1

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

2

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

3

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.

4

To my grandfather, Marty Steckel,

For teaching me the value of intellectual curiosity.

5

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

6

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.

7

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

8

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.

9

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.

10

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

11

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.

12

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.

13

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.

14

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.

15

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.

16

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.

17

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.

18

Figure 1: Frontispiece of the Ornithologiae

19

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

20

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.

21

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.

22

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.

23

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

24

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.

25

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.

26

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).

27

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.

28

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.

29

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.

30

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.

31

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.

32

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.

33

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).

34

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.

35

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).

36

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.

37

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.

38

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.

39

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.

40

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.

41

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.

42

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).

43

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.

44

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.

45

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.

46

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.

47

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.

48

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.

49

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.

50

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.

51

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.

52

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.

53

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.

54

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.

55

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.

56

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.

57

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.

58

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

59

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.

60

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.

61

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.

62

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.

63

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.

64

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.

65

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.

66

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.

67

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.

68

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.”

69

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.

70

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.

71

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.

72

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.

73

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/.

74

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.

75

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/.

76

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).

77

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,

78

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.

79

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).

80

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.

81

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.

82

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.

83

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.

84

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.

85

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.”

86

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.

87

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.

88

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

89

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.

90

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MANUSCRIPT SOURCES

Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna

Mss. Aldrovandi. Cod. 34, Vol. I, c. 6r, Aldrovandi (1603). Cod. 124, nr.6, III, Epistola de sepe di Paleotti (1579). Cod. 152, cc. 2-25, Erbario alchemico.

Cod. 384 (408), Busta VI, f. II. Inventario dei mobile grossi, che si trovano nello Studio Aldrovandi e Museo Cospiano (12 March 1696).

Cod. 595-Y, n. 1. Catalogo dei libri dello Studio di Ulisse Aldrovandi (25 May 1742).

Cod. 738 (1071), XXIII, n. 14. Decreto per la concessione di una sala al Marchese Ferdinando Cospi appresso lo Studio Aldrovandi (28 June 1660).

Cod. 382, I, c. 260 (Macerata, 25 May 1555). Archivio per le materie. Storia naturale.

Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna

B. 164. Pompeo Viziano, “Del Museo del S[igno]r Dotore Aldrovandi” (1604). s. XIX. B. 3803. Ulisse Aldrovandi, Informazione del rotulo del studio di Bologna de

Ph[ilosoph]I e Medici all’Ill[ustrissi]mo Card. Paleotti (1573). Coll. Autogr., XLVIII, 12705. Ovidio Montalbandi. Lettera. SELECTED PRIMARY SOURCES Aldrovandi, Ulisse. De animalibus insectis libri spetum (Bologna, 1602). ———. Dendrologia (Bologna, 1648). ———. De Mollibus, crustaceis, testaceis, et zoophytis (Bologna, 1606). ———. Monstrorum historia (Bologna, 1648). ———. Ornithologiae hoc est de avibus historiae libri XII (Bologna, 1599). ———. De piscibus libri V et de cetis lib[rus] unus (Bologna, 1613).

91

Boccone, Paolo. Osservazioni naturali (Bologna, 1648). Bolletti, Giuseppe Gaetano. Dell’origine e de’ progresso dell’Istituto delle Scienze di

Bologna (Bologna, 1751). Bromley, William. Remarks made in Travels through France and Italy

(London,1693). De Rosa, Stefano. “Ulisse Aldrovandi e la Toscana. Quattro letter inedite dello

scienziato a Francesco I e Ferdinando I de’Medici e a Belisario Vinta.” Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza 6 (1981): pp. 203-215.

Mattioli, Pier Andrea. I discorsi nei i sei libri della materia medicinale di Pedacio

Dioscoride Anazarbeo (Venice, 1557). SELECTED SECONDARY SOURCES “A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters.” ARCADE,

https://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/sketch-map-lost-continent-republic-letters. Abram, Simone, and Marianne Elisabeth Lien. “Performing Nature at World’s Ends.”

