Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds 1032397209, 9781032397207

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“Natural Things is a creative, exciting, and genre-defying volume that helps readers to understand natural history more attentively and capaciously. The volume puts nature back into nature and follows natural things across built environments, ecological niches, and academic felds, embracing the unruliness required if one puts them, rather than people, at the center.” Surekha Davies, PhD, Researcher, Department of History and Art History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands “This visually arresting and all-absorbing book takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic journey across the world from the Pacifc Islands to South Asia, from the Atlantic world to Europe and the Americas at a time in which humans profoundly redefned their relationship with the global natural world. By bringing material culture, ecology, technologies, science and economy into conversation, Natural Things defes disciplinary boundaries and redefnes our understanding of nature. It does so by considering a number of surprising ‘things,’ among which an pink edible animal and a carnivorous plant; an anti-poison stone and one of the most toxic plants; the produce of the intestines of a sperm whale and a delicious beverage to be sipped in company. After reading Natural Things, when you step out of your front door, you’ll never see the world with the same eyes, and you’ll notice ‘things’ that you had not appreciated before!” Giorgio Riello, PhD, Professor of Early Modern Global History, European University Institute, Florence “This excellent collection of essays brings alive crucial exchanges of ideas and objects that characterize the scientifc and cultural history of the early modern world. Combining archival erudition, critical historiography, and imaginative visualization, this book is an inspiring new resource for teaching as well as further research. In evocative essays, we are reminded that seeing’ things that make up various understandings of nature should be understood as an active pursuit, whether for us today or in the way we ascribe it to past peoples whose imaginations we try to bring to life in our work. The book provides one of the most successful cases I know for using images as crucial historical evidence rather than as indexical illustrations.” Shahzad Bashir, PhD, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island “What better can be said of a book than that it impels the reader to realize things are not as they seem, nor can they be easily categorized, especially not into binary classifcations such as natural/unnatural, live/dead, human/nature, indigenous/exotic, west/east, and subject/object. This is a volume full of surprises, changelings, liminalities, and polyvalent meanings. In its capacious and always fascinating roving around the terrains, ecologies, and intersections of material culture, global exchange, environmental history, and the history of knowledge and science/nature studies, Natural Things will unsettle assumptions and introduce instabilities into seemingly fxed points of reference. Read it!” Pamela H. Smith, PhD, Seth Low Professor of History, Columbia University, New York

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds The essays and original visualizations collected in Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds explore the relationships among natural things—ranging from pollen in a gust of wind to a carnivorous pitcher plant to a shell-like skinned armadillo—and the humans enthralled with them. Episodes from 1500 to the early 1900s reveal connected histories across early modern worlds as natural things traveled across the Indian Ocean, the Ottoman Empire, Pacifc islands, Southeast Asia, the Spanish Empire, and Western Europe. In distant worlds that were constantly changing with expanding networks of trade, colonial aspirations, and the rise of empiricism, natural things obtained new meanings and became alienated from their origins. Tracing the processes of their displacement, each chapter starts with a piece of original artwork that relies on digital collage to pull image sources out of place and to represent meanings that natural things lost and remade. Accessible and elegant, Natural Things is the frst study of its kind to combine original visualizations with the history of science. Museum-goers, scholars, scientists, and students will fnd new histories of nature and collecting within. Its playful visuality will capture the imagination of non-academic and academic readers alike while reminding us of the alienating capacity of the modern life sciences. Mackenzie Cooley is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern history. She is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. Anna Toledano is a historian of science and a museum professional. Her academic research focuses on natural history collecting in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of knowledge working on the comparative and connected histories of science and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds Edited by Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım

Designed cover image: Base Design by Katie Dean & Zoë Sadokierski. First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 selection and editorial matter, Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım to be identifed as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identifcation and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN: 978-1-032-39718-4 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-39720-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-35105-4 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054 Typeset in Palatino by Apex CoVantage, LLC

CONTENTS List of Figures ix List of Tables xv List of Contributors xvii Acknowledgements xix Glossary xxi

Introduction 1 Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım On the Design 15 Zoë Sadokierski and Katie Dean PART I

Manipulated

21

Chapter 1

Pollen: The Sexual Life of Plants in Mesoamerica Helen Burgos-Ellis

23

Chapter 2

Bezoar: Medicine in the Belly of the Beast Mackenzie Cooley

Chapter 3

Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water Alexander Statman

Chapter 4

Ambergris: From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann

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PART II

Felt

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Chapter 5

Squid: Natural History as Food History, c. 1730–1860 Whitney Barlow Robles

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Chapter 6

Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences Duygu Yıldırım

Chapter 7

Manchineel: Power, Pain, and Knowledge in the Lesser Antilles Thomas C. Anderson

Chapter 8

Pitcher Plant: Drowning in her Sweet Nectar Elaine Ayers

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PART III

Preserved

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Chapter 9

Leaf: The Twofold Materiality of Early Modern Herbals Julia Heideklang

Chapter 10

Armadillo: An Animal in Search of a Place Florencia Pierri

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Contents

Chapter 11

Bird: Living Names of Félix de Azara’s Lost Collection Anna Toledano

Chapter 12

Brain: Objecthood, Subjecthood, and the Genius of Gauss 343 Nicolaas Rupke

Epilogue: Nature’s Narratives 365 Paula Findlen Afterword: The Disorder of Things: A Virus Dispatch Alan Mikhail Index

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FIGURES 1.1 1.2 1.3

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1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4

King Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina (r. 1440–1469) at the Chapultepec Gardens, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la tierra firme, chronicle by Fray Diego Durán, c. 1579, fol. 91v (detail), Biblioteca Nacional de España. Specimen of cross between a Carnation pink with pollen of a Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) by Thomas Fairchild (c. 1717). Oxford University Herbaria. Maize flanked by Quetzalcoatl (god of wind) and Macuilxochitl (god of flowers), each sprinkling blood from his penis onto maize cobs, Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 53 (detail). Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Image from full-color restoration by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers (1993), reproduced with permission of Dover Publications. Bone, feathers, flowers, and pollinating bird in Quetzalcoatl’s headdress, Codex Magliabechiano, early colonial Aztec manuscript, mid-sixteenth century, fol. 60v. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence. Quetzalcoatl’s headdress featuring bones and flower, Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 23. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Image from full-color restoration by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers 1993, reproduced with permission of Dover Publications. Quetzalcoatl surrounded by pollen and holding a hoe, Primeros Memoriales, early colonial Aztec manuscript, c. 1558–61, fol. 282v (left), Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid; and pollen on maize plant, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, early colonial Aztec manuscript, mid-sixteenth century, fol. 43r (right), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris. Dots surrounding hummingbirds’ beaks, Codex Madrid, page 34 (left), Codex Madrid, page 23 (center) (image in Seler 1996a: Figure 394), Maya manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), Museo de América, Madrid, Spain; and Codex Dresden, page 6 (left) (image in Seler 1996a: Figure 389), Maya manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), Saxon State University Library Dresden. Hummingbird with dots on beak, polychrome painting in Maya drinking vessel from Tikal Burial 196, late Classic (c. 650–900 CE), Museo Sylvanus G. Morley, Tikal, Guatemala. Photo by Justin Kerr, K8008, Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C. Bird “pollinating” a human. Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. Tlazolteotl simultaneously conceiving (through her hair as indicated by the black footprints, upper right) and childbearing, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 11. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Males with overextended erections marching towards Tlazolteotl (also Toci “Great Mother”) during the autumnal feast Ochpaniztli, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 30. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Quetzalcoatl and Tlazolteotl, Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 39. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. A bezoar-carrying goat jumping from rock to rock. In Pierre Pomet, Histoire générale des drogues, traitant des plantes, des animaux et des minéraux, Seconde Partie, Livre Premier, Des Animaux (Paris: J. B. Loyson et A. Pillon, 1694), 10. Open access via Gallica. An Iberian bezoar stone with an ornate chain and gold adornment. Dated from 1500–1550. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 994. A Spanish bezoar stone from the sixteenth century, wrapped in gold, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 958. “PEDRA . BESOHAR . FINISSIMA. PESA . OCHO . ONCAS” Onion of Knowledge. Black indicates works that explicitly compare the bezoar to an onion. Gray indicates similar imagery of building of layers but without the explicit onion reference. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann.

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A bezoar stone covered in gold fligree stamped with the coat of arms of the Duke of Alba (1508–1582) from Goa, India. 16.2 cm in length. Dated to 1575–1600. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 998. 2.6 The Circulation of Bezoars as Elite Gifts: Map. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann 2.7 The Circulation of Bezoars as Elite Gifts: Royal Gifting Network. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann. 2.8 and 2.9 What’s in a sheep? The Sheep of Peru and Chile in Willem Piso, Georg Marcgrave, and Joannes de Laet’s Historia naturalis brasiliae (Lugdun. Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hakium; et Amestelodami: Apud Lud. Elzevirium, 1648). Appendix on the Peruvian Sheep,” 243–4. Public Domain via Biodiversity Heritage Library. Held by Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library. 3.1 Plan du canal de Briare, premier canal à point de partage qui ait existé . . . J. Cartault, 1852. BnF Gallica. Note the step-like elevation gain of the sections below. 3.2 Écluses de Rogny (Canal de Briare). Embouchure du canal du Midi. 1895. Cote: PH391P. BnF Gallica. The most impressive locks on the Briare Canal. 3.3 “Manière de faire passer une barque d’un Canal dans un autre de diffèrent niveau.” Louis Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état present de la Chine, 1696. 3.4 “Image of the High Weir” Gao yan tu高堰圖; depicting the weir built along the edge of Lake Hongze, the site where the Huai River meets the Yellow River. Fu Zehong, 傅澤洪, Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑. 3.5 A section of the Grand Canal in Shandong province, showing fash locks (labeled zha閘), with additional channels fowing in front the mountains and out into the felds. Fu Zehong, 傅澤洪, Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑. 4.1 Beached sperm whales, Johannes Wierix, Three Beached Whales (Antwerp, 1577), etching 22.20 mm x 30.50 mm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. The etching’s two captions identify the large aquatic beings as “sea monsters” (seemonsters in Dutch on the left and monstres de mer in French on the right). Flemish engraver Johannes Wierix depicted boats haphazardly abandoned on the beach and frightened seafarers running away from the whales. The imagery and the captions failed to broach the possibilities of fortuitous extractions or embedded treasures. 4.2a, 4.2b, and 4.2c Early modern squids in Ippolito Salviani, Aquatilium animalium historiæ, liber primvs (Romae: Medicinam Proftente Auctore, 1544), 164, 165, 169. Italian physician-naturalist Ippolito Salviani (1514–1572) personally observed and studied the Mediterranean Sea creatures described and illustrated in his Aquatilium animalium historiæ (1544). Pictured above are the three squid species that Salviani studied, all of which would have served as a Mediterranean sperm whale’s diet. Note the visible squid beak on the center squid, embedded in the rounded opening surrounded by the squid’s arms, which would have caused the greatest irritation to the whale’s digestion. 4.3 Civet cat and the secretory perineal glands in D. Fabio Columna Lynceo, “Animalis Zibethici Maris Icon,” in Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae, eds. Francisco Hernández and Federico Cesi (Romae: Superior permissu Ex Typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, 1651), 580. 5.1 Squid beak from 1769 at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSHC/308). © Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. 5.2 Owen’s reconstruction of the squid (left). From Richard Owen, “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda,” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 11 (June 1881). 5.3 Tea leaves in a glass bottle gathered on the shore of Dorchester Neck the morning of December 17, 1773. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 5.4 Ladyfsh (Elops saurus), LINN 90, the Linnaean Fish Collection. Permission of the Linnean Society of London. 5.5 Thomas Rowlandson, Sir Joseph Banks about to Eat an Alligator (‘The Fish Supper’), 1788 or later, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 5.6 From Pierre Denys de Montfort, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques (Paris, 1802), Vol. 2.

