The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800

Course Description

“This course was an excellent balance of lecture, book examination, historical techniques instruction, and discussion.” — 2016 student

Examples will be drawn from a wide range of scientific, medical, technical, and natural history books from the earliest years of printing to 1800, with case studies of illustrated books by such key figures as Vesalius, Galileo, and Hooke. The intention is to interpret the illustrated scientific book, not to provide a history of scientific illustration. Topics will include: the roles of authors, artists, block cutters, engravers and printers; the interrelationships of images and verbal texts; and the operation of diagrams, representational illustrations, and graphic displays of data in scientific communication. Students will learn to describe and analyze images, and we will discuss ways in which the current standards of bibliographical description can be extended to take account of illustrative content.

Rare Book School’s teaching collection of printing surfaces and sample pages will be used to help students identify different graphic processes, and the technical aspects of text and image will be studied at first-hand, printing on the replica eighteenth-century common press and rolling press (see The Presswork).

There will be sessions in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (with its strengths in architecture, navigation, and astronomy) and sessions with the medical books from the UVA Health Sciences Library. A highlight of the course–new this year–will be a field trip to Upperville, Virginia, to visit the private Oak Spring Garden Foundation Library in order to study some of the most spectacular color plate natural history books.

The course will be of value to historians, librarians, and others who wish to incorporate book history in their research and teaching, to develop their knowledge of early modern illustrated books, and to acquire the skills necessary for the analysis and interpretation of these works.

In their personal statements, applicants should describe their background, if any, in bibliography and the history of science, though neither is a pre-requisite. Students who have taken I-20 and G-10 should expect some overlap at the start of the course, and will have a valuable foundation for the analytical approach that we will be taking. Students are required to upload a copy of their most recent CV along with their personal statement.

Please note: the tuition for this course is $1,595 owing to the expenses associated with the scheduled field trip.

View the course description for the virtual version of this course, Making the Early Modern Illustrated Scientific Book.

Advance Reading List

Required Reading

• Gaskell, Philip. A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: 1972; reprinted with corrections 1974 and 1979; New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1995, 2009).
  • Read all of the first section, “Book Production: The Hand-press Period, 1500–1800” (pp. 1–170), this is important, and the first part of the final section, “Bibliographical Applications” (pp. 311–335).
• Griffiths, Antony. Prints and Printmaking. London: British Museum Press, 1980; reprinted Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996.
  • Read the first two sections on relief printing and intaglio printing (pp. 13–99) and the short section on color printing (pp. 113–119). We will not be dealing with lithography.
• Gaskell, Roger. “Printing House and Engraving Shop. A Mysterious Collaboration.” The Book Collector 53 (2004): 213–251; and Gaskell, Roger. “Printing House and Engraving Shop, Part II. Further Thoughts on ‘Printing and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration.” The Book Collector 67 (2018): 788–97.
  • Both can be downloaded from my Academia.edu page at Gaskell 2004 and Gaskell 2018
• Kusukawa, Sachiko. Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
  • This is one of the few studies of scientific illustration that pays attention to the scientific book. Read some of the chapters that interest you.
• Leerdam, Andrea van. Woodcuts as Reading Guides: How Images Shaped Knowledge Transmission in Medical-Astrological Books in Dutch (1500-1550). Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2023.
  • Read Chapter 2, ‘Organising Knowledge. Conceptualisations and Visual Strategies’, pp. 77–131. Open access.

Recommended Reading

History of Science

• Cohen, I. Bernard. Album of Science: from Leonardo to Lavoisier 1450–1800. New York: Scribner, 1980.
  • A picture book with good short summaries of the key topics.
• Whitfield, Peter. Landmarks in Western Science from Prehistory to the Atomic Age. London: The British Library, 1999
  • A good introduction to the canonical books in the history of science with plenty of illustrations.
• Fara, Patricia. Science: A Four Thousand Year History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.
  • A social and cultural history of science.
• Bauer, Susan Wise, The Story of Western Science from the Writings of Aristotle to the Big Bang, New York and London, W.W. Norton & co. 2015
  • The great men version, heavily text based, an easy read.

Visual Culture of Scientific Images

• Doherty, Meghan C. Engraving Accuracy in Early Modern England. Visual Communication and the Royal Society. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022 (to be published in March).
• Hentschel, Klaus. Visual Cultures in Science and Technology: A Comparative History. First edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.
  • A meta-analysis of a large range of case studies.
• Ivins, William M. Prints and Visual Communication. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1953; reprinted 1969.
  • Often cited and still thought-provoking.

Books of essays providing a good range of approaches to scientific illustration, for example

• Baigrie, Brian S. Picturing Knowledge. Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1996.
  • The volume includes essays by Martin Kemp on Vesalius and Copernicus and Baigrie on Descartes as well as David Topper’s “Towards and Epistemology of Scientific Illustration.”
• Lefèvre, Wolfgang, Jürgen Renn, and Urs Schoepflin, eds. The Power of Images in Early Modern Science. Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag, 2003.
  • All the essays are good and relevant: try Ogilvie, Brian W. “Image and Text in Natural History, 1500-1700,” pp. 141–166.
• Mazzolini, Renato G, ed. Non-Verbal Communication in Science Prior to 1900. Biblioteca Di Nuncius 11. Firenze: Olschki, 1993.
  • I especially like Roche, John J. “The Semantics of Graphics in Mathematical Natural History,” pp. 197–233.
• Jardine, Nicholas, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• Curry, H. A., Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and E. C. Spary. Worlds of Natural History. Cambridge: University Press, 2018.
  • Daniela Bleichmar’s chapter “Botanical conqistadors” has a lot to say about the way illustrations are constructed and do their work.

For Particular Genres

• Carpo, Mario. Architecture in the Age of Printing: Orality, Writing, Typography, and Printed Images in the History of Architectural Theory. Cambridge, Mass. ; London: MIT Press, 2001.
• Cazort, Mimi, Monique Kornell, and K. B. Roberts. The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996.
  • Based on an exhibition, this collection of three long essays and a catalog of the exhibition is the best guide to anatomical illustration.
• Blunt, Wilfrid, and William T. Stearn. The Art of Botanical Illustration. New ed., rev. and enl. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club in association with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, 1994.
• Egmond, Florike. “Looking Beyond the Margins of Print: Depicting Water Creatures in Europe, c.1500-1620,” in Ichthyology in Context (1500-1880). Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2024.
• Harris, Stephen A. The Beauty of the Flower : The Art and Science of Botanical Illustration. London: Reaktion Books, 2023.
  • The title is misleading. The book might have been called ‘the Science of botanical illustration,’ in contradistinction to Blunt’s Art of Botanical Illustration.
• Neville, Sarah. Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Open Access on Cambridge Core.
  • An important work discussing early English herbals as commercial products whose form and content were the result of publishing decisions. Read the introduction.
• Whitfield, Peter. The Mapping of the Heavens. London: British Library, 1995.

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