Chapter 3 discusses the designations for the classes of objects (i.e. animals, plants – including flora and fauna – and minerals), as well as for the respective disciplines. In the early modern period, historia naturalis/natural history was the name applied to the study of natural objects, later to be known as biology and geology/mineralogy. The names for these and other subdisciplines emerged in the early modern period but at different stages and sometimes with divergent intentions and meanings.

The main questions posed at the beginning of this study can be tentatively answered as follows.

Giving names to new things and concepts is an important part of the scientific process, as it establishes something as an object of study. Names can also reveal the conceptions and the intentions behind them. These conceptions can be very different compared to our modern views on the objects in question.

Chapter 5 turns its attention to the so-called New World, focusing on the flora and fauna of the Americas. The chapter begins with an overview of the relevant texts and examines the practical and conceptual challenges faced by European naturalists – particularly the difficulty of reconciling unfamiliar species with biblical accounts of creation and the flood. It then analyses the naming of American plants and animals in Latin texts, highlighting characteristic processes of lexical acculturation. Four case studies delve into specific challenges in depth: the sloth, which was assigned multiple names across European languages; the penguin, mistakenly identified as a European species; a mythical creature called Su, for which Conrad Gessner sought a more classical name; and ficus indicus, a term applied to at least three entirely different plants.

Chapter 1 begins with an overview of Neo-Latin as a scientific language. By the mid-fifteenth century, Latin had been the Western European lingua franca of science and learning for more than a millennium. However, the stylistic preferences of humanist authors, who tried to imitate classical texts, especially their vocabulary, presented a challenge in many areas, but above all in the sciences, where a new-found wealth of knowledge required an equal number of new names. Important debates on how far nonclassical words were to be tolerated and the hierarchy of res and verba are also analysed in this chapter.

Chapter 4 focuses on naturalia from Europe. The naming of natural objects from the so-called Old World presented early modern natural scientists with major challenges. While European scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century were primarily concerned with the identification of minerals, plants, and animals mentioned in ancient texts, knowledge soon increased dramatically through systematic observation of nature, requiring new forms of description, cataloguing, systematisation, and naming. The chapter charts this development with a focus on naming and highlights specific processes through three case studies: the controversy between Fuchs and Mattioli over the identification of ancient plant names, the incorporation of German mining terminology into Latin scholarly discourse, and the role of misunderstanding and chance in the formation of technical terms.

Chapter 2 presents the relevant linguistic terminology, provides an overview of different forms of names, and addresses the question of which languages the names were based on. Two principal kinds of neologism can be distinguished: form and sense. The former denotes the coinage of new words and the latter the process of giving existing words a new meaning. In practice, they were not as distinct as they appeared, since most new words were coined from well-known roots and according to long-established rules. Although the texts that form the corpus of the monograph were predominantly written in Latin, many names were also taken from Greek, some from Arabic and Hebrew, and others from vernacular languages. The last part of Chapter 2 discusses processes of naming using four examples: Technica, Musa, the names of the moons of Jupiter, and Atlas. The case studies have been arranged according to their ever-increasing contingency, beginning with a term that had been chosen on purpose and ending with a term that was never meant to assume its present connotation.

Chapter 6 explores what is arguably the most peculiar ‘world’ – that revealed by the microscope. The technical challenges and the fleeting nature of microscopic observations hindered the systematic study and naming of this hidden realm, leading to the use of rather vague or metaphorical terms, often diminutives. The first two case studies consolidate and extend findings gained in other contexts. The naming of the microscope itself illustrates that terms for technical innovations could be subject to processes similar to those of natural objects. Meanwhile, spermatozoa were long conceptualised and named as a type of animal. It was not until the nineteenth century that their true nature as a type of cell became widely accepted, yet the terminology persists, continuing to imply an animal-like nature. The third case examines how an assumed analogy between plant seeds and animal embryos led Malpighi to an erroneous description of plant seeds.