Collecting for Russia's Apothecary and Botanical
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SEEDS OF EXCHANGE: COLLECTING FOR RUSSIA’S APOTHECARY AND BOTANICAL GARDENS IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES BY RACHEL KOROLOFF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in History in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2014 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor John W. Randolph, Chair Professor Mark D. Steinberg Professor Richard W. Burkhardt Associate Professor Kelly O’Neill Abstract This dissertation follows the collection and cultivation of plants in the Russian Empire for medicinal and botanical purposes from the beginning of the seventeenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries. It focuses on the itineraries of collection and the spaces of cultivation established by herbalists, doctors, and naturalists in the employ of the Apothecary (Medical) Chancellery and the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In doing so it investigates how methods of botanical collection, including specific itineraries, influenced the creation spaces of botanical cultivation, including gardens, collections of correspondence and regional Floras. This juxtaposition and analysis of the mutual influence between routes and gardens ultimately attempts to explore how mobility and space intersected with the production of natural knowledge in the early modern Russian context. The first chapter of this dissertation, “Travniki and the Chancellery,” details the seventeenth-century network of itinerant herbalists [travniki] who collected plants, flowers, roots and seeds seasonally for the Apothecary Chancellery’s pharmacies and gardens. The travels of the Chancellery’s travniki are contrasted with the trade in materia medica, which included medicinal plants as well as chemical medicines, found in the herb stalls [zeleinye riady] of Moscow’s trading quarters. The specter of witchcraft and the role of Chancellery doctors in witchcraft trials concludes the chapter and is used to underscore the perceived threat and power of plants as they were transported from the countryside into the city. The second chapter, “Via the Volga,” then follows the Apothecary Chancellery into the eighteenth century, spanning its reorganization as the Medical Chancellery and detailing the first botanical and medical expeditions of Chancellery doctors down the Don and Volga Rivers. Chancellery expeditions clearly had a strong southern orientation throughout the century in no ii small part due to the Chancellery’s growing relationship with the Russian military. The existence of a broadly shared botanical imaginary which saw the eastern edges of the Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus as the origin of post-Noachian global plant and animal diversity also fueled the Chancellery’s collecting activities there. These itineraries led to collections in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Astrakhan that allowed the Russian Empire to advertise more broadly its own unique access to the botanical wealth and thus the storied landscape at the edges of the Caspian Sea, the Caucasus and the surrounding steppe. In the third chapter, “Translatio Botanicae,” the relationship between the city of St. Petersburg, the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (established in 1724) and the idea of Siberia as a site of scientific investigation are presented and explored as a powerful complex of interconnected ideas and images produced by a growing empire desirous of entering the Republic of Letters. Just as the Chancellery doctors travelled south, naturalists from the Academy of Sciences travelled east into Siberia as far as Kamchatka and the Pacific Ocean. These itineraries, the gardens they produced, and the scientific claims they were then used to substantiate show how the scientific image of Siberia was constructed in combination with the establishment of the city of St. Petersburg as the new imperial capital and cosmopolitan city of science. The fourth and final chapter, “Collecting Europe,” follows the mid-eighteenth century travels of Russian students (and one in particular) who were dispatched to collect botanical specimens in the gardens of Europe. It highlights how certain Russian travelers sought to treat Europe as a botanical borderland to be collected, organized, and displayed back in Russia. Rather than reinforcing the imbalance of a “center-periphery” relationship between Russian naturalists and their European counterparts, this chapter focuses on the subtle and dynamic ways in which iii Russian students and collectors met, engaged with and benefited from the European botanical community. This dissertation therefore traces the emergence of a widely-recognized Russian botanical community by the end of the eighteenth century. It details the intersection of three broad but intimately connected processes: the creation of itineraries of collection, the establishment of spaces of cultivation and the production of botanical knowledge, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The larger role played by Russian imperial policy infiltrated the emergence of this scientific community at every level, but none more so than in the ways in which herbalists, doctors and naturalists chose to travel through the surrounding landscape. This process of actively turning otherwise unassuming products of nature into bona fide botanical objects for circulation and exchange in the global scientific community was as influenced by its Russian imperial context as it as by the plants in which it dealt. iv Acknowledgements A dissertation is a document that is a long time in coming and it inevitably incurs many debts in the process. While these debts can never be fully repaid, they can be acknowledged. I would like begin by thanking those who were a part of this dissertation’s beginning: my advisers and colleagues in the program in the History of Science at Oregon State University. Professors Paul Farber, Mary Jo and Robert Nye, Ron Doel, William Husband, Lisa Sarasohn and Ben Mutschler all gave to me a firm scholarly foundation and offered thoughtful, often challenging advice that has served me professionally and personally ever since. My fellow students at Oregon State, Katie Zimmerman, Leandra Swanner, Erica Jensen-Shiflet and Melinda Gormley continue to form the core of my History of Science community and have been unstinting in sharing their energy and their intellect over the years. My great thanks, as well, to the Columbia History of Science Group at Friday Harbor, Washington and the excellent historians and philosophers of science and technology who every year make that meeting one of the most stimulating and hilarious anyone could hope to find. The seed of this dissertation was generated at Oregon State, but it was lovingly cultivated at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I thank the faculty there, especially Professor Diane Koenker, for irrevocably broadening my inquiry and sharpening my analysis while providing me and my research all the support necessary to visit archives and begin writing. The Russian, East European, Eurasian Center on the campus of the University of Illinois, along with its Summer Research Lab and its annual Fisher Forum have been among the greatest resources on campus for me as a developing scholar in Russian history. The expertise and generous aid offered by the staff at the Slavic, East European and Eurasian Collection in the Main Library on v campus contributed immensely to the preparation for and writing of this dissertation. I look forward to many more summers in their utterly pleasant reading room. My fellow graduate students at the University of Illinois, Patryk Reid, Stephanie Seawell, David Greenstein, Zack Poppel, Heidi Dodson, Jay Jordan and T. J. Tallie among many many others have made my years in Champaign a not only intellectually fruitful but truly some of the best in my life so far. I thank you for the Lynn St. barbeques most of all. There have been far too many archivists and librarians that have contributed their time and their knowledge of collections and institutional holdings to this dissertation to count. The incredible staff at the Archives of the Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg (SPF ARAN), the St. Petersburg Historical Institute (II SPB) and the State Archives of Ancient Acts (RGADA) in Moscow all kindly show me how to navigate the often confusing seventeenth and eighteenth collections at their archives while helping me to narrow down my broad interests by introducing me to documents and collections I would never would have found other wise. Similarly, the efforts of Eva Nyström at the Linnaean Correspondence Online and the librarians of the Linnaean Society in London went well above the call of duty in helping me to locate rare Linnaean manuscripts and letters. I am also deeply grateful to the institutional home that was made for me at European University, St. Petersburg by Professors Aleksandra Bekasova and Julia Lajus during my year of research from 2011 to 2012. I am also indebted to professor Andrei Kirilovich Sytin, botanist and historian at the Russian Academy of Sciences Komarov Botanical Institute in St. Petersburg, who acted as my scientific advisor and has long been my inspiration in writing about eighteenth- century Russian botany. I cannot pretend to equal his botanical expertise or his archival skill, but I hope I have begun to attain his level of passion and diligence in the subject. vi I have also been lucky to receive writing support for this dissertation from Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collections