Dominik Berrens, "Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History" (Cambridge UP, 2026)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Episode: Dominik Berrens, "Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern Science: The Case of Natural History" (Cambridge UP, 2026)
Date: April 6, 2026
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Dominik Berrens

Theme:
This episode explores how new scientific concepts and objects were named during the early modern period, focusing particularly on natural history. Dr. Dominik Berrens discusses the linguistic, cultural, and scholarly processes behind the creation of scientific terminology—many of which are still in use today. The conversation delves into the complex interplay of Latin, Greek, vernacular, and even indigenous languages, the challenge of naming new discoveries (including those from the Americas and microscopic worlds), and debates that shaped modern scientific nomenclature.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins and Motivations for the Book [03:15–05:09]

• Dr. Berrens introduces himself as a classicist with a biology background, heavily interested in scientific texts written in Latin and Greek.
• The book emerges from a European Research Council project (“Nos Chemos”) at the University of Innsbruck, investigating the role of Latin in early modern scientific discourse.
• The central motivation: “The most fundamental process of the scientific endeavor is to name new things and new concepts because this established something as an object worth studying.” [04:36, Berrens]

2. What Is Neo-Latin and Its Role? [05:09–09:20]

• Neo-Latin is defined as the Latin used in the early modern period—a “written and spoken language” but no longer a mother tongue.
• Revival of classical Latin forms and grammar began in Renaissance Italy (~1400), inspired by the works of Cicero.
• Challenge: Cicero’s Latin, while the stylistic ideal, was ill-fitted for scientific vocabulary; thus, scholars had to innovate beyond classical models, especially in the natural sciences.

“In the end, especially in the natural sciences, people were quite used to introduce new terms that were not based on Cicero anymore.” [08:53, Berrens]

3. Other Sources of Scientific Names [09:20–12:13]

• Beyond Latin, Greek significantly influenced terminology, especially for its long-standing role as the language of science.
• Arabic, Hebrew, and European vernaculars (and even indigenous American languages) also contributed, particularly in medicine, astronomy, and botany.
• Example: The plant “foxglove” is “Fingerhut” (thimble) in German. Botanist Leonhart Fuchs translated it into the Latin “digitalis.” [11:17, Berrens]

4. The Process of Naming New Things [12:13–16:09]

• Early scholars hesitated to recognize “new” entities, believing ancient authorities like Aristotle had cataloged all knowledge.
• The discovery of new flora and fauna in the Americas and advances in other sciences forced acknowledgment of knowledge gaps and the need for new terms.
• Naming methods included:
  • Greek compounds for new animals/objects (e.g., hippopotamus = “river horse”)
  • Integration of indigenous and local terms as transliterations or translations

“Compounds are a kind of elegant way to name new or so far unknown animals... you can use parts of already known objects or animals and just mix them in a compound.” [13:54, Berrens]

5. Development of Classification Systems (Taxonomy) [16:09–19:08]

• Systematic taxonomy is a relatively late phenomenon, developing from the late 17th century onward (culminating with Linnaeus in the 18th century).
• The rapid increase in known species—“from about 500 plants to 6,000” within a century—necessitated new broader categories and generic terms, such as “flora.” [17:44, Berrens]

“These more specific layers of taxonomy are a rather late phenomenon, at least late for the corpus that I was looking at.” [18:48, Berrens]

6. Debates Over Reusing Ancient Names [19:08–22:22]

• Re-applying ancient Greek or Latin names generated considerable controversy because ancient descriptions were often vague.
• Famous debate: German botanist Leonhart Fuchs and Italian physician Mattioli fiercely disputed plant identifications from Dioscorides’s Materia Medica, marking errors in the margins.

“He always wrote, ‘it’s an error that was made by Fuchs,’ thus pointing his readers to Fuchs’ errors... But it was important to identify these ancient names because initially, people had the idea that everything... is already in the ancient text, and we just need to restore ancient knowledge.” [20:54, Berrens]

7. Naming New World Flora and Fauna: Conceptual Challenges [22:22–26:06]

• The encounter with American species disproved the completeness of ancient knowledge—and even posed theological puzzles (e.g., how could Noah’s Ark account for New World species?).
• Strategies included mapping new animals to European ones, using indigenous terms, or inventing descriptive Greek or Latin compounds.
• Memorable anecdote: The sloth was named by Gessner “Arctopithecus”—a “bear-monkey” (Greek arktos + pithekos).

