In the days of Goethe and Humboldt, the dream of a ‘natural history’ attentive to all beings, without restriction or distinction, drew on the combined forces of science and literature to elevate ‘landscape painting’ to the rank of crucial knowledge. The galaxy and the lichen, the child and the butterfly coexisted peacefully in the same narrative. It was not that humans mattered little: it was that everything mattered infinitely. From Alfred Wallace’s sketches to Francis Ponge’s ‘proems,’ from William Swainson’s bestiaries to Rainer Maria Rilke’s sonnets, this book gives voice to the song, as tenacious as it is tenuous, of a very ancient knowledge of the world — a knowledge that catalogues beings by their concordances of hues and textures, composes ephemeral dictionaries with their glimmers, and is both ruined and soothed by the spectacle of their metamorphoses. 

Research Director at the Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, attached to the Centre de recherches internationales (CERI-Sciences Po-CNRS) since 2008, Romain Bertrand is a member of the editorial board of the Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales. He is a specialist in European imperial domination in Southeast Asia in the modern era and studies the circulation and construction of knowledge in this context.

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