the scientific view of nature. 113 Donna Haraway, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 1985. When Haraway asserts that ‘we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” she is trying to express the idea that no human bodies/selves are stable or natural (1991, p. 150). Rather, we are multiple bodies and multiple selves, depending on the context in which we find ourselves and the other bodies and nonhuman entities with which we interact. Haraway contends that human bodies cannot easily be categorized in a static binary opposition; nor can technologies be singled out as separate entities from the human or as natural, self-evidence truths. Each contributes to the other: we understand our bodies/selves through technologies and our bodies/selves give meaning and configure technologies through the repeated performances of daily life. The cyborg, then, stands as an allegory for shifting political and physical boundaries which, in its interface with us and the world around us, ironically destabilizes what we perceive to be natural: the “source of insight and promise of innocence” which is now “undermined, probably fatally” (1991, p. 152).

79 significant power.”114 Technoscience takes effect by the practices “through which what will count as nature and as matters of fact get constituted.”115 Social, material, and literary technologies have been used to evaluate knowledge claims, to determine what can count as knowledge and truth.

Within the “mythic narrative” of the Scientific Revolution, the site in which

Haraway argues that technoscience has its origin, technology operates as an

“objectifying resource;” that is to say, it is able to present things as matters of fact, as if they were simply given.116 Specifically, this apparatus of production distinguishes expert knowledge from mere amateur opinion or curiosity, a founding gesture of the separation between the technical and the political. Without explicit appeal to transcendent or metaphysical authority, technoscience legitimizes knowledge in its

“self-invisibility.”117 Haraway explains that this man of reason, the modern witness, is part of “a culture of no culture,” and is the man who refrains from interventions and testifies without prejudice to new facts. His authorized account of the object world acts as a perfect mirror, reflecting an objectivity that loses all its constructed history.118 By establishing distance from the domain of culture and society, technoscience restructures natural philosophy into modern experimental philosophy: science.

114 Donna Haraway, Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 51. The title of this book is significant; the formal structure is that of an email address that can send and receive messages, specifically the differential literacies necessary to evade millenarian closures and the contaminated practice of figuration that pervades the Second Millenium. 115 Ibid., p. 50. 116 Ibid., p. 25. My use of the term “objectifying” can be read in the Kantian, extra-moral sense of “object” as an object of knowledge. 117 Ibid., p. 23. 118 Ibid., p. 23. Haraway borrows this suggestive term from Sharon Traweek’s Beantimes and Lifetimes, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

80 However, technoscience also offers us important tools in that it “extravagantly exceeds the distinction between science and technology” as well as those between

“nature and society, subjects and objects, and the natural and the artifactual that structured the imaginary time called modernity.”119 As a fulsome practice – an

“excess” – technoscience has the capacity to be a generative cultural form. In its

“condensation of space and time, [its] speeding up and concentrating of effects in the webs of knowledge and power,” technoscientific production can destabilize binaries and forge new alliances.120 The solid objects of technoscience are useful ways to designate stabilized interactions in a given frame of reference, but the provisional quality of these boundaries and stabilizations should not be forgotten. The objectifications are constructed of tropes and metaphors, naturalized to appear self- evident.

To be a construct does not mean to be unreal or to lack material ramifications, and because of that, the objects of technoscience require additional attention and study. These nodal articulations have outward, world-building translations that materialize worlds in some forms but not in others, that give power to some metaphors to bring these worlds together. What, then, are these nodal alliances that are the object of Haraway’s concern in her technoscientific politics? They are the material-semiotic offspring of the mutated time-space regime of technobiopower. In her 1997 book, Haraway reflects on several objects: the computer chip, gene, seed,

119 Ibid., p. 3. 120 Ibid., p. 50.; This conception of power is reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s, as “a mode of actions which does not act directly and immediately upon others, but instead acts upon their actions,” emphasizing patterns of mutual interaction among performances rather than any shared presupposition or norm.

81 fetus, database, bomb, race, brain, and ecosystem. The temporal modality for each object in this set is condensation and fusion; they are the place, placing, and practice of rhizomatic associations.121 In this disruption, the objects are saturated with heterogenous assemblages that can resist the objective, factual, defended confidence of the civic man of reason, the modest witness.

We can apply Haraway’s argument to the BRAHMS database of Aldrovandi’s collection. Here, the particularities of Aldrovandi’s natural history appear to be an afterthought. In the digitized architectural layout, representations of nature cohabit the technical-semiotic zone of cyberspace; the naturalia are transformed into 6,000 X

6,000 pixels and put to work exhibiting the technological advancements provided by the University of Oxford’s programming. The architecture of Aldrovandi’s studio and galleria have been replaced by the program architecture of BRAHMS online by amassing material that was dispersed into a boundless digital archive. These plant specimens are mediated through photographed representations, pre-arranged to allow the larger database’s classifying system to function, that is, to permit the user to make connections across plant species from different collections, not just within this early modern Italian one. The database, in its reproduction of the values of the modest witness, is an instrument to endorse the knowledge of this digital archive, but only in so far as it masks the power running through its structure and ordering.

