Know Thyself, Know the World: Early Modern Paper Engineering and Anatomical-Geometrical Bodies

This paper opens by considering a peculiar phenomenon in scientific history – namely, the invention of the anatomical flap-book in the 16thcentury, in which a reader can lift a torso flap on a picture of a seated figure to reveal the organs beneath. Thus the reader replicates the experience of the anatomist, successively uncovering the body’s secrets. Usually these texts were uncomplicated, with one figure and one flap; but we will consider here a bizarre multi-flap, moving-part anatomy first published in Europe at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Johann Remmelin’s Catoptrum microcosmicum. This anatomy was republished in England, and by the end of the seventeenth century, it contained not outdated copies of images from a prior century, but pirated illustrations from a famous contemporary neuroscientific text, Thomas Willis’s 1664 Cerebri anatome. Yet anatomy was not the only discipline to make use of flaps, as mathematical texts such as Sir Henry Billingsley’s 1570 Elements of Euclid deployed similar pop-up page elements to illustrate geometrical concepts of surface area or volume. This paper will address the folded page, namely the ways in which flaps could be folded up, in, or out to replicate three-dimensional figures and spaces. As a corollary, I will consider the particular relationship such similar paper folding techniques invites (or provokes) between the disciplines of geometry and anatomy.