Ethnos, vol. 76, no. 1, Mar. 2011, pp. 3–18. Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto di Bologna.

http://www.accademiascienzebologna.it/it/index.html. Adversi, Aldo. “Ulisse Aldrovandi bibliofilo, bibliografo e bibliologo del

Cinquecento.” Annali di scoula speciale per archivisti e bibliotecari dell’Università 8, n. 1-2, 1968: pp. 85-181.

Alcoff, Linda, and Elizabeth Potter. Feminist Epistemologies. Routledge, 1993. Aldrovandi, Ulisse in “Dizionario Biografico.”

http://www.treccani.it//enciclopedia/ulisse-aldrovandi_(Dizionario-Biografico).

92

Allington, Daniel, et al. “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/.

AMS Historica: Collezione Digitale Di Opere Storiche. https://amshistorica.unibo.it/. Arendt, Hannah. Reflections on Literature and Culture. Translated by Susannah

Young-ah Gottlieb. Meridian, Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Arnold, Ken. Cabinets for the Curious: Practicing Science in Early Modern English

Museums, Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 1991. Ashworth, William B., Jr. “Catholicism and Early Modern Science.” In God and

Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science, David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, eds., Berkeley, 1987, pp. 136-166.

———. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” In Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution, David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, eds., Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 303-332.

Atran, Scott. Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: towards an Anthropology of

Science. Cambridge University Press; Editions De La Maison Des Sciences De L'homme, 1990.

Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. Christian Classics, 1981. Azzi Visentini, Margherita. L’Orto Botanico di Padova e il giardino del

Rinascimento, Milan: Edizioni il Polifilo, 1984. Baldini, E. “Fruits and Fruit Trees in Aldrovandi’s «Iconographia Plantarum».”

Advances in Horticultural Science, vol. 4, no. 1, 1990, pp. 61–73. Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of

93

Renaissance Culture. Yale University Press, 1999. Barker, Peter, and Roger Ariew. Revolution and Continuity: Essays in the History

and Philosophy of Early Modern Science. Catholic University of America Press, 1991.

Barocchi, Paola, and Giovanna Ragionieri. Gli Uffizi, quattro secoli di una galleria:

atti del convegno internazionale di studi, (Firenze 20-24 settembre 1982). LSOlschki, 1983.

Barthes, Roland. Theory of the Text. Boston: Routledge, 1981. Barthes, Roland, and Annette Lavers. Mythologies. Hill and Wang, 1972. Bendini, Silvio. “The Evolution of Science Museums.” Technology and Culture, vol.

6, no. 1, 1965, pp. 1–29. ———. “The Social Status of Italian Mathematicians, 1450–1600.” History of

Science, vol. 27, no. 1, 1989, pp. 41–95.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010.

Blair, Ann. Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern

Age. Yale University Press, 2010. Blumenberg, Hans. Shipwreck with Spectator: Paradigm of a Metaphor for

Existence. MIT Press, 1997.

Blumenberg, Hans, and Robert Savage. Paradigms for a Metaphorology. Cornell University Press: Cornell University Library, 2010.

Blunt, Wilfrid, and Sandra Raphael. The Illustrated Herbal. Thames and Hudson:

Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979. BRAHMS Database: Video Clips for BRAHMS v8 - BRAHMS Online.

https://herbaria.plants.ox.ac.uk/bol/brahms/software/v8videos.

94

Brizzi, Gian Paolo. La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento: I

seminaria nobilium nell’Italia centro-settentrionale, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978.

Burke, Peter. Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence. Cornell

University Press, 2001. ———. The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy, Cambridge, U.K.:

Cambridge University Press, 1987. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge,

1993. ———. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.

