Translator’s Introduction

Conrad Gessner (1516–65) was the leading Swiss scholar of his day. He was an impressively prolific philologist, naturalist, linguist, physician, illustrator, and author of more than seventy published works, and is still remembered for his pioneering scientific work in zoology and botany, the comprehensive Historia Animalium (History of Animals, 1551–58, 1587), and for the posthumously published Historia Plantarum (History of Plants, 1555–65). The range of his work is by modern standards almost impossibly broad. He is called the father of bibliography for his huge Bibliotheca Universalis, intended to account for all Greek, Latin, and Hebrew works to date, some twelve thousand variously catalogued and indexed. His other works range from Greek and Latin lexica, printed editions of Marcus Aurelius, Galen, Aristotle, Aelian, Heraclides Ponticus, and Martial to works on fossils, insects, minerals, herbs, potions, medicine, Aristotelian scholia, the origins of philology, and much more. He was, on the one hand, a comprehensive genius of the latter part of the northern European Renaissance, writing across the range of traditional humanistic and particularly scientific subjects in Greek and Latin. On the other hand, he is a cautionary example of what can be wrung from a brilliant scholar of modest means, driven by penury to work day and night until ruined health sent him to an early grave. “For twenty years [he wrote in appeal to the Zurich city counselor Heinrich Bullinger], I never had the good fortune to rest even once from my uninterrupted and intensive nightly labors… . If only I could have more leisure, I would enjoy better health; presently, I am very sick as my deathly pallor and my emaciated body indicate.” Only toward the very end of his life did he receive the material help he had long needed: the title and salary of canon in the city of Zurich, where he had spent most of his life as physician and teacher, and an imperial coat of arms from the Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand I. This last distinction entailed copyright protections and assured some steady income from his works, but the relief was neither timely nor sufficient; a weakened constitution and plague took him before his fiftieth year.