Awards

• Commended for PROSE (Hist Sci/Med/Tech) 2012

Overview

Because of their spectacular, naturalistic pictures of plants and the human body, Leonhart Fuchs' ""De historia stirpium"" and Andreas Vesalius' ""De humani corporis fabrica"" are landmark publications in the history of the printed book. But as ""Picturing the Book of Nature"" makes clear, they do more than bear witness to the development of book publishing during the Renaissance and to the prominence attained by the fields of medical botany and anatomy in European medicine. Sachiko Kusukawa examines these texts, as well as Conrad Gessner's unpublished ""Historia plantarum"", and demonstrates how their illustrations were integral to the emergence of a new type of argument during this period - a visual argument for the scientific study of nature. Kusukawa begins with a survey of the technical, financial, artistic, and political conditions that governed the production of printed books during the Renaissance. It was during the first half of the sixteenth century that learned authors began using images in their research and writing, but because the technology was so new, there was a great deal of variety of thought - and often disagreement - about exactly what images could do. Kusukawa investigates the works of Fuchs, Gessner, and Vesalius in light of these debates, scrutinizing the scientists' treatment of illustrations and tracing their motivation for including them in their works. What results is a fascinating and original study of the visual dimension of scientific knowledge in the sixteenth century.

Full Product Details

9780226465296

Table of Contents

Reviews

Today we take for granted the usefulness of images in making a scientific argument, but in the sixteenth century many scholars had good reasons for criticizing the use of images in books. In this deeply intelligent and eloquently written (and illustrated) book, Sachiko Kusukawa tells us exactly how sixteenth-century authors struggled--with publishers, artists, classical authorities, and their fellow humanists--to make images a part of their books and a central component of their scientific arguments. Kusukawa overturns many assumptions about the relationship of images and books, making clear that images always worked in tandem with the texts because for these scholars, nature was understood through books. In doing so, she provides essential new insight into humanist scholarship and the interplay among texts, images, the things of nature, eyewitness observation, and the testimony of authorities in the sixteenth century. Picturing the Book of Nature presents an illuminating new view o

Author Information

Sachiko Kusukawa is a fellow in the history and philosophy of science at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon.

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