Verso, 2000, pp. 11-43. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 2006. Campbell, Mary B. The Witness and the Other World: Exotic European Travel

Writing, 400-1600. Cornell University Press, 1988. Ceccarelli, Francesco, Studi di architettura di Ulisse Aldrovandi, «ANNALI DI

ARCHITETTURA», 2017, 28, pp. 63–82. Ceccarelli, Leah. On the Frontier of Science: An American Rhetoric of Exploration and Exploitation. Michigan State University Press, 2013. Chaplin, Joyce E. “Ogres and Omnivores: Early American Historians and Climate

History.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 72, no. 1, 2015, pp. 25–32. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages. University of

Minnesota Press, 1999. Colliva, Paolo. “Bologna dal XIV al XVIII secolo: ‘governo misto’ o signoria

senatoria,” in Storia dell’Emilia Romagna, Aldo Berselli, Bologna, 1977, pp. 13-34.

Cropper, Elizabeth, et al. Documentary culture: Florence and Rome from Grand-duke

95

Ferdinand I to Pope Alexander VII: papers from a colloquium held at the Villa Spelman, Florence 1990. Nuova Alfa Editoriale: John Hopkins University Press, 1992.

Curran, Andrew S. The Anatomy of Blackness: Science & Slavery in an Age of

Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Daston, Lorraine. I. The Morality of Natural Orders: The Power of Medea II.

Nature’s Customs versus Nature’s Laws. p. 41. ———. “The Ideal and Reality of the Republic of Letters in the Enlightenment.”

Science in Context, vol. 4, no. 2, 1991, pp. 367–386. ———. “The Moral Economy of Science.” Osiris, vol. 10, 1995, pp. 2–24. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750.

Zone Books: MIT Press, 1998.

Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books: MIT Press, 2007. Davies, Surekha. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New

Worlds, Maps and Monsters. Cambridge University Press, 2016.

De Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. Yale University Press, 1979.

Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. University of Chicago Press, 1982.

———. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Dickason, Olive. The Myth of the Savage: And the Beginnings of French Colonialism in the Americas. 1984.

Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and

Hermeneutics. University of Chicago Press, 1982. Duroselle-Melish, C., and D. A. Lines. “The Library of Ulisse Aldrovandi (1605):

96

Acquiring and Organizing Books in Sixteenth-Century Bologna.” The Library, vol. 16, pp. 133–61.

Eamon, William. “From the Secrets of Nature to Public Knowledge: The Origins of

the Concept of Openness in Science.” Minerva 23, 1985, pp. 321-347. ———. “Science and Popular Culture in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” Sixteenth-Century

Journal 16, 1985, pp. 471-485.

Eco, Umberto. The Infinity of Lists. Rizzoli, 2009. Egmond, Florike. Eye for Detail: Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science,

1500-1630. Reaktion Books Ltd, 2017. Field, Judith Veronica, and Frank A. J. L. James. Renaissance and Revolution:

Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Findlen, Paula. Founding a Scientific Academy: Gender, Patronage and Knowledge

in Early Eighteenth-Century Milan. p. 43. ———. “History of Science: How Buildings Matter.” Journal of the Society of

Architectural Historians, vol. 65, no. 1, 2006, pp. 7–8. ———. Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space, and Knowledge in the Early Modern

Museum,” The Architecture of Science, ed. P. Galison and E. Thompson (Cambridge, MA, 1999), pp. 29–57.

———. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy. University of California Press, 1994.

———. “Possessing the Past: The Material World of the Italian Renaissance.” The American Historical Review, vol. 103, no. 1, 1998, pp. 83–114.

———. “Projecting Nature: Agostino Scilla’s Seventeenth-Century Fossil Drawings.” Endeavour, vol. 42, no. 2–3, 2018, pp. 99–132.

Flint, Valerie I. J. The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton University Press, 1992.

Foucault, Michel. Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and

Interviews. Cornell University Press, 1977.

97

———. “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in Aesthetics, Methods, and Epistemology, edited by James Faubion (The New Press: New York): 385.