In fact, what Haraway refers to as the “God trick” – the delusion that valid scientific knowledge is only achieved by adopting a disinterested, impartial view

121 I use the term “rhizomatic” because Haraway has adopted it throughout her book, but I want to note its genealogy out of Deleuze and Guattari who use it to describe theory and research that allows for multiple, non-hierarchical entry and exit points in data representation and interpretation.

82 from nowhere – has been a concern in the Digital Humanities debate more generally.122 The professed technological expertise dangerously trumps all other forms of knowledge, including any critique of the ends to which such expertise is put.

Martha Nell Smith, an early Digital Humanist and founder of one of the first Digital

Humanities centers, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

(MITH), has since emerged as a leading critic of the movement:

When I first started attending humanities computing conferences in the mid-1990s, I was struck by how many of the presentations remarked, either explicitly or implicitly, that concerns that had taken over so much academic work in literature — of gender, race, class, sexuality — were irrelevant to humanities computing.123

For Smith, the biggest problem is how the Digital Humanities discourse disregards other ethical and social concerns. As such, the Digital Humanities functions similarly to the modest witness memorialized in the narrative of the Scientific Revolution. The database legitimizes and fetishizes knowledge that masquerades as metaphor-free and outside of culture, even if there is, after all, no work and no way to be in the world that is not political. We can hear Buffon’s critique of Aldrovandi’s amateur delight in irrelevant legend ringing in the background when the Digital Humanities denounces identity politics for “feminizing” the objectives of the digital archives.124 Like the eighteenth-century European, white, male value for modesty, these tendencies reveal that the digital discipline is moving toward “a post-interpretative, non-suspicious,

122 For a comprehensive and scathing critique of DH see Daniel Allington et al in “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities,” Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/neoliberal-tools-archives-political-history-digital-humanities/, 2016. 123 Smith, as cited in Daniel Allington et al in “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” 124 Ibid.

83 technocratic, conservative, managerial, lab-based practice.”125 And, we should be suspicious about this trend towards false objectivity.

Other proponents of Digital Humanities retort that these digital/computational methodologies are just new tools designated to provide insights into humanistic research questions, often at scales never before approachable. Well, yes and no. The

Digital Humanities manages to make large collections public, but not without restructuring and changing the intent of the projects along raced, classed, and gendered ontics. Alan Liu, another early supporter of Digital Humanities, articulates that “while digital humanists develop tools, data, and other meta-data critically […] rarely do they extend their critique to the full register of society, economics, politics, or culture.”126 What he is pointing to is the way in which funding and administrative bodies exert a huge influence on what gets digitized. Many digital humanists “just concentrate on pushing the ‘execute’ button on projects that amass the most,” without pausing to reflect on the impact of their digital projects within larger social, political, and economic contexts.127

The dilemma that scholars within the community of Digital Humanities such as Smith and Liu have identified is, once again, the problematic insistence on a culture of no culture. This digital discourse views technological innovation as an end in itself. The discipline of the humanities should give us a way to pose questions that respond to the ethical demands of identity politics and cultural in which the academy is implicated and never neutral or innocent. But, the Digital Humanities instead

125 Daniel Allington et al in “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.” 126 Alan Liu, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012. 127 Ibid.

84 promotes an interest in lab-based research over reading and writing, in redefining technical proficiency as preferred humanist knowledge. The fetishizing of code and data together with the relative neglect of critical discourse within Digital Humanities has led to a false algorithm for objectivity. It is at best telling, at worst disturbing, that the Digital Humanities hopes to bracket off the political work of interpretation and the wonders of literature in order to become “postcritical.”128 Do we feel comfortable with “the bodies mediating today’s dominant socioeconomic and political beliefs” expediting projects that process the most data as flexibly as possible regardless of their cultural aftermath?

V. Hopeful Disunity: Realigning the Technical and the Political

While the Digital Humanities aims to archive materials, produce data, and develop software – all of which are likely beneficial for research, as I found through my own primary research on the Aldrovandi’s studio thanks to BRAHMS’ digitization

– this work cannot be alienated from its material, social, and cultural context. The construction of such an expansive archive requires an unparalleled level of material support. And it certainly cannot be dismissed that the object of all this effort was the

“canonical oeuvre of a dead white man” – as is the case of most of the digital archives supported by BRAHMS’ scalable management system.129 As Alan Liu explains, extensive funding controls academic politics from the top-down, enabling some projects and thwarting others. Liu pins public and private capital support for the

128 Mullins, Matthew. “Are We Postcritical?” Los Angeles Review of Books, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/are-we-postcritical/. 129 Daniel Allington et al in “Neoliberal Tools (and Archives): A Political History of Digital Humanities.”

