Natural history was a truly encyclopedic science in which broad sectors of society participated, although not, at this point, as a unified group. In the early modern period, natural history was an important, controversial, and much discussed kind of knowledge. Gessner’s methodological lessons in the midst of his Renaissance zoology remind us that the natural sciences were an important arena in which new definitions of knowledge arose from an increased emphasis on experience. It was reason that allowed him to give some semblance of order to nature and to interpret the similarities and differences he saw among the natural things of the world.

But he confessed that experience alone was an undisciplined kind of knowledge. By placing great emphasis on experience, Gessner had amassed enough material to write four hefty volumes that far surpassed what anyone had known before about animals. The more material he uncovered, the more difficult it was to organize the natural world into distinctly logical patterns. Science is born from the collaboration of the two.” Gessner’s experience gathering materials for a new history of nature in the mid-sixteenth century gave him direct insight into the problems of combining reason and experience. “Reason comes to us from God experience depends on the will of man. “Reason and experience are the two pillars of scientific work,” he affirmed.

In the midst of his great Historia animalium (History of Animals, 1551–8), the Swiss-German naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) offered the following reflection on the process of creating knowledge.

Possessing Nature by Paula Findlen