2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
her husband, Heinrich Schombach, who had come to assist an alchemist Duke
Julius had recently hired. Nonetheless, Zieglerin quickly found ample
opportunity to pursue her own alchemical interests at Julius’s court. She had
her own laboratory in which she carried out alchemical processes, and tried to
interest the Duke in her work by presenting him with a booklet on the
preparation of the Philosopher’s Stone in 1573. The centerpiece of Zieglerin’s
career in Wolfenbüttel, however, was her claim to have a special relationship
with a mysterious adept in the alchemical arts, Count Carl von Oettingen.
This count, Zieglerin contended, was not only Paracelsus’s illegitimate son
and thus had unique access to alchemy’s secrets he also had shared his
knowledge with her over the course of a long amorous relationship in which
he came to see Zieglerin as his partner in an alchemical project of great import.
As I shall argue in this paper, Zieglerin’s account of her relationship with the
fictional Count Carl served a twofold purpose. First, she used the story quite
successfully to attract attention and establish herself as a legitimate alchemist
whose knowledge and expertise surpassed even that of her male colleagues at
court. Second, the story played an equally important role in Zieglerin’s
understanding of her personal life. By making herself out to be the fictional
Count’s partner in nothing less than the alchemical regeneration of the world,
she gave shape and meaning to her own life story as well. Ultimately, Zieglerin
stands at the conjunction of science and self in early modern Europe, suggesting
that legitimating the two were often part of the very same process.
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Brian␣ W. Ogilvie University of Massachusetts, Amherst
The Many Books of Nature:
How Renaissance Botanists Created and Responded to Information
Overload
Formerly fact-poor, botany became a fact-rich discipline in the sixteenth
century. As an unintended consequence of new attitudes and techniques in
botany, the number of plants described in botanical books grew an order of
magnitude between 1530 and 1630, creating new problems of organization
and classification. To humanistically-oriented naturalists, this phenomenon
was as much a problem of words as of things: for every new plant at least one
new name was coined, often more, and these new names appeared in a
burgeoning variety of new books. Indeed, it soon became difficult to tell
whether a new name corresponded to a new plant or whether it was simply a
synonym for something already known, and naturalists had to master an
increasingly large bibliography before they could themselves decide whether
they had discovered something new. The solutions that were developed for
this problem of information overload were effective, but they helped transform
botany from an amalgam of humanism and medicine to an autonomous
discipline which no longer attracted much interest from the broader culture.
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