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Conrad Gessner's Private Library

a
Brian Vickers
a
School of Advanced Study , London University , Senate House,
Malet Street, London , WC1E 7HU , UK
Published online: 08 Mar 2012.

To cite this article: Brian Vickers (2012) Conrad Gessner's Private Library, Annals of Science, 69:4,
571-574, DOI: 10.1080/00033790.2010.549958

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 ANNALS OF SCIENCE,
Vol. 69, No. 4, October 2012, 571
574

Essay Review

Library of a Polymath

URS B. LEU, RAFFAEL KELLER and SANDRA WEIMANN, Conrad Gessner’s Private
Library. History of Science and Medicine Library, 1872-0684, v. 5. Leiden, Boston:
Brill, 2008. 310 pp. 20 halftones. Cloth. t88.00/$126.00. ISBN: 978 90 04 16723.0.

REVIEWED BY
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BRIAN VICKERS, School of Advanced Study, London University, Senate House,

Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU, UK. Email: vickersbw@gmail.com

Conrad Gessner (1516
1565) was one of the most knowledgeable scholars of his day.
Born in Zürich, the son of a furrier, he studied at the universities of Bourges and
Paris, beginning his academic career as professor of Greek at Lausanne in 1537, the
same year in which he published a Greek-Latin dictionary. In 1541 he took his
doctorate of medicine at Basel and returned to Zürich, working simultaneously as
town physician (from 1552) and as professor of moral philosophy and natural history
at the Schola Tigurina, the first Reformed-Protestant theological college for the
education and training of pastors, founded by Huldrych Zwingli in 1525. Gessner
first displayed the range of his learning in a reference work that he ambitiously called
Bibliotheca Universalis (1545
1549), planned to contain the titles of all the books
then known in Hebrew, Greek and Latin (it actually included more than 15 000
items), classified according to subject matter into twenty categories. His scientific
works included the Historia Animalium in four folio volumes (1551
58), often
described as the founding work of modern descriptive zoology, comprising 4500
pages, in which he treated mammals, amphibians and reptiles, birds and water
animals, with over a thousand woodcuts (often reprinted separately); a fifth volume,
on snakes, appeared posthumously in 1587, and a sixth, on insects, in 1634. His great
work on botany, the Historia Plantarum, uncompleted at his death, was to have been
an encyclopaedia of plants, arranged not alphabetically but by morphological
characteristics.
A distinguished humanist and classical scholar, in 1555 Gessner published
Mithridates. De differentiis linguarum, often claimed as the first work in comparative
linguistics, which listed 130 known languages and printed the Lord’s Prayer in 22
tongues. In 1559 he published the editio princeps of Marcus Aurelius’ De vita sua,
now known as the Meditations. His other philological publications included editions
and translations of Porphyry, Stobaeus, Heraclides Pontus, Martial and Aelian. Of
his many medical works those on Galen and Hippocrates were frequently reprinted,
while his Thesaurus Euonymi Philiatri, de remediis secretiis (1552), or The tresure of
Euonymus, conteyninge the secretes of nature, to destyl medicines, as the translation
(1558
1559) by Peter Morwyng (or Morwent) called it, was a best-seller, as a glance
at the Wellcome catalogue will show. No modern edition of Gessner’s writings has
Annals of Science ISSN 0003-3790 print/ISSN 1464-505X online # 2012 The Author
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00033790.2010.549958
 572 Essay Review