“For more exotic species like the sloth... they resorted to indigenous names... or found new figurative names.” [25:09, Berrens]

8. Microscopy and the Problem of the Unprecedented [26:06–30:12]

• The microscope introduced new challenges: there were no indigenous or vernacular names for microscopic entities.
• Early microscopists, such as Leeuwenhoek, often lacked classical training and used plain language (“little animals”; “animalcula”), resulting in unspecific, almost informal terminology.

“One of the things that startled me during my research was that the microscopic world barely has any specific names... just descriptions or very unspecific names like little animal or worms and so on.” [29:28, Berrens]

9. Accidental and Serendipitous Coinages [30:12–34:20]

• Not all scientific terms arose from deliberate invention—many were “accidents.”
• Example: The word “atlas” (for map collections) was never meant for that use: Mercator’s intended cosmic treatise was unfinished and only its geographical part published, yet the title stuck.

“There’s so much accident in our modern terminology. So many terms were never intended to work as such...” [30:47, Berrens]

“Atlas nowadays refers to a work of cartography... but it was planned to work as a title for an astronomical or cosmological book.” [32:48, Berrens]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the necessity of naming:

  “The most fundamental process of the scientific endeavor is to name new things and new concepts because this established something as an object worth studying.”
  — Dr. Dominik Berrens [04:36]

• On the inadequacy of Ciceronian Latin for science:

  “You could not rely entirely on Ciceronian Latin. You had to come up with new names, new ways of describing.”
  — Dr. Dominik Berrens [07:57]

• On creative etymology:

  “Compounds are a kind of elegant way to name new or so far unknown animals... For instance, because you could make sense of them.”
  — Dr. Dominik Berrens [13:54]

• On the conceptual shock of the Americas:

  “This was a huge conceptual problem... Even the Bible was called into question, because people still had a very literal understanding of the Bible... Why do these animals look different from those in Europe?”
  — Dr. Dominik Berrens [23:14]

• On the randomness in terminology:

  “There’s so much accident in our modern terminology. So many terms were never intended to work as such and just more or less by accident became a technical term.”
  — Dr. Dominik Berrens [30:47]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Introduction & Book Motivation: 03:15–05:09
• Neo-Latin’s Role: 05:09–09:20
• Sources of Scientific Names beyond Latin: 09:20–12:13
• Mechanisms of Naming New Things: 12:13–16:09
• Classification and Taxonomy Emergence: 16:09–19:08
• Debates on Ancient Name Reuse: 19:08–22:22
• Naming New World Species & Theological Issues: 22:22–26:06
• Microscopy and Naming Unseeable Creatures: 26:06–30:12
• Serendipity and Accident in Technical Vocabulary: 30:12–34:20

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Closing & Future Work

• Dr. Berrens is currently working on a commentary on Seneca’s Epistolae Morales and will next begin a project on early modern scientific translations, examining how knowledge crossed linguistic and cultural boundaries.
• The conversation richly highlights the contingencies and debates that underpin the scientific language we use today—and how historical, linguistic, and even theological puzzles shaped the naming of the world.

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For listeners interested in how the very building blocks of scientific knowledge—names and classifications—came into being, this episode is a must-hear.

Transcript

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[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

I was groomed to become one of his wives. This week on Disorder, the podcast that orders the disorder, an Epstein survivor tells me her story and what justice looks like for her. I want to see action, and I am demanding action. Do not just talk the talk.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

You need to start walking the walk now.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

