Case 4: Animals through the Centuries: From Bestiaries to Zoology
The Library’s historic collections enable us to trace the development of many disciplines from the Middle Ages to modern times through the academic works written over the centuries. Natural history, especially zoology, is one of the visually most appealing examples of this point.
During the Middle Ages, knowledge about animals was collected primarily in two types of books: encyclopaedic works, like Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae, on the one, and highly illustrated bestiaries on the other hand. The bestiaries mixed ‘scientific’ facts with legends and Christian morals. One of St John’s medieval bestiaries is a luxury manuscript produced in York during the 13th-century (MS 61). In the 16th century, Conrad Gessner begins to distinguish fact from fiction in his Historia animalium (Y.1.3.(1)). In later centuries, the expansion of scientific and geographical knowledge makes books about animals gradually more akin to today’s zoology. An important milestone along the way was the 37-volume publication Histoire naturelle by the 18th-century naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (Gamma.scam.13). Around one hundred years later, Darwin’s theory of evolution prompted the reassessment of the place of humans in nature. Thomas Henry Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature (Vet.Biol.20) is an early advocate of the theory that both humans and apes evolved from a common ancestor.
