Sachiko Kusukawa is a fellow in the history and philosophy of science at Trinity College, University of Cambridge. She is the author of The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon.
"Picturing the Book of Nature is both a lucidly written study of an
intellectually significant topic and also a lavishly illustrated
and beautiful material object. It discusses the uses of
illustration in printed books of medico-scientific botany and
anatomy in the sixteenth century, early years of both print culture
and the scientific revolution, thus reconstructing a scholarly
argument by 'reading pictures.' A sense of the nuanced complexity
of the relationship between pictures and words in the early modern
period illuminates Kusukawa's history while casting a raking light
on our own time. Students of print culture, whether historians of
science or not, should take notice."-- "Society for the History of
Authorship, Reading & Publishing"
"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."--Ren�e J. Raphael,
University of California, Irvine "Journal of Historical
Geography"
"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"
"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"
"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"
"Science historian Sachiko Kusukawa probes the role of illustration
in sixteenth-century medical treatises, before the advent of the
microscope. Looking at Leonhart Fuch's De historia stirpium,
Vesalius's De humani corporis fabrica and the unpublished Historia
plantarum of Conrad Gessner, Kusukawa argues that such anatomical
and botanic images were not simply records of natural phenomena,
but varied visual experiments. [Her] book is studded with
illustrative gems, not least John Dee's 'pop-up' pyramids in Of
Euclid's Elements."-- "Nature"
"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
"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
"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
"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
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