It's one of the most powerful interviews I've ever done in over 20 years as a journalist. Search Disorder in your podcast app to listen right now. Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Dominic Barrons about his book titled Naming New Things and Concepts in Early Modern the Case of Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Now, the fact that loads of different things and concepts have kind of official scientific names, often in addition to the everyday names, honestly might be something we kind of take for granted. And certainly the fact that this is usually in Latin is like, oh, well, it must have been like that forever, right? Because Latin has been dead for a while. And yet this book helps us understand the kind of obvious fact that nevertheless we overlook, which is, well, at some point those things had to be named, right? Decisions had to be made, processes had to be undergone about what do we call things? And especially what do we call things that maybe didn't exist as things or concepts when Latin was being used? Like, what do you do if you're in the early modern period and something new pops up? How do you deal with it? Right. And so this is exactly the kind of history I always find fascinating, which is taking something that we use all the time is really important, but maybe we don't think about this book helps us do that. So, Dominic, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. I'm really glad that I can be here and talk a bit about my book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, I'm very pleased to have you, too. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? What kinds of questions motivated this project?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Right. So my name is Dominic Behrens. As you said, I'm a classicist from now the University of Mainz, but I also studied biology, not just classics. So I've always been interested in technical text, scientific text written in Latin and Greek. And this project was conducted at the University of Innsbruck, where we had an ESC project called Nos Chemos. It was about early modern scientific texts written in Latin and how Latin, let's say, fostered or established the scientific discourse in the early modern period. Period. And my project on naming was one of the sub projects. Yeah. And it was, let's say, the most fundamental process of the scientific endeavor is to name new things and new concepts because this established something as an object worth studying. And yeah, I was most interested, as you already said, I was most interested in. In the processes behind naming because we still have these Latin and Greek names stemming from antiquity or from the early modern period still in use today. But I was interested. How did they come to be and how were they established as technical terms? And most of this happened in the early modern period. And yeah, that was the main question behind my book.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