been undertaken, and indeed it would be difficult to separate his own contributions
from the many works he summarised or abridged. But an excellent Opera Omnia
on microfiche, based on Hans Wellisch’s Bio-Bibliography of Gessner (1984), has
been published by IDC, Leiden. This includes, on 77 microfiches, all of Gessner’s
own works, including his published letters, and his contributions to other authors’
works, and ought to be in the library of every institution with a serious interest in the
history of science and medicine.
Gessner’s is the largest surviving library from that remarkable generation of Swiss
scholars*Zwingli, Heinrich Bullinger, Rudolf Gwalter and Ludwig Lavater, all great
book collectors who readily loaned each other their treasures. Gessner’s own copy of
his Bibliotheca Universalis survives, in which ‘he annotated more than one hundred
titles with their owners’ (p. 3)*one of the first catalogues to give locations where
books could be found and consulted. Against 53 titles in that list he wrote ‘habeo’ or
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‘habemus’, allowing the editors to compile a rather melancholy list of ‘Lost Books’
(pp. 259
81). After Gessner’s death (of the plague) his estate went to Caspar Wolf
(1525
1601), who succeeded him as town physician and published several of his
works, though not as many as he had planned. On Wolf’s death the library was
dispersed, many of the titles remaining in Swiss possession, others dispersed as far
as Tartu (Estonia), Erlangen and the Wellcome Library.
The present volume has been produced by Dr Urs Leu, head of early printed
books at the Zentralbibliothek, Zürich, together with Raffael Keller and Sandra
Weidmann of that department. Leu, author of a monograph on Gessner as a
theologian, contributed the introductory chapters surveying the collection’s history
and contents, while his younger colleagues compiled the catalogue of 395 extant
books, 51 now lost, and 34 ‘lost and extant manuscripts’. The catalogue (pp. 41
295)
is an alphabetical arrangement by author or title (Anthologia Graeca), including 11
(only) of Gessner’s own productions. For each entry the editors give the full title,
colophon, collation and a bibliographical reference to the standard authorities (Hain,
GW, VD, and so on). They also give brief details of the bindings (which are mostly
utilitarian ‘pigskin of the period’ or boards, as befits a working library), records of
gifts or acquisition, and whether an item contains Gessner’s annotations. Many do,
and it would be of great interest if some young scholar could transcribe some
specimens, so that we could form an impression of how Gessner read, and what
things he thought worth noting. Each entry is completed by a record of the volume’s
current whereabouts: many are in Zürich, but others have been located in a private
library ‘in Bronx (New York)’, the Biblioteca Angelica (Rome), Baltimore and the
Wellcome Library. The level of accuracy is as commendably high as we could expect
from these scholarly editors and their generous publisher, who has allowed them 20
well-chosen illustrations, and given the catalogue a spacious lay-out.1

1
The only blemishes in this beautifully produced book concern the English language. Four helpers are
thanked in the Preface, but they have not distinguished themselves. In Leu’s Introduction there are several
literal transliterations from the German (‘Neoplatonics’, ‘Chrysipp’), superfluous uses of the definite
article, (‘to describe the nature’; ‘discovered . . . the reproduction of the ferns’), incorrect verb tenses (‘all
the professors . . . were using this library’; ‘the numbers are referring to numbers of the catalogue’),
superfluous prepositions (‘despite of the’), and the erroneous use of ‘much’ instead of ‘many’ (‘owned
much more works’), among other grammatical mistakes. But there are few misprints: ‘mathemtcs’ (p. 30 n.
67); ‘worte’ (p. 33), and in the Catalogue I noted only one (possible) error, ‘Thronodia’ for ‘Threnodia’ in
item 299, Poemata (Basel, 1544). These are trifling errors, but Gessner deserves better.
 Essay Review 573

