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The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload
- Journal of the History of Ideas
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 64, Number 1, January 2003
- pp. 29-40
- 10.1353/jhi.2003.0015
- Article
- Additional Information
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Early Renaissance naturalists worked to identify the plans described in ancient sources. But during the middle decades of the sixteenth century, naturalists instead began to describe and name plans unknown to the ancients. They also divided nature much more finely, distinguishing species that their predecessors had lumped together. As a result, they created an information overload. Dictionaries of synonyms and local flora were invented in the early seventeenth century as partial solutions to this problem of information overload.