———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78. Palgrave Macmillan: République Française, 2007.

———. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76. Picador, 2003.

———. “The Order of Discourse.” Translated by Ian McLeod. In Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader, ed. Robert Young, London: Routledge, 1981, pp. 48-78.

———. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Pantheon Books, 1971.

———. The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. Vintage Books, 1988. Freedberg, David. The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of

Modern Natural History. University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Ferrari on the Classification of Oranges and Lemons.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/faculty/Freedberg/Ferrari-on-the-Classification.pdf.

Galison, Peter, and David J. Stump. The Disunity of Science: Boundaries, Contexts,

and Power. Stanford University Press, 1996. Garrard, Mary D. Brunelleschi’s Egg: Nature, Art, and Gender in Renaissance Italy.

University of California Press, 2010. Ghadessi, Touba. “Inventoried Monsters.” Journal of the History of Collections, vol.

23, no. 2, 2011, pp. 267–281.

Golinski, Jan. Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science. Cambridge University Press, 1998.

Grafton, Anthony. New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock

of Discovery. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1992. ———. “Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and His

Books.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 91, no. 2

98

(1997): 139–57. Grafton, Anthony, and Nancy G. Siraisi. Natural Particulars: Nature and the

Disciplines in Renaissance Europe. MIT Press, 1999. Grant, Edward. A History of Natural Philosophy: From the Ancient World to the

Nineteenth Century. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ———. “Aristotelianism and the Longevity of the Medieval World View.” History of

Science, vol. 16, no. 2, 1978, pp. 93–106. ———. Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy. Variorum Reprints,

1981. ———. The Nature of Natural Philosophy in the Late Middle Ages. Catholic

University of America Press, 2010.

Greenblatt, Stephen. Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Greene, Edward Lee. Landmarks of Botanical History: A Study of Certain Epochs in

the Development of the Science of Botany: Part 1, Prior to 1562 A.D. Smithsonian Institution, 1909.

Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Halil, Tekiner. DIOSCORIDES’ MATERIA MEDICA MANUSCRIPTS IN TURKEY.

http://www.pharmaziegeschichte.at/ichp2009/vortraege/vortraege_volltext_pd f/L07.pdf.

Harari, Josué V. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism.

Cornell University Press, 1979. Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the

Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–599.

———. Modest₋Witness@Second₋Millennium.FemaleMan₋Meets₋OncoMouse:

99

Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge, 1997. ———. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991. Harris, Stephen A. “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.

Henderson, John. The Medieval World of Isidore of Seville: Truth from Words.

Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ihde, Don, and Evan Selinger. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality.

Indiana University Press, 2003.

Impey, O. R, and Arthur MacGregor. The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe. House of Stratus, 2001.

Ivins, William Mills. Prints and Visual Communication. MIT Press, 1978. J. B Harley, and David Woodward. The History of Cartography. University of

Chicago Press, 1987. Jardine, Nicholas, et al. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge University Press,

1996. Katherine Behar. Object-Oriented Feminism. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. Klein, Ursula. “Experiments at the Intersection of Experimental History,

Technological Inquiry, and Conceptually Driven Analysis: A Case Study from Early Nineteenth-Century France.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 13, no. 1, 2005, pp. 1–48.

———. “Technoscience Avant La Lettre.” Perspectives on Science, vol. 13, no. 2, 2005, pp. 226–266.

Knoppers, Laura Lunger, and Joan B. Landes. Monstrous Bodies/Political Monstrosities: In Early Modern Europe. Cornell University Press, 2004.

100

Kraemer, Fabian. “Ulisse Aldrovandi’s ‘Pandechion Epistemonicon’ and the Use of

Paper Technology in Renaissance Natural History.” Early Science and Medicine, vol. 19, no. 5, 2014, pp. 398–423.

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy.