All right, so let's get into those processes. Obviously, we've both mentioned Latin is part of this, but we should be more specific because you talk about in the book that really by the time we're looking at sort of the 15th century in Western Europe, we're looking at Neo Latin. So what is Neo Latin and why was this being talked about at this point?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, that's a good question. And so easily said. Neo Latin is the Latin that was used in the early modern period. It was both a written and a spoken language at that time. But we can make it a Bit more difficult because in antiquity, we had the Romans who spoke Latin as their kind of mother tongue. But during the Middle Ages, there were no more, let's say, native speakers of Latin, and Latin became a language of science and learning in general. So by the end of antiquity, in the start of the Middle Ages and beginning in Italy around the year 15, 1400, people oriented themselves more towards the ancient times, which is called the Renaissance and humanism. And they started to reintroduce, let's say, the stylistic models of ancient Latin grammar, and that's what we call neolatin. So it's not really new, but rather the Renaissance use of ancient Latin grammar and lexicography, let's say. Yeah, but it was a process and a lot of debate, starting in Italy, as I said, but then spreading all across Western Europe, what kind of Latin we should use, simply because in the Middle Ages, as I said, linguistic changes had crept into the way of how people wrote and spoke Latin, and they wanted to reintroduce the more classical models, especially Cicero. Cicero was deemed the stylistic model for pros at least, and people aimed to imitate him as closely as possible. But especially with scientific texts, it was kind of a problem. Cicero was a rhetorician, a politician, but not a scientist or a physician. And he did not use so many technical terms for plants or rocks or other stuff related to the natural sciences. And moreover, as we have already said, in the early modern period, so many new things were discovered that had to be given a new name. So you could not rely entirely on Ciceronian Latin. You had to come up with new names, new ways of describing. And that's what is part of my book. We had these discussions on how far you could go away from Ciceronian Latin, especially in the early phase of the Renaissance. But in the end, especially in the. The natural sciences, people were quite used to introduce new terms that were not based on Cicero anymore. So I hope this answers your question.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that helps us understand kind of what's going on with Latin. But you gave us a little hint earlier, with your own background, that Latin is not the only relevant language here. Where were some of the other. What were some of the other sources that new terms might be coming from?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Right. So with the Beginning of the 15th century, Western Europe saw an influx on Greek scholars coming from Constantinople, modern Istanbul, and they brought with them Greek texts from antiquity and also from their Middle Ages, and they reintroduced the study of Greek, first in Italy again, and then in the rest of Europe. So we have quite a lot of new technical terms coming from Ancient Greek. And this is no wonder, because in antiquity, not Latin, but Greek was the language of science, so to say, and it had already in antiquity a much more refined seminology, especially in medicine. But Latin and Greek were not the only two languages that were relevant for terminology. We also have a lot of terms coming from Arabic, especially in medicine and in mathematics and astronomy, we have Hebrew words and later on, also European vernacular languages and other languages, for instance, from the Americas, Nahuatl or Tupi, they all made it into Latin at some point. But, yeah, sometimes the words were just transliterated and then integrated into Latin. But we also have a lot of loan translations from originally vernacular languages that were then translated into Latin. If I may give an example, a good example is the foxglove, which. This flower, it was not described in antiquity and therefore it didn't have a Latin name. It was introduced. The Latin name was introduced by Leonhard Fuchs, a German botanist. And in Germany, this plant is known as fingerhut, it means thimble. And he had it translated into Latin as digitalis, and that's still the generic name for foxglove in modern botany. So this is also a way how to integrate vernacular names into Latin.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, no, that's a very helpful example. And in fact, I wonder if you can take us through a few more, because it sounds like we now sort of have, I suppose, the ingredients. Right. We are in a time where there are things that need names. We've got sort of a range of languages available. We've had the debates about how far Latin can be pushed. So how does the process of naming something actually work?