Jokes of Nature and Jokes of Knowledge: The Playfulness of Scientific Discourse in Early Modern Europe^*

Abstract

During The Sixteenth And Seventeenth centuries natural history, and to a certain extent science in general, rediscovered its capacity for playfulness in the form of the scientific joke. By scientific joke, I mean thelusus naturae, or joke of nature, and the lusus scientiae, or joke of knowledge, that populated the museums and scientific texts of the period. The relation between the natural paradox of lusus and the scientific demonstrations and experiments that were also lusus points to the way in which the dynamic between art and nature and between collector and audience unfolded in the spectacle of science.

Pieter Bruegel'sMagpie on the Gallows

“…An emblem was intended to be clever, to be both subtle and difficult, to permit readers to demonstrate their knowledge and considerable education. 104 Just as Ovid's Metamorphoses and descriptions in nature were particularly important to sixteenth-and seventeenth-century natural science, 105 so emblematists, too, assumed that readers could move through a series of recognition responses, that they would see the interlocking patterns, that they would thus remember all the related aspects of the problem. The Magpie on the Gallows, in other words, belongs to a very specific intellectual context.…”

Materia medica in the seventeenth-century Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo

“…Bromehead (1947a, p. 73) cites many medical uses for the piece of fossil bone or ivory seen in Figure 11/3, possibly sent to Cesi by Sicilian fellow Linceo, Vincenzo Mirabella (1570-1624). It would have been regarded as a fragment of one of that strikingly reconstructed series of human giants, but now known to belong to fossil elephants (Findlen 1990;Gould 2004;Agnesi et al 2007;Godard 2009;Godwin 2009). The pharmacist Potier 'saw a large amount of this [fossil ivory] at the house of his well respected patron in Rome, Cassiano dal Pozzo, where he showed us many wonderful secrets of nature.…”

Inside the Camera Obscura: Kepler's Experiment and Theory of Optical Imagery

“…See Horst Bredekamp, "Die Kunstkammer als Ort spielerischen Austauschs," in omas W. Gaehtgens in this period no distinction was made between ludus, as social play, and lusus, as intellectual play (such as the jokes of nature or of knowledge that populated the contemporary collections and texts). 28 e category of lusus was used to grasp the preternatural. e realm of the preternatural consisted of those 'wonders' or marvellous events and objects that fell outside the ordinary course of nature, but of which the cause was nevertheless not supernatural.…”