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Ildikó Sz. Kristóf
children” have been found in the forests in different parts of Europe—cases from
Hessen, Lithuania, and from Ireland, Holland, Spain, and France are mentioned
from the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. The inclusion of such
miraculous beings, human “wonders” in the schoolbook also would suggest that
in his account of the “history of Man,” Raff drew much more on the works of the
Swedish scholar whose concepts regarding “feral children” and “feral men” (Homo
sapiens ferus) were well known in the age—and heavily criticized by, among others,
Blumenbach himself.
Raff’s Naturgeschichte could contribute enormously to the diffusion of new—as
well as some old-fashioned—ideas of nature (and of humans included in it), by its
numerous editions both in western as well as eastern Europe. This, however, is only
a part of the story. Let us see even closer what was represented in the schoolbook
and how.
a. Project(s) of reading, projects of interpretation
Raff and his engravers also have invented certain subgroupings or clusters of items
inside of the “kingdoms” or “countries” of nature. They have created certain micro¬
scenes and represented them as genre pictures in the plates attached to the school¬
book, which they most probably thought more attractive and understandable for
children than Linnaeus’s sophisticated division and dry Latin taxonomy. These mi¬
croscenes, as I have shown elsewhere (Sz. Krist6f 2011: 313-319), have been arranged
in a particular way, and Raff has given instructions in the preface, as well as scattered
throughout the main text, for how to imagine this order, how to learn and teach
from the book, that is, how to read it. The different scenes were to be imagined along
a straight line, a /inear itinerary leaving out of a center and crossing different “worlds”
(subgroups or scenes) that have been arranged in concentric circles. In the very center
of these circles there was The House (of the reader/viewer), represented—so far as can
be judged from the picture of silkworm breeding (Plate III, middle section [ills. 3
and 3a])—in a basic, stereotyped “European” way. Moving linearly away from it, the
“Little Traveler,” as the child or student reader was often called in the text, penetrated
first the world of vicinity, that is, the well known, domestic world, such as the Garden
(Plate III, upper and lower sections [ill. 4]); the (Court)yard (Plate IX, middle section
(ill. 5]); the Cultivated land and the Meadow (Plate VI, middle and upper sections
[ill. 6]); the Pasture (Plate V, middle section [ill. 8]); and the Lake (Plate V, lower sec¬
tion). Then he arrived to the world of faraway, that is, the wild, lesser known regions:
the Forest (Plate VII, middle section); the East and the North of Europe; the sea/
ocean (Plate XI, middle section [ill. 7]); and finally other continents.
8 For Blumenbach’s refutation of “feral men” as a distinct species of Homo sapiens that would relate
humans closely to animals as well as his criticism of Linnaeus, see his Of the Difference of Man From
Other Animals in Blumenbach 2005: 163-166.