There are several useful Indexes, listing Printers (unsurprisingly, Basel is the
biggest source, with 128 titles, followed by Venice with 47 and Paris with 42),
Provenances, Donors, Dedicators and Annotators. There is a helpful Subject Index,
but the curiously titled Index of ‘Collaborators’ mingles authors and commentators
in an incomplete listing. From the mere six entries for ‘Aristoteles’ one would never
guess the extent of Gessner’s interest in Aristotle. Fortunately, Leu devotes a whole
section of his Introduction (pp. 21
25) to discussing Gessner’s life-long study of the
Stagirite, as witnessed by his copious annotations in two sets of complete works
(Basel: 1539, 1542). As Leu comments, and as I can verify, having been privileged to
inspect these volumes during my time at the ETH Zürich, in the earlier of these ‘he
made so many annotations by hand that sometimes the printed text disappears
behind the thicket of notes’ (p. 23). Readers can get a rough idea of the density of his
annotations from the illustration of the opening of the Nicomachean Ethics. Gessner
also owned a full collection of ancient, Byzantine and contemporary commentaries
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on Aristotle. Plato, by contrast, is represented by one Opera Omnia (Basel, 1540), and
one copy of Ficino’s Latin translation (Basel, 1540).
Urs Leu provides a breakdown of Gessner’s collection which contains one or two
surprises. The largest category is medicine (73 titles) with pharmacology (20),
comprising 107 books, or 26% of the whole. Hippocrates (13 titles) and Galen (22)
accounted for a third of these*indeed, Gessner said of himself that he had been
‘educated at the University of Basel alongside Galen’. Gessner edited the Latin
translation of Galen’s works by Cornarius (1549), and assisted the Basel printer
Froben with his edition of Galen’s Opera Omnia (1562), to which he also contributed
an introduction and a bio-bibliography. Gessner owned numerous books by
contemporary Galenic physicians, and evidently favoured school medicine as against
Paracelsus, whom he described in 1560 as an ‘impious man and sorcerer, who was
clearly in league with demons’, dismissing his treatise Von der Pestilenz as ‘a long
babble (‘‘longas deblaterationes’’)’ (p. 36). Nevertheless, he owned a small collection of
Paracelsian tracts, including one on ‘Guajak’ wood as a possible remedy against
syphilis, ‘die Kranckheit der Frantzosen’, as a related title calls it.
After medicine, the next largest category in what survives of Gessner’s library is
‘Language and Literature’, with 90 titles or 26% of the whole. Of these, 39 concern
his earliest profession, the study of Greek, ranging from grammars and dictionaries
to editions of all the major authors. His special interest was the Homeric poems, of
which he possessed four editions, and on which he published three allegorical
interpretations in 1542, drawing on ancient and modern commentators. Other
humanistic disciplines * history, philosophy, theology * account for a further 23%,
which, together with some miscellaneous books, means that half of Gessner’s library
was devoted to the humanities, half to the sciences, an ideal balance. Of the natural
sciences (19%), 13 titles are general books, there are 19 on the earth sciences
(geography, geology), 15 on astronomy, astrology and cosmology, 13 on zoology, 12
on botany, while mathematics scores a mere three titles: Euclid’s Elements with
Proclus’ commentary (Basel, 1533), Boethius’ Epitome (Paris, 1503) and the
Sphaericorun, libri tres (Paris, 1558) of Theodosius Bithynius (first century BC),
the oldest Greek work on spherical sections. Gessner was evidently not an abstract
thinker, but an observer and collector of every possible form of animal and plant life,
from descriptions and illustrations taken from real life and printed books, together
with actual specimens. Gessner collected plants all his life, and his many contacts in
the Republic of Letters sent him seeds and plants for his three botanical gardens and
 574 Essay Review

herbaria. Many of these were Swiss, but some came from as far afield as Montpellier
and Augsburg, while a colleague in Bologna once sent him 400 dried plants. In 1580
Caspar Wolf sold more than 1,500 illustrations of plants that Gessner had collected.
Fortunately, many have survived, and were reproduced in a beautifully produced
facsimile edition by Heinrich Zoller, Martin Steinmann and Karl Schmid, Conradi
Gesneri Historia Plantarum, 8 vols. (Dietikon
Zürich, 1972
1980). Gessner’s last
book published in his lifetime was De omni rerum fossiium genere (1565), and of his
geological collection, ‘a fossil crab and a piece of terra sigillata’ are still preserved in
the Natural History Museum in Basel. Urs Leu records that Gessner ‘owned guinea
pigs, vipers, mice, rats, and other animals’, while he researched the effects of South
American tobacco by smoking it himself, ‘experimented with ‘‘Guajak’’ wood, and
grew tomatoes, pumpkins and peppers from the New World in his garden in Zurich’.
Conrad Gessner devoted his industrious life to the collection and transmission of
knowledge. It is a wonder that he managed to achieve so much while also working as
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a doctor and teacher. (However, Bullinger described him as a passionate scientist who
‘preferred spending time on research and writing books to taking care of his
patients’.) Many of the attitudes to the natural world that we associate with
seventeenth-century natural philosophy can be found implicitly in his range of
interests and activities, and occasionally explicitly, as in this letter of 1556 to the
German botanist Leonhart Fuchs expressing his conception of knowledge-making as
a collective process:
For there are infinite kinds of plants, a great part of which must be unknown to
any one person on account of the differences between regions. But if every
person offers his observations in the public good, there is hope that at some
time it will come about that from them all a single perfectly complete work will
be produced by someone who will add the final touch. (p. 27)
That may seem to us a rather naı̈ve hope, especially since so many new forms of
animal and marine life have been discovered in the last few months. Nonetheless,
Conrad Gessner’s books, and the increase of knowledge which they represent, convey
to us vividly and tangibly the hopes and ambitions of early modern science.