Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin, Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education (original) (raw)

Cultivating the Botanical Woman : Rousseau, Wakefield and the instruction of Ladies in botany

2006

In the eighteenth century many botanical texts were specifically addressed to the female sex. The language and arguments of botany, centring around reproduction and sexuality, experience and science, classification and order, introspective solitude and public debate, become inextricably implicated in arguments about women's intellectual and moral faculties and their general social status. This paper will attempt to unveil some of the underlying patterns that involve the cultivation of eighteenth-century women and the feminised discourse of botanical literature. It may not be widely known today, but Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a keen botanist, and one of the most popular eighteenth-century texts on botany in England was a translation of his Lettres elementaires sur la botanique (1771-73). 1 Rousseau wrote the botanical letters for Madame Étienne Delessert, who was the owner of a famous herbarium and botanical library. 2 They offer guidance to a young mother over the instruction in botany of her daughter.

Carl Linnaeus, Erasmus Darwin and Anna Seward: Botanical Poetry and Female Education

2014

This article will explore the intersection between 'literature' and 'science' in one key area, the botanical poem with scientific notes. It reveals significant aspects of the way knowledge was gendered in the Enlightenment, which is relevant to the present-day education of girls in science. It aims to illustrate how members of the Lichfield Botanical Society (headed by Erasmus Darwin) became implicated in debates around the education of women in Linnaean botany. The Society's translations from Linnaeus inspired a new genre of women's educational writing, the botanical poem with scientific notes, which emerged at this time. It focuses in particular on a poem by Anna Seward and argues that significant problems regarding the representation of the Linnaean sexual system of botany are found in such works and that women in the culture of botany struggled to give voice to a subject which was judged improper for female education. The story of this unique poem and the surrounding controversies can teach us much about how gender impacted upon women's scientific writing in eighteenth century Britain, and how it shaped the language and terminology of botany in works for female education. In particular, it demonstrates how the sexuality of plants uncovered by Linnaeus is a paradigmatic illustration of how societal forces can simultaneously both constrict and stimulate women's involvement in science. Despite the vast changes to women's access in scientific knowledge of the present day, this 'fair sexing' of botany illustrates the struggle that women have undergone to give voice to their botanical knowledge.

‘Revolutions in Botany: Nation, Gender and Education in the French Translation of Priscilla Wakefield’s Introduction to Botany (1796)’

Journal of literature and science, 2011

In 1801 a new botanical work appeared on French booksellers' shelves. Entitled the Flore des jeunes personnes (Flora for Young People), it swelled the ranks of both popular and more academic texts on the science of botany that were appearing in ever swifter succession on the francophone book markets towards the end of the eighteenth century. 1 But the Flore des jeunes personnes was no home-grown product. Rather, it was a translation by Octave Ségur (1778-1818) of the immensely popular Introduction to Botany (1796) by the British Quaker writer Priscilla Wakefield (1750-1832). Ségur's French rendering of Wakefield's work, like the original, set out in twentyeight letters the guiding principles behind Linnaean botany, with eleven engraved plates at the back illustrating the twenty-four classes underpinning this system. Its appearance did not go unnoticed by the French critical press, and it was reviewed to some acclaim both in obviously scientific and more literary journals. The Journal Général de la Littérature de France (General Gazette of Literature in France) even bestowed on it the dubious accolade of being accessible to "the simplest of minds," given its relative brevity and avoidance of complex scientific terminology (Rev. of Flore des jeunes personnes 164). A year later the Flore had gone into a second edition and a third appeared in 1810. 2 Ségur's translation of Wakefield's work was not only taken up in French literary and scientific journals. It was also mentioned by the Genevan botanist Auguste de Candolle in the bibliographical supplement to his Regni vegetabilis systema naturale . But the popularity shared by the English and French editions of Wakefield's Introduction to Botany belies the fact that they were rather different works. While the Flore des jeunes personnes retained Wakefield's characteristic epistolary format, Ségur exploited the creative possibilities afforded by the activity of translation to reposition her text politically, scientifically and also with regard to gender. Moreover Ségur's translation was highly self-referential from the very outset, with the inclusion of a translator's preface and paratextual information in footnotes that ostentatiously demonstrated that we were reading a translation and that the French text was very much the product of his pen. Far from being an 'invisible' translator, he explicitly made his presence felt in the text in ways which, I would suggest, caused his voice to resound throughout the translation. 3 Indeed, what I want to argue here is that the French translation was no longer solely Wakefield's text, and by offering a closer analysis of Ségur's Flore des jeunes personnes, I will examine how his translation subtly differed from Wakefield's original. Recent research in translation studies into the notion of 'voice' in translation has explored how the activity of translation can be considered a complex form of quotation, a re-enunciation of the source text and reanimation of it in ways that can be neutral but can also be interpretative, critical or dissociative (Hermans). I begin here by considering the translation as a virtual meeting point of two very different minds, Wakefield and Ségur being, as we shall see, from cultural and social backgrounds diametrically opposed -in itself a reflection of the range of people generating botanical writing in this period. Through a microtextual analysis of source and target text I then explore in turn the political,