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Elena Recco, Fruits of the Sea, seventeenth century, oil on canvas, private collection. Image from Wikimedia Commons. A. van Doeff, Stilleven met vissen (Still Life with Fish), c. 1625–1675, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1407). “A Sketch of part of the Sheer, and Middle-deck of His Majesty’s Ship Providence, Shewing the disposition and number of Pots contained in the Garden, for the Reception of the BreadFruit Plants,” 1791, Joseph Banks Papers, Section 9, Series 49.12, State Library of New South Wales. “Specimen of Dried Breadfruit,” late eighteenth century, British Museum (Oc,TAH.71). © The Trustees of the British Museum. The Kitchen in the Cabinet visualization. Food specimens—many of them centuries old—peer out from the shelves, tables, and storage vessels of an eighteenth-century workshop. Adapted from the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, this scene shows the entanglements of knowledge production and food production. It likewise restores isolated museum artifacts back to an ecology of other objects, bodies, and craft practices. Visualization by Katie Dean. Steeped beverages: coffee, tea, and chocolate. The tacit visual messaging here does not forge a sense of empathy for the original drinkers of exotic beverages. Instead, it dialectically consolidates their difference in contrast to Europe’s own self-fashioning. The Oriental Other, stereotyped as an Ottoman and an Asian, is depicted as a crosslegged fgure sitting on the ground. The seated positions imply that their bodies are emasculated and stunted. The American in the frontispiece stands in an erect position, in contrast to the assumed civility of their European counterparts. The frontispiece to the section on coffee. The image is giving hints about the origins of the new and curious substances by racial coding attached to three fgures. The mesmerizing impact on these drinkers is obvious. This state of bewilderment does not necessarily stem from a moderate use of the beverages, but from an abuse. The sensation evoked by overdrinking stands in sharp contrast to refned taste associated with moderate drinking. The coffee plant and the utensils for preparing the drink. While the curiosity about coffee, tea, and chocolate was connected, the natural history illustrations of these substances were unbalanced and disparate. Pictural and textual representations could create taxonomic identities, yet Ottoman coffee posed distinct challenges. European naturalists and physicians hardly saw a live specimen in Ottoman lands. Moreover, Ottoman nature studies were intrinsically textual with only few, if any, illustrations. The illustration here represents almost impossible efforts to fll this pictorial void. Unlike the illustrations of tea and chocolate with their denaturalized environment in the background, the coffee plant remains entirely alienated on a white and invisible landscape. “A Coffee Drinker” in the Dryden Album. The Dryden Album showcases a drawing of a begging dervish with severe cuts on his chest and arms, but the dervish is misidentifed as a coffee drinker. This misrepresentation implies the earlier Western associations between dervishes and coffee in the Ottoman Empire before the popularization of coffee in Europe. By the seventeenth century, however, the forlorn image of an Ottoman coffee drinker had expanded from erratic, unruly, and selfharming wandering dervishes to any Turkish body consuming coffee. The embodied knowledge of coffee imbued with the Western gaze redefned Turkish bodies while overlooking and occluding human diversity in Ottoman lands. Melancholy as a discursive strategy staved off threats emerging from using the very same natural thing. An Ottoman illustration of a coffee plant from Yemen. © Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna—University Library of Bologna Marsigli’s observations on coffee beans. © Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna—University Library of Bologna. Ricord’s drawing of several parts of the manchineel from his 1826 published work Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 79. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

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This map zooms in on the North East coast of Grand cul-de-sac Marin, where one fnds a town called Mansenilier. It should be noted that the Manchineel is known by many names across European languages. In French, several examples of this varied spelling are: Mancenillier, Mancenilier, and Mansenillier. Sir Archibald Campbell, A Map of the Island of Guadeloupe, Drawn from an Accurate Survey by Lieut. Archibald Campbell, Engineer, Engraved by Thomas Jefferys, Geographer to His Majesty, 1764. Digital editing my own. Courtesy of Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection. 7.3 This multi-layered visualization depicts the manchineel’s potential range and the locations where Ricord most likely conducted his experiments. At the base is the same 1764 map of Guadeloupe seen in Figure 7.2. On top of this historical map is a modern outline (purple) of Guadeloupe’s coastline. Within these boundaries is an outline drawn from satellite imagery of the mangrove habitat (green); this represents the range of the manchineel’s potential habitat. Finally, the seven largest population centers in close proximity to this habitat are pinned (teal); these are the most likely locations where Ricord ran his experiments. Sir Archibald Campbell, A Map of the Island of Guadeloupe, 1764; Florent Taureau, “Cartographie Harmonisée des Mangroves de l’Outre-Mer Français” (doctoral thesis, Université de Nantes, 2017), 31–47. Image created on Google Earth Pro. 7.4 Depiction of a manchineel (Mancaneel) from Hans Sloane’s 1707 A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, St. Christophers, Nieves, and Jamaica, Table 159. Courtesy of Hamilton College Special Collections. 7.5 Breakdown of Ricord’s experiments by substance. 7.6 A life-sized drawing of the Nhandiroba’s fruit by Jean-Baptiste Ricord, taken from page 151 of his Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library. 8.1 Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew [RBGK], K00065180. 8.2 Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], RBGK, K00065181. 8.3 John Ellis, “A Botanical Description of the Dionæa Muscipula, or Venus’s Fly-Trap, a Newly-Discovered Sensitive Plant,” in Directions for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants, from the East-Indies and Other Distant Countries, in a State of Vegetation (London: L. Davis, 1770). 8.4 Tab. 4285: Nepenthes raffesiana, del. William Hood Fitch (after William Jack, whose original sketches have been lost), in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 73.3 (1847). 8.5 Nepenthes ampullaria, in Pieter Willem Korthals, Over het Geslacht Nepenthes, in Verhandelingen over de Natuurlijke Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen (Leiden, S. & J. Luchtmans and C. C. van der Hoek, 1839). 8.6 Nepenthes rajah, in Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862). 8.7 Nepenthes rajah, del. Walter Hood Fitch, in Joseph Dalton Hooker, “On the Origin and Development of the Pitchers of Nepenthes, with an Account of Some New Bornean Plants of that Genus,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 22 (1859): 415–24. 8.8 Nepenthes edwardsiana, in Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862). 9.1 Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (1542): Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica, BL4A14 (Fondo Webb), p. 206/207, used by permission of the University of Florence. 9.2a Historiographies of Botanical Knowledge (1484–1583) Grouped by Author. This chart depicts mentions of authorities in the feld of medico-botanical knowledge. The size of the nodes corresponds to the number of connections to referenced authorities. The nodes of the examined authors are colored silver. The core group of the cited authorities are red, and the two main ancient authorities are orange. 9.2b Historiographies of Botanical Knowledge Grouped by Work. All mentioned authorities in the feld of medico-botanical knowledge sorted by works and year of publication, showing the absolute number of authorities named within the examined works.

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Authorities named by Andrea Cesalpino and Pietro Andrea Mattioli in comparison. Red (shared authorities of the core group as in Figure 9.2a); orange (additional authorities shared by both authors); green (Southern European authorities whose works were printed in the 1560s); turquoise (Southern European authorities not invoked by Mattioli, but by Cesalpino). Dioscorides is also invoked by Cesalpino, but in a negative context of reprehensio. Varieties of Armadillo Drawn from Previous Natural Histories. Joannes Jonstronis, Historiae Naturalis de quadrupetibus libri IV (Frankfurt: Matthaeus Merian, 1650–1653), “Armadillo sive aiatochtli” and “Armadillo Genus Alterum Clusii,” Table LXXIIII. Museum Wormianum as depicted in Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, seu, Historia rerum rariorum (Leiden: Elsevier, 1655). Gessner’s Armadillo. Historiae Animalium. Conrad Gessner, “Appendix Historiae Quadrupedum Viviparorum,” in Historia Animalium Liber II: De Quadrupedibus Oviparis (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1554), 20. Aldrovandi’s Armadillo. “Tatum, sive Echinus Brasilianus,” Ulisse Aldrovandi, De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis libri tres (Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini (printer) and Marco Antonio Bernia, 1645), 480. Nahua “turtle-rabbit” or “Ayotochin.” Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Book 11, Chapter 3, Part 4, Biblioteca Laurenziana, 65r. The frst page of Azara’s initial handwritten list of birds. Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural de las aves contenidas en la botijuela 1ª, que dirige al Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] D. Félix de Azara, 1788; ACN0022/402, p. 1; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. A map of the Rio de la Plata Region—including present-day Paraguay to the north, Argentina to the west, and Uruguay to the southeast—in which Azara worked, from the French edition of his Voyages. Félix de Azara, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, and Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale: Collection de Planches (1809), plate VII. David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. The black anteater, one of the two varieties that Azara studied, as illustrated in the French edition of his Voyages. Azara commissioned these illustrations from specimens that he identifed in the museum in Paris as correctly corresponding to those in his notes from South America. Félix de Azara, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, and Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale: Collection de Planches (1809), plate VII; David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries. Francisco Goya’s 1805 portrait of Félix de Azara. Azara wears his military regalia, replete with sword, cane, and well-pressed uniform. Yet, his intellectual pursuits also fgure into the symbolism of the scene. He holds in his right hand a paper, indicating he is a learned man. Most wonderfully, behind him is a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Taxidermy felines grace the lowest shelf while his beloved birds overfow on the others, tucked away for study when necessary. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Portrait of Félix de Azara (1805), oil on canvas. Museo Goya. Colección Ibercaja-Museo Camón Aznar. Gauss in repose, February 23, 1855 (daguerreotype from Krämer, 2000, Figure 6; original: SUB Göttingen). The fask marked C. F. G—ss; visible here is the right cerebral hemisphere of which the convolutions proved to be characteristic of the brain of Fuchs. Shown in the lowerright corner, outside the fask is part of the cast of the inner surface of Gauss’s skull (author’s photo, May 29, 1997). A view of the exhibition room with cartographic Humboldtiana and four of Wagner’s elite brains. The fask marked C. F. G—ss, in the display case on the left, proved to contain the brain of Fuchs and vice versa. The fask marked C. H. F—s with Gauss’s brain is in the rear showcase on the left (author’s photo, May 29, 1997). The brains of Carl Friedrich Hermann and Peter Gustav Lejeune-Dirichlet being examined by a conference delegate. The Fuchs fask with the brain of Gauss is on the right, just outside the picture (author’s photo, May 29, 1997).

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Carl Friedrich Gauss (1877 oil painting by Gottlieb Biermann after the 1840 original by Christian Albrecht Jensen). Gauss’s brain, left hemisphere (from Wagner 1860, plate 4). The brain of Saartjie Baartman (from Vogt 1863, part 1, 232). Huxley’s Rule illustrated, intending to demonstrate, among other things, that the difference in intelligence as shown by cerebral convolutions between Baartman and Gauss is greater than between Baartman and a chimpanzee (from Flammarion 1886, 752). Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557). Metropolitan Museum of Art 17.3.859, engraving, 9 x 11 5/8 in. (22.9 x 29.6 cm). Abraham Storck, Dutch Whalers Near Spitsbergen (1690). Stichting Rijksmuseum het Zuiderzeemuseum. 022296, oil on canvas, Wikimedia Commons. The Wind as Baconian Servant to Mankind. Francis Bacon, Historia naturalis & experimentalis de ventis (Leiden, 1648 ed.). Courtesy of the Internet Archive, Early European Books/Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland. Anonymous, The wonders of this windie winter (London, 1613). Folger Shakespeare Library, LUNA Folger 16730 (STC 25949). Edmond Halley’s Map of Trade Winds and Monsoons. Edmond Halley, “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and Near the Tropicks,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 16, n. 183 (1686), Wikimedia Commons. The Great Storm of 1703. The Great Storm Nov[em]ber 26 1703 Wherein Rear Admiral Beaumont was lost on the Goodwin Sands . . . Beaumont’s Squadron of Observation off Dunkerque, engraving, 328 mm × 449 mm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PY7410.

349 353 357

357 366 367 370 372

373

374

TABLES 1.1 2.1 9.1 9.2 11.1

Botanical gardens and elite pleasances in postclassic Central Mexico (c. 1250–1521). A bezoar hierarchy. Remaining copies of Fuchs, Mattioli, and Cesalpino from the Biblioteca Botanica and Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence. Texts analyzed in Florence, their number, presence of annotations, drawings, and traces of fora. A selection of bird species from Azara’s inventory that retain their Guaraní names in their modern scientifc names.

