Feeling divine nature : Natural history, emotions and Bernard Palissy's knowledge practice

[Extract] This essay examines the participation of Protestant potter and author Bernard Palissy, ‘inventor of rustic figulines’ and supplier of ceramic artefacts and installations to the late sixteenth-century French court, within sixteenth-century natural-historical production.¹ Palissy’s ceramic works presented striking intricate designs of plant and animal life present in ponds and swamps, while his published texts elaborated complex systems about the natural world in which the specific properties of waters and salts acted in powerful ways. I argue that Palissy’s knowledge was revealed through an integrated oral, textual and material practice, which represented a method for both discovering and disseminating what he apprehended through his emotions. It was an affective practice of natural history that was produced through individual aesthetic appreciation, spiritual revelation and emotional response to both scholarly works and sensory experiences of spaces and objects to be touched, seen, heard and smelled. However, as I explore here, Palissy did not enjoy the sociality, stimulation and validation of like-minded practitioners, factors that helped other scholars to form a sense of themselves as a cohort and of their practices as constituting disciplinary techniques. For this reason, modern scholarship rarely envisages his unique affective knowledge production alongside the natural history of his contemporaries. Indeed, Palissy’s unusual method of apprehension and dissemination through highly individual textual and material practices both emerged from, and resulted in, his lack of integration alongside practitioners of natural history of his era.