Edward Topsell

Edward Topsell (about 1572 to 1625) was an English cleric and author remembered for his bestiary. Born and schooled in Sevenoaks, Kent, he studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, and then made a career in the Church of England, serving as the first rector of East Hoathly in Sussex and from 1604 as perpetual curate of St Botolph's, Aldersgate. He wrote on religious and moral themes, but his lasting work is zoological: The History of Four-footed Beasts (1607) and The History of Serpents (1608), reprinted together in 1658, an 1100-page treatise that repeats ancient and fantastic lore about real and mythical animals. Topsell was not a naturalist himself and leaned on earlier authorities, above all the Historiae animalium of the Swiss scholar Conrad Gessner. The book is remembered chiefly for its vigorous illustrations, among them the famous image known as Dürer's Rhinoceros, and it records beliefs such as toads carrying a toadstone in the head and weasels giving birth through the ear.