Pseudodoxia epidemica was first published in English in London in 1646. A sixth London edition was published by 1672 with each edition having been significantly expanded, revised and corrected. A Dutch translation was published in 1668 and a French translation in 1733 (published in Amsterdam) and an Italian translation published in 1737.
Rarity: the present edition is held by 11 German institutions but only BL, Bodley, Cambridge (Keynes) and Glasgow in the UK; Yale (Medical), University of Pennsylvania, Columbia and McGill in North America.
At the core of this stout quarto volume is the first German translation of Browne’s famous Pseudodoxia epidemica but, much like Browne’s original work, Christian Knorr von Rosenroth’s ‘translation’ veers off in various directions and incorporates other works by writers such as Leibniz, Jean D’Espagnet, Henry More, Thomas Hobbes and Antoine Le Grand (amongst many others) to create a one-volume melting-pot of European intellectual thought which, until now, has been largely unstudied by English-speaking scholars.
This translation includes a complete translation of Leibniz’s important Hypothesis physica nova into German (it was first published in Latin in Mainz in 1671). It is a remarkably early translation of any work by Leibniz and particularly noteworthy for being a translation into a vernacular language intended for a much wider readership than Leibniz’s own specialised audience. The translation also pulls Leibniz’s challenging and complex theories into the same realm as Thomas Browne’s often wild and eccentric catalogue of popular beliefs.
Sir Thomas Browne’s original work is founded upon his immense and precise reading and its pages resound with the names of long-dead scholars and their works giving shining examples of human credulity. In his preface Sir Thomas writes of how he has composed the work “by snatches of time, as medical vacations, and the fruitless importunity of Uroscopy would permit us” and how “our first intentions considering the common interest of truth, resolved to propose it unto the Latine republique and equal Judges of Europe, but owing in the first place this service unto our Country, and therein especially unto to its ingenuous Gentry, we have declared our self in a language best conceived…” It was not in Latin but in European vernaculars that the book circulated although Browne’s vocabulary and syntax must surely have presented problems for the translators.
Knorr states on the title-page that Browne’s original work has been carefully translated from the English into German but gives little indication of how Psuedodoxia is merely the foundation of this book and that it incorporates a number of other important contemporary European philosophical works. Knorr also expands the work with extensive annotations, additional historical and scientific examples, and personal interventions based on his eyewitness testimony.
Christian Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689) was a highly skilled translator and adaptor of works from a variety of languages. He spent time in the Netherlands where he encountered many heterodox views including those of Jakob Böhme. He was also a political figure in Sulzbach where he was counsellor to the princely court of Christian August, Count Palatine of Sulzbach (1622-1708; r. from 1632). Knorr was known to Leibniz as they had met in 1671 through the mediation of Franciscus Mercurius van Helmont (1614-98). It was also through van Helmont that Knorr became acquainted with the Platonic philosopher and letter-writer Anne (Finch) Conway, Viscountess Conway (1631-1679) and her family at Ragley in Warwickshire who he visited and it may well have been at Ragley that Knorr first encountered the writings of Sir Thomas Browne.
Knorr translates almost the entirety of Pseudodoxia including many of the additions and revisions from later editions. Book I is translated with no additions. At p. 445, Book II resumes and is largely faithful to the English original but there are additions or notes such as on p.534, after the section on the Rose of Jericho, is a note (pp. 534-536) “und weil sich einige dergleichen Bäume auch in Deutschland befinden…” (and because some of these tree are located in Germany) where reference is made to Zeilerus, i.e. Martin Zeiler (1589-1661 ) who in one of his many works describes an apple tree in Katzen-Ellbogen which for an hour at Christmas is said to bloom and bring forth apples the size of beans. On p.536 Olfert Dapper is referred to as describing various plants and fruits in Bermuda and on the island of Santa Cruz, i.e. Santa Cruz de Tenerife (in his Naukeurige Beschrijvinge der Afrikaensche Gewesten, Amsterdam, 1668) where a tree called ‘Mamor’ by the inhabitants is constantly fruitful. The section on the efficacy against drunkenness of Bitter Almonds (II, vi, 7) is followed (pp. 541-543) by a long supplementary note on drunkenness and its cures “Die Trunkenheit kommt eigentlich her von den sauren Theilichen des flüchtigen Geistes…” (Drunkeness actually comes from the sour tastes of the fleeting spirit).
Book III begins with a discussion of the elephant and here there are considerable additions on the subject of talking beasts with much reference to classical sources (Hyginus, Apollonius Rhodius, Oppian and Propertius and many others) followed by an account of Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc’s (1580-1637) examination of the elephant which passed through Toulon when he was able to establish that Pliny was wrong in stating the number of its teeth.
Chapter III on the dove is likewise followed by a lengthy note (in part using Browne) which begins with a precise citation (Book I chapter 7) of Bochart’s Hierozoicon. In chapter IV “On the Beaver” the quotation from Juvenal (Sat. xii, 34-36) is provided with a German verse translation (“…als wie ins Bibers Sachen/ der sich in der Gefahr pflegt zum Capaun zu machen; / damit er mit Verlust der Seilen were frey: / wohlwissend das diss Glied zur Artsney dienlich sey“) as is the much longer prose citation from Rondelet’s De piscibus. In neither case does Sir Thomas give a translation. Similarly in chapter VI “On Bears” the quotation from Ovid (*Met.*XV, 379-381) has a verse translation “auf unsre Sprache” (in our language) as does the prose quotation from Scaliger (p. 576). The chapter on the mythical basilisk is extensively extended and in chapter XI on Griffons (pp. 599-603) there is a paragraph inserted about strange beasts and flying cats where Knorr writes personally: “Und hab ich im Jahr 1663 mitten im Augusto zu Amsterdam in der Raritäten-Kammer Hern Johann Schwamerdams Apothekers daselbst ein aufgedörrtes Fell von einer solchen Katz selbst gesehen…” [And in the year 1663, in the middle of August, in Amsterdam, in the rarities chamber of Mr. Johann Schwamerdam’s apothecary there, I saw a withered pelt of such a cat itself]. This is a reference to Jan Swammerdam (1637-80) the famous Amsterdam apothecary and collector whose Wunderkammer was widely celebrated.
