The Rhinoceros as ‘Mid-Wife to Divine Wonderment’ in Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes

Abstract

For the armchair zoologist of the early modern period, there were many foreign bodies to behold in wonderment. Thanks to the indefatigable work of Conrad Gessner and his five-volume Historiae animalium (1551–58; 1587) with some 3,500 folio pages and a fine collection of woodcuts, those keen to discover, document, reproduce, study, imagine, or simply gaze at the complexities of the animal kingdom had rich resources available. Here not only could they read about the familiar—the hedgehog and the dormouse—but they could wonder at the foreign—the unicorn, the dragon, the lamia, and the ferocious manticore. Fifty years later, in 1607 and 1608, two separate volumes of Gessner’s Latin works, together with their woodcuts, appeared in English. These were the product of a devout English clergyman, Edward Topsell, whose The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes (1607), based on Gessner’s first volume, and his The Historie of Serpents (1608), based on Gessner’s posthumously published fifth volume Qui est de serpentium natura (1587), were not only translations but summaries, commentaries, emendations, and at times revisionings of Gessner’s work, which brought it thereby for the first time to a broad English readership. In 1658, after Topsell’s death, another edition appeared with both volumes combined into one and with the addition of The Theater of Insects by the physician and naturalist Thomas Muffett (1553–1604), whose work, also derived from Gessner, completed the zoological categories of these English volumes. While Gessner was a layman—a physician, naturalist, bibliographer, and philologist—whose universalising and encyclopedic goals were reflected in his publications, Topsell, the Protestant cleric, had no such ambitions. His goal instead was a singular one, derived from his primary vocation and purpose in life, the worship of his God. For Topsell, as for others of his time, the natural world was inextricably bound with, as well as providing evidence for, providential history. In this short appraisal of a copy of Topsell’s 1607 volume held in the Rare Books Collection of the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne, I wish to focus