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46 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 microscenes and represented them as genre pictures in the plates attached to the schoolbook, which they most probably thought more attractive and understandable for children than Linnaeus’s sophisticated division and dry Latin taxonomy. These microscenes, 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 section). 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.
