Insectopedia (63 page)

9.
Erica Fudge,
Animal
(London: Reaktion Books, 2002). My thanks also to Danny Solomon at UC Santa Cruz for interesting conversations on this question.

10.
Greenspan and Dierick, “‘Am Not I a Fly Like Thee?,’” R267.

11.
Elias Canetti,
Crowds and Power
, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1962), 205. My thanks to Dejan Lukic for pointing me to this passage.

12.
Annemarie Mol,
The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 126.

1.
Joris Hoefnagel,
The Four Elements
, vol. 1,
Animalia rationalia et insecta
(
Ignis
), watercolor and gouache on vellum, 1582, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. For this chapter, I have drawn extensively on the work of Lee Hendrix, curator of drawings at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and authority on Joris Hoefnagel, particularly her excellent “Of Hirsutes and Insects: Joris Hoefnagel and the Art of the Wondrous,”
Word and Image
11, no. 4 (1995): 373–90. In addition, see Lee Hendrix, “Joris Hoefnagel and
The Four Elements:
A Study in Sixteenth-Century Nature Painting” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1984), and, with Thea Vignau-Wilberg,
Mira calligraphiae monumenta: A Sixteenth-Century Calligraphic Manuscript Inscribed by Georg Bocskay and Illuminated by Joris Hoefnagel
(Malibu, Calif.: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1992). See also the helpful contextualizing discussion of Hoefnagel and his son Jacob in Thea Vignau-Wilberg,
Archetypa studiaque patris Georgii Hoefnagelii, 1592: Nature, Poetry and Science in Art around 1600
(Munich, Germany: Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1994).

2.
Thomas Moffett quoted in Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” in
Archetypa
, 42n14. Moffett’s volume is compiled from the entomological notes of the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner, as well as from work by the Londoners Thomas Penny
and Edward Wotton. See Edward Topsell,
The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects
, vol. 3,
The Theatre of Insects
by T. Moffett (London, 1658; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1967). Gesner had planned the sixth and final volume of his
Historiae animalium
to cover the insects but managed to complete only a short section on scorpions before he died in 1565. On Moffett, see Frances Dawbarn, “New Light on Dr Thomas Moffet: The Triple Roles of an Early Modern Physician, Client, and Patronage Broker,”
Medical History
47, no. 1 (2003): 3–22.

3.
Topsell, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in
Theater of Insects
, 6. Moffett is quoting Psalms 92:5 “How great are Thy works, oh Lord!” My thanks to Abigail Winograd for making this connection.

4.
Max Beier, “The Early Naturalists and Anatomists during the Renaissance and Seventeenth Century,” in
History of Entomology
, ed. Ray F. Smith, Thomas E. Mittler, and Carroll N. Smith (Palo Alto, Calif.: Annual Reviews, 1973), 81–94. For a fascinating extended discussion of Aldrovandi, see Paula Findlen,
Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); in relation to the study of insects specifically, see Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects.”

5.
Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 382.

6.
Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” 39. And see, for comparison, the similar but far more ancient East Asian preoccupation with miniaturization explored in Rolf A. Stein,
The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought
, trans. Phyllis Brooks (Palo Alto, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); see also François Jullien,
The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China
, trans. Janet Lloyd (New York: Zone Books, 1995), esp. 94–98.

7.
See R.J.W. Evans,
Rudolf II and His World: A Study in Intellectual History, 1576–1612
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), and Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann,
The School of Prague: Painting at the Court of Rudolf II
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

8.
Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann,
The Mastery of Nature: Aspects of Art, Science, and Humanism in the Renaissance
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 48 (emphasis added).

9.
In this sense, Hoefnagel can be regarded as an eirenist. See ibid., 92–93.

10.
For an account of the ways in which epistemologies that appear contradictory to modern understandings could productively coexist in late-sixteenth-century scholarship, see Stephen J. Greenblatt’s insightful discussion of John Dee in
Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles
(New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973). Also, famously, Frances A. Yates,
Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition
(Chicago: University of Chicago, 1991); Yates,
The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age
(London: Routledge, 2001); and Anthony Grafton,
Cardano’s Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999).

11.
Evans,
Rudolf II and His World
, 248 (emphasis removed).

12.
Francis Bacon,
Sylva sylvarum, or A Naturall History in Ten Centuries
(London, 1627), century 7, 143. Mary Poovey has convincingly argued that Bacon’s empirical “revolution” was more a question of style than substance, though no less effective for that. Poovey,
A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–11.

13.
Lorraine Daston, “Attention and the Values of Nature in the Enlightenment,” in
The Moral Authority of Nature
, ed. Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 100–126. For a discussion of wonder in relation to the exploration of the Americas, see Stephen J. Greenblatt,
Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For an account of an Elizabethan England in which (un)natural events were conventionally understood in terms of portentous correspondences, see E.M.W. Tillyard,
The Elizabethan World Picture
(London: Chatto and Windus, 1943), and the early chapters of Keith Thomas,
Man and the Natural World: A History of the Modern Sensibility
(New York: Pantheon, 1983).