Botany, Sexuality and Women's Writing 1760–1830: From Modest Shoot to Forward Plant

European Journal of English Studies, 2009

Sample. Have a separate maintenance! They must be your fashionable plants then. What and some have their misses, I reckon, as well as their wives? Anna. O yes! A great many: and some ladies have their gallants too. Sample. Upon my word, Miss, a very pretty study this seems to be that you've learnt: I can't say I should much like my wife to know anything about it. Anna. That you'll find a difficult matter to get one who's ignorant of it; for all ladies that know any thing study botamy [sic] now. (III. 1. 43-44) The Lakers and The Unsex'd Females show how fashionable women's botany had become. They demonstrate the spread of Linnaean ideas in England and the anxieties surrounding the figure of the female botanist in the last decade of the eighteenth century.

‘Emily Lawless and Botany as Foreign Science’

The Journal of Literature and Science, 2011

The primary goal of botanical science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was to describe, categorise and define plants according to one of the many classification systems used. Despite its basis in subjectively selected criteria, system-building was perceived as an objective science and as soon as a classification method was adopted, it was considered universally applicable. Carl Linnaeus's Sexual System was structured and easy to understand and became one of the most widely used models. System-building and system-modification remained masculine enterprises, but collecting and classification were pursuits open to all, and botany was promoted as an edifying pastime for both men and women in the Enlightenment period. Linnaeus's System was disseminated throughout Europe in both the original Latin and in various translations, and circulated to a wider audience with the help of popular texts like botanical poems, dialogues and letters. The English versions that popularised the system, however, drew attention to the marriage metaphors Linnaeus used, and the sexual-political climate of the time required that women should be protected from sexualised language. Thus a need-or a market-arose for botanical texts addressed specifically to female users. Apart from being linguistically translated, the texts, or rather the knowledge they contained, needed to be put through a process of what Roman Jakobson terms "intralingual translation": a rewording where what might be construed as offensive language was removed (114). Alongside literal translations designed to be faithful to the original, a number of feminised adaptations of the Linnaean system therefore also appeared, initially written by men but increasingly produced by women writers (George 1-21). It could be said, then, that two types of translations were necessary to establish Linnaean taxonomy in Britain: linguistic translations from the original Latin to English and cultural translations from scientific botanical language to popular and what was regarded as feminised forms. The most common understanding of translation is the process of changing a text from one language to another, but it can also be defined as "the expression or rendering of something in another medium or form" ("Translation"). The Oxford English Dictionary gives the example of translating a painting into an engraving or etching, and in the case of written material, the other medium or form could be the translation of a scientific treatise into poetry or fiction. The process often involves transmitting metropolitan ideas to the conditions in the periphery, which draws attention to the cultural-political dimensions of the activity. Since no translation can be perfectly equivalent to the source text, the effort paradoxically accentuates the differences between the linguistic and cultural systems it is intended to erase. One effect of conveying information in a translated or alternative form may therefore be that the shortcomings of the original are uncovered. In the case of interlingual translations, the impossibility of exact equivalence is frequently noted as a problem. Intralingual translations, on the other hand, are not expected to be completely faithful to the original, and as a result they create spaces for variations, commentary and subversion. By remaining outside the norms of scientific writing, popular botanical works may expand the subject and include dimensions not normally found in a scientific text, such as subjective or emotional responses to the natural world.