25 66 276 283 331

CONTRIBUTORS EDITORS Mackenzie Cooley is an intellectual historian who studies the uses, abuses, and understandings of the natural world in early modern history. She is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Hamilton College. Anna Toledano is a historian of science and a museum professional. Her academic research focuses on natural history collecting in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. Duygu Yıldırım is a historian of knowledge working on the comparative and connected histories of science and medicine in the early modern Mediterranean and in the Ottoman Empire. She is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

CONTRIBUTORS Thomas C. Anderson is a PhD student at Yale University studying the history of science and medicine. His research explores the interplay between medicine, natural science, and race in the early modern and Enlightenment era Atlantic World. His work with early modern ethnobotany and acclimatization has been supported by Dumbarton Oaks, the Richard J. Franke Fellowship, the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, and Hamilton College. Elaine Ayers teaches history of science at New York University, where she works on the intersections between art, science, and collecting in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She holds a PhD in the history of science from Princeton University and is currently working on book manuscripts on botanical collecting, preservation, and display. She has written for publications like Cabinet Magazine, Slate, and Hyperallergic, and her work has been supported by institutions including the Yale Center for British Art, NYU’s Digital Humanities Center, and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine. She co-leads a decolonization project based in participatory design at the New York Botanical Garden. Kathryn Biedermann graduated from Hamilton College where she earned the Graves Prize in History. Her research on Renaissance Italian science and medicine was supported by the college’s Digital Humanities Initiative, Kirkland Foundation, and the New World Nature Project. Helen Burgos-Ellis, a native of El Salvador, received her PhD in art history at UCLA. Her forthcoming book, Aztec Science: Plant Sexuality, Pollination, and the Origin of Maize in the pre-Columbian Codex Borgia, combines evidence from ethnohistory, iconography, etymology, and botany to show the extent of Nahua scientifc knowledge about maize. Katie Dean is a designer based in Sydney. Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History at Stanford University. Her books include Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (with Pamela H. Smith, eds.), Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, and she has recently published a second edition of Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800. Julia Heideklang is a postdoctoral researcher at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen at the Department of Philology. She obtained her master’s degrees in Latin, biology, and classical philology from the Humboldt University of Berlin. Her dissertation, “Botanics in the Making (1500–1700): Communication and Construction of the Botanical Science in Early Modern Europe” focuses on the paratexts of botanical writings in early modern Europe. She currently works in the DFG project “Versio latina” of Prof. Dr. Anja Wolkenhauer examining the actors, functions, and aims of early modern translations into Latin. Alan Mikhail is the Chace Family Professor of History at Yale University. He is the author of fve books, most recently My Egypt Archive.

xviii Contributors

Florencia Pierri is an assistant curator in science and technology at the MIT Museum. Her Princeton University dissertation, “A World of Wonder: Exotic Animals in Early Modern Europe,” examines how European travelers, naturalists, scholars, and collectors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reacted to, described, and understood exotic animals in the age of European expansion. Whitney Barlow Robles is a lecturer in history at Dartmouth College. Her research and teaching span the history of science, early American history, environmental studies, and material culture and museum studies. She received her PhD in American Studies and AM in History from Harvard University. Her current book, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History, is forthcoming with Yale University Press and positions animals like corals, rattlesnakes, fsh, and raccoons as central protagonists of the history of eighteenth-century science. Her most recent publications have appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, The New England Quarterly, the book The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820, and Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life. Nicolaas Rupke received his PhD from Princeton University. Having retired as the professor of the history of science and director of the Institute for the History of Science at Göttingen University, he now holds the Johnson Professorship in the College at Washington & Lee University. In between, he has been the recipient of an international range of research fellowships and professorships as well as elections to the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences. A geologist and historian of geology, Rupke’s publications include a scientifc biography of William Buckland, The Great Chain of History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago UP, 2008) and Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago UP, 2009). Currently, he works on Johann Friedrich Blumenbach and the non-Darwinian tradition in evolutionary theory. Zoë Sadokierski is an award-winning book designer, writer, and senior lecturer at the UTS School of Design, where she is part of Spec Studio, a collective of design researchers exploring narrative approaches to ecological communication. She is former president and a founding member of the Australian Book Designers Association. In 2015 Zoë established Page Screen Books, an independent publisher of artist’s books and visual essays. Alexander Statman is a historian of science and distinguished scholar at the UCLA School of Law. He completed his PhD at Stanford University and has held postdoctoral fellowships at the Huntington Library and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His book, A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The Natural Things | Ad Fontes Naturae Project took shape at Stanford University in 2015 when we three graduate students found that we had more in common than our diverse temporal and geographic specialties might suggest. What did natural history mean for an Ottomanist, a Renaissance specialist, and a museum expert? Why, when so many people around the globe sought to understand nature by studying its materiality, did we always recenter the story of natural history in Europe? We started to see natural things—in art, as commodities, in science—everywhere we looked. We thank Paula Findlen, Londa Schiebinger, and Jessica Riskin for their mentorship, curiosity, and encouragement to think about natural history and global nature studies. Stanford’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science supported these conversations; we are grateful to Elaine Ayers, Daniela Bleichmar, Shireen Hamza, Taylor M. Moore, Sarah Richter, and Claire Sabel. Stanford’s Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis supported the digital mapping of natural histories and their publications from 1500 to 1900, and student research assistant Dhara Kumari Yu built a database and series of maps to trace publication distribution, geographic focus of the published natural histories, and their stated interest in universal or geographically specifc nature. We are indebted to organizers and audiences at the History of Science Society (2017), University of Göttingen Conference on “Global Natural History around 1800” (2017), Historia de la Ciencia Seminario, Institución Milá y Fontanals de investigación en Humanidades (IMF)—Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas (2017), the History of Science and Medicine Working Group at the European University Institute (2022), and the Berlin Natural History Museum (2023). Conversations with and feedback from Shahzad Bashir, Dominik Hünniger, Lauren Kassell, Lissa Roberts, and José Pardo Tomás shaped this project for the better. Most of all, we are grateful to Surekha Davies for her advice on how to move this project from idea to draft to book. The manuscript took its current shape at Hamilton College during the Natural Things Conference in April 2019. Ben Breen, Alan Mikhail, Iris Montero, Nicolaas Rupke, and Rebecca Woods challenged us to think carefully about how materiality interacts with knowledge. Over the next year of research, writing, and editing in the wake of the colloquium, Kathryn Biedermann and Thomas C. Anderson blossomed into contributors; thanks to Anderson for his work on copy-editing for textual unity. Finally, we thank those who joined us in textual, visual, and digital play in the making of this research. Art infuses the history of nature studies. To pay homage to this, visual experiments provide coherence to this project, incorporating maps, charts, and images produced through digital approaches. We are grateful to Katie Dean and Zoë Sadokierski, whose design work brings coherence to such wideranging explorations. It is through their visualizations of our academic prose and sources that we hope to draw attention to the uncertainty, loss, and the circulation of knowledge. At Routledge, Laura Pillsworth’s editorial vision has shaped this book; Isabel Voice has wrangled our many documents and images; Kate Fornadel enacted fnal design decisions, copy-editing, and proofng. We are grateful for their labor and support of this project. Thanks also to Kathleen Czerwiak for her help with the index.

GLOSSARY

Introduction Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım What happens when natural things—pollen in a gust of wind, a carnivorous pitcher plant, an armadillo’s thick skin—enter human history? In the early modern period, the tradition of scientifc materialism offered techniques for making meaning of nature from the structure, order, and makeup of natural things. Natural histories taught that pollen grains are powdery substances produced by seed plants and male sperm cells. Botany described pitcher plants as having characteristic leaves to trap and digest their prey. Collections suggested that the armadillo’s dermal bone plates protect the animal from predators until it can fee or dig itself away from a threat. However, all of these ways of seeing risk erasing the human observer. Scientifc materialism reveals some aspects of nature but obscures others. As early modern naturalists sought to defne pollen, pitcher plant, and armadillo, they separated them from other ecological and cultural landscapes that shaped their meanings. These natural things gave purpose to natural science, becoming part of human history and transcending it. This is a book about the relationships among natural things and the humans enthralled by them. Sometimes agentive in their own right, natural things have histories beyond humanity as well as the potential to upset ways of knowing. Most often, though, human actors shaped, collected, sorted, and bedecked natural things with multifarious, relative meanings. These histories are flled with surprising twists, as one observer after another experienced natural things differently. The histories of natural things, with all of their ambiguities, broaden our understanding of manipulating, feeling, and preserving the natural world. The stories natural things tell are grounded in the relationship between alienation and meaning making. As understanding of the natural world expanded from 1500 to the early 1900s, natural philosophy, science, medicine, and colonialism converged on the global stage. The more humans engaged with natural worlds, the more alienated natural things became. Alienation occurred via multiple mechanisms, but chief among those were commodifcation and empiricism. As early moderns established newly global markets, they removed things from their geographies of origin, causing many of them to lose their links to local nature along the way. Simultaneously, alienation became more central to European science as it made experiment and empiricism the bedrock of the new science. For naturalists for whom travel was a challenge, in order to complete an empirical study, alienation of the natural thing was a necessity. Firsthand, direct interaction with a natural thing was the way in which to know it. Taxonomizing, collecting, harvesting, and preserving took on new importance. These approaches bore fruit, including a clearer system of taxonomy and a rise of instrumentation. Alienation was often productive in this increasingly globalized world, although it was frequently violent. DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-1

2

Introduction

ACROSS EARLY MODERN WORLDS We have developed thirteen histories to follow natural things in motion across early modern worlds. By focusing on mobility, these essays trace the ways in which natural knowledge and practices were messily exchanged, translated, repurposed, and sometimes lost along their journeys from Mesoamerica to Madrid, Borneo to Britain, and China to France.1 Through the use of itinerary and connected histories, we aim to contribute to writing more expansive “histories of science that include indigenous actors and categories,” as Neil Safer has suggested.2 Each global microhistory in the resulting series uses a detailed study to refect on wider global historical structures. Many of these essays can also be seen as “entangled histories,” to adopt the term coined by Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton. In the case of the early modern Atlantic World, they note that writing entangled histories “requires paying attention to the agentive capacities of all actors.”3 We seek to expand the spectrum of entanglements to include humans and nonhumans, living things and inanimate ones. These entangled histories reveal forms of alienation that remain lost and forgotten within crosscultural interaction, which weaves the webs of materiality, symbolism, and charged encounters. We have adopted the term “worlds” instead of a single category of the “early modern world.” Oftentimes, world functions as a unifying geographical category, such as the Atlantic World, the Ottoman World, or the Indo-Pacifc World of a particular time period. In these essays, sometimes worlds are historical actors’ categories, such as the Old World and the New World.4 At other times, they are the viewpoints of particular actors, such as the world of women in Renaissance Italy, the world of food history, the world of natural history, or the natural world. Tracing the histories of natural things reveals how even a single context encompasses the overlapping of many worlds of experience and alienation. Embracing the plurality of these worlds demonstrates how one’s ontology shifts what one sees in natural things. Sometimes natural things are entangled across different worlds, such as how squid and breadfruit mediate the worlds of food and natural history. Yet, since not everything moves, these worlds often remain disconnected entities with their own internal logics. Knowing is a world making practice: through knowing, historical actors “make the worlds they know.”5 By building on the recent ontological and material turns in scholarship, the natural things examined here are in-between concepts, objects, and materials.6 However, talking about things as concrete and monolithic entities is often reminiscent of a modern understanding of Cartesian dualism, imposing a sharp divide between the sensing mind and brute matter. Instead, we emphasize the in-betweenness of things in their own right and how their histories blurred with the lives of those enthralled with them. As Pablo F. Gómez has highlighted, recent scholarship has shown the existence of the multitude of “world views” in the early modern period, yet “the very provincial and parochial universalizing premising of the modern western ontological and epistemological apparatus . . . have prevented anthropologists—and historians—from understanding worlds (and not world views).”7 In a similar vein, the approach we employ here considers the (un)making of natural things in early modern worlds, which are distinct realms of alterity. Knowledge about nature reveals itself when it goes through a process of making natural things recognizable and localizable.8

Introduction

NATURAL HISTORY AS NATURE STUDIES Chapters in this volume both gesture to the European natural history tradition and question its limits.9 When we imagine natural histories, we often think of European printed books that include images of minerals, plants, and animals. Take, for instance, the Historia animalium by Conrad Gessner, in which he defned cat to include information loosely related to felines and linked it to a woodcut.10 However, if we search the global early modern archive for similar sources that follow these patterns, we fnd that they are few and far between, if they exist at all. Studying the premodern Islamic world, for example, requires a deep focus on archives of manuscripts and contexts of textual descriptions rather than printed books flled with pictures. The term natural history, then, is embedded in such a specifc valence that it is insuffciently capacious to describe the non-European ways of knowing the natural world. Drawing direct parallels to well-known European examples obscures diverse ways of knowing nature. By favoring the analytical term nature studies over natural history, contributions from Ellis and Yıldırım, in particular, show the imbalances across different archives and provide this more expansive way of seeing the scholarship of the natural world. The entanglement of various archives of nature studies indicates the hybridity of early modern scholars trying to observe the world—both the known and the unfamiliar. When we learn to look for nature studies—records riddled with tasting, seeing, hearing, feeling, and smelling of natural things that are mutable and at times disembodied—strict modern categories of what defnes a scientifc archive become questionable, too. As a more inclusive term, nature studies offers an expansive and dynamic picture of what a global history of science might look like. Nature studies brings more ambiguous forms of engagement with nature to the fore, unearthing moments of decontextualization and alienation.11 It suggests a new framework that goes beyond the question of whether, for example, Ottomans had a distinct tradition of natural history, which could be exchanged or transmitted, compared to that of their counterparts in Europe. The scarcity of commensurable episodes of innovation-driven change—namely the impact of print, visualization of the natural world, and imperial collecting projects—still leaves non-European experiences lingering on the margins of global history. Nature studies with its own distinct understanding of image making and reception demonstrates the intertwined archives of nature and their innate transience. The visual experiments that accompany this volume seek to build on the theme of alienation in the creation of knowledge. Just as Leonhardt Fuchs folded a visual argument into printed copies of his books, which depicted plants throughout the seasons united in one image, designer contributors have created new images to accompany each chapter.12 These visual experiments are intentionally recombinatory and reliant on digital collage to pull visual sources out of place and create new meanings via their displacement.13 This plays on the tradition of early modern naturalists using images to take natural things out of their original places. For these naturalists and their artist collaborators, scientifc visualizations were epistemological arguments. Many natural histories embraced naturalism, a technique of representation that claimed to match optical experience with an assumed objectivity in viewing nature.14 While not all early European natural histories included naturalistic representation, as Daniela Bleichmar has argued, natural history illustration was increasingly governed by European visual conventions of both style and subject matter.15