Harvard University Press, 2004. ———. Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for Materiality. 2003. ———. Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society.

Harvard University Press, 1987. Lindberg, David C. Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University

Press, 1990. ———. The Cambridge History of Science. Cambridge University Press, 2003. Lines, David A. “Beyond Latin in Renaissance Philosophy: A Plea for New Critical

Perspectives.” Intellectual History Review, vol. 25, no. 4, 2015, pp. 1–17. Linné, Carl von, and Stephen Freer. Linnaeus’ Philosophia Botanica. Oxford

University Press, 2003.

Liu, Alan. Debates in the Digital Humanities: Where Is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities? http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/20, 2012.

———. respondent, "Literary Studies in Cyberspace: Texts, Contexts, and Criticism," Modern Language Association Annual Convention, New York, December 29, 2002.

Lohr, Charles. The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Natural

Philosophy, 1988. Longo, Nicola. “I dintorni del testo. Approcci alle periferie del libro, Atti del

101

Convegno internazionale (Roma, 15-17 novembre 2004; Bologna, 18-19 novembre 2004) (Book Review).” Italianistica: Rivista di letteratura italiana, vol. 35, no. 1, 2006, pp. 195–199.

Lynch, Michael, and Steve Woolgar. Representation in Scientific Practice. MIT

Press, 1990. MacLeod, Roy. Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise. University

of Chicago Press, 2000. Manoff, Marlene. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” Portal:

Libraries and the Academy, vol. 4, no. 1, 2004, pp. 9–25. Martin, Craig. Subverting Aristotle: Religion, History, and Philosophy in Early

Modern Science. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Vintage Books, 1977. Mattirolo, Oreste. L’opera botanica di Ulisse Aldrovandi. p. 170. McHam, Sarah Blake. Pliny and the Artistic Culture of the Italian Renaissance: The

Legacy of the Natural History. Yale University Press, 2013. Merchant, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture.

Routledge, 2003. ———. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution. Harper

& Row, 1980. Mignolo, Walter. “Geopolitics of Sensing and Knowing: On (de)Coloniality, Border

Thinking, and Epistemic Disobedience.” Essays on Education, Philosophy and Politics, vol. 1, no. 1, 2013, pp. 129–150.

———. “Prophets Facing Sidewise: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference.” Social Epistemology, vol. 19, no. 1, 2005, pp. 111–127.

Millon, Henry A., and Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Emilian

Painting of the 16th and 17th Centuries: A Symposium. Nuova Alfa, 1987.

102

Montaigne, Michel de. Essays. Penguin Books, 1958. Moore, Jason. “The Rise of Cheap Nature.” Sociology Faculty Scholarship, January

2016. Moore, Jason and Raj Patel. 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.

Muller - Wille, Staffan. “Nature as a Marketplace: The Political Economy of

Linnaean Botany.” History of Political Economy, vol. 35, 2003, pp. 154–72.

———. Walnuts at Hudson Bay, Coral Reefs in Gotland: The Colonialism of Linnaean Botany. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004.

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

Naas, Valérie. “D’Aristote à Pline: les modèles d’Aldrovandi, collectionneur

encyclopédique.” Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Sciences, vol. 61, no. 166–167, 2011, pp. 259–276.

Nietzsche, Friedrich, “On Truth and Lies in an Extra-Moral Sense,” 1873. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance

Europe. University of Chicago Press, 2006. Olmi, Giuseppe. La Scienza e La Corte: Alcune Riflessioni Sul «patronage» in Italia,

in «Giornale Critico Della Filosofia Italiana», LXXIV, 1995. ———. Le Raffigurazioni Della Natura Nell’età Moderna: «Spirito e Vita» Dei

Libri, in I Dintorni Del Testo. Approcci Alle Periferie Del Libro, Atti Del Convegno Internazionale a Cura Di Marco Santoro e Mariagioia Tavoni, Roma, 2005.

