Thinking with Crocodiles: An Iconic Animal at the Intersection of Early-Modern Religion and Natural Philosophy
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This paper seeks to explore how culturally and religiously significant animals could shape discourses in which they were deployed, taking the crocodile as its case study. Beginning with the textual and visual traditions linking the crocodile with Africa and the Middle East, I read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel narratives categorizing American reptiles as “crocodiles” rather than “alligators,” as attempts to mitigate the disruptive strangeness of the Americas. The second section draws on Ann Blair’s study of “Mosaic Philosophy” to examine scholarly debates over the taxonomic identity of the biblical Leviathan. I argue that the language and analytical tools of natural philosophy progressively permeated religious discourse. Finally, a survey of more than 25 extant examples of the premodern practice of displaying crocodiles in churches, as well as other crocodilian elements in Christian iconography, provides an explanation for the ubiquity of crocodiles in Wunderkammern, as natural philosophy appropriated ecclesial visual vocabularies.
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2
William B. Ashworth, Jr., “Emblematic Natural History of the Renaissance,” in Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, 17–37 (Cambridge, 1996), 36.
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3
Charlotte Sleigh, “Jan Swammerdam’s Frogs,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 66 (2012), 373–392, 388.
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4
Simon Ditchfield, “Thinking with Saints: Sanctity and Society in the Early Modern World,” Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 552–584, 554.
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5
Ann Blair, “Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance,” Isis, 91 (2000), 32–58, 33, 35.
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8
Wilma George, “Sources and Background to Discoveries of New Animals in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” History of Science, 18 (1980), 79–104, 101.
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9
Joan-Pau, Rubiés, “New Worlds and Renaissance Ethnology,” History and Anthropology, 6 (1993), 157–197, 159–161.
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10
Susan Scott Parrish, “The Female Opossum and the Nature of the New World,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 54 (1997), 475–514, 480. Rubiés, “New Worlds,” 161, 181.
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14
Parrish, “Female Opossum,” 485. While Parrish usefully highlights the familiarity of the Old World animals as the source of their “morphological normalcy,” it seems to me that it was equally the product of religious associations, to which I shall return farther on.
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16
Natalie Lawrence, “Assembling the Dodo in Early Modern Natural History,” The British Journal for the History of Science, FirstView article (2015), 1–22, 12.
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17
George C. Druce, “The Symbolism of the Crocodile in the Middle Ages,” The Archaeological Journal, 66 (1909), 311–338, 315–316.
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37
Eric Jorink, “Noah’s Ark Restored (and Wrecked): Dutch Collectors, Natural History and the Problem of Biblical Exegesis,” in Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries, edited by Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy (Münster, 2011), 153–182, 174–175.
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42
Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 34, 50. Jonathan Sheehan, “From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 41–60, 46, 60.
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43
Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 34. For an excellent discussion of the role of religious knowledge in organizing natural knowledge, see Jorink, “Noah’s Ark.”
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53
Blair, “Mosaic Physics,” 49–50. Sheehan, “Philology to Fossils,” 42.
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57
Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, 41. Italics in the original.
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63
Hutcheson, Exposition, 37. Writers of every faction in early-modern confessional and intellectual conflicts “took the Bible as the only fully valid account of the past,” including natural history. Grafton, with Shelford and Siraisi, New Worlds, 207. By contrast, Sheehan suggests that the confidence in biblical accuracy expressed by authors like Bochart was an attempt to stifle anxieties. Sheehan, “Philology to Fossils,” 46.
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66
Hasselquist, Voyages and Travels, 216. Pontoppidan, Natural History, 206.
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67
Ibid., 440.
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74
Paula Findlen, “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities,” in Merchants and Marvels, edited by Pamela Smith and Paula Findlen, 297–323 (New York, 2002), 307, 312–313. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 17–21, 28.
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75
Louise W. Lippincott, “The Unnatural History of Dragons,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 77 (1981), 2–24, 3.
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78
Paula Findlen, “Courting Nature,” in Cultures of Natural History, edited by Nicholas Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary, 57–74 (Cambridge, 1996), 60.
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92
Druce, “Crocodile,” 313–314, 316. J.V. Kinnier Wilson, “A Return to the Problems of Behemoth and Leviathan,” Vetus Testamentum, 25 (1975), 1–14, 1–2.
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94
Druce, “Crocodile,” 321, 324. For further discussion of the hydrus, see Ignacio Malaxecheverria, “L’Hydre et le Crocodile Médiévaux,” Romance Notes, 21 (1980), 376–380.
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100
See M. Boskovits, “Krokodil,” in Lexikon der christlichen Ikonographie, edited by Engelbert Kirschbaum, 659 (Rome, 1970), 659.
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106
Paula Findlen, “Scientific Spectacle in Baroque Rome: Athanasius Kircher and the Roman College Museum,” in Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters, edited by Mordechai Feingold (Cambridge, 2007), 225–284, 245, 257. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 81–82, 84, 91.
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113
Attilio Zanca, “The crocodile of Santuario of Saint Mary of Grazie,” Grazie’s Sanctuary, 2000, http://www.fermimn.gov.it/grazie/inglese/s4.html [accessed 19 May 2015].
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117
Cabildo Catedral de Sevilla, “Catedral de Sevilla.” Maxime de Montrond, “Les crocodiles de l’Hôtel de ville de Nîmes,” Bibliothèque de l’École des Chartes, 14 (1853). 67. Le Quellec, “Le Crocodile d’Oiron,” 58.
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123
Findlen, “Courting Nature,” 60. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 201, 208. Lugli, “Inquiry as Collection,” 111–112.
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128
Mueller, “Mathematical Wunderkammern,” 785. Findlen, Possessing Nature, 201.
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Thinking with Crocodiles: An Iconic Animal at the Intersection of Early-Modern Religion and Natural Philosophy
In: Early Science and MedicineSearch for other papers by Spencer J. Weinreich in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
This paper seeks to explore how culturally and religiously significant animals could shape discourses in which they were deployed, taking the crocodile as its case study. Beginning with the textual and visual traditions linking the crocodile with Africa and the Middle East, I read sixteenth- and seventeenth-century travel narratives categorizing American reptiles as “crocodiles” rather than “alligators,” as attempts to mitigate the disruptive strangeness of the Americas. The second section draws on Ann Blair’s study of “Mosaic Philosophy” to examine scholarly debates over the taxonomic identity of the biblical Leviathan. I argue that the language and analytical tools of natural philosophy progressively permeated religious discourse. Finally, a survey of more than 25 extant examples of the premodern practice of displaying crocodiles in churches, as well as other crocodilian elements in Christian iconography, provides an explanation for the ubiquity of crocodiles in Wunderkammern, as natural philosophy appropriated ecclesial visual vocabularies.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2058 | 243 | 36 |
| Full Text Views | 486 | 16 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 281 | 28 | 2 |