3

4

Introduction

Collaging requires a corpus of existing visual material that artists can access and manipulate digitally. Therefore, the visual experiments in this book tend to use images created by our historical subjects: those engaged with early modern nature studies. However, the distinctive character of different primary sources determines the limits of these experiments, meaning usage and frequency of visualizations change across different archives. While epistemic images illustrate the close relationship between visual arts and natural history in the European context, fnding similar engagements in the early modern Ottoman World is much less common. In this volume, the remaking of these distinctive visual primary sources offers new insights into the process of how historical actors came to different interpretations of the very same sources. Despite their commonality in the intertwined histories of European art, science, and colonialism, such images were not simply representations of natural things. Any representation of a natural thing, built in ambiguity, had already undergone a process of alienation.16 It was the reader’s responsibility to think through and resolve these uncertainties, which led to various scientifc and cultural debates across time and space.17 Yet, ambiguity exists not only in visualization but in natural things, too. Natural things were tools of remembering, forgetting, and losing; and they were continuously made and remade through these processes across the globe. The combined ubiquity and speechlessness of things animated Lorraine Daston’s Things that Talk.18 For Daston, the power of things comes from their specifcity. Without them, the world would be hazy, lacking both separations and distinctions.19 Things and nature are left shaken from the realm of certainty in favor of histories of negotiation, translation, and individuated ontology-making repeated anew in every encounter. Building on Igor Kopytoff’s 1986 article on cultural biography, over the last three decades scholars have sought to complicate the history of commodifcation by reading objects as things with lives, for which questions of origin, life story, and death might be fruitfully answered.20 In humanistic scholarship, no longer does a life arc pertain to humans alone; scholars have increasingly understood objects as able to generate meaning and infuence actions throughout history in unpredictable ways.21 While objects are everywhere, things are hard to grasp, oscillating on the line between material certainty and phenomenological evocation.22 In the last decades, commodity history has taken a cultural turn. Paula Findlen’s Early Modern Things and Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello’s The Global Lives of Things center material objects to understand the rise of commodifcation and collecting that characterizes the early modern period.23 Findlen argues that “the single most important new development in the history of early modern things concerns the geography of objects and its implications for seeing the history of material culture as an essential component of global history.”24 Gerritsen and Riello read commodities with attention to more than just their economic valence; one must trace how these objects acquired meaning as they traveled.25 The careful study of the many commodities that Europeans brought back subsequently unlocked a new approach to imagining a global early modern world.26 This book’s three sections focus on the human interventions by which natural things were made, separated, and aspirationally known. Part I, “Manipulated,” contains histories of natural things primarily characterized by the ways in which they served human ends. In the cases of bezoar stone and ambergris, the natural thing in question is ultimately not reducible to the plant or animal from whence it came, but rather defned by human usage as healing medicament. These natural things took on different guises and explanations depending on the social context in which they

Introduction

were evoked. In the case of both the control of pollination in Mesoamerica and water management through canals, agriculturalists and urbanists alike wielded wind and water to shape felds and cities to produce the staff of life. Part II, “Felt,” considers appetite, taste, scent, stimulation, poison, and the taxonomic problem of vegetable sensitivity. The natural historical project proved challenging when ravenous collectors needed to preserve specimens instead of eating them on their voyages, as we see in the case of squid. Manchineel uses the metric of pain in human and nonhuman bodies as a colonial physician sought a tool of control beyond the mangroves. Coffee reads melancholy as a new cultural signifer in the age of encounters. The boundaries of feeling are even more fraught in the case of pitcher plant and the problem of plant-mammalian carnivory. Part III, “Preserved,” brings together chapters concerning how some natural things are made to remain, focusing on the utility of remembering and forgetting. The studies of leaf and armadillo both refect on the relationship between the desiccated, material thing stripped of life and textual afterlives that sought to record and classify plants and animals. Bird and brain both provide histories of the promise and peril of collecting objects and their contested reappraisal in relation to an institution’s fallen enthusiasm for such natural things. In the case of South American birds, we bemoan their loss; in the case of the mathematician’s brain, its preservation opens fraught questions about the display of human remains. Taxonomy, even in a table of contents, can only do so much. As we tell the histories of natural things manipulated, felt, and preserved, we intervene in three distinct felds of historical writing: material culture, global exchange, and the intersection of environmental history and the history of science. We think through material culture by highlighting its ambiguous nature. In conversation with the growing feld of global history, we emphasize ecologies of knowledge, which showcase the plural connections of human and more-than-human nature across distinct worlds. We approach curious historical episodes as both connected and disconnected entities, akin to ecological systems including human actors. Many of our essays tell histories of embodied objects whose remnants only persist in documents. While material culture has often privileged the study of nonliving and human-made things, many essays play on the slippage between life and death. In what follows, we walk the reader through the contents of the volume with an emphasis on resonances visible in ambiguous materialities, ecologies of knowledge, and the oscillation between life and death.

AMBIGUOUS MATERIALITIES Just as natural things themselves, the human experience of nature is deeply plural. Some of our natural things are unique (a particular pitcher plant), while others are an overarching category (armadillos collectively). Animal studies and material studies offer new tools for engaging with that diversity, including complicating the corpus of published European natural history. The story of the armadillo, as told by Florencia Pierri, refects the disrupted imaginings of New World animals by revealing how sixteenthcentury European naturalists struggled to ft American species into their cast of creatures. The armadillo posed a taxonomic mystery: it grazed like a horse and was so covered in armor that it became a favorite of curiosity cabinets. Although it was not uncommon for European naturalists to see an armadillo either in a painting or engraving or as a dried and durable specimen, by the late seventeenth century, they still struggled to decide

5

6

Introduction

whether it was a quadruped, a fsh, or a reptile. Yet rather than posing a problem, the ambiguity of the armadillo became a good example of how to think with American animals in a broader European context. Natural things took on lives as moving objects, valued and categorized differently at their many resting places around the world. We return to the Renaissance library and botanical garden in Julia Heideklang’s chapter, “Leaf.” Heideklang searches for literal natural things in the corpus of European natural histories, reading these tomes for their dual materiality: they were both books of information and de facto herbaria. “Leaf” refects on the relationship between the desiccated, material thing stripped of life and textual afterlives that sought to record and classify plants and animals. By reading the leaves of medicinal plants pressed between pages of botanical treatises, Heideklang’s chapter considers how books and plants spoke to Renaissance readers both materially and textually. Conventional natural histories and their focus on authoritative texts by ancient scholars miss what a history of nature studies, devoted to more ephemeral ways of knowledge making, reveals. Drawing attention to the fuidity of the boundaries between natural history and food histories, chapters on squid and coffee highlight the ephemeral and sensorial nature of edible and drinkable commodities. Whitney Barlow Robles’s chapter, “Squid,” demonstrates how this creature held a double status both as a curious object and as food, which stimulated the material practices of natural history. At the nexus of food and science, squid as a consumable and perishable object challenged the most common ways of doing natural history and opened up new inquiries when naturalists eventually recognized the “importance of being edible.”27 A rotting squid corpse and the redolent squid-based blockage of a sperm whale were not obvious items for consumption. Smell and taste were key to nature studies whether or not they were palatable. The importance of an expansive category of nature studies is key in the case of connected histories that consider exchanges between distinct knowledge traditions and sensory experiences. Duygu Yıldırım traces the nexus at which sensory history merges with nature studies through the case of an iconic drink, coffee. As it traveled from the Ottoman Empire to Europe, coffee triggered acute anxieties to differentiate the human bodies that constantly consumed this curious Turkish beverage. Coffee was not simply a recreational or medicinal drink, but a natural thing that could cause transmutation across distinct human bodies. Yıldırım follows elite European men’s struggle to reconcile their sensory experiences with their defnition of refned taste, leading them to doubt if they really enjoyed drinking this foreign beverage. When concerned that a European body became less and less different from a Turkish one in tasting coffee, the European mind sought a means of cultivating difference via bodily attributes, assigning an innate melancholy to the Ottomans. The alienation of coffee failed, yet the fellowship among coffee drinkers was severed. A coffee-like history of natural things thus reveals their agentive capacity to both unite and differentiate humans—their bodies and minds alike. These differentiations continued to hold sway in philosophical and scientifc discourses into the eighteenth century; Immanuel Kant, writing nearly a century after the authors Yıldırım examines, insisted on refraining from coffee in order to lead “a healthy philosophical life.”

ECOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE Many of the natural things discussed across this volume were once part of animate plants and animals, but only gained value once they were extracted from them. Whether in the South Pacifc or the mountains of Peru, early

Introduction

modern nature studies were entangled with a changing landscape; human fascination with natural things led to bioprospecting, extraction, and sometimes even ecological shifts.28 Humans intentionally infuenced their environments, carving countryside into waterways in China and France and creating botanical gardens to bring together the most alluring facets of their natural world. But while we often focus on cases of alterability, in more instances nature proved unphased, quite beyond human infuence. If many naturalists, merchants, and travelers created meaning by taking natural things out of place, then many essays in this volume seek to resist that decontextualization. To do so, contributors take inspiration from ecology, the modern branch of biology that focuses on the relationships between living creatures and their environments. Ecological thinking is attentive to the cycles, links, and systems that transcend individuals alone. Contributors explore both knowledge in ecologies and ecologies of knowledge, resisting alienation of natural things from the webs of which they were part. Alan Mikhail, whose afterword considers the coronavirus as a natural thing, has elsewhere prompted scholars to analyze empires as ecosystems. Mikhail has argued that reading “the Ottoman Empire as an ecosystem opens up Ottoman historical realities in all their complexities to reveal sets of relationships among resources, peoples, ideas, animals, and places in which all elements of the system are connected and dependent on one another.”29 These interconnections prove so deeply overlapping that biotic and abiotic components respond to one another in turn without always relying on human intervention. Seeing ecosystems in empires—their politics, their expertise, and their insights—brings them “down to earth, forces us to slog through muddy canals of the countryside, and focuses on ecological processes.”30 In short, even the exchange of ideas, prized as a uniquely human skill, is shaped by the same forces of competition, limited resources, and interconnection that created Darwin’s entangled bank. Helen Burgos-Ellis’ essay “Pollen” examines nature studies of Mesoamerican domesticated plants—chiefy maize—as evidence for the biological expertise of the Nahua society. By examining the nature studies produced by Nahua thinkers, she shows how they linked natural knowledge with pre-Columbian worldviews that emphasized human and botanical reproduction and fecundity. Symbolic worlds bleed into material ones as Ellis reconceptualizes the god Queztalcoatl in the guise of wind and traces the scientifc observation behind pictorial renderings in Borgia Group codices. She reveals knowledge of nature through successful interventions in and descriptions of natural cycles that produce and reproduce. To grow maize, then, was to intentionally intervene in a living natural world in which plants, animals, and humans were intimately connected reproductively and agriculturally. In “Canal,” Alexander Statman explores how efforts to remake the environment offer object lessons for understanding how humans respond to and shape natural systems.31 Through the parallel accounts of French traveler Pierre Poivre, Chinese priest Aloys Kô, and their contemporaries, Statman paints a picture of an Enlightenment world in which knowledge and technological expertise around water management fowed in both directions. Canal construction had developed in parallel in both Europe and Asia, creating an archive of nature studies that sought to explain whose technology worked better and why. Beyond the ecological disruption involved in canal production itself, Statman argues that the canals “were plainly ecological, in that they related living organisms— natural things like grain and water—to their physical surroundings, especially mountains and rivers. But they also maintained an ecology of

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Introduction

knowledge, relating society to nature.”32 Canals carved new networks into geography itself by digging paths of least resistance that facilitated travel and increased the circulation of people and things. Ecologies of knowledge are positive feedback loops in which nature creates science and science shapes nature. Mackenzie Cooley’s essay “Bezoar” traces this relationship through a focus on the acclaimed antidote in the European pharmacy tradition. In reaction to the European desire to fnd this stone that would cure any disease, scholars of nature and medicine working in the Mesoamerican and Andean worlds looked for medicine in the bellies of local beasts. However, rather than centering the bezoar as materia medica collected in the Wunderkammer or prepared in the apothecary’s shop, Cooley begins and ends her essay with the animals—goats, camelids, iguanas, and birds—from which the stones were extracted. In their pursuit of new sources of these medicines, early modern hunters killed a great number of vicuñas, guanacos, and alpacas, contributing to a bottleneck in Andean camelid populations in the sixteenth century that has shaped these animals to the present day. Empires could transform ecosystems, as the Spanish displacement of the Inca led to a radical reimagining of the role of camelids and ruminants. Bezoars were not the only animal-medical currency in which ambitious merchants traffcked. They also traded ambergris, a scented excretion from sperm whales that was used in perfumery and medicine. In another quintessential example of a changeling object, Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann’s analysis of ambergris showcases another quintessential example of a changeling object, revealing how the unstable nature of this odiferous substance complicated material and intellectual exchanges. Using medical manuals, natural histories, and noble correspondence as nature studies, this chapter follows the making of the substance from its appearance foating on the ocean’s surface to its use in European potions and apothecary shops. Scholars, merchants, and medical authorities could not settle on one ambergris; sometimes it was an amber stone, and sometimes it was an animal product.