Emily Lawless and Botany as a Foreign Science

Journal of Literature and Science, 2011

Some German Literary Reflections of the Sexuality of Plants, 1779-1799

Among German contributions to literature and philosophy in the 18 th century, one of most significant was the idea of vegetable genius. The theories of artistic creation elaborated by Herder, Goethe, Karl Philipp Moritz, the brothers Humboldt and Kant fundamentally transformed how Europeans thought about literature by replacing traditional religious or mechanist metaphors with those drawn from the language of natural generation. "Generation" should be understood here in the older sense that encompasses both growth and reproduction, but I would like to concentrate today on the reproductive aspect of botany -not so much plant growth as plant love -in several German literary texts of the late 18 th c. Let me begin (actually, in 1778) with Herder's seminal essay, "Vom Erkennen und Empfinden der menschlichen Seele." No doubt inspired by Edward Young's formulations about the vegetable nature of original composition, which "rises spontaneously from the vital root of genius," Herder's text teems with botanical metaphors for human creativity and its fruits: Sieh jene Pflanze, den schönen Bau organischer Fibern! […] Wie wunderbar emsig läutert eine Pflanze fremden Saft zu Teilen ihres feinern Selbst, wächst, liebt, gibt und empfängt Samen auf den Fittigen des Zephyrs, treibt lebende Abdrücke von sich, Blätter, Keime, Blüten, Früchte […]. (II: 669-70) In contrast to Young, for Herder genius is not merely associated with the quality of spontaneous growth, but with the reproductive bounty of plant sexuality: the giving and receiving of seeds, the bringing forth of new versions of the self in leaf, flower, and fruit. Nevertheless, his exchange-of-seeds metaphor does not strictly reflect the actual process of fructification through pollen transfer. A few years later, however, in his Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784), he continues the analogy between human life and vegetation; paraphrasing the depiction of the so-called marriage of plants in the Philosophia botanica of Karl von Linné, or Linnaeus: Insonderheit, dünkt mich, demütiget es den Menschen, daß er mit den süßen Trieben, die er Liebe nennt […] beinah eben so blind wie die Pflanze, den Gesetzen der Natur dienet. Auch die Distel, sagt man, ist schön, wenn sie blühet; und die Blüte, wissen wir, ist bei den Pflanzen die Zeit der Liebe. Der Kelch ist das Bett, die Krone sein Vorhang, die andern Teile der Blume sind Werkzeuge der Fortpflanzung […]. (III/2: 54) Although Linnaeus is more graphic about the "Werkzeuge der Fortpflanzung" equivalents in plants and people, Herder clearly indicates his awareness and acceptance of the great botanist's sexual system of plant classification and, more importantly, its equation of plants with humans and human social arrangements. Based upon the disposition of the female pistil and the male stamens in the flower, Linnaeus' twenty-four classes of plants include, for example, the Monandria, Diandria and Polyandria,

A woman botanist in Rousseau's footsteps: Clémence Lortet's Botanical Walks (ca.1811)

Huntia, Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, 2020

Written in collaboration with Marc Philippe (Université Lyon 1 CNRS, UMR 5023 - LEHNA, France). This study presents for the first time a partial translation of Clémence Lortet’s manuscript entitled “Promenades Botaniques” (Botanical Walks), which had remained unpublished and little known until recently. Clémence Lortet, born Richard (1772–1835), was a student and friend of physician and botanist Jean-Emmanuel Gilibert. Although she shunned publicity for most of her life, Lortet was a key figure of botany in the Lyons area in the period 1808–1835. While all her works were published under the names of her collaborators (Gilibert and others), she was instrumental in the founding of the Lyons branch of the Linnean Society. A staunch defender of the newly born French Republic, and closely connected with Freemasonry, she helped botanist G. Battista Balbis safely relocate from Italy to France. She also prompted collaborations and exchanges among botanists based in the Lyons area. Her Botanical Walks provided readers with a floristic guide. Lortet also filled her itineraries with personal memories, lyrical expressions and esthetic appreciations of various sceneries, wherein she emulates Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782). Finally, her text can also be read as a moving homage paid to the memory of Gilibert, her teacher and friend, who had first recommended botany to her as a salutary diversion against the somber impressions left by the French Terror. The following analysis aims to shed light on the various cultural, botanical and literary elements in Lortet’s sole attempt to craft an original instance of personal writing out of an inventory of the flora of Lyons.

Linnaeus and the Love Lives of Plants

Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, 2018

Plants held a central place in eighteenth-century debate about physiological and economic reproduction. One of the most visible signs of this enlightenment fascination with the plant world came from the periphery of Europe. In 1735, the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) published his Systema naturae in which he proposed to classify plants by their sexual characteristics. Linnaeus's sexual system played was widely received and played a key role in the popularization of botany during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It has often been analysed by historians of science as a prominent example of enlightenment tendencies to dichotomize and naturalize social categories of sex and gender. Contrary to that, this chapter argues that the sexual system constituted a satirical attack on the ancient idea of a linear scale of nature along which all beings could be arranged according to their degree of perfection. If one looks at Linnaeus's discussion of sexual reproduction in his dietetic, physiological, ecological and economic writings a different, antagonistic model of sexual reproduction emerges that incorporated both hopes placed on the seemingly boundless productivity of life as well as fears of exhaustion from exuberant sexual drives and desires.

