Foundations of Botany in Western Europe

Chapter 2 Foundations of Botany in Western Europe

1 Europe & the World: Phases & Aspects of Botanical Abstraction

The preceding part of this paper (Chaper 1) establishes the material, social and conceptual ground within which the more particular, private and articulate events that concern this chapter may now be considered. Extensive, ongoing plant-selection among peasant populations constitutes a vast experiential ground of anonymous conceptual and technical knowledge lying behind the more articulate levels of horticultural activity, and intellectual exercises in sys- tematics and medicine, and that act as a kind of contextual and constitutive background, observable in the texts of contemporary medical botanists in, say, China or Europe. That, at the least, is the hypothesis advanced in this and the following chapter. The manner in which different vegetative parts come to be identified and individuated for « pharmaceutical » purposes, thus for transmission in relative quantity from place to place, through a series of markets, is itself parasitic, so to speak, on this larger background of intensely used and institutionalised practice. This could be interpreted in terms of the broader knowledge-ground of medical, herbal practice developed continuously through space wherever there are such agrarian populations, or instead in the broader and cogent sense of a dense and extensive experience in commodification processes themselves, whereby a certain manner of generating new object forms suitable for communication across distance (regulated and facilitated by institution and instrument) and suitable for recognition, become graced with certain kinds of reference, description and speech, quantification, thus for fitting into a universally necessary, yet particular kind of knowledge enabling repeated passage between distant places. Furthermore, commodity production and marketing, together with the modes and means of « abstract » payment, obviously entail everywhere the development of a general cadre of facilitating reference, capable of specifying and channelling orders, shipments and descriptions, by name, number, value, place and date, by property, or in terms of constituents and substitutes, by transformative process, in combination or in reduction to « parts ».1 The point

1 « Property » as used in the scientific sense of “an attribute or quality belonging to a thing or person” (oed, viii, 1471 iii—first edn.).

460 Part 2 – Chapter 2 concerns a complex of taken-for-granted reference modalities that will become part and parcel of the more articulate, esoteric and particular movement of seeds and bulbs, plant illustration, description of plants in letters, methods of cultivation, or speciation and designation, all that characterise botanical text and correspondence in these centuries. Communication becomes itself a particular concern of textual reference, so that a letter or plant entry may refer back to a wider network of previous contacts and events, in the same manner as would the letters of a merchant or East India Company agent. Information is given concerning the sites in which certain new bulbs have been seen, by whom grown, and reference may be made to particular orders or packages of plants listing names and quantities, while priority claims interrupt such treat- ment.2 Then, in a more physical sense, it is the institutional organisation of services for conveyance of goods and letters (commercial orders, part prod- ucts, admonitions concerning quality, price information, and so forth) that must also provide the dense, daily, repetitive frameworks in which those concerned with botany and educated amateurs could correspond more occasion- ally among themselves about botanical and other plant-related matters. A physical praxis develops in which techniques of textual reference become familiarised.3 Plant varieties are sent by package from one « botanist » to an- other, say from Dodonæus in Mechlin to Clusius in Vienna, or from Clusius, now in Leiden, to Caccini in Florence, or from Ulisse Aldrovandi in Bologna to Clusius, rather in the way that astronomical manuscripts were also conveyed and exchanged across Europe, found their way into the libraries of those such as Leibniz, Newton, da Vinci and Kepler, and formed part of a similar complex reference cadre with specific stylistic characteristics.4 There is this background in which established, anonymous modes of conveyance take place. Abraham Munting, like da Orta or Clusius, is praised for obtaining specimens from the known parts of the world, for recreating the variety of that world in the micro- cosm of his own garden. Such transmissions occur by private hand, agent or

2 Cf. W. van Dijk, A Treatise on Tulips by Carolus Clusius of Arras, 69–70, n. 3. 3 Cf. van Dijk’s English translation of extracts from Clusius, Rariorum Plantarum Historia (1601) and the « relevant » parts of the latter’s Curæ posteriores (1611), 137–52, in A Treatise. 4 On Clusius’ contacts by letter and package, see Conti, Lettere inedite, 14, for his correspondence with specialists concerned with botany (& G.B. de Toni, Il Carteggio degli Italiani col Botanico Carlo Clusio nella Biblioteca leidense, for transcription of letters). The Library of Lei- den University holds, according to Conti, op cit, 11, “935 lettere di eruditi olandesi, francesi, inglesi, italiani, lettere privatedi personaggi più o meno illustre, lettere di parenti e di amici…”. Dodonæus’ correspondence is mentioned by P.J. van Meerbeeck, Recherches historiques et critiques sur la Vie & les Ouvrages de Rembert Dodoens (Dodonæus), “Revue de la Correspon- dance botanique de Rembert Dodoens”, 131–8.