LIFE AND DEATH Natural things are strange, liminal objects that inhabit the blurry border between life and death. Aside from the rare fossilizing forces of nature, only human intervention can prolong the survival of a natural thing’s physical remains. Therefore, any material study of natural things must grapple with the peculiarity of preserving dead things that once were alive. While our human historical actors may not be resuscitated, with intentional preservation natural things can physically persist into the present as dead and collected. We can touch the brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss, but the man whose consciousness embodied it has become immaterial. To preserve a natural thing is not easy. The deleterious effects of time have committed countless bones, horns, feathers, and fowers to dust. Nicolaas Rupke’s essay, “Brain,” shows us that the brain of famed mathematician Gauss could persist in its climate-controlled storeroom at the University of Göttingen. Indeed, it remains there to the present day, a dead natural thing containing the identity of a particular human who was once alive. In his personal tale of the history of this specimen, Rupke demonstrates how this brain took on new meaning after the death of its owner. Ironically, this unusually identifed brain was in fact incorrectly labeled as Gauss’s, showing that despite curators’ best efforts to catalog, natural things have a tendency to slip into disorder. The most natural end for a natural thing is its material destruction. In “Bird,” Anna Toledano resurrects the 84 bird specimens that soldier

Introduction

turned naturalist Félix de Azara sent from Asunción, Paraguay to Madrid, Spain, from inventories alone. The specimens had suffered so much decay during the journey that upon receipt at the Royal Cabinet of Natural History, the director determined them useless. These birds few farther in death than in life, taking on new identities as Azara adapted their local common names into the European system of binomial nomenclature. Across the volume, our authors bring lost natural things to life as material historical actors through object biography. To do so, they employ the same methodologies on which traditional historians rely, reading silences in the material archive.33 Living natural things struggled for life. In “Pitcher Plant,” Elaine Ayers explores a particular specimen, an overtly sexualized and violent natural thing that very few Europeans saw because it proved so diffcult to ship alive. Ayers follows the British botanist Hugh Low’s explorations in Borneo, where he observed a decaying rat in the bell of this individual plant in 1858. The sight struck him as so unusual that it spurred debates among colonial botanists not just about the uncontrollability of the species, but of Borneo itself, which they painted as both biodiverse and unstable. The pitcher plant’s maw—causing death in order to sustain its life—appeared to be a microcosm of its larger environment in nineteenthcentury colonial ecology. An ocean away, similar colonial dynamics shaped how naturalists and physicians saw local environments and human populations as interlinked. In his chapter “Manchineel,” Thomas C. Anderson reveals how a French colonial physician appropriated a plant’s defense mechanism. Anderson reads a series of medical experiments conducted by JeanBaptiste Ricord, emplacing them within the ecology of the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. Ricord transformed manchineel, known as the world’s deadliest tree, into poisons, which he then tested on dogs and enslaved people, including a boy named Jacob. The poison, which the manchineel had developed for its own defense, became a means of maintaining colonial order. As Ayers saw in Borneo, unsettling fora became a salient metaphor for resistance against colonial power, which in this case European administrators sought to bottle. To stay in power, once again, seemed to require knowledge of nature. Natural Things features object biographies as nonhuman nature passed into human hands. Through the paradoxical process of alienation as both an extractive and a generative force in knowledge construction, natural things transformed, were transformed, and transformed others. Through visual experiments we explore the human gaze as a means of alienating nature from its environment, a thing from its representation.34 While the tendrils of the entangled bank continue to ensnare us, the essays in this volume wander along the hillside, creating pathways through the web of life and the people who sought to know about it.

NOTES 1 John-Paul A. Ghobrial, “Introduction: Seeing the World Like a Microhistorian,” Past & Present 242, Issue Supplement-14 (November 2019): 1–22. 2 Neil Safer, “Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, American Indian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science,” Isis 101 (2010): 133–45. Also see Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009). 3 Ralph Bauer and Marcy Norton, “Introduction: Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European Histories,” Colonial Latin American Review 26 (2017): 1–17, esp. 3.

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Introduction 4 Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 5 Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, “Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds,” in A World of Many Worlds, ed. Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018), 1–22, 6. 6 Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 7 Pablo F. Gómez, “Caribbean Stones and the Creation of Early-Modern Worlds,” History and Technology 34, no. 1 (2018): 11–20; esp. 12. 8 Cadena and Blaser, “Pluriverse,” 6. 9 A robust feld of scholarship has centered natural history; we seek to build on that momentum. See, for instance, Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Nicholas Jardine, James Andrew Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Cultures of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Helen Anne Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James Andrew Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds., Worlds of Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019); Juan Pimentel, The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History, trans. Peter Mason (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); James Delbourgo, Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2017). See also: Antoinette Burton and Renisa Mawani, eds., Animalia: An Anti-Imperialist Bestiary for Our Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020); Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, eds., New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities (London: University of London Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 2021). 10 Conrad Gessner, Historia animalium lib. I. de quadrupedibus viviparis (Zurich: Christophorum Froschoverum, 1551), 345–54. 11 For a foundational study of early modern European knowledge-making, see Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998). 12 Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 46–47, 60. 13 On digital reformulation of historical evidence, see Shahzad Bashir, “Composing History for the Web: Digital Reformulation of Narrative, Evidence, and Context,” History and Theory 61 (2022): 19–36. 14 Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature, 4. 15 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 107–8. 16 Daniel Margócsy, “The Pineapple and the Worms,” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2021): 53–81. On the relation between scientifc information and images, see Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Horst Bredekamp, Darwin’s Corals: A New Model of Evolution and the Tradition of Natural History (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019); Susan Dackerman, Prints and the Production of Knowledge (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011). 17 As Surekha Davies has shown, visual genres can teach us about the practice of science as a visual pursuit and the epistemological consequences of creating and then recombining images. Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 18 Lorriane Daston, Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2004).

Introduction 19 For “changeling objects” in motion, see Daniela Bleichmar, “Pictorial Knowledge on the Move: The Translations of the Codex Mendoza,” Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science, ed. Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 95–118. 20 Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986), 64–91. 21 Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn, 2001): 1–22, esp. 4–5. 22 Ken Alder, “Introduction,” Isis, Focus: Thick Things 98 (2007): 80–83, esp. 82; Paula Findlen, Early Modern Things: Object and Their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2016); Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter, and Samantha van Gerbig, eds., Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015). 23 Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 (New York: Routledge, 2013) and Anne Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, eds., The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World (New York: Routledge, 2016). Daniela Bleichmar and Meredith Martin, eds., Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World (Chichester, Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016). 24 Findlen, Early Modern Things, 15. 25 Gerritsen and Giorgio Riello, The Global Lives of Things, 8. 26 Neil MacGregor, A History of the World in a Hundred Objects in the British Museum’s Collections (New York: Viking, 2011). 27 Barlow Robles, “Squid: Natural History as Food History, c. 1730–1860,” 144. 28 Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007). On environmental history and the history of science: Mark D. Hersey and Jeremy Vetter, “Shared Ground: Between Environmental History and the History of Science,” History of Science 57, no. 4, Special Issue (2019): 403–40. There are a number of working groups considering this intersection, such as Collection Ecologies (https://collecte. hypotheses.org). The idea of the anthropocene is central to this conception: Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Anthropocene Time,” History & Theory 57 (2018): 5–32. 29 Alan Mikhail, Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 199–203. 30 Ibid. 31 Paula Findlen, “Objects of History: The Past Materialized,” History and Theory 59 (2020): 270–82, esp. 270. 32 Alexander Statman, “Canal: Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water,” 102. 33 See Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995). 34 Surekha Davies, Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monster (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alder, Ken. “Introduction.” Isis, Focus: Thick Things 98 (2007): 80–83. Bashir, Shahzad. “Composing History for the Web: Digital Reformulation of Narrative, Evidence, and Context.” History and Theory 61 (2022): 19–36. Bauer, Ralph and Marcy Norton. “Introduction: Entangled Trajectories: Indigenous and European histories.” Colonial Latin American Review 26 (2017): 1–17. Bleichmar, Daniela. “Pictorial Knowledge on the Move: The Translations of the Codex Mendoza.” In Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural

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Histories of Early Modern Science, edited by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer, 95–118. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bleichmar, Daniela and Meredith Martin, eds. Objects in Motion in the Early Modern World. Chichester, Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2016. Bredekamp, Horst. Darwin’s Corals: A New Model of Evolution and the Tradition of Natural History. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1, Things (Autumn 2001): 1–22. Burton, Antoinette and Renisa Mawani, eds. Animalia: An Anti-Imperialist Bestiary for Our Time. Durham: Duke University Press, 2020. Cañizares-Esguerra, Jorge. How to Write the History of the New World: Histories, Epistemologies, and Identities in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Anthropocene Time.” History & Theory 57 (2018): 5–32. Curry, Helen Anne, Nicholas Jardine, James Andrew Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds. Worlds of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Dackerman, Susan. Prints and the Production of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011. Daston, Lorriane. Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. Davies, Surekha. Renaissance Ethnography and the Invention of the Human: New Worlds, Maps, and Monster. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. de la Cadena, Marisol and Mario Blaser. “Pluriverse: Proposals for a World of Many Worlds.” In A World of Many Worlds, edited by Marisol de la Cadena and Mario Blaser, 1–22. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018. Delbourgo, James. Collecting the World: Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press, 2017. Findlen, Paula, ed. Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500– 1800. New York: Routledge, 2013. Findlen, Paula. “Objects of History: The Past Materialized.” History and Theory 59 (2020): 270–82. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019. Gerritsen, Anne and Giorgio Riello, eds. The Global Lives of Things: The Material Culture of Connections in the Early Modern World. New York: Routledge, 2016. Gessner, Conrad. Historia animalium lib. I. de quadrupedibus viviparis. Zurich: Christophorum Froschoverum, 1551. Ghobrial, John-Paul A. “Introduction: Seeing the World Like a Microhistorian.” Past & Present 242, Issue Supplement-14 (November 2019): 1–22.

