{"id":235,"date":"2024-10-28T16:57:06","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T16:57:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/?p=235"},"modified":"2024-12-20T02:42:59","modified_gmt":"2024-12-20T02:42:59","slug":"a-material-description-of-edward-topsells-the-historie-of-fovre-footed-beastes-and-a-historie-of-serpents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/2024\/10\/28\/a-material-description-of-edward-topsells-the-historie-of-fovre-footed-beastes-and-a-historie-of-serpents\/","title":{"rendered":"A Material Description of Edward Topsell\u2019s The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes and A Historie of Serpents"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Figure 1: title page with the “Gorgon” vingette. As my copy of Beastes<\/em> is missing its original title page, this is a scanned copy.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0While I understand that history is not divided into inflexible periods, what struck me about Edward Topsell\u2019s <\/span>The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes<\/span><\/i>, printed by William Jaggard in 1607,<\/span> is that it seemed so anachronistic; I did not expect a bestiary, an anecdotal treatise that is, in my mind, characteristically \u2018Medieval,\u2019 to have been created in the early seventeenth century. At once, this made me reconsider the text and its context.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2: Topsell’s entry on the “Rat.” Note the detailed crosshatching, skin folds, and hair in this accurate depiction of a rat.<\/p><\/div>\n

Beastes <\/span><\/i>seems caught in this awkward period between eras\u2013\u2013Reformation and Enlightenment\u2013\u2013when scientific inquiry began supplanting the old dogmas of scholasticism and divine revelation. Like Medieval bestiaries, this codex is a compendium of factual and fantastical creatures with not only physical description of each but accompanying Christian symbology that explains them. In contrast to earlier texts, <\/span>Beastes<\/span><\/i> displays a subtle hint of the systematism I associated with later periods of bookmaking: it includes a catalog of every author known to Topsell who has written about animals, an epilogue, and an index of Latin and English animal names\u2013\u2013all of which were comparatively new to the codex at the turn of the seventeenth century. Moreover, like Conrad Gessner\u2019s <\/span>Historia Animalium, <\/span><\/i>from which Topsell drew almost <\/span>all<\/span><\/i> of his material, <\/span>Beastes <\/span><\/i>displays an interest in classifying the natural world with precise description in an easily accessible form intended for broader audiences. In the prefatory materials, an epistle from the collected works of Conrad Gessner, two introductions by Gessner and Topsell, contains its stated purpose: to inform, amuse, and above all to enlighten, for animals themselves are instructive, pleasing, and divine.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 3: you might note that this print of “Rhinoceros” is stylistically different from the other prints, that is because this is actually a reproduction of Albrecht D\u00fcrer’s print of the same name<\/p><\/div>\n

This early-modern juxtaposition between natural philosophy and natural theology is intriguing. However, my primary reason for choosing this book is, perhaps, less<\/span> academic<\/span><\/i>; what sealed the deal was the title\u2019s vignette, \u201c<\/span>The Gorgon\u201d<\/span><\/i>: a creature that appears to be a scaled bull with pig trotters, a cow\u2019s nose, and a woman\u2019s mop of hair (Figure 1). How absurd is that? I would say that\u2019s not what a Gorgon looks like, snake-haired and all, but then I\u2019ve never actually <\/span>seen <\/span><\/i>one for myself, have I?<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 4: the “Mantichora”<\/p><\/div>\n

These woodblock prints are an incredible feature of this codex; it is replete with them\u2013\u2013large and small, of animals, real and imagined, from the benign to the frightful: animals familiar to seventeenth-century England like rats or cats are represented with considerable accuracy (Figure 2 & 5); creatures less familiar to the Continent, like the rhinoceros, are armored in a literal sense, clad in what appears to be fluted plate mail and lamellar (Figure 3); others still, like the \u201cMantichora,\u201d with its toothy grin that hangs from either ear, considers the reader with a hungry look (Figure 4). Doubtless, it would have been expensive to produce so many prints in a single book.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 5: the “Cat”<\/p><\/div>\n

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Figure 6: manicules<\/p><\/div>\n