Chapter XXI deals with the chameleon and on p.647 there is a note on the observation of a chamelon by Peiresc in February 1637 recorded by Gassendi in his Vita (published in 1651 p. 478 –“medio Februario, extremus chameleonum octo, quos ab aestate enutrierat, foveratque, interiit.”) and on p. 648 a reference to Kircher’s Ars magna lucis et umbrae who speaks of the return of a Franciscan to Rome in 1639 from Palestine who brought a chameleon with him. There is also (p. 649) an account of a chameleon in Leiden in 1663 “an denen man befand wenn man ihnen Honig an das Maul strich dass sie mit der Zung ablecken; auch davon assen wenn es inhnen vorgesetzt ward.”
Chapter XXVI, “Of Sperma-Ceti, and the Sperma-Ceti Whale” was added in the 1658 edition of Psuedodoxia and is translated in full, and the last chapter of this book XXVII “Compendiously of sundry tenents concerning other animals…” contains after the third paragraph an addition. The section on the glow worm (12 & 13 in Browne) or “Johannis würmlein” has a lengthy addition referring to Knorr’s translation of Giovanni della Porta and to an account of Sri Lanka and further on mentions a bookseller in Pisa who, when he took off a close-fitting shirt, sparked off an electrical discharge which everyone wondered at.
Leibniz’s Hypothesis physica nova:
On p.201 (continued to p.251) begins: “Ein ander vortrefflicher Tractat wider die gemeinen Irrthmer von der Bewegung natürlicher Dinge” (Another excellent tract against common errors On the motion of natural things). The foreword to this states that the author of the work is known by the initials G. G. L. L, [i.e. Gothofredus Gulielmus Leibnitius Lipsiensis (1646-1716)].
This is a complete German translation of Leibniz’s Hypothesis physica nova (first published in Mainz 1671) along with Theoria motus abstracti and then in London in the same year by John Martyn (the printer to the Royal Society, to whom the work is dedicated). Leibniz’s work was partly a response to Christaan Huygens’s theories on the laws of motion. Leibniz suggested that the laws of motion could be expressed in two ways - according to reason and according to the senses - holding that the laws of motion proposed by Huygens could not be genuine laws at all, but were instead to be seen as descriptions of natural phenomena. The two approaches did not, he held, have the same epistemic value: the senses do not have the power to override the dictates of reason but the opposite is certainly true; “wherever the senses appear to contradict reason it is necessary to conclude that something exists which is not perceived except through its effect”. He later went to on provide two theories, one based on pure reason (Theoria motus abstracti) and the other (Hypothesis physica nova) dealing with concrete motion.
The Latin text is in 60 sections (section 51 with a typographically presented table), followed by the ‘Conclusio’ in German ‘Der Schluss’ pp. 251-253 providing a resumé. The German text is throughout an accurate translation of Leibniz’s original Latin.
Pp. 254-444 contain a translation from the Latin of the Cambridge Platonist and theologian (and friend and correspondent of Anne Conway) Henry More’s (1614-87) Enchiridion metaphysicum sive, De rebus incorporeis succincta & luculenta dissertatio (Metaphysical Handbook or, a succinct and lucid dissertation on incorporal things) published at London in 1671.
“In this work he radically revises his earlier enthusiasm for Cartesianism in favour of his own theory that the operative causal agent in the natural world is an incorporeal spirit that he calls the ‘Spirit of Nature’ or ‘Principium Hylarchicum’. In the course of this treatise he restates his theory of infinite space adumbrated in earlier writings. The Enchiridion metaphysicum was the occasion of controversy, however, on account of More’s attempt to use the findings of Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-Mechanical to underwrite his concept of the ‘Spirit of Nature’. The result was censure by Robert Boyle in Tracts … Containing New Experiments Touching the Relation betwixt Flame and Fire (1672).” (ODNB).
It is to this section that the 16 engraved plates (copied from the in-text illustrations in the first edition which include a depiction of Robert Boyle’s air-pump) at the end belong.
The translation of Browne’s Pseudodoxia resumes from p. 445 with Books II to VII and it is from here here that the additions noted above are found.
The English works of Sir Thomas Browne continue to fascinate readers and engage scholars to this day and thus this highly unusual “translation” by Christian Knorr von Rosenroth deserves far more attention by English-speaking researchers. The mixture of Knorr’s personal responses to Browne’s text alongside comparison and extension through various important authors via Knorr’s obvious wide and deep reading transform the already astounding English work into an important statement on the intellectual world of late 17th-century Europe and its connections with England.
Provenance: Royal Engineering and Artillery Academy Library, Hanover, established as the Artillery School n 1782, with ink stamps, shelfmarks and a late 18th-century “Artillerie Schule” bookplate. The buildings were demolished after 1866 and the library has been long-dispersed.
