Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research Pitzer Faculty Scholarship 9-1-2001 Review: Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge, Mass., 1999) Andre Wakefield Pitzer College Recommended Citation Andre Wakefield. Review of Koerner, Lisbet, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. The ourJ nal of Modern History 73.3 (September 2001): 653–655. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/339107 This Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Pitzer Faculty Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Pitzer Faculty Publications and Research by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Book Reviews La socie´te´ des princes, XVIe–XVIIIe sie`cle. By Lucien Be´ly. Paris: Fayard, 1999. Pp. 651. Fr 195. However brilliantly they shone in the eyes of their contemporaries, early modern royal courts and the “society of princes” they accommodated have been curiously invisible to historians until recently. To be sure, the biographers of major and minor court personalities have provided many small windows onto the early modern court as a means of shedding light on the lives of their respective subjects, just as scholars of the fine arts have long been illuminating the dynamics of court patronage. But it was only about twenty years ago, when the previously neglected work of Norbert Elias was translated and republished in new editions, that the royal court as an integral institution began to attract the focused attention of historians as had other extensions of the early modern state, such as the army, the judiciary, and the fisc, with more established traditions of scholarship behind them. Even Versailles, the most conspicuous and in- fluential court in Europe during the early modern era, remains today in many respects understudied and misunderstood. Most recent studies of princely entourages have been confined to individual exam- ples, an understandable and probably necessary result of the fact that most princes left rich archives behind for historians to master. But as time has passed it is has become increasingly evident that a comparative perspective is needed to address certain specific issues, such as the origins of court ceremonials and their international diffusion, as well as broader ones, such as the relationship of courts to society at large. If for no other reason, this study by Lucien Be´ly, professor of modern history at the Sorbonne, is welcome, since the book deals with the “society of princes” in its various settings from Portugal to Russia over the entire early modern era—that is, the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. Be´ly examines an enormous number of topics relating to princes and their courts—from the breast-feeding of infant princes and the diplomacy of royal marriages to the conduct of foreign policy and the use of the arts as instruments of politics. Having authored and edited six books on early modern French politics and European international relations during the last decade, Be´ly comes particularly well prepared to undertake this task, which would have daunted most historians. His grasp of the primary sources is impressive, and he draws effectively on the secondary liter- ature, including the work of his own students, to fill in the gaps left by his own con- siderable archival investigations. Although the author paints on a vast canvas, his style is pointilliste. While acknowl- edging that the history of nations cannot be reduced to the lives of its sovereigns, Be´ly sets out to revalorize the personal careers of individual princes rather than to delineate the general mechanisms and guiding conceptions of the state. Appropriately entitling the first section of this book “The Simple Humanity of the Prince,” Be´ly devotes a great deal of attention to studies of specific princes and the extensive genealogical interrelationships prevailing among such major houses as the Bourbons and Habsburgs and minor ones such as that of the Palatine counts. In support of this approach, one can only concur with Be´ly’s not very revolutionary premise that the outcome of state- Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author. Book Reviews 653 craft in the early modern period was often intimately tied to the personal lives of the rulers who occupied the thrones of Europe. Despite growing bureaucratization, princes and their entourages typically provided the only unifying institution within heavily fragmented states, while the claims of nations in international conflicts were normally expressed in the language of rights accruing to their ruling houses. Moreover, the increasing tendency for members of sovereign families to marry into other sovereign families, rather than forging marital alliances with their own subjects, promoted a kind of royal caste formation, which, critical as it was to state interrelations—as Be´ly shows—has received much less attention than the process of nation building during the same period. At the same time, I cannot help but conclude that the author’s pointilliste method has resulted in his getting the worst of two worlds. On the one hand, a great deal— though not all—of the biographical and genealogical detail provided about the many figures who populate this work is common knowledge, and it is insufficiently integrated to create much sense of their “simple humanity.” At times the reader gains the im- pression that he/she is reading a reference work, not a historical narrative. On the other hand, the effort to “humanize” secular historical processes through reliance on cameo biographies—which, apart from details, could have been written a century ago—means that many issues that a cross-national approach might have helped clarify go unre- solved. To be sure, the author does occasionally illuminate intriguing and relatively unexplored facets of court life, such as the use of the incognito by heads of state traveling abroad. But in a comparative study of this sort one very well could have expected far more light upon a whole range of larger questions that have arisen out of recent studies of domestic and international political culture. To raise but a small num- ber: How different were rules of succession from one state to the other, and What do these differences reveal about the respective political cultures from which they emerged? How differently were female rulers viewed from male sovereigns, and What were their prospects of governing as effectively? To what extent did courts function as promoters of social mobility or immobility? How much and in what ways did courts borrow from one another, both as regards ceremonial and practice? How did they interact with religious establishments in their respective areas of authority? How, if at all, did they promote or discourage nationalism? In sum, this richly detailed and well-documented book makes a step, if only a modest one, toward a comparative study of European courtly society in the early modern period. The wealth of information and occasional insights it contains should facilitate the taking of the next one. THOMAS E. KAISER University of Arkansas at Little Rock Linnaeus: Nature and Nation. By Lisbet Koerner. .$39.95 .297םCambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. Pp. viii Linnaeus. The name alone provokes visions of dried botanical specimens and Latin binomials, of obsessive ordering and compulsive classification. But Lisbet Koerner has something else in mind. Her Linnaeus is fallible, ambitious, absurd, and, above all, local—a man wholly bound to his eighteenth-century Swedish homeland. Still, Lin- naeus: Nature and Nation is more than a quaint biography. It is also a strikingly original study of the relationship between natural knowledge and political economy in the En- 654 Book Reviews lightenment. With Linnaeus as guide, Koerner introduces us to a world in which natural history was virtually unthinkable without “oeconomy,” a world in which one could imagine “Lapland plantations of nutmeg, mace, and cinnamon” (p. 80). It is a delightful book, full of pungent asides, vivid descriptions, and lively anecdotes. Linnaeus: Nature and Nation, as Koerner herself points out, reads like a collection of stories about Linnaeus’s life and work, and this is fortunate because Koerner is a very good storyteller. Yet her stories have a unifying theme. They are about Linnaeus’s “economics,” which is to say, they are about his notions of nature and nation. Linnaeus viewed nature as a prelapsarian paradise, “an infinite larder” capable of fulfilling hu- mankind’s every need (p. 92). At the same time, he was acutely aware of the deadly famines that periodically decimated his fellow countrymen. How could there be famine in paradise? This, claims Koerner, was the central riddle for Linnaeus, and his natural history represented one possible solution to that riddle. She also argues that Linnaeus was an orthodox cameralist who had a “zero-sum view of the economy” (p. 2), saw trade as parasitic, advocated a positive trade balance, and equated wealth with barrels of gold. In Koerner’s narrative these dual conceptions of nature and nation, of natural economy and human economy, create the dynamic that generates Linnaean economics. For all the interest of the larger theoretical framework, however, Koerner’s best work appears in the guts of the book. She shows Linnaeus “in his manifold and constructed personae—as a son and student, traveler, physician, botanist, economist, theologian, teacher, husband, and father” (p. 10). Koerner emphasizes the importance of local circumstances. Linnaeus was, she points out, a kind of country bumpkin, and it is this “parochiality” which explains his importance for the Enlightenment. She shows, for example, how his most famous invention—the binomial nomenclature—developed haphazardly and almost by accident out of immediate local circumstances. Linnaeus, that is, introduced binomials as a “stopgap” measure to make his students more effective “support staff” for his economic botany.