Crowther-Heyck Kathleen
Department of the History of Science, University of Oklahoma, 601 Elm Avenue, PHSC 622, Norman, Oklahoma 73019, USA.
Isis. 2003 Jun;94(2):253-73. doi: 10.1086/379386.
Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world.
16世纪的德国见证了本土文学的蓬勃发展。为新的读者群体创作了数量空前、种类繁多的文本。本文分析了这种本土文学中一种未被充分探索的体裁：关于自然世界的文本。这一时期，大量关于动物、植物、矿物和自然奇观的书籍从德国印刷机上印刷出来，表明人们对自然世界普遍充满好奇。这些文本为广大懂德语但不一定懂拉丁语的普通读者提供了有关自然观的宝贵见解。它们揭示了一种普遍的观念，即自然是神创造的，并且深信对自然世界的思考会带来更高的虔诚。在本土自然史中，神圣与世俗紧密交织。虽然其他科学史学家将16世纪视为一个对自然的思考方式日益世俗化的时期，但我认为，对自然世界的深刻宗教态度依然存在，甚至有所强化。
