The Zurich polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) is known as the founder of zoology and plant geography, the father of bibliography, editor of ancient texts, and author of one of the most important paleontological works of the sixteenth century. While preparing his extensive work on plants, he died unexpectedly and early from the plague. Gessner's interest in the natural sciences was rooted, on the one hand, in the new conception of nature that emerged with the Renaissance, and, on the other hand, in the creation theology of the Reformation, which considered nature as a second book of God's revelation next to the Bible. This richly illustrated and erudite biography is the first biography of Gessner to appear in English. This biography is a translation of Conrad Gessner (1516-1565): Universalgelehrter und Naturforscher der Renaissance (Basel: NZZ Libro, 2016).
The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took a passionate interest in Livy’s History of Rome. No one studied the text more intensively than the Swiss scholar Henricus Glareanus, who not only held lectures on different Roman historians at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, but also drew up chronological tables for ancient history, which were printed several times in Basle, sometimes together with Livy’s History. Glareanus annotated his personal copy of the chronological tables and invited his students to copy his marginal notes into their own copies of the book. Three of these copies survived, and give new insight into Glareanus’s practices as a scholar and teacher. The notes they contain—and the way in which Glareanus used them as a teacher—are distinctive, and neither has had much attention in the past from historians of reading. This volume presents facsimile reproductions of the tables from one of the surviving copies, now kept in Princeton University Library. The high-quality reproductions include transcriptions of the handwritten notes, unlocking Glareanus’s teachings for a new generation of students and researchers.
The Swiss physician and polymath Conrad Gessner (1516-1565) was one of the most prominent scientists of the early modern period and wrote numerous important works. During the last two decades were discovered nearly 400 titles from his private library. They give an interesting insight into his interests and his sources. The present book contains not only an introduction and a catalogue of these books, but also inventories of the lost works as well as the still extant and lost manuscripts possessed by Gessner. They open the door to Gessner's study and to the intellectual world of a fascinating Renaissance scholar.
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