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Right. So, as I said, especially at the beginning, scholars were a bit reluctant to name new things or even acknowledge something as new because the ancient authorities were still so much an authority that many scholars believed that people like Aristotle, Theophrastus or Dioscorides already knew basically everything, and we just need to restore their knowledge so that we can use it again. And only gradually people became aware that these ancient authors did not know everything. And this became very much clear with the encountering of the American flora and fauna, for instance, but also in medicine, with the BV sections of Vesalius or Tycho Brahes, studies of the sky. And then, yeah, they acknowledged that the. That they had new things in front of them. And then, only then, they started to really name those new objects and concepts they found. Very often they resorted to Greek terms, especially when it came to compound words. Compounds are a kind of elegant way to name new or so far unknown animals. For Instance, because you could make sense of them. So if you want to describe how a new animal looks like, you can use parts of already known objects or animals and just mix them in a compound. A good example already hailing from antiquity, is the hippopotamus. It's a hippos and horse living in a river, a potamos. And then you can create the compound potamos. And these compounds are very often in Greek, just because, for stylistic reasons, Quintilian, an ancient rhetorician, Latin rhetorician, was not very fond of Latin compounds. And he said, well, it's better stylistically better to use Greek compounds. And that's why we have so many Greek compounds still in the early modern period, when encountering especially the American flora and fauna. Later authors beginning, let's say, the 17th century, were quite ready to integrate their local names from Nahuatl or Tupi or other languages, and they would just either transliterate them into Latin or sometimes add a little Latin ending or just try a loan translation. But in the 17th century, we get quite a lot of those foreign words alone, words that made it into Latin terminology.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's definitely helpful to understand the process and sort of those fun insights about, like, wait, why do we have more in Greek than Latin when we're looking at compound words? So very useful to understand. If we're thinking then about kind of how this develops in terms of particular, I suppose, groups of objects. Right. Obviously naming individual objects is important, but being able to kind of understand links between them also really matters. So maybe we could talk a bit about natural history, where we have lots of sort of classes being named and how that worked.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Right. So, yeah, this is also a quite late phenomenon, I have to say. So these classes, or the generics terms that we have in modern biological taxonomy are a rather late phenomenon, I have to say. A more let's say refined taxonomy was only introduced by the end of the 17th, and then with Linnaeus in the 18th century, simply because it was not necessary before. By the end of antiquity, people knew about 500 different plant species, let's say kinds of plants. And that's also about as much as Leonard Fuchs, for instance, knew in the year 1542 when he wrote his Commentarii, so his book on botany. But he. During the 16th century, knowledge about the mass of known species grew exponentially. And about 100 years later, Pohan already knew 6,000 plants, or 10 times more than Fuchs before him. And by this time, it was more important to have more categories under which you could subsume some of these New species. And that's when generic terms, orders and so on developed. We also have more general terms like flora, tubes, denoting the plant life of certain region. That was also originally used as a metonymy and then became a technical term in the course of the 17th century. So, yeah, these more specific layers of taxonomy are rather late phenomenon, at least late for the corpus that I was looking at.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm, that's interesting to see. Thinking then, about this kind of early versus late idea. Is there anything further we want to talk about in terms of not just using names from antiquity, but you also talk in the book about reusing names as well in this period, because that certainly sounds like there'd be lots of debates there.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, that's of course. Yeah, that's also an important topic. When people rediscovered especially the Greek books in the early modern period in Western Europe, they encountered many terms or words, names for plants, animals, rock and minerals, but they didn't know to which objects they referred. So there were debates. So they read a name of a certain animal in Aristotle, but didn't know to which animal it referred. Exactly. And then they started looking in nature, in their environment, and tried to find these animals. However, these descriptions in most of these ancient texts were not very specific and not really systematic. So because of their unspecificity, different early modern scholars came up with different solutions or identifications. And then there was a debate, of course, lots of debates of what these ancient terms refer to. And, yeah, a famous debate that I talk about in my book is between Leonhard Fuchs, whom I already mentioned, and Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, let's say, who tried to identify different plants mentioned by Dioscorides, an ancient author of Materia Medica. And, yeah, both were rather quarrelsome persons and liked to show that they knew more than the others. And Mattioli even marked in the margins of his work every time he disagreed with Fuchs, but he didn't write. I disagree with Fuchs's identification. He always wrote, it's an error that was made by Fuchs on this and thus pointing his readers to Fuxii, Auroris and so on. But it was important to identify these ancient names because, as I said initially, people had the idea that everything, or almost everything there is to know is already in the ancient text, and we just need to restore ancient knowledge to make it useful for us today. So it was an important task.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