85 Digital Humanities at the epicenter of the “neoliberal takeover” of the university. 130

The main public research funding organizations, the National Endowment for the

Humanities (NEH), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, were key early funders of the Digital Humanities.131 Though romanticized for the supposed openness of the software, the material reality reveals how digital research and archives are often structured to reproduce the inequalities and underrepresentations that plague these funding institutions to begin with. In other words, whose voice gets to speak and what archives receive the funds for publishing is controlled by established financial power relations.

My analysis of the Digital Humanities as a social movement that plays a leading role in the corporatist restructuring of the humanities is in conversation with the critiques of Daniel Allington, Sarah Brouilette, and David Golumbia in

“Neoliberal Tools (and Archives).” Like their “inducement to other scholars” to take their claims seriously in order to reform the Digital Humanities and make these archives more critical and suspicious (without throwing the baby out with the bathwater), I wonder if the BRAHMS database can be investigated from a different perspective to reveal how its platform is nonetheless woven into complex networks.

The development of a computer database for handling data from the various cabinets and rooms of Aldrovandi’s studio required advanced informatics research and complex interdisciplinary negotiations. One is not outside the technoscientific webwork; rather, one is “inside the net of stories, agencies, and instruments” that

130 Alan Liu, Debates in the Digital Humanities, 2012. 131 For utmost transparency, the latter has been the primary funding stream for the University of Oxford’s BRAHMS database.

86 make it up.132 Our knowledge, too, enacts the world by engaging in specific sociological and cultural configurations from the inside. By articulating a different, opaque, and non-innocent representational attitude which is partial and embodied at the multiple crossings inside of these material and semiotic fields, these situated knowledges recognize the impossibility of doing without representations. And these representations, or re-visions, are acknowledged and honored for being always generated from somewhere, from below, and from within the networks of technobiopower. They are neither complete nor static pictures of the world but are representationally adequate only insofar as they keep their performance – filled with tensions, resonances, and contradictions – alive.

If recognized as such, the admixture of the human and the technoscientific nonhuman creates a critical situation that might offer a hopeful, disunified, and open- ended break from the past. I hope to put the culture back into the culture of no culture. The denial, in which these large, distributed, articulated practices of epistemological and scientific domination revel, can be exposed by asking critical questions, even if the structure – be it architectural, textual, or imaginary – does not elicit them. Through putting into practice Donna Haraway’s methodology of situated knowledges, I have worked to bring the technical and the political “back into re- alignment” so that new questions and imaginaries about better, more inclusive worlds can lie visibly at the heart of cutting-edge, modern technoscience.133

132 Donna Haraway, Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience, New York: Routledge, 1997. 133 Ibid., Haraway completed a Ph.D. in Biology at Yale and has never been anti-science but argues that we must be aware of how technoscience is actually working, not be convinced by false “naked,” naturalized claims.

87 CONCLUSION

This thesis has been dedicated to exploring the sociology of natural history. I have attempted to model this perspective through my “un-disciplined” approach to studying and describing the Aldrovandi’s studio as well as our relationship to the past. Within this perspective, I have constructed a narrative to accompany this monument, taken seriously the sixteenth-century system of knowledge, called attention to the colonial enterprise of its curiosity, reflected on its transformations and digital archivization, and most importantly, pointed to the archive’s multiplicity of interpretations over time. My analysis of the intermingling science and culture is theoretical in character. This is because I believe that a robust conceptual framework is an indispensable component for worthwhile practical action. That is to say that even though my arguments do not amount to a manifesto for redirecting the discipline of science studies towards more self-reflective thinking, the possible practical considerations and situated knowledges that can arrive from my theoretical arguments and my applied model of a history of representations have played a significant role in the narrative I have written and in the arguments that I have proposed.

The transformations of the Aldrovandi’s studio have never fit easily into the standard dichotomies of the old and the new, and we would do well to reexamine the significance of that dialectic. Neither the hopeless naiveté and nostalgia for a moment of critical, public, democratic science nor the disparaging analysis that Aldrovandi lacked a defined system of knowledge production hold up. Rather than distancing academic culture from science and perpetuating this transcendent binary categorization, situated knowledges serve to displace fixed identities and place

88 boundaries into constructive tensions that require sustained engagement. By this theorization, representations are activated through critical interpretation. Through this process of translation, they become affective, dynamic figurations rather than reflective depictions of static, empty givens. Stories and facts do not naturally keep a respectable distance from each other; indeed, they promiscuously cohabit the same very material places. The messy political does not recede to the background just because we think we are cleanly in the zone of the technical. Understanding how these dimensions are constituted takes boundary-making and maintenance work. We are called to enliven our practical imagination and lean into this messy, curious, strangely fascinating world of knowledge-making.

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