———. “Ordine e fama: il museo naturalistico in Italia nei secoli XVI e XVII / Ordnung und Ruhm: das naturalistische Museum im Italien des 16. und 17.

103

Jahrhunderts.” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, vol. 8, 1982, p. 225.

———. “Osservazione della natura e raffigurazione in Ulisse Aldrovandi/Ulisse Aldrovandis Naturbeobachtung und Naturabbildung.” Annali dell’Istituto Storico Italo-Germanico in Trento, vol. 3, 1977, p. 105.

Olmi, Giuseppe, and Paolo Prodi. “Gabriele Paleotti, Ulisse Aldrovandi e la culture a Bologna nel secondo Cinquecento.” In Nell’età di Correggio e dei Caracci: Pittura in Emilia dei secoli XVI e XVII, Bologna: Nuova Alfa, 1986, pp. 213-235.

Pavord, Anna. The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants.

Bloomsbury, 2005. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge,

1992. Rabinow, Paul. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton University Press,

1996. Reeds, Karen Meier. “Renaissance Humanism and Botany.” Annals of Science, vol.

33, no. 6, 1976, pp. 519–542. Reid, Roddey, and Sharon Traweek. Doing Science + Culture. Routledge, 2000. Rouse, Joseph. Articulating the World: Conceptual Understanding and the Scientific

Image. The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Rubenstein, Mary-Jane. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the

Opening of Awe. Columbia University Press, 2008. Ryan, W. F., and Charles B. Schmitt. Pseudo-Aristotle, the Secret of Secrets: Sources

and Influences. Warburg Institute, University of London, 1982.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. Vintage Books, 2003.

104

Sarti, Carlo. Le collezioni di geologia nel Museo di Ulisse Aldrovandi – The geology collections in Aldrovandi’s Museum. Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio in Bologna, 2003.

Schiebinger, Londa L. Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science.

Beacon Press, 1993. Schiebinger, Londa L., and Claudia Swan. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and

Politics in the Early Modern World. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Schmitt, Charles B. Aristotle and the Renaissance. Published for Oberlin College by

Harvard University Press, 1983. Sgarbi, Marco. “Aristotle and the People: Vernacular Philosophy in Renaissance

Italy.” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme, vol. 39, no. 3, 2016, pp. 59–109.

Shapin, Steven. A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-

Century England. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Simili, Raffaella. Il teatro della natura di Ulisse Aldrovandi. Compositori, 2001. Slater, John, et al. Medical Cultures of the Early Modern Spanish Empire. Ashgate,

2014. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Belief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary

Intellectual Controversy. Harvard University Press, 1997. Smith, Pamela H., and Paula Findlen. Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science and

Art in Early Modern Europe. Routledge, 2002. Stannard, Jerry. “The Herbal as a Medical Document.” Bulletin of the History of

Medicine, vol. 43, no. 3, 1969, pp. 212–20. Stearn, William T. “Botanical Exploration to the Time of Linnaeus.” Proceedings of

the Linnaean Society of London, vol. 169, no. 3, 1958, pp. 173–196.

105

Stieber, Nancy. “Introduction.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,

vol. 65, no. 1, 2006, pp. 5–6. Thomas, Nicholas. Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism

in the Pacific. Harvard University Press, 1991. Università di Firenze: Dipartimento di ortoflorofrutticoltura. Advances in

Horticultural Science. Deptof Horticulture, University of Florence, 1987. Weil, Kari. Androgyny and the Denial of Difference. University Press of Virginia,

1992. ———Thinking Animals: Why Animal Studies Now? Columbia University Press,

2012. Wiesner, Merry E. The Marvelous Hairy Girls: The Gonzales Sisters and Their

Worlds. Yale University Press, 2009. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford

University Press, 1976.

Wyatt, Michael. The Cambridge Companion to the Italian Renaissance. Cambridge University Press, 2014.

Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Routledge, 1999.