Inventing

In the year 1643, on the shores of the Baltic, an obscure author published a small book on the plants to be found growing near his home town. Nicolaus Oelhafen’s treatise was tiny, but it discussed what its author felt was a significant problem, one which extended far beyond its immediate setting, the merchant town of Danzig (today’s Gdańsk). Why, Oelhafen complained, were so many people in his day fascinated by “strange” natural objects, “brought from faraway regions at great expense,” while they “trod underfoot” those to be found at home? Rebuking them for their “ingratitude,” he bitterly remarked that “Meanwhile, those things which grow under our own sun, in our own soil . . . if they don’t lie entirely neglected and in contempt, are at any rate held to be viler than seaweed”!1 In his book, Oelhafen attempted to reintroduce his readers to the richness and variety of their own easily accessible countryside by compiling a detailed inventory of hundreds of local plant species, together with notes on where they could be found. By thus documenting local nature, he hoped, he could help to remedy his compatriots’ ignorance while reestablishing a sort of balance and harmony in the greater world. By taking this step, Oelhafen joined himself to a much larger enterprise. For across early modern Europe, many of his contemporaries – in such areas as Italy, France, England, the Netherlands, and the scattered territories of the Holy Roman Empire – were also beginning to contribute to “natural history,” as they saw it, by documenting their own local natural worlds. Natural history, which comprised the study of rocks, plants, animals, and any other phenomena that might conceivably be described as “natural,” was a pursuit with a venerable genealogy dating back to Greco-Roman antiquity.2