The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload

Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of the history of ideas 2003-01, Vol.64 (1), p.29-40
Main Author: Ogilvie, Brian W.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Books - history
Botany
Early modern history
Early Modern Information Overload
Europe
Herbaria
History of ideas
History of medicine
History, Early Modern 1451-1600
Humanism
Information
Information Dissemination - history
Information overload
Knowledge
Literary naturalism
Natural history
Natural History - history
Naturalism
Nature
Plant names
Plants
Reading
Renaissance period
Science
Terminology
Writers
Citations: Items that cite this one
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Description
Summary:Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this problem of information overload.
ISSN:0022-5037
1086-3222
1086-3222
DOI:10.1353/jhi.2003.0015