Making the Early Modern Illustrated Scientific Book

Course Description

Assisted by Caroline Duroselle-Melish Length: 10 hours Format: Online This online course will concentrate on the production history of illustrated books in the fields of science, medicine, technology and natural history between 1500–1800. Topics will include letterpress book production; woodcut and engraved illustration; the cutting of woodblocks and the engraving of copperplates; the printing of woodcuts with text and the separate printing of engravings; and bibliographical analysis and description. We will look at online books and discuss what can—and cannot—be learned from digital surrogates, how to research the production of illustrated books, and the implications for interpretation. The course will be of interest to all those who curate, collect, and research scientific books and want to ask: how were the illustrations made; how was the book made; and what are the implications for our historical understanding of the book. The books analyzed will be, broadly, in the history of science, but the course would be valuable to anyone working with illustrated books in other fields.  There will be 10 hours of online sessions over 5 days, including PowerPoint presentations, virtual show-and-tells of books and artifacts, and opportunities for discussion. Students are strongly encouraged to spend an additional one hour per day of directed private study.  This course differs from The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800 (I-40) in that the focus will be on production history, bibliographical description, and analysis. Without being able to work first-hand with the range of books as we do in the full-length in-person course, we will spend less time on the formal analysis of images and their role in scientific communication in different genres. The full-length course also includes handling printing blocks and plates and printing on the replica eighteenth-century common press and rolling press. Click here to view the course description for the in-person version of this course, “The Illustrated Scientific Book to 1800.”

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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, here Gaskell 2004 and here 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.

 

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

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 provide 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.” 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

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 catalogue of the exhibition is the best guide to anatomical illustration.

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.

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.

Jackson, Christine E. Bird etchings.The Illustrators and their Books 1655–1855. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985

Tongiorgi Tomasi, Lucia and Tony Willis. An Oak Spring Herbaria. Herbs and Herbals from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries. Upperville, VA: Oak Spring Garden Library, 2009

– This and the companion Sylva, Pomona and Flora are available as searchable e-books here.

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Course History