Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Hardback)

-Picturing the Book of Nature transitions gracefully from addressing general print concerns about illustrated texts to examining these themes in pictures of medicinal plants and ultimately to images of human anatomy. By moving toward greater specificity, Kusukawa connects specific debates and general trends, thus underscoring the symbiotic relationship between botany and medicine that characterized natural history during the period. . . . Kusukawa's command of primary sources is impressive, and she addresses historiographic lacunae with gusto. . . . [A] captivating read.---Justin Grosslight -Arts Fuse -
-Like many of its sources, Picturing the Book of Nature is stunningly and extensively illustrated; it embodies and carefully propounds an assiduous attention to the potentialities and limitations of books as material objects that individuals use in specific ways. . . . Kusukawa's study . . . is vital reading for anyone seeking to understand the exigencies of medical publishing in the Renaissance.---Killian Quigley -MAKE -
-Elegantly designed and well-illustrated, . . . [Picturing the Book of Nature] is a clear and concise account of the process of book making and publishing that students of the history of art and science will appreciate.---Susan Dackerman -Print Quarterly -
-Picturing the Book of Nature enriches the field of science and visual culture through its detailed focus on the composition, production, and reception of printed books containing both text and images. . . . Kusukawa has masterfully undermined our identification of these texts as canonical examples of period use of illustration by demonstrating that what is generally taken to be key and emblematic in them (namely a new attention to and the role of the visual) was in reality highly contested.---Renee J. Raphael, University of California, Irvine -Journal of Historical Geography -
-Today we take for granted the usefulness of images in making a scientific argument, but in the sixteenth century many scholars had good reasons for criticizing the use of images in books. In this deeply intelligent and eloquently written (and illustrated) book, Sachiko Kusukawa tells us exactly how sixteenth-century authors struggled--with publishers, artists, classical authorities, and their fellow humanists--to make images a part of their books and a central component of their scientific arguments. Kusukawa overturns many assumptions about the relationship of images and books, making clear that images always worked in tandem with the texts because for these scholars, nature was understood through books. In doing so, she provides essential new insight into humanist scholarship and the interplay among texts, images, the things of nature, eyewitness observation, and the testimony of authorities in the sixteenth century. Picturing the Book of Nature presents an illuminating new view of how sixteenth-century scholars went about constructing a pictorial form of argument in their novel pursuit of making the structure of nature visible.---Pamela H. Smith, Columbia University
-How do images make an argument? Picturing the Book of Nature rewrites the history of Renaissance science and medicine to demonstrate how illustrations became an instrument of knowledge in the mid-sixteenth century. Kusukawa's careful attention to the making and use of images not only describes something fundamental about science in the age of Gutenberg and Vesalius but also illuminates a culture of lively and contentious debate about the relationship between word and image on the eve of the Scientific Revolution.---Paula Findlen, Stanford University
-Sachiko Kusukawa has elegantly and persuasively displayed the complexity of the choices that faced early modern learned authors regarding the use of illustrations in printed scientific books. She shows that the decision to use or to omit illustrations depended not only on financial and technical considerations, important though these were, but also on a range of intellectual positions concerning the relative authority of text, image, and personal experience; as well as on a diversity of opinion about the relation of image to natural object and to verbal description by ancient and recent writers, and about ways of employing images in an author's own text. Her learned and absorbing study throws new light on the assumptions and practices that shaped the production of Renaissance books on human anatomy and on medical botany.-
--Nancy Siraisi, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
-In this magnificent study of botanical and anatomical images in early printed books, Kusukawa asks not only how the first great illustrated scientific books were produced but why. She shows that, rather than simply recording observations, pictures were controversial tools for teaching, learning, researching, demonstrating, and persuading, and that they were shaped and informed by these complex goals. Erudite, lucidly argued, and original, Picturing the Book of Nature is itself a wonderful example of the power of images in and as arguments.---Katharine Park, Harvard University