It would seem that past students also enjoyed this book as much as I have. <\/span>Beastes <\/span><\/i>has the many signs of frequent use\u2013\u2013and misuse. The buildup of residual hand oil, indicated by smooth and darkened areas at the foot corners, suggests frequent use. In parts of the book, the damage seems intentional: in the section enumerating the various virtues and vices of the \u201cCat,\u201d a reader has scratched away the eyes of the accompanying print (Figure 5), perhaps wary of the beguiling gaze which Topsell suggests; other entries, like that on the dromedary, given the cleanness of the tear, seem to have been ripped out of the book entirely!\u2013\u2013a souvenir, perhaps? Or did one reader have a particular dislike for humped, desert-going mammalians? There are other examples of readers\u2019 engagement with the book. Marginalia and annotation abound: I have found <\/span>manicules<\/span><\/i>, underlining, and margin notes throughout the book, signs that the readers sought to highlight information in the text for its later use (Figure 6).<\/span> In other places, humorously, I found the bored and uneven, graphite scribblings of an uncooperative pupil, perhaps a more contemporary one (Figures 7). Indeed, it seems readers consulted <\/span>Beastes <\/span><\/i>often; however, these same readers were not, perhaps to Topsell\u2019s chagrin, all that precious about this book.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 7: you can just make out the graphite scribblings on the back endpaper here. Note also that someone, perhaps a former proprietor of this book, signed this book. This will no doubt proove useful when I investigate this book’s afterlife in the following posts.<\/p><\/div>\n

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Figure 8: the spine and raised cords<\/p><\/div>\n

At seven-hundred and ninety pages,<\/span> twelve and a half inches long, eight inches wide, and two and a half inches deep, Topsell\u2019s tome is a heavy and unyielding thing and in decidedly poor condition. The eight raised cords along the spine are nearly fully exposed, and only one remains attached to the front board (Figure 8). The somewhat flimsy pasteboards, covered in cracked caf\u2019s skin, have all but separated from their hinges and joints (Figure 9). The endpapers have peeled away, revealing two equally spaced incisions along the outer edges of either board through which green ribbon appears to have been threaded (Figure 10). Perhaps because of the binding\u2019s disrepair, the front matter is similarly damaged. The overall make of the book\u2019s rag paper feels good\u2013\u2013fine and smooth\u2013\u2013but very thin, so much so that the printed ink bleeds through the pages, and many pages throughout are torn and crumpled.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 9: the cover<\/p><\/div>\n

I do not believe these were original features of this codex and am certain that it was rebound at least once. In <\/span>The Historie of Fovre-Footed<\/span><\/i> Beastes,<\/span><\/i> the outer margins are one and three-quarter inches whereas the gutter margins are only one inch; in <\/span>A Historie of Serpents<\/span><\/i>, the outer margins are two inches, the gutter margins, one inch. This irregularity in formatting indicates that the pages were perhaps cropped to facilitate a rebinding. However, it is also possible the outer margins were deliberately made larger to accommodate the printed marginalia. Notwithstanding this, as discussed above, Topsell compiled and published <\/span>Beastes <\/span><\/i>and its front matter in 1607; he published <\/span>Serpents <\/span><\/i>the following year in 1608. Topsell\u2019s introductory notes do not mention <\/span>Serpents <\/span><\/i>which indicates that, even if <\/span>Beastes <\/span><\/i>was not rebound to include the later text, if it were, say, taken to a binder only after the publication of the later text the following year, it was not Topsell\u2019s initial intent to compile them. It is also possible that this book was one of those volumes produced in 1658; however, as there is no original front matter, this is something I cannot corroborate.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 10: paste board<\/p><\/div>\n

What is most striking about the binding is that it is not striking; even in its diminished state, it hosts no ornamentation, no embossing, no gold tooling, no marbling or mottled treatment\u2013\u2013<\/span>nothing<\/span><\/i>. Why would such spartan binding enclose this no doubt expensive and decorative codex? Well, Topsell aimed not simply to impress but to inform and educate, and his audience, scholars, naturalists, aspirant zoologists, autodidacts, and students, likely valued content over aesthetics, facts over embellishment\u2013\u2013<\/span>decorative<\/span><\/i> embellishments, that is, for as we probably know now, there is no such thing as a Gorgon. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0While I understand that history is not divided into inflexible periods, what struck me about Edward Topsell\u2019s The Historie of Fovre-Footed Beastes, printed by William Jaggard in 1607, is that it seemed so anachronistic; I did not expect a bestiary, an anecdotal treatise that is, in my mind, characteristically \u2018Medieval,\u2019 to have been created in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5250,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-material-description","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=235"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/235\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/historyofthebook2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}