Gender and botany in early nineteenth-century Portugal: the circle of the Marquise of Alorna

Notes and Records: the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, 2022

An ample number of studies have shown that during the late eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century, botany attracted the attention and involvement of women not only as readers of literature on the subject but also as participants in botanical activities and as authors. However, women are still largely absent from the historiography of Portuguese botany in this period. This article contributes to filling this gap by focusing on the translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Letters on the elements of botany (1800) by the Marquise of Alorna (1750–1839) and her long poem Botanical recreations (1844). It addresses the issue of women's participation in science and looks not only at the importance of gender but also genre and social status in the dissemination of botany in Portugal. This article shows that in the period, the cultivation of science by women was associated with the upper classes while exchanges within circles of sociability through salons offered...

Clandestine Marriage: Botany and Romantic Culture

Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2013

The title of Theresa M. Kelley's monograph refers to the twenty-fourth and last class in Carl Linnaeus's influential eighteenth-century taxonomy (first suggested in Systema Naturae, 1735) of the 'kingdom' of plants, 'Cryptogamia,' a term translatable as 'clandestine marriages.' While Linnaeus conceded that his method was artificial, his aim was nonetheless to allow all plants to be easily classified within one comprehensive system. This was done by way of counting certain external features that he referred to as the male and female sex organs of a plant detectable in the blossom, that is, stamens and pistils. Whereas the first twenty-three classes included species that could be more or less straightforwardly accommodated with the tableau's logic, the cryptogamia comprised those plants that resisted categorisation on the grounds that they had no apparent sex organs, like ferns or mushrooms. For Kelley, this blind spot indicates the fundamental ambiguities that haunted not only late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century botany in the narrower sense, but all Romantic enquiries into the "nature of […] nature" (262), be they scientific, political, aesthetic, or philosophical: "Written all over botanical and extrabotanical debates in this period are problems of borders and definitions that register a highly metafigurative interest in the security of territories and bodies, whether human or animal or vegetable, native or alien." (24, 25) If it eventually proved to be impossible to find or, rather, establish an ultimately airtight order in nature, how hard would it be to secure stability in the sphere of human culture, not least regarding Britain's colonial ventures? One difficulty Kelley returns to repeatedly is the fact that all attempts at grasping the orderedness of plants were hijacked by the figurative tendencies of the language used to describe it: "whatever else botanical figures do, they fool with categories, thereby undoing the work of hierarchical and taxonomic analysis to entertain the resources of figure and aesthetic play" (56). A case in point is again Linnaeus, as Kelley explains in her first main chapter (ch. 2). Whereas the early translators of his works avoided to make the Swedish scientist's theories concerning the sex life of plants all too explicit, it was only Erasmus Darwin and his collaborators who for the first time in the 1780s rendered the suggestive images of concubines and hermaphrodites, of the polygamous 'public marriages' of plants in plain English (see 33). No doubt, Darwin's 'liberal' translations, his scientific interests, his literary works,

Botanical palimpsests, or Erasure of Women in Science: The Case Study of Mme Dugage de Pommereul (1733-1782)

Harvard Papers in Botany, 2018

Wondering why so few women have been scientists in the past, Londa Schiebinger in The Mind has no Sex ? reconfigured the history of science as a story of exclusion and misogyny. She argued that scientific institutions in the past excluded women from their ranks. Moreover, women who attempted to engage in scientific pursuits were discouraged by the mechanicist turn of modern science or put off by the sexual politics deriving from Linnaean metaphorical descriptions of the sexual life of plants. Focusing on the absence of women may, however, create the impression that women had no interest in science. To ascertain whether women were truly absent from fields of scientific inquiry or whether they were just made invisible, the first step would be to adopt a larger view that does not only focus on the institutions, but also, as Sarah Hutton invites us to do, eschew " concentrating on only the few high-profile women who had the attendant disadvantage of ignoring their less famous colleagues." [...] However, these positions still tend to see the past as an inert matter waiting to be investigated as well as fail to interrogate it as a living historical byproduct of present times. They obscure or do not put enough emphasis on, the slow erosion at work on material sources. Testimonies and evidence are lost, not only because accidents destroyed them, but also because past and present historians did not deem them worthy to preserve. Although time is commonly held responsible for the fortune of the deserving and the disappearance of the obscure, acting like a great decanter, ideology and prejudice are to blame for creating the invisibility of women in science. As we shall see, a trend, akin to the process of de-feminization in science that Ann B. Shteir documented for female botanists in England, also occurred in 19 th and 20 th century France and led to the concerted and systematic destruction of evidence of female involvement in science. Past historians' bias not only distorted historical accounts but also led them to select what conformed to their thesis, transform or falsify what did not conform, or worse, to destroy evidence of the contrary. The life and work of Mme Dugage de Pommereul will perfectly exemplify this ideological shift in historiography. It is the story of her fate in archival documents that I present today as emblematic of the engineered erasure of a woman botanist in late 18th-century France.