14.
Topsell, “Epistle Dedicatory,” 3.

15.
Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park,
Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750
(New York: Zone Books, 1998), 14.

16.
Daston and Park,
Wonders
, 167. And, among others, Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds.,
The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe
(New York: Clarendon Press, 1985); Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, eds.,
Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe
(New York: Routledge, 2002); and Findlen,
Possessing Nature.

17.
Though, as the precision of Hoefnagel’s attention to morphology makes evident, it would be a mistake to imagine this break as one between new science and old superstition. For a brief and effective introduction to recent scholarship on this question, see Steven Shapin,
The Scientific Revolution
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

18.
Such as: “In all natural things there is something of the marvellous.” Aristotle,
Parts of Animals
, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 323 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1937), 645a.

19.
See Edward Grant, “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View,”
History of Science
16 (1978): 93–106. We can extend this claim even to the alchemists, although as R.J.W. Evans makes clear, “their ‘Aristotle’ was a mystic sage.” Evans,
Rudolf II and His World
, 203n2.

20.
John Scarborough, “On the History of Early Entomology, Chiefly Greek and Roman with a Preliminary Bibliography,”
Melsheimer Entomological Series
26 (1979): 17–27. Although there is no good analogue in contemporary systematics, the Aristotelian
entomon
resembled the modern Arthropoda phylum more closely than it did the class Insecta. As well as such anomalies as the worms, it included the modern insecta, arachnids, and myriapoda (centipedes and millipedes), although it excluded the crustaceans. For overviews, see Günter Morge, “Entomology in the Western World in Antiquity and in Medieval Times,” in Smith, Mittler, and Smith,
History of Entomology
, 37–80, and Harry B. Weiss, “The Entomology of Aristotle,”
Journal of the New York Entomological Society
37 (1929): 101–9. See also Malcolm Davies and Jeyaraney Kathirithamby,
Greek Insects
(Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1986). The Linnaean shift to morphology exiled worms, spiders, scorpions, centipedes, millipedes, and others to different classes. For a detailed discussion of the taxonomic criteria at work in Aristotle and Linnaeus, see Scott Atran,
Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

21.
Atran,
Cognitive Foundations of Natural History
, 38.

22.
G.E.R. Lloyd,
Science, Folklore and Ideology: Studies in the Life Sciences in Ancient Greece
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 18.

23.
I have drawn on Morge, “Entomology in the Western World,” for these examples.

24.
In 1668, Francesco Redi carried out his famous series of experiments in which several flasks containing meat were prepared with various types of coverings. Maggots appeared only in those to which flies had access, a result that dealt a significant but not fatal blow to the theory of spontaneous generation. The question, in fact, stayed open long after the use of microscopes became widespread. It was only with Pasteur’s experiments of 1859 that the basis of the dispute shifted firmly from philosophy to experiment.

25.
Kaufmann,
Mastery of Nature
, 42; Vignau-Wilberg, “Excursus: Insects,” 40–41.

26.
Grant, “Aristotelianism,” 94–95.

27.
Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 380–82.

28.
Quoted in ibid., 378; Job 14:1.

29.
Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals” (1578–80), in
The Complete Works
, trans. Donald M. Frame (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2003), 182–93.

30.
Aldrovandi’s
Monstrorum historia
was published posthumously in 1642. See Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects,” 377. In this respect, the González family took its place in the history of exhibition and examination visited on all kinds of non-normative others transported to Europe in the colonial period. Effective accounts of well-known examples—of which there are many—include Londa Schiebinger’s discussion of Sara Baartman, the so-called Hottentot Venus, in
Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), and Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume’s
Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

31.
Hendrix, “Of Hirsutes and Insects.”

32.
Lee Hendrix, “The Writing Model Book,” in Hendrix and Vignau-Wilberg,
Mira calligraphiae monumenta
, 42.

33.
Frazer distinguishes homoeopathic magic from contagious magic based on what he calls the law of contact, which works on substances—such as hair or nail clippings—drawn from the targeted body itself rather than its likeness. See James George Frazer,
The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion
(London: Macmillan, 1911), 3:55–119.

34.
R.J.W. Evans explains this as follows: “The object of such a philosophy was not only to describe the hidden forces of nature but also to control them, since the initiate who understood their powers could also apply his knowledge. This pursuit was magic, yet—as its exponents never ceased explaining—the magic was ‘natural’ and not ‘black,’ for the inspiration which made it possible was divine not diabolical.” Evans,
Rudolf II and His World
, 197.

35.
“It is no accident that the great conquering races of the world have done most to advance and spread civilization,” he wrote in a characteristic commentary. Frazer,
Golden Bough
, 3:118.