V.2 'several Plants bound up into one Volume'

Much has been written on the early modern concept of the Book of Nature, the idea that the divine order of the world becomes legible to humans through faith. For Renaissance thinkers, the natural world was alive with hieroglyphic signs; yet, as Ken Robinson points outKen Robinson, "The Book of Nature," Into Another Mould: Change and Continuity in English Culture 1625-1700 (New York: Routledge, 1992): 89., drawing on a now-common argument first articulated by Foucault, the epistemic break at the end of the seventeenth century radically changed the kind of book thinkers read. Thus if, in earlier centuries, the Book of Nature was "a remarkable tissue of correspondences or resemblances which require allegorical, mystical-religious reading," the book of the Royal Society transformed resemblances into "the language of mathematics," which "sharply divided qualities from quantities and saw its province as the latter."