Introduction

Gómez, Pablo F. “Caribbean Stones and the Creation of Early-Modern Worlds.” History and Technology 34, no. 1 (2018): 11–20. Hersey, Mark D. and Jeremy Vetter. “Shared Ground: Between Environmental History and the History of Science.” History of Science 57, no. 4, Special Issue (2019): 403–40. Holbraad, Martin and Morten Axel Pedersen. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Jardine, Nicholas, James Andrew Secord, and Emma C. Spary, eds. Cultures of Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Kopytoff, Igor. “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” In The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, edited by Arjun Appadurai, 64–91. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1986. Kusukawa, Sachiko. Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. MacGregor, Neil. A History of the World in a Hundred Objects in the British Museum’s Collections. New York: Viking, 2011. Marcon, Federico. The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Margócsy, Daniel. “The Pineapple and the Worms.” KNOW: A Journal on the Formation of Knowledge 5, no. 1 (2021): 53–81. Mikhail, Alan. Under Osman’s Tree: The Ottoman Empire, Egypt, and Environmental History. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pimentel, Juan. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History. Translated by Peter Mason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017. Safer, Neil. “Global Knowledge on the Move: Itineraries, American Indian Narratives, and Deep Histories of Science.” Isis 101 (2010): 133–45. Schaffer, Simon, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009. Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Boston: Harvard University Press, 2007. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Explorations in Connected History: Mughals and Franks. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Thurner, Mark and Juan Pimentel, eds. New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities. London: University of London Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 2021. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995. Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher, Ivan Gaskell, Sara Schechner, Sarah Anne Carter, and Samantha van Gerbig. Tangible Things: Making History Through Objects. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

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On the Design Zoë Sadokierski and Katie Dean FLOATING IMAGES In scholarly publications, images, such as photographs, illustrations, graphs, and charts are used to visually communicate complex data or key ideas in a succinct way. However, where linguistic expression can aspire to monosemy—the articulation of specifc and unambiguous meanings, images are polysemic—visual expression cannot explicitly make propositions or express abstract ideas. In other words, images are always ambiguous and open to multiple possible interpretations. Therefore, authors write captions to “pin” an intended meaning or interpretation to an image. Roland Barthes proposes that captions “anchor” images within written texts, “to fx the foating signifers in such a way as to counter the terror of uncertain signs.”1 This convention is so successful that, according to Elizabeth Chaplin, readers barely register captions as verbal instructions on how to read the image; instead, upon reading an image and its caption simultaneously, readers perceive “an image whose meaning is clear (whose meaning is ‘given’).”2 Submitting to the author’s authority on how to interpret images in scholarly texts means that readers often overlook the fact that images also present arguments, and arrive before us loaded with the interpretive bias of the original image maker, as well as the biases embedded in an author’s caption. Working against this convention of captioning, we consciously avoided pinning specifc meaning to the illustrated plates in this book by captioning them with quotations from the chapter, hinting at rather than dictating an interpretation of the image. Unlike conventional academic fgures, these images aim to complexify rather than simplify the written text. With this complexity, we invite the readers to experience fuidity of meanings obtained from images. There are two types of images that appear within this book—fgures supplied by authors and illustrated plates created by designers Katie Dean and Zoë Sadokierski. They both perform different functions in relation to the written text. Figures in the book are either reproductions of cultural material which authors reference in their research (natural history illustrations, maps, photographs) or data visualizations created to summarize or demonstrate specifc aspects of the research (charts, graphs, and diagrams). Author-supplied fgures are scattered throughout chapters and presented in a simple frame. The second type of image in the book are illustrated plates, which appear at the start of each chapter. These plates have been digitally collaged from archival material relevant to the chapter, supplied by authors and sourced by the editors and designers. Rather than providing visual evidence or visual summaries of a particular aspect of the written text, these images are visual provocations; they are deliberately complex, ambiguous, and often surprising, inviting readers to critique the way the archival material is visually represented in scholarly publishing, and the inherent bias embedded in the process of creating images. In this way, the plates function like editorial illustrations, inviting contemplation on a theme, problem, or object central to the written text rather than illustrating a specifc point. DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-2

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Ideally, readers of this book who revisit an illustrated plate after reading the chapter may fnd, through refection and deliberation, fresh interpretations of both the image and the written text. Readers must work through the assembled visual elements of the plate, in the same way that the authors (and editors, and designers) have worked through collections of material culture, to make sense of these complex phenomena. Below, we frame collage as a critical image-making process and describe how our image-making practice for this book involved collaboration with the editors and authors to provide insight into how images are created with particular bias and intentions and to help guide curious readers toward thresholds of interpretation for the illustrated plates in this book.3

COLLAGE AS CRITICAL IMAGE MAKING The digitization and open access sharing of archival images from the collections of museums, libraries, and galleries has resulted in historical images fooding digital platforms, such as stock libraries, Flickr, Pinterest and the cultural institutions’ own websites. Often released under Creative Commons (CC) licenses,4 it is possible to download, share and print high resolution images onto everything from coffee cups to websites and commercially published books, without seeking permission or paying a fee. Although free to use, many CC licenses stipulate that the original source should be clearly credited. However, this cultural material is often used without such attribution, which uproots the images from the context of their production and original distribution. Any indication that this material was produced by people with cultural bias, in particular historical circumstances, is lost in the ether. In addition to simply sharing and printing images, many artists and designers are “remixing” archival material—collaging new images from fragments of existing images.5 Some frame this as a critical practice—using image making to think through ways to use this digital proliferation of material, but also to surface questions around potential issues with doing so.6 Curator and historian Louise Anemaat acknowledges “ digitisation has given us the ability to unlock new lines of investigation,” enabling us to trace the history of cultural images, to study and compare their stylistic variations, and to “ raise questions we might not have thought to ask, suggest possibilities we might not have considered.”7 The history of collage as a critical image-making process in Western art stems from early Modernism; the term was coined by Braque and Picasso from the French coller or “to glue” and has been used by avant-garde artists since the turn of the twentieth century.8 Performed with thought and skill, collage can produce complex and unsettling images. Collage can also draw attention to authorship, revealing the hand of the maker through unexpected cuts, connecting lines and juxtaposition—placing unexpected elements next to each other—that draw the viewer out of a state of passive viewing and into a stance of active, interpretive participant. Through our own ongoing digital collage practices, we aim to unsettle viewers’ expectations of what a natural history illustration should look like, to prompt discussion around the way images are constructed and shared. By subverting familiar-looking natural history illustrations through collage techniques, we call attention to the fact that all images are fctions. A botanical specimen depicted with roots but not dirt, worms, or other parts of the ecosystem it was pulled from is a fction, a visual narrative that this specimen exists in white-backgrounded isolation. There is no evidence of the environment in which it was extracted or the complex network of human and nonhuman actors involved in that extraction. Image

On the Design

makers choose what to include, but also what to omit within the frame of the image. This example draws our attention to the fact that all representations of the natural world have been made by someone or someones with interpretive bias and following cultural and historical conventions for representing the natural world. Once this is understood, consciously questioning what has been omitted from images reveals the trace of the maker and context of an image’s creation, one of the key aims of the authors in this book. However, in addition to critiquing what has been omitted and the conventions of representation related to the time and place of an image’s creation, considering compositional decisions including hierarchy of elements, color, size, and graphic lines also reveals traces of authorship and context, as discussed using examples of our image-making process below.

OUR IMAGE-MAKING PROCESS An initial set of questions underpinned our image-making process for Natural Things, based on regular conversations with the editors: 1. How might we collage cultural materials together in ways that prompt viewers to consider the horror of human colonization, of exerting control over the natural world and indigenous peoples? 2. How might we draw attention to collection practices that isolate specimens from their environmental and cultural contexts? 3. How to capture the absence of representations in non-European archives? Through experimental image making, can we bring hidden (silenced and mutilated) voices to the light? We follow a research through design methodology, which recognizes that questions and methods can emerge through design experimentation and relies on critical documentation to capture and refect upon insights that emerge through this design process in order to write about it later.9 For example, Katie Dean wrote an email refecting further on an image that was discussed during a collaborative working session: I was reading about Ruysch’s embalming jars last night and how he created decorative lids that refected the life of the specimen contained within the jar. I think our approach is a similar type of visual construction that uses collage of separate elements to form a story around the natural object. I’ve also included some of Humboldt’s maps to talk about how a comparative view can be created through collage, layering, juxtaposition, etc. Here, a discussion about historical image-making practices begins to inform our response to the questions we set ourselves at the start of the project. Below, accounts of creating images for two of the plates further explains the kinds of thinking-through-making and cross-disciplinary dialogue that underpin our critical practice.

EXAMPLE 1: PITCHER PLANT Visual Strategies: Deliberate Omissions, Desaturation, and Subtle Additions For the pitcher plant collage, we slipped into choosing images based on aesthetic appeal (seduced by the beauty) and shape (whether the particular plant would work well as a repeating pattern in a border). For one draft,

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we mocked up a colorful border of vibrant, sensual pitcher plants using an Ernst Haekel illustration. In conversation with author Elaine Ayers and the editors, we realized that using Haekel’s beautiful, intricate work is a problem for two reasons. First, continuing to promote well-known work, such as Haekel’s botanical illustrations, limits the diversity of historical material we see, perpetuating the idea that individual champions are responsible for history. Second, Haekel deliberately reported false data in order to promote his theories, and according to some historians, promoted eugenics, a racist worldview. Further championing his work is to willfully overlook its complicated history. This problem was easily overcome by going back to a more considered selection process, working closely with Ayers to source and confrm appropriate images. Another challenge in this plate was communicating the idea that through the colonial collection process, the specimens often ended up devoid of the color, vibrancy, and “feshiness” of the original plants—the very issue we describe in working with herbarium specimens in the chapter on pollen. For this plate, desaturating the plant in a gradient implies the bleeding out of liveliness of the living specimen. The hidden rodent in the pitcher plant subtly plays out the idea of this as a monstrous species, and hopefully presents a surprising discovery to the attentive viewer, to give a sense of the frst encounters with these carnivorous plants by European botanists. Through ongoing conversations, Ayers understood that we needed visual material to collage into the borders; to replace the inappropriate Haeckel images, she suggested the snakes, which we would not have found on our own but contribute a great deal to the fnal plate as a menacing visual metaphor for the dangers associated with hunting the pitcher plant specimens. This account of our collaborative process speaks to the importance of ongoing, candid conversations as part of the image-making process. Through cross -disciplinary collaboration we become more informed, critical creative practitioners.

EXAMPLE 2: BRAIN Visual Strategies: Subversion and Visual Humor The “Brain” chapter describes embalmed brain specimens foating in jars, not just for study as biological organs but also representations of the abstract concepts of knowledge and intelligence. Communicating the variety of things that the brain, as an object, can represent as a single, fat image is diffcult. The plate is an assemblage of elements: Gauss, with brain specimen illustrations foating around him to imply the non-physical things, such as knowledge and power. The author-supplied images for this chapter presented an ethical challenge; we discussed our discomfort about the 1886 illustration of Huxley’s Rule, which aimed to show a hierarchy of intelligences, placing the African female’s brain lower than the European male, and closer to the monkey and ape specimens. Despite being professional image makers who understand that the construction of images directs what is communicated, we were initially so taken aback by the arguments presented through the diagram that we struggled to conceive an alternate, critical approach to visually communicate the subject. We aimed to disrupt how the image is read over and over again. In addition to subverting this conventional hierarchy by rearranging the placement of the brains, opening the top of Gauss’s head transforms his portrait into a surreal, Monty Python-esque parody, a visual subversion of his authority. In our collage,

On the Design

Gauss’s fip-top head looks absurd, refecting the farcical idea—to us, contemporary readers—that intelligence could be measured by examining the physical properties of a brain. Visual humor can be a powerful tool for destabilizing authority.

CONCLUDING REMARKS A wonderful aspect of the design process was experiencing different ways to come at the visual material in this volume, expanding our perspective as designers with the expertise and perspectives of historians and cultural ecologists. The authors and editors were without exception generous and patient with us, nonexperts in their feld, as we worked through the complexity of the material associated with their scholarship. The plates, each a product of fruitful conversations incorporating multiple perspectives, are designed to be discursive tools which challenge our expectations about natural history illustrations in scholarly texts. The new conversations and lines of inquiry these images might open up across disciplinary divides is exciting. Amy Frielander argues that multidisciplinary collaboration in the digital humanities has the potential to prompt “creative cross fertilization of ideas and techniques” which can allow for new questions and ideas to be pursued.10 This volume embraces cross-fertilization as central to both its intervention in the history of science and its presentation of that research through the visual material integrated within the written text.

NOTES 1 Roland Barthes, Image—Music—Text, trans. S. Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 39. 2 Elizabeth Chaplin, “The Convention of Captioning: W. G. Sebald and the Release of the Captive Image,” Visual Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 42–53. 3 Gérard Genette describes paratextual devices which surround and present an author’s “primary text” to the reader, including the title, frontmatter, critical reviews and illustrations, as providing “thresholds of interpretation” for that text. See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Literature, Culture, Theory Series Number 20), trans. Jane E. Lewin, foreword by Richard Macksey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 4 See https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ for a comprehensive overview of the various licenses individual creators, companies and institutions can apply to grant copyright permission for creative work. Creative Commons CC0 1.0 licenses are used by many cultural institutions: “You can copy, modify, distribute and perform the work, even for commercial purposes, all without asking permission.” 5 See, for example, the Rijksstudio Award for remixing their collection in unexpected ways: www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio/144597--entriesrijksstudio-award/creations. 6 See Ramia Mazé’s defnition of critical practice in design in Ramia Mazé, “Critical of What?,” in Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader, ed. Magnus Ericson, Martin Frostner, Zak Kyes, Sara Teleman, and Jonas Williamson (London: Sternberg Press, 2009), 389–408. 7 Louise Anematt, Natural Curiosity: Unseen Art of the First Fleet (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2014), 16–18. 8 Here, we refer to collage being used to produce socio-cultural and politically critical images. Historians trace the origins of collage more broadly as far back as 200 BC in China, and many non-Western art practices involve collage as an image-making process. 9 Zoë Sadokierski, “Developing Critical Documentation Practices for Design Researchers,” Design Studies 69 (July 2020): 69.

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On the Design 10 Amy Friedlander, “Asking Questions and Building a Research Agenda for Digital Scholarship,” in Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship: Report of a Workshop Cosponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and the National Endowment for the Humanities (Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2009), 1–15.

