Plants from Abroad: Botanical Terminology in 18th-century British Encyclopaedias (original) (raw)

The influence of new world species on the botany of the 16th century

Asclepio, 1996

El presente trabajo analiza cómo algunas especies botánicas del Nuevo mundo, no tan difundidas como el tomate, el tabaco, etc., formaron parte del conocimiento botánico europeo, haciendo especial referencia a la de obra de Ulisse Aldrovandi . Su herbario, sus colecciones iconográficas y manuscritos que contienen listas de semillas, maderas y otros materiales, se conservan en su Museo y algunas de las especies crecen en el Jardín Botánico de Bolonia.

Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Plant Science and Technology in A Cultural History of Plants, vol. 4

A Cultural History of Plants vol. 4, 2022

Breaking news: Cultural History of Plants; vols. 1 - 6 have been awarded the Society of Economic Botany’s Daniel F. Austin Award for this year’s best edited volume[s]. My chapter foregrounds the role of knowledge management systems such as plant nomenclature, classification and herbaria in appropriating, translating and exploiting the natural knowledge built up over thousands of years by peoples around the world. The contributions of indigenous peoples, their languages and ways of using and understanding plants, undergird what has for too long been taken to be a European project of accumulating, translating and assembling plant knowledge. Publisher's description: A Cultural History of Plants presents a global exploration of how plants have shaped human culture. Covering the last 12,000 years, it is the definitive history of how we have cultivated, traded, classified, and altered plants and how, in turn, plants have influenced our ideas of luxury and wealth, health and well-being, art and architecture. See https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/cultural-history-of-plants-9781474273596/

The Rise of Botanical Terminology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Coming to Terms. Approaches to (Ancient) Terminologies, 2024

Early modern scientific literature was to a big part written in Latin and until today many technical terms are derived from a Greek or Latin root. Botany, in particular, has maintained this tradition of describing and naming new plant species in Latin to this day. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a sudden and un-precedented increase in knowledge of plants not only due to the Europeans’ encounter with other parts of the world but also due to a more thorough study of the indigenous flora and the new possibilities that inventions like the microscope offered.This new knowledge sparked the development of more comprehensive and specialized terminologies. The following chapter aims at giving an overview of this development and tries to answer the questions why new terms were introduced, how they were formed, and what contributed to their acceptance and success. The study is based on several important texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the findings are exemplified by a close reading of passages on the development of fruits.

“From the Known to the Unknown:” Nature’s Diversity, Materia Medica, and Analogy in 18th Century Botany, Through the Work of Tournefort, the Jussieu Brothers, and Linnaeus

Journal of the History of Biology, 2023

The growth of botany following European expansion and the consequent increase of plants necessitated significant development in classification methodology, during the key decades spanning the late 17th to the mid-18th century, leading to the emergence of a “natural method.” Much of this development was driven by the need to accurately identify medicinal plants, and was founded on the principle of analogy, used particularly in relation to properties. Analogical reasoning established correlations (affinities) between plants, moreover between their external and internal characteristics (here, medicinal properties). The diversity of plants, names, and botanical information gathered worldwide amplified confusion. This triggered the systematisation of the collection and referencing of data, prioritizing the meticulous observation of plant characteristics and the recording of medicinal properties as established by tradition: it resulted in principled methods of natural classification and nomenclature, represented by the genus, to enhance reliability of plant knowledge, which was crucial in medical contexts. The scope of botany increased dramatically, with new methods broadening studies beyond traditional medicinal plants. The failure of chemical methods to predict properties, particularly of unknown flora, amplified the reliance on analogy and on natural affinities.