Notes on the Editors
Paul J. Smith
is Emeritus Professor of French literature at Leiden University. His research focuses on 16th-, 17th-, and 20th-century French literature, its reception in the Netherlands, French and Dutch fable and emblem books, literary rhetoric and intermediality. He has also published on animal symbolism and early modern zoology, and its presence in art and literature. His main book publications include Voyage et écriture. Etude sur le Quart Livre de Rabelais (1987), Het schouwtoneel der dieren. Embleemfabels in de Nederlanden (1567–ca. 1670) (2006), Dispositio. Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (2007), and Réécrire la Renaissance, de Marcel Proust à Michel Tournier. Exercices de lecture rapprochée (2009). He is co-author of Francis Ponge: lectures et méthodes (2004), editor of Editer et traduire Rabelais à travers les âges (1997) and Translating Montaigne (2011), and co-editor of Lectures de René Char (1990), Fabuleux La Fontaine (1996), Le paradoxe en linguistique et en littérature (1996), Montaigne and the Low Countries (1580–1700) (2007), Early Modern Zoology. The Construction of Animals in Science, Literature and the Visual Arts (2007), Zoology in Early Modern Culture (2014), Emblems and the Natural World (2017), Natural History in Early Modern France (2018), Langues hybrides: expérimentations linguistiques et littéraires (XVe–début XVIIe siècle) (2019), Early Modern Catalogues of Imaginary Books. A Scholarly Anthology (2020), and Ronsard and Du Bartas in Early Modern Europe (2021). Currently he is the director of two NWO research projects: A New History of Fishes. A long-term approach to fishes in science and culture, 1550–1880, and Aesopian Fables 1500–2010: Word, Image, Education. He is chief editor of Neophilologus, and member of the editorial board of Intersections, Montaigne Studies, and Deshima.
Florike Egmond
is a retired historian affiliated with Leiden University and living in Rome. She has worked for successive NWO-funded research projects in the field of natural history that were based at Leiden University. Her main research interests are the history of natural history, collecting and depicting naturalia in early modern Europe, gardens as botanical collections, the visual history of science, and methodological aspects of the early modern natural sciences studied in the context of the history of medicine, communication and exchange. She is currently involved in research on botanical collections, images of fossils, marine history, and networks of naturalists centred on Rome. Her main publications include the monographs Eye for Detail. Images of Plants and Animals in Art and Science (2017), The World of Carolus Clusius. Natural History in the Making, 1550–1610 (2010), and Het Visboek. De wereld volgens Adriaen Coenen (2005). She is the co-author of The Mammoth and the Mouse. Microhistory and Morphology (1997). She edited and introduced Conrad Gessners Thierbuch. Die Originalzeichnungen (2018), and co-edited Das Naturalien-Kabinett des Ulisse Adrovandi. 1000 Aquarelltafeln aus dem 16. Jahrhundert (2024); Carolus Clusius. Towards a cultural history of a Renaissance naturalist (Amsterdam, 2007); Correspondence and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe 1400–1700 (2007); The Whale Book. Whales and other marine animals as described by Adriaen Coenen in 1585 (2003); and Bodily Extremities. Preoccupations with the Human Body in Early Modern European Culture (2003).