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Article: The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe.(Book review)
- Article from:
- Renaissance Quarterly
- Article date:
- December 22, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 The Renaissance Society of America. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Brian W. Ogilvie. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe.
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006. xvi + 386 pp. index. illus. bibl. $45. ISBN: 0-226-62087-5.
Touted as a "discipline of description," natural history, Brian Ogilvie tells us, "was invented in the Renaissance" (1). Though rooted in the traditions of classical antiquity and the later Middle Ages, what emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was something novel: a community of naturalists who created their own methods of studying, classifying, and representing the natural world. Ogilvie points to remarks made by Francis Bacon in the early years of ...