Naturalists in the field : collecting, recording and preserving the natural world from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century / edited by Arthur MacGregor.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

New World and other Exotic Animals in the Italian Renaissance: the Menageries of Lorenzo Il Magnifico and his Son, Pope Leo X / Marco Masseti -- The Emperor's Exotic and New World Animals: Hans Khevenhüller and Habsburg Menageries in Vienna and Prague / Annemarie Jordan Gschwend -- "Judge by experience and by learninge": the Fieldwork of William Turner (c.1508-1568) / Marie Addyman -- On Northern Shores: Sixteenth-Century Observations of Fish and Seabirds (North Sea and North Atlantic) / Florike Egmond -- Collecting and Preserving Fishes: a Historical Perspective / Peter Davis -- Into the Wild: Botanical Fieldwork in the Sixteenth Century / Florike Egmond -- "Take with you a small Spudd or Trowell": James Petiver's Directions for Collecting Natural Curiosities / Charles E. Jarvis -- Linnaean Scholars Out of Doors: So Much to Name, Learn and Profit From / Hanna Hodacs -- "Devilish fellows who test patience to the very limit": Naturalists in the Pacific in the Age of Cook / Glyn Williams -- Catesby's Birds / Shepard Krech III --The Hudson's Bay Company and its Collectors / C. Stuart Houston -- European Enlightenment in India: an Episode of Anglo-German Collaboration in the Natural Sciences on the Coromandel Coast, Late 1700s-Early 1800s / Arthur MacGregor -- ight Ways to Catch a Seal: Fieldwork in Siberia in the Age of Enlightenment / Han F. Vermeulen -- Face to Face with Nain Singh: the Schlagintweit Collections and Their Uses / Felix Driver -- More Than One Way to Skin a Wombat: the How and Why of Collecting in the South Seas / Robert Huxley -- William Burchell in Southern Africa, 1811-1815 / Malgosia Nowak-Kemp -- Snapshots of Tropical Diversity: Collecting Plants in Colonial and Imperial Brazil / Stephen A. Harris -- From Tubs to Flying Boats: Episodes in Transporting Living Plants / E. Charles Nelson -- Faunal Collecting, Inventorying and Systematizing in the Marine Environment: a Historical, Mostly British, Perspective / : P.G. Moore -- Gathering Spirals: on the Naturalist and Shell Collector Hugh Cuming / : Helen Scales -- Bat-Fowlers, Pooters and Cyanide Jars: a Historical Overview of Insect Collecting and Preservation / Peter C. Barnard -- Nets, Labels and Boards: Materiality and Natural History Practices in Continental European Manuals on Insect Collecting 1688-1776 / Dominik Hünniger -- Collecting Abroad, Preserving at Home: Titian Ramsay Peale Ii, American Entomologist and Collector / Robert McCracken Peck -- John Russell Malloch: Amateur Naturalist to Professional Taxonomist / E. Geoffrey Hancock -- Reflections on Some Practical Aspects of Collecting During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries / Pat Morris --Following the Lure: Field Experience and Professional Opportunities in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century American Vertebrate Paleontology / Paul D. Brinkman -- Evolving Contexts of Collecting: the Australian Experience / A.M. Lucas -- Virtual Collecting: Camera-Trapping and the Assembly of Population Data in Twenty-First-Century Biology / Sarah Elmeligi, Ian Convery, Volker Deecke and Owen Nevin -- The Psychology of Finding and Recognizing Wildlife / Mark Lawley -- Appendices: Some Key Texts in the History of Field Collecting / Arthur MacGregor.

Interposed between the natural world in all its diversity and the edited form in which we encounter it in literature, imagery and the museum, lie the multiple practices of the naturalists in selecting, recording and preserving the specimens from which our world view is to be reconstituted. The factors that weigh at every stage are here dissected, analysed and set within a historical narrative that spans more than five centuries. During that era, every aspect evolved and changed, as engagement with nature moved from a speculative pursuit heavily influenced by classical scholarship to a systematic science, drawing on advanced theory and technology. Far from being neutrally objective, the process of representing nature is shown as fraught with constraint and compromise.