Talking of animals: Whales, ambergris, and the circulation of knowledge in seventeenth-century Rome

The sixteenth century marks a watershed in the study of the natural world, and animals within it. Never before did so many Europeans devote so much ink to describing animals, their physical characteristics, their utility, and the environment in which they lived. Reading, observation, correspondence, illustration, and conversation represented key moments in this process of knowledge production. While the first four aspects have received sustained attention from intellectual historians and historians of science, much less emphasis has been placed on the key role of the spoken word in shaping early modern natural knowledge. This article examines the significance of oral discourse in transmitting natural knowledge within the social setting of seventeenth-century Rome and among Italian natural historians more broadly. It focuses on the way in which the study of unusual animals such as the whale (and by extension ambergris, the substance that it allegedly produced) was shaped by the oral testimony of those who saw it first-hand, often with little distinction being made between the social and professional status of different informants. While the oral testimony of a learned missionary may have trumped that of others, ultimately pride of place was given to first-hand experience over second-hand written accounts. Personal acquaintance also played an important role. On the whole, the examples analyzed in this article aim to illustrate the plurality of means and voices that actively contributed to the making of early-modern natural knowledge of animals. Within the inductive method that characterized early modern natural history, conversation and hearsay thus played an active and significant role that historians of science have mostly underestimated.