An important task, but obviously fails once we start dealing with, as you said, sort of quote unquote, New World flora and Fauna. Right. Like, that presents a sort of obvious problem for that goal. So can you tell us more about how they dealt with that?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, that was a really conceptual problem because, as I said, yeah, the New World American flora and fauna really demonstrated that the ancient authorities did not know everything, that there's a lot more to discover and a lot more to describe than Aristotle could have done. And what's more, it's not just the ancient pagan authorities that were called into questions, but even the Bible, because people still had a very literal understanding of the Bible. And if you then have a look at book Genesis and the tale of Noah's ark and the flood, it says that Noah took every species of animal in pairs on his ark and then released them after the flood at Mount Ararat in modern day Turkey. It was hard for them to explain why they are even people and animals in the Americas when there's such a large ocean in between. And moreover, why do these animals look different from those in Europe? So this was a huge conceptual problem. And scholars like the Jesuit Athanasius Kircher wrote a whole book about this problem, and he tried to find solutions. For example, he assumed that they could have been islands from which animal species could hop across the ocean, or that angels transported them to their right places, or that there are hybrids like the Amadeo, as a hybrid of turtle and hedgehog, however, to understand that. So, yeah, we have these conceptual problems. And naming was perhaps even a minor problem in this regard. Very often then, these scholars refer to New World species by kind of European or Eurasian equivalent. For example, they would call jaguars leopards or tigers, but with more, let's say, strange or more exotic quote, unquote, species like the sloth, it was more difficult. And they resorted, for example, to, as I already said, to indigenous names like Haud or I, in case of the Slav, or they found new figurative names for the sloth. For example, Gessner came up with Actopithecus because it resembled him of a bear. Arktos and Pittacos means monkey. So it's a bear monkey. So there we have again, these Greek compounds that so many early modern scholars used.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, no, that's exactly what you were telling us about before. How much then do these sort of methods of going beyond what sort of, you know, Aristotle, et cetera, had like, they've now come up with kind of a process to deal with it. When we're talking about flora and fauna in the Americas, does any of that work? Once microscopes come into the picture and there's Like a whole other new world of things that have to be named.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, an even more difficult one. Yeah. So I have to say the microscope is a quite late phenomenon in my book. Let's say it was invented at the very end of this 16th century, but the earliest macroscopical studies happened in the 17th century. So people were no longer. Did no longer feel obliged to write in Ciceronian Latin, and they would have. They were ready to use more figurative language and new coinages. However, with the microscopic world, you could not use indigenous word. Right. So you could use indigenous words for the American flora and fauna, but there are no indigenous inhabitants of the microscopical world. That was one of the problems. And the other one was that it's sometimes hard to understand what you're actually seeing through the lens of the microscope, because you can clearly see that something is a tree, even though it looks different from those, you know, from Europe. But at least you can identify it as a plant or a tree. But this is not very often the case with the microscopical studies. Moreover, one of the. Or even arguably the best microscopists, Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, he was not a scholar, let's say he was a trader. And he didn't know any Latin. And he refrained from introducing a scientific terminology on purpose. So he would use very unspecific terms in Dutch, the language that he usually wrote. And sometimes his letters to the Royal Society were translated into either English or Latin. But if he saw something, he was the first, for example, to see bacteria, and also spermatozoa. He just referred to them as deerkins or animalcula, little animals, or he used very unspecific names like worms or vermis and so on. So one of the things that startled me during my research was that the microscopic world barely has any specific names. It's very often just descriptions or very unspecific names like little animal or worms and so on. So, yeah, I think naming the macroscopic world was much more difficult task for scholars, at least in the 17th century. And a systematic study and naming of the microscopic world only started when also microscopes became better. So the first microscopes cannot be compared to modern scientific instruments. They have a much lower resolution. And it's not really possible for every microscope from this period to see bacteria, for example. Just too small.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah. I admit, coming into this book, I was expecting there to be a discussion about how to deal with American flora and fauna. I sort of saw that coming as a potential challenge, but I hadn't thought at all about the microscope. Aspect. So I'm so glad you included that because it really clearly from the details in the book was hard for them to deal with. So I was certainly surprised and intrigued. It sounds like you had some surprises as well. Anything else that particularly jumped out at you as you were figuring this all out, you'd like to tell us about?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Well, yeah. What is really interesting or what. What really amazes me until today is that very often these processes are not straightforward. There's so much accident in our modern terminology. So many terms were never intended to work as such and just more or less by accident or became a technical term. I have some examples in it. They are of course, very straightforward coinages. I have the example of Technica. It was coined by, probably coined by Caspar Schott as a companion to Physica. Physica means natural things. And he had a companion titled Physica Curiosa, so Interesting natural things. And then he wrote a companion on technical, interesting technical things. And he just came up with the term Technica. So this is an example of a very straightforward process. And it's still called technics or Technic nowadays. But for example, the term atlas, which we nowadays use as title for books containing maps of the world, was never intended to work for such a book. Gerhard Mercato, who wrote the first book titled Atlas, planned to write a large opus magnum on cosmology, the world and the rest of the cosmos. But he died before he could finish his part on astronomy and astrology. And only the description of the world, and especially many maps, were ready when he died. But still, his son published what was written so far under the title Atlas. And so in the end, atlas nowadays refers to. To a work of cartography or a work containing maps. But it was planned to work as a title for astronomical or cosmological book. And this would have been a much more apt title because Atlas is a titan in ancient mythology who is bearing the whole world or the whole cosmos on his shoulders. And already in antiquity it was kind of. This myth was kind of rationalized and explained that a guy named Atlas was probably a famous teacher who would teach humans about the secrets of the cosmos and the earth. So it would have been a very apt title for a cosmological book, but not so much for a work of maps of the world of the earth. But still, nowadays we have Atlas for this kind of work.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

That is definitely a fun thing to add into our conversation. Thank you very much for that. Concluding then our discussion with this book, I wonder if you might have anything you're currently working on. Now that it's done that you want to give us a sneak preview of?

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Yeah, right now I'm working on a more canonical classical author. I'm working on Seneca and his Epistolae Morales. I'm writing a commentary and yeah, it should be finished by the end of the year. And then I will delve more into scientific texts again and I will start a project on early modern scientific translations. So this is related to what I've done in the book on naming and we'll have a look at how scientific translations in the early modern period worked and how they enabled to understand foreign text and how they fostered, let's say, early modern science.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, definitely related in some intriguing ways. So best of luck with that. Of course, while you're working on new projects, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Naming New Things and Concepts and Early Modern Science the Case of Natural History, published by Cambridge University Press in 2026. Dominic, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Dominic Behrens]

Thank you very much. Yeah, thank you for having me. It was really fun.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Quick break. One useful thing to share. I thought TikTok was just dances. Turns out it's where I learned how to save money, fix stuff, and get real tips. Short videos, real people. Download TikTok now.