The humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took a passionate interest in Livy's History of Rome. No one studied the text more intensively than the Swiss scholar Henricus Glareanus, who not only held lectures on different Roman historians at the University of Freiburg im Breisgau, but also drew up chronological tables for ancient history, which were printed several times in Basle, sometimes together with Livy's History. Glareanus annotated his personal copy of the chronological tables and invited his students to copy his marginal notes into their own copies of the...

The Zurich polymath Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) is known as the founder of zoology and plant geography, the father of bibliography, editor of ancient texts, and author of one of the most important paleontological works of the sixteenth century. While preparing his extensive work on plants, he died unexpectedly and early from the plague. Gessner's interest in the natural sciences was rooted, on the one hand, in the new conception of nature that emerged with the Renaissance, and, on the other hand, in the creation theology of the Reformation, which considered nature as a second book of God's...