BIBLIOGRAPHY “About the Licenses.” Creative Commons. https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/ (accessed August 5, 2022). Anematt, Louise. Natural Curiosity: Unseen Art of the First Fleet. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2014. Barthes, Roland. Image—Music—Text. Translated by S. Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Chaplin, Elizabeth. “The Convention of Captioning: W. G. Sebald and the Release of the Captive Image.” Visual Studies 21, no. 1 (2006): 42–53. “Entries Rijksstudio Award.” Rijksmuseum. www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/ rijksstudio/144597--entries-rijksstudio-award/creations (accessed August 5, 2022). Friedlander, Amy. “Asking Questions and Building a Research Agenda for Digital Scholarship.” In Working Together or Apart: Promoting the Next Generation of Digital Scholarship: Report of a Workshop Cosponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources and The National Endowment for the Humanities. Washington, DC: Council on Library and Information Resources, 2009. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (Literature, Culture, Theory Series Number 20). Translated by Jane E. Lewin, Foreword by Richard Macksey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Mazé, Ramia. “Critical of What?” In Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader, edited by Magnus Ericson, Martin Frostner, Zak Kyes, Sara teleman, and Jonas Williamson, 389–408. London: Sternberg Press, 2009. Sadokierski, Zoë. “Developing Critical Documentation Practices for Design Researchers.” Design Studies 69 (July 2020). https://doi. org/10.1016/j.destud.2020.03.002

PART I

Manipulated

Chapter 1

Pollen The Sexual Life of Plants in Mesoamerica Helen Burgos-Ellis

“Mesoamericans did not record botanical messages in a manner readily intelligible in the West. For instance, the horticulturists who established the Huaxtepec Garden performed rituals with blood, birds, and fowers to make plants ‘burst forth with fower and fruit.’” Page 32

VISUALIZATION 1 Pollen/Maize: Zea mays L., herbarium specimen, New York Botanical Garden. Background and grid: created by designers. The background features a manuscript’s page and a series of squares that seem to await information to be recorded on them, evoking the early colonial Aztec Codex Telleriano-Remensis. While the images in the foreground point to the present, those in the background indicate humans in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, as suggested by the year referring to pre-Cortesian Mesoamerica. The foreground features a tassel disseminating pollen along with the image of black cobs in their husks. The tassel reads almost like a brush, painting information onto the squares. The viewer is pushed to think of the natural things (the tassel and the corn cobs) as part of the natural world and simultaneously as dependent on humans.

Abstract: Pollen, pollination, and plant sexuality are biological realities that exist independently of human infuence. Yet, these processes transform into socio-cultural constructions via the human conceptualization, manipulation, and recording of natural phenomena related to plant reproduction. Mesoamerica, a region whose history of plant domestication and manipulation of plants and plant material spans millennia, provides an ideal case study for understanding how advanced nonEuropean biological engineering calls into question the geography of early modern science. For the Nahuas, popularly known as the Aztecs, maize reproduction and human reproduction overlapped. Uncannily, given how their description of pollination is virtually identical to that which Linnaeus and Cotton Mather would express centuries later, Nahua agriculturalists proved their knowledge of plant reproduction by engineering maize that never could have grown in the wild.

In his old age, King Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina (r. 1440–1469) commissioned artists to carve his portrait in stone and called for plants grown in his empire to be brought to the imperial capital (Figure 1.1).1 His second in command, Tlacaelel (r. 1426–1487), suggested that the Aztec ruler also dam a series of rivers and springs to build a delightful retreat with a pond and garden in Huaxtepec (Oaxtepec, Morelos): Let us send to Cuetlaxtla, where Pinotl governs in your name, and order him to send the following plants to us: cacao trees, xochinacaztli, volloxochitl, cacaoxochitl, izquixochitl, huacalxochitl, cacaloxochitl, and other fowers that grow in the Hot Country near the coast.2 With the king’s blessing, Tlacaelel began the project and sent for specimens from coastal areas and experts to transplant them. It apparently pleased the king to “bequeath to Mexico-Tenochtitlan and all the nations in the provinces associated with the Aztecs the refreshment and the delights of the fowers they had lacked until then.”3 It is thus that the chronicler says, “fowers and plants were brought to Tenochtitlan in great quantities, with the earth still about the roots, wrapped in fne cloth.”4 After completing their work, with the customary solemnity required of these occasions, the gardeners fasted and drew blood from their ears to smear on the leaves. They also sacrifced birds and sprinkled their blood on the earth and plants to honor the god of fowers. Fray Diego Durán, who compiled this account with native informants in the 1570s, commented that the Aztecs believed that by DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-4

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Figure 1.1: King Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina (r. 1440–1469) at the Chapultepec Gardens, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la tierra frme, chronicle by Fray Diego Durán, c. 1579, fol. 91v (detail), Biblioteca Nacional de España. exalting this god, “no plant would be lost and that soon all would burst forth with fower and fruit,” adding, “thus it was that the devil . . . let not one plant be lost” and that “in the third year they gave abundant fowers.”5 This episode sheds light on Aztecs’ botanical knowledge, the devotion they accorded gardens, and their sacrosanct approach to handling plants and fowers. Designing botanical gardens and elite pleasances was common among the Aztecs who created environments flled with lavishments, just as Europeans did an ocean away. Their fondness for fowers was legendary for Mesoamericans (Table 1.1) and Europeans alike, as Spanish chroniclers such as José de Acosta remarked about the former’s peculiar foral fxation: The Indians love fowers, more in New Spain than in any other part of the world, and so they are accustomed to make nosegays that are called suchiles in that land, with so much variety and care and artistry that they leave nothing to be desired. It is customary to honor lords and guests by offering them these suchiles or nosegays . . . The Indians used to carry fowers in their hands during their dances and festivals, and the great lords and kings used them as a sign of greatness. This is why one ordinarily sees pictures of their ancients with fowers in their hands, as in Europe the great ones are depicted with gloves.6 Table 1.1 lists some of the major Aztec gardens identifed in ethnohistoric sources.7 Why the obsession with fowers? While Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina’s botanical garden is now lost and cannot provide clues, other material culture from Mesoamerica survives and teems with botanical references.8 This is not surprising. Mesoamericans domesticated numerous plants that are currently cultivated, manipulated, and consumed throughout the world, such as maize, cacao, vanilla, rubber, tomato, squash, and beans.9 Scientists, including the Nobel laureate George Beadle and the eminent biologist Paul Mangelsdorf, seeking a better understanding of maize’s

Chapter 1 • Pollen

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Table 1.1 Botanical gardens and elite pleasances in postclassic Central Mexico (c. 1250–1521) Date

Name of Garden

Designer or Patron

Type of Garden

c. 1420

Chapultepec Garden (now Bosque de Chapultepec)

Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco

c. 1430s

Acolhua Garden at Acatetelco (Atenco, Bosque El Contador)

Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco

c. 1440s

Texcotzingo

Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco

c. 1440s

Yahualiuhcan Gardens

Calpullalpan municipality

c. 1440s

Calpulalpan

c. 1440s

Mazaapan

c. 1460s

Huaxtepec (Oaxtepec, Morelos)

c. 1510s

Itztapalapa Gardens

Nezahualcoyotl, Texcoco Calpullalpan municipality Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina, Tenochtitlan Aztec, Moteuczoma II

Postclassic

Mazantzintamalco, Tacuba causeway Tenochtitlan’s Zoological Gardens

Tenochtitlan nobility Aztec (also Mexica or Tenochca) Nobility

Xochimilco

Aztec (also Mexica or Tenochca)

Pleasance where gardens featured paths lined with trees, sculpture, and springs; had an aqueduct that supplied Tenochtitlan with potable water Pleasance with orchard and treelined walkways especially the ahuehuetl (cypress), ponds, and canals made from the rerouting of two rivers Gardens with sculpture, waterfalls, fountains, baths, and channels; aqueducts carved on mountains supplied site’s water; styled after ancient Tula and Tenayuca Botanical garden with fowering plants and medicinal specimens; had canals and ponds Botanical garden with medicinal specimens Horticultural garden specializing in medicinal plants Botanical garden with rare specimens of fowering plants and trees as well as ponds Ornamental specimens, scented fowering plants, tree orchards, baths, and pools for fsh and water fowl Botanical garden for horticultural study Botanical gardens featuring a wide array of plants and trees, ponds, caged exotic animals, and domesticated water fowl; staffed with attendants and veterinarians Gardens for fowers, maize, amaranth, bean, squash, and tomato grown in beds of mud, reeds, and other biodegradable materials, placed in shallow water thus called “foating gardens” or chinampas; required no irrigation

Postclassic

Postclassic

genetic origin, analyzed Mesoamerican artworks. Unfortunately, those studies have few counterparts in the humanities. The urge to fll this lacuna prompted the questions: Why did Mesoamericans venerate wind? Why was Quetzalcoatl, the wind god, linked to birds, sex, and pregnancy?

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This chapter addresses these questions to argue that the Aztecs understood the concepts of pollen and pollination, and that they used this knowledge to produce hybrids through selective breeding.10 The Aztecs explained that fowers are a plant’s reproductive organs that are comprised of male and female parts that produce seeds and fruit. Above all, wind’s role in pollination clarifes its correlation to the Nahua vision of Quetzalcoatl, a creator god in command of this element. What we see as science and Mesoamerican spirituality are irrevocably linked and co-produced the modern crops that are the staples of diets today. Consequently, this chapter calls for a wholesale reevaluation of Quetzalcoatl’s guise as wind. It also highlights the importance of Mesoamerican botanical expertise, analyzing the points of convergence between their understanding of sexual reproduction in plants and botanical insights from centuries later credited to Europeans such as John Ray, Rudolf Jacob Camerarius, Cotton Mather, and Carl Linnaeus. By 1492, Amerindians had acquired botanical knowledge from their observations of and experimentations with plants, and scholars should approach this evidence with the same rigor and status accorded that referencing European accomplishments in science.11 Rejection of this premise is an unjust restriction of the history of science to a purely European timeline and cast of characters that disregards material evidence for natural things’ careful creation. Ethnobiological research calls for a reinterpretation of neglected evidence of selective breeding in Mesoamerica. For example, David Clément reports how Europeans who learned about North American plants from local Amerindians dismissed their approaches to cultivation as strange because the former failed to understand why an “old Indian chief” would go about “advising his people in a stentorian voice to eat only the small potatoes and keep the big ones as seed for the next crops.”12 European ignorance of this clear example of artifcial selection derives from their unwillingness to recognize other knowledge. Therefore, while Amerindians intentionally preserved stronger specimens for reproductive purposes, those practices failed to enter the European record of scientifc achievement. Mesoamerica is an ideal case study to examine how indigenous scribes recorded botanical information in their artifacts. If botanical knowledge was omitted by colonial chroniclers, can plants themselves provide suffcient evidence of what Mesoamericans knew?

MESOAMERICAN MATERIAL CULTURE The dearth of remaining Mesoamerican written documents requires a new methodology that focuses on material culture and nature studies. The earliest evidence of high culture in Mesoamerica emerged around 1800 BCE in the tropical lowlands of Veracruz and Tabasco, where aspects associated with the Olmec culture began to coalesce.13 Soon, other cultures began to diverge from the Olmec and exhibited various distinctions—though none was more signifcant than their many different writing systems. Despite the vigorous degree of cultural and economic exchange between Mesoamerican societies, writing practices varied widely; while the Maya, for example, embraced hieroglyphic writing, other Mesoamericans preferred using images and calendar glyphs to record information.14 By the late Postclassic Era (c. 1250–1521), immediately preceding the Spanish Conquest, manuscripts in numerous Mesoamerican languages with information on plants were ubiquitous. Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1584), a soldier in Hernán Cortés’ army during Tenochtitlan’s siege, reported that King Moteuczoma Xocoyotzin (r. 1502–1520) had “books which were made of paper which they call amatl, and he had

Chapter 1 • Pollen

a great house full of these books.”15 Regrettably, Spaniards considered these books heretical and destroyed them, and only twelve are known to survive.16 Diego de Landa, a ruthless proselytizer of the Maya starting in 1549, reported: We found a large number of books in these characters and, as they contained nothing in which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of the devil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amazing degree, and which caused them much affiction.17 The mestizo Juan Bautista de Pomar reported that in Texcoco, a city second only to Tenochtitlan in prestige, Cortés and his soldiers burned the manuscripts in King Nezahualpiltzintli’s libraries, which caused him and his kingdom to “weep with much grief for having been left as if in darkness without news or memory of their past deeds.”18 Unfortunately, burning or otherwise destroying books as a political tactic also occurred in precontact central Mexico, including during the Tepanec War (1427–1428).19 In the colonial period, after 1521, the manuscript-making tradition continued, but indigenous scribes adopted alphabetic text, which the Spaniards introduced. Native scribes and Spanish offcials began compiling a capacious archive—chronicles, manuscripts, and other documents—that elucidate pre-Columbian texts and provide additional information on Mesoamericans’ botanical understanding. In this enterprise, Mesoamerican scribes and Spanish chroniclers interviewed native elders and/or consulted surviving pre-Columbian manuscripts to use as precedent. This is exemplifed in the story of a Nahua sage who conserved an ancient manuscript and allowed Diego Durán to consult it; the friar remarked: He made me swear that I would return it to him. When I had given him my word that when I had copied it I would return it, he fnally loaned it to me with so much ceremony and elaborate talk, and in such great secrecy, that I was astonished at the value he placed upon it. And I will affrm my belief that he stayed tenaciously with the artist until the picture was done.20 While this encyclopedic effort to catalogue the New World vastly reduced the degree of pre-Columbian knowledge lost, it is all but certain that many more precious texts like the one guarded by Durán’s Nahua sage perished at the hands of the colonial enterprise. Until now, the scholarship on Mesoamerica has treated evidence on plants as referencing religion, astronomy, and farming, particularly rain prediction. This chapter presents an alternative. Using material culture studies, it analyzes Mesoamerican religious images as depictions of botanical information. Even while the majority of manuscripts were destroyed, the centrality of plant knowledge to Mesoamerican life at large renders the remaining pre-Columbian records enormously informative to the pre-contact botanical tradition.

