4 -- Sennert's Natural History and other Digests: Disputations to Edited Volumes

In 1600, Sennert published a book that is today only once available, his Epitome Naturalis Scientiae. The Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris holds this one copy. The book contains an introductory dedication with the announcement of 26 disputations, but no table of contents. Twentysix independent pamphlet publications of around 10 pages each follow: these are disputations, defended by Sennert's students at the University of Wittenberg, continuously every week in the academic year 1599/1600.

The pamphlet publications that were sent out and distributed for the oral defense or response were already consecutively numbered, and the last publication was marked as such: "26 et ultima", "twentysixth and last". These 26 disputations formed the corpus of the chapters of this book. Both the pamphlets and the later opening credits were printed by the Wittenberg printer Gronenberg. We do not know how many times the entire publication was sold (or printed) bound, as there are no other copies of this book.

Daniel Sennert published the epitome in an expanded form in 1618, 1624, 1633, and 1650. The changes he made between 1600 and 1618 are significant: in 1618 he no longer dedicated the volume to the Senate of Breslau (today's Wrocław in Poland), but to Severin Schato von Schattenthal, a friend of his who was also first physician of the Bohemian government, and then he greeted also the readers. An index follows, provided together with a table of contents, where the chapters are grouped into eight books. Sennert added chapters in 1618, so that the full number of book chapters is now 47. The newly inserted chapters treated especially newly mentioned chemical ingrediences. In book five, for example, he wrote about bitumen and sulfur, which he had not yet mentioned in 1600.

It is particularly important that although he reproduced the disputations verbatim, he no longer mentioned the students by name. The co-authorship of the individual chapters is therefore unreferenced. He also erased both the dedications that the students put in front of their disputation and the dates of the public defenses. Sennert thus incorporated the disputations into his oeuvre.

Question: If this was a path that the disputations took in Sennert's work, what is their path in the work of the students? Did they mention the disputations again? What did they think about their content later on in their career?