[Animals, anatomy, and natural history in Louis XIV's Paris]

[Elizabeth Fee:] Our speaker today is Anita Guerrini,

and she is Professor of Environmental Studies and History at the University

of California, Santa Barbara. She received her PhD in History

and Philosophy of Science from Indiana University in 1983.

After doing research there and at the University of Oxford.

She has numerous publications,

including three books, today?

natural history and the New World,1524‑1770: An Annotated Bibliography.

Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment:The Life and Times of George Cheyne.

Experimenting with Humans and Animals:From Galen to Animal Rights.

Let me just take a moment to let you

know that the next History of Medicine seminar is going to be a joint meeting

with the Washington Society for the History of Medicine on Tuesday, November 6.

And that'll be from 4:00 to

6:00 PM here in the Lister Hill Visitor Center just next door.

And Catherine Hoffman of the University of Hawaii at Manoa will speak on, quote

"When Sleeping Beauty walked out of the Anatomy Museum,

Anatomical Shows that Inspired Art, made

Fairground Fame and altered the face of a saint."  So that's just next week.

And now please help me to welcome Anita Guerrini.

Her topic for today is Animals, Anatomy and natural history in Louis the 14th, Paris.

[applause]

[Anita Guerrini:] Well, thank you. It's always nice to be back here.

Some of you know I worked here for 2

summers in 1982 and 1983 on the Peter with Peter Krivatsy on the 17th century catalog.

So it's always nice to be back and see how many things have changed

and how many things haven't changed. And so, and thanks to Steve for inviting me.

This paper is part of a book project that's called The Courtiers' Anatomists Animals and Humans

in Louis the 14th Paris. And in the book I look at two natural

philosophers in the period between 1616, about 1730.

There is no portrait of one of them, Joseph-Guichard Duverney. This is supposedly a portrait of him,

but since it's from 1886, it's probably not drawn from

life since he died in 1730. But Duverney dissected animals and

humans at the King's Garden in Paris and at the Paris Academy of Sciences.

And the second person is this guy, the polymath physician, architect Claude Perrault.

Who was in charge of the Paris Academy's research projects in the life sciences.

In the book, I look at what I call the Early Modern Animal Project,

and particularly at these two men, in the context of the court of Louis the 14th,

the city of Paris and the burgeoning audience for natural philosophy. The King's Garden

where Duverney dissected before hundreds of spectators? And the Paris Academy, whose membership

was strictly limited by royal policy? Were the two main sites in Paris for

the performance of natural philosophy, and both of them were funded by the crown.

In the performance of anatomy, Duverney, the dissector and Perrault the

philosopher bring to light, I think, the implicit tension in the scientific

revolution between empiricism and theory, between description and analysis. In addition,

anatomy partook of the culture of display of the Cabinet, which provided the basis eventually

for the natural history Museum. So today I'm going to talk about 1 portion

of this research focusing on this book, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux,

which I will henceforth refer to as Memoirs [Mémoires] published in

1671 and 1676 and edited by Perrault, and for which Duverney did much of the dissecting.

And my focus today will be on the relationship between anatomy and natural history,

two areas not usually thought of as belonging together. And this is a quote from the 1820s,

it says "Anatomy differs essentially from natural history", and this is of course during

one of the heydays of anatomy. "natural history dwells upon forms,

upon the exterior qualities of bodies, and is restricted, in whatever guise,

to skimming their surfaces. Anatomy goes further: it penetrates bodies, divides them,

isolates the parts of which they are composed, and seeks to lift the veil,

hiding the secret of their organization." Would you like this one?

Now, Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, classified natural history as a

subject of memory, a topic concerned with the collection of information.

He contrasted this to natural philosophy, which was a topic of reason. Now I'd like to look a little

more closely at this distinction, which historians of science also make between

natural history and natural philosophy, that is, between works mainly of observation and description,

and works of theory, experimentation, and generalization. The dividing line between these two

areas of endeavor was never clear cut, and it became fainter as the period progressed.

The English natural philosopher Robert Boyle's General Heads for the natural history of a Country,

published posthumously in 1692, followed Bacon's lead and implicitly

distinguishing the history from the philosophy of nature. His work was intended as a guide

for travelers to unexplored places who are not necessarily learned in natural philosophy.

Such as this guy, the former pirate turned explorer William Dampier. Boyle counseled the traveler to

a record but not to draw conclusions. Yet because these observations followed his guidelines,

they would not be random or naïve.

The Jesuit Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix

stated that his task in writing his natural history of New France in the mid 18th

century was to report all that he could discover that was curious, useful and interesting.

But of course he defined these categories, disentangling, he said, the true from the false.

By the end of the 17th century, as Robert Boyle's General Heads makes clear,

natural history was a standard component of the voyages of exploration and discovery,

and it became an increasingly important aspect of the colonial enterprise.

[audio microphone distortion]

Although the economic value of plants made them more common objects of the naturalists regard,

animals provided more visible evidence of colonial power when they were brought back to Europe.

The collection of rare animals had been an aristocratic and especially a royal

pastime from the late alleges onward. These animals were difficult to

obtain and expensive to maintain, making them even more desirable.

Dictionnaire de l’Académie française says, defined a menagerie as: In the houses of princes,

one calls the menagerie the place where they keep rare and exotic animals. And similarly in

the Dictionnaire universel  from the 1690, Antoine Furetière’s said that Princess

and Great Lords maintain them more for curiosity and magnificence than for profit.

And he gives the menagerie of Versailles an example. Only the wealthiest could afford to

maintain collections of live animals. The cabinets of curiosities,

which included dead stuffed animals, were very common aristocratic pastimes.

Louis the 14th maintained a menagerie at the medieval fortress [?Vincennes?] just outside Paris.

Well, when he built Versailles in the 1660s, he included a menagerie built by

[Louis] Le Vau between 1662 and 1669 on the southwestern part of the grounds. And this is a view of the

Versailles menagerie, and it has the the sort of Panopticon style actually was like

as a model for prisons as well. But there's the central building

where you can see everything. The first animals arrived there

in 1664 and included gifts from foreign rulers and the products of French colonies and explorations.

Plant and animals died, as they frequently did in the Parisian winters.

They were sent to the newly founded Paris Academy of Sciences, founded in 1666,

to be dissected and analyzed, and many of them were then described in the volumes of the memoirs.

natural history and natural philosophy therefore merged in the memoirs.

The combination of natural history description and anatomical exploration

displayed in these volumes superseded the descriptive style of 16th