PLANT SEXUALITY AND BREEDING: EUROPEAN AND MESOAMERICAN UNDERSTANDINGS Plants have an active sex life: they copulate often, with multiple partners, and overtly. As Jennifer Frazier humorously clarifes, “when you bend over to sniff a fower, you are shoving your nose into the plant’s genitalia.”21 Thus, fowers, the defning feature of angiosperms (fowering plants that produce seeds), are tasked with the evolutionary burden of ensuring the plant’s ability to survive and reproduce. Flowers (as conceptualized

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in the current scientifc paradigm), are comprised of two principal parts: male stamens composed of flaments topped by anthers, and female pistils composed of ovaries with styles topped by stigmas. In pollination, pollen travels from anthers to stigmas, and depending on their fowers’ structure, angiosperms may be classifed as dioecious (unisexual) or monoecious (bisexual).22 Furthermore, a fower’s structure determines its optimal function for pollen transfer, meaning either biotic (involving animals including humans but especially insects, bats, and birds) or abiotic (involving wind or water) pollination. However, as Londa Schiebinger explains, in the eighteenth century, plant sexuality was not fully understood or even accepted in Europe. She remarks that “as late as the Renaissance, botanists gave names to what we today call the sexual parts of fowers that were not associated in any way with reproduction.”23 Scholars have argued that prudery, creationism, or gender bias are some of the reasons that may have prevented scientists from embracing plant sexuality.24 In 1716, Thomas Fairchild, a nurseryman from Hoxton, in North London, specializing in exotic plants not native to Britain, conducted a botanical experiment, reportedly in great secrecy because such a feat had never been attempted. Seeking to create a unique specimen, and being a gifted horticulturist, he pollinated a Carnation pink (D. caryophyllus) with the pollen of a Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus). Nature rewarded Fairchild’s botanical acumen handsomely with a new plant, now conserved at Oxford University’s herbaria (Figure 1.2). However, British genteel society was not as magnanimous and initially underplayed Fairchild’s accomplishment. The Royal Society in London recorded the following entry on its annals on February 4, 1720, when, for the beneft of science, Fairchild presented his specimen: The other Experiment was made by Mr. Fairchild some years ago. He found a plant in his garden of a middle nature between the sweet william and carnation July fower (a specimen of which was produced before the Society) it grew in a bed where the seed of each of those fowers had by accident been thrown promiscuously, & he takes it to be an heterogeneous production from these two different fowers .  .  . these new sort of plants produce no seed, but are barren like the Mule or other mongrel animals which are generated from different species.25 Why did he wait four years to report his results to one of the most prestigious institutions for the advancement of science in Europe? Perhaps he feared challenging religious determinism, as his experiment might have appeared to be a challenge to God’s omnipotence to a devout European audience. Regardless of the merits of the argument on creation or the faults of the plant often derisively dubbed “Fairchild’s mule,” history has clearly absolved the horticulturist from Hoxton. The plant he created entirely from his ingenuity was bestowed shortly after with the merit of being the frst artifcial hybrid cultivated anywhere. Indeed, “Fairchild’s Mule” was not the world’s frst artifcial hybrid. Millenia earlier, Mesoamericans had transformed teosinte, a grass with several branches, tassels, and cobs that yielded a few seeds enclosed in hard shells into maize, a plant with a single branch, tassel, and cobs with easily accessible seeds. While at frst their new maize plant produced small cobs, Mesoamericans, in a collective endeavor that began ten thousand years ago, made the plant produce larger ones through selective breeding. Modern maize is the product of human selection. Whereas Fairchild regarded his hybrid as a mere experiment into the possibilities of

Chapter 1 • Pollen

Figure 1.2: Specimen of cross between a Carnation pink with pollen of a Sweet William (Dianthus barbatus) by Thomas Fairchild (c. 1717). Oxford University Herbaria. horticultural practices, Mesoamericans depended on their maize to sustain cities with dense populations. Artifcial selection was not simply a phenomenon of European science, but a practice of Mesoamerican necessity spanning millennia. Mesoamericans were already accomplished plant breeders and wardens of a distinguished botanical tradition by the time Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492. From this point forward, interest in botany grew exponentially in early modern Europe, and New World specimens deeply infuenced the feld’s development. While the Orto Botanico di Padova in Italy opened in 1545 and is seen as the oldest establishment of its kind in the world, botanical gardens in Mesoamerica such as the one established at Huaxtepec far predated European versions. In this light, many European botanists such as Fairchild drew inspiration either directly or indirectly from ancient Mesoamerican botanical knowledge.

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MESOAMERICANS, PLANT SEXUALITY, AND VOYEURISM Ample evidence indicates that the Nahuas understood fowers to be reproductive organs. They knew that to produce seeds, male fowers released a substance (pollen) that fertilized female fowers. Moreover, by controlling pollen shed, the Nahua elicited specifc traits. Book 11 of the Florentine Codex lists hybrids they cultivated, including maize yielding cobs with white, black, yellow, red, tawny, and varicolored grains (kernels), which they achieved by controlling pollen shed through selective breeding.26 Spanish chroniclers echoed this information. Durán reported that the Nahua required maize cobs with kernels in four specifc colors— white, black, yellow, and purple—during a feast honoring Xochiquetzal, the goddess of fowers.27 At her celebration, priests dispersed the kernels on the ground, which Durán remarked people rushed to collect, adding, “even if they could only obtain but two grains, they took and kept [those grains] with great care and planted them so that they could have seed of that blessed maize.”28 The Nahuas’ obsessive attention to fowers often confounded and exasperated Spanish chroniclers. Durán often complained about this devotion, explaining that in all their “joys and feasts they celebrate with fowers” and that “even hunger they alleviated” by smelling them, adding that “they passed their lives among fowers, in such blindness and darkness, and, deceived and persuaded by the devil, who saw” how much they valued them.29 Perhaps Durán’s contempt pertained to the sexual connotations the Nahuas ascribed to fowers. The feast that he describes as one of their “most solemn” was held in honor of Xochiquetzal, a goddess of fowers and sexuality, identifed as a harlot and the mother of maize.30 Plant sexuality explains why the Nahua did not necessarily link sex to wrongdoing. In fact, Tlazolteotl, a goddess of lust, was held in great reverence in Mesoamerica as the Florentine Codex explains: It is said that all worshipped Tlaçolteotl as a goddess—all who called themselves Mexicans; especially the Mixteca, the Olmeca guarded her as their true goddess .  .  . And as for the Huaxteca, it is said that they specifcally worshipped [the] Tlaçolteotl goddesses. However, they did no penance before them, nor did they confess, because they did not consider lust as a wrong.31 Nahua horticulturists were meticulous in their analysis of fowers and their processes. They observed fowers’ color, aroma, and other physical changes that took place throughout their lifecycle. In the Florentine Codex the Nahua describe a fower’s parts, emphasizing its male and female aspects, and various processes that occur during reproduction as follows: All the fowers. They begin to blossom in this manner: frst they become fat; they fatten. Then they form a droplet. Then they swell; then they blossom; they burst. Then they open; they produce pistils, they form pistils. Then they are fully in bloom; they fll out. At this time they produce a pleasing odor, a fragrance, an aroma. At this time they are required, desired, coveted, needed. They are cherished, wonderful, meriting wonder, considered wonderful. They fade, shed petals, drop petals, darken, wither. They become verdigris-colored, turn verdigriscolored; they become blotched, dry; they drop. Pertaining to the blossoming of the fower are the fattening, the petals, the calyx, the pistil, the pistils, the seed, the seed of the fower, the ovary, the receptacle, the stamen of the fower, the stamens.32

Chapter 1 • Pollen

Thus, Nahuas’ interest in fowers and their development can be understood in the context of their importance in reproducing and transferring traits. This may explain why maize plants in Mesoamerican artifacts are depicted with tassels and silks—the essential organs in reproduction and genetic manipulation. A few days after planting and watering a kernel, the Nahua explained: The grain of maize bursts; then it takes root. Then it sprouts; then it pushes up; then it reaches the surface then it gathers moisture; it really fies. . . . Then the corn silk develops [tzopilivi]; then the corn tassels form [miiaoati]. . . . Then an embryonic ear forms. Then the green maize ear begins to form.33 In describing the development of silks, the Nahua reported: it “spreads becoming coveted—spreads becoming desired,” a statement that further sexualizes the plant’s development.34 Dorothy McMeekin has discussed pre-Columbian spindle whorls from Mexico and South America (Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru) decorated with fower and fruit anatomy motifs. McMeekin argues that these objects, which were used for weaving and given as gifts to newborn females demonstrate that pre-Columbian Indians understood the morphology of plants and regarded plant reproduction as an explicitly sexual process.35 While characterizing reproduction as involving male-female coupling is not in and of itself remarkable—since it is analogous to animal, including human, reproduction—what is revealing is how the Nahuas explain the process in plants. They recognized plants as having reproductive organs (genitalia), for example, tassels and silks in maize, indicating that sex in plants occurs specifcally in fowers, and that their sexual intercourse caused maize kernels or seeds. This explains why the Nahua regarded fowers as lustful and generally associated sexual reproduction with wind, sky, air, and similar ethereal themes to link the process to pollination. Knowledge of plant sexuality is unequivocally stated in some of the most important early sources. In the Histoyre du Mechique (c. 1543), the Nahua explain that attaining maize required the sexual act between a goddess and Piltzintecuhtli, the frstborn son of the frst human couple: “Piltzintecuhtli slept with a goddess Xochiquetzal, from whom a god Cinteotl [maize] was born,” the scribe wrote.36 Similarly, the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas relates: “The grain that they eat is called maize, it was made in this manner: the gods descended, all of them, to a cave, where a god called Piltzintecuhtli was lying with a goddess called Xochipilli, from whom was born a god called Cinteotl [maize].”37 Therefore, maize is the product of sexual intercourse, and the father of maize is Piltzintecuhtli, son of the frst human couple. Maize’s sexuality is further emphasized at the beginning of the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas, which explains that because the gods recognized that there was no female for Piltzintecuhtli to marry, they created a woman specifcally for him: “and because he lacked a woman with whom he could be married, the gods made from Xochiquetzal’s hair, a woman, with whom he was for the frst time married.”38 That the female with whom Piltzintecuhtli copulates to procreate maize derived from hair is signifcant because she is further linked to maize’s silks or female fowers. Clearly, the Nahuas thought of plant reproduction as being similar to human reproduction, and therefore sexual. This explains why the Nahua understood their gods to be sexual beings and fowers as engaging in lustful sex. It is noteworthy that in Nahuatl the verb mimiliu “to bud the fower or to grow the womb of that who is pregnant,” likens their development to that of embryos within wombs during pregnancy.39

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Regarding sexuality as something to be celebrated, deifed, and linked to creation seems to have been embraced in Mesoamerica, yet anathema to Catholic Church doctrine where Jesus’ mother is described as “ever Virgin Mary.”40 This may have inhibited the development of botany as a scientifc feld in Europe, where Christine Lehleiter explains, “plant sexuality was still relatively controversial in the mid-eighteenth century, and even at the end of the eighteenth century Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) could argue that reproduction requires ‘no mother.’”41 Similarly, Ernst Mayr discusses Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s contributions to understanding plant sexuality, which “was accepted by most of his contemporaries, but the idea that plants should have sex was so repugnant to some botanists—even well into the nineteenth century—that they not only refused to accept Kölreuter’s fndings but wrote learned refutations of them.”42 While established paradigms did not entirely stop European scientists from questioning, observing, