Seventeenth-Century Botanical Practices and Natural
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
_full_journalsubtitle: A Journal for the Study of Science, Technology and Medicine in the Pre-modern Period _full_abbrevjournaltitle: ESM _full_ppubnumber: ISSN 1383-7427 (print version) _full_epubnumber: ISSN 1573-3823 (online version) _full_issue: 5-6 _full_issuetitle: Manipulating Flora: Seventeenth-Century Botanical Practices and Natural Philosophy _full_alt_author_running_head (neem stramien J2 voor dit article en vul alleen 0 in hierna): Baldassarri and Matei _full_alt_articletitle_running_head (rechter kopregel - mag alles zijn): Manipulating Flora _full_is_advance_article: 0 _full_article_language: en indien anders: engelse articletitle: 0 Manipulating FloraEarly Science and Medicine 23 (2018) 413-419 413 www.brill.com/esm Contents Manipulating Flora: Seventeenth-Century Manipulating Flora: Seventeenth-Century Botanical Practices and Natural Philosophy. Introduction 413 Fabrizio Baldassarri * Botanical Practices and Natural Philosophy. Oana Matei ** Touch Me Not: Sense and Sensibility in Early Modern Botany 420 Introduction Guido Giglioni* Same Spirit, Different Structure: Francis Bacon on Inanimate and Animate Matter 444 Fabrizio Baldassarri * Doina-Cristina Rusu* Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel/University of Bucharest Spirits Coming Alive: The Subtle Alchemy of Francis Bacon’s Sylva Sylvarum 459 [email protected] Dana Jalobeanu* Athanasius Kircher and Vegetal Magnetism: Analogy as a Method 487 Lucie Čermáková* Oana Matei ** Descartes’ Bio-Medical Study of Plants: Vegetative Activities, Soul, and Power 509 Vasile Goldiş Western University of Arad/University of Bucharest * Fabrizio Baldassari [email protected] Appetitive Matter and Perception in Ralph Austen’s Projects of Natural History of Plants 530 Oana Matei * Plant and Soil Chemistry in Seventeenth-Century England: Worsley, Boyle and Coxe 550 Antonio Clericuzio* The study of plants and vegetal bodies has always played an essential role in Contents to Volume 23 (2018) 585 the knowledge of nature for both theoretical and practical purposes. Since the Middle Ages, the practical perspective had prevailed, as the study of vegetation lacked disciplinary autonomy and was primarily an aspect of medical training. Plants were mainly subject to medicinal or pharmacological uses, although a great variety of topics, such as the naturalistic study of plants, the building of gardens, or the symbolical approach to flora, reflected a more comprehensive attention to the vegetal world.1 Scholars interested in plants generally worked with Dioscorides’ Materia medica, Galen’s De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus, and Pliny’s Naturalis historia, and learned the uses and properties of medicinal herbs. When Theophrastus’ De causis planta- rum, which contained a more theoretical interpretation of plants, was redis- covered and brought back to Europe from Constantinople, this work attracted * Fabrizio Baldassarri, Herzog August Bibliothek, Lessingplatz 1, 38304 Wolfenbüttel, Germany; Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest, 1 Dimitrie Brandza Str., 060102 Bucharest, Romania. ** Oana Matei, Vasile Goldiș Western University of Arad, 15 M. Eminescu Str., 310086 Arad, Romania; Institute for Research in the Humanities, University of Bucharest, 1 Dimitrie Brandza Str., 060102 Bucharest, Romania 1 Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York and London, 1991), 3. For a general treatment on plants in the Middle Ages, see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, Le monde végétal: Médecine, botanique, symbolique (Florence, 2009). © KoninklijkeEarly Science Brill and MedicineNV, Leiden, 232018 | doi:10.1163/15733823-02356P01 (2018) 413-419 414 Baldassarri And Matei less attention than materia medica, and this testified to the medical predilec- tion for the study of plants.2 Yet a few signs of disciplinary transformations were surfacing in the late fif- teenth and early sixteenth centuries as a theoretical perspective gained mo- mentum. During the Renaissance, these transformations involved a variety of approaches to the vegetal world, which manifested itself in a slow transition of the study of plants into a botanical discipline which was more concerned with observations on and the description of the inner structure and nature of plants. This would result in the work of Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694), John Ray (1627- 1705), and Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712), amongst others.3 The path was long and challenging. In the Renaissance, the study of medici- nal herbs prompted the need to explore green nature, given that “the principal concern of scholars interested in botany seems to have been the problem of identifying the plants that were described in the ancient writings of Materia medica.”4 While originating in the commentaries on materia medica,5 the ‘Bo- tanical Renaissance’ became “emancipated from practical exigencies and ac- quired disciplinary status through the study of similarities and differences between appearances and internal structures.”6 Plant collecting, res herbaria, and catalogues unfolded the knowledge of this period as directed at speci- mens, and aimed to define a way of classifying plants. Karen Reeds, Paula Find- 2 Cristina Bellorini, The World of Plants in Renaissance Tuscany: Medicine and Botany (Fahrnam, 2016); Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550-1650 (Fahrnam, 2009). 3 For a broad reconstruction of the history of botany, see Alan G. Morton, History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to Present Day (London, 1981). 4 Elsa M. Cappelletti and Andrea Ubrizsy Savoia, “Didactics in a Botanic Garden: Garden Plans and Botanical Education in the ‘horto medicinale’ of Padua in the 16th Century,” in Sabine Anagnostou, Florike Egmond, and Christoph Friedrichs, eds., A Passion for Plants: Materia Medica and Botany in Scientific Networks from the 16th to the 18th Centuries (Stuttgart, 2011), 79-91, 79. 5 María M. Carrión, “Planted Knowledge: Art, Science, and Preservation in the 16th-Century Herbarium from the Hurtado de Mendoza Collection in El Escorial,” Journal of Early Modern Studies, 6 (2017), 47-67. 6 Claudia Swan, “The Uses of Botanical Treatises in the Netherlands, c. 1600,” in Therese O’Malley and Amy R.W. Meyers, eds., The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400-1850 (New Haven, CT and London, 2008), 62-81, 64. Cf. Alicja Zemanek, “Renaissance Botany and Modern Science,” in Zbigniew Mirek and Alicja Zemanek, eds., Studies in Renaissance Botany (Krakow, 1998), 9-47; Mauro Ambrosoli, “Conservation and Diffusion of Species Diversity in Northern Italy: Peasant Gardens of the Renaissance and After,” in Michel Conan and W. John Kress, eds., Botanical Progress, Horticultural Innovation and Cultural Change (Washington, DC, 2007), 177-200. Early Science and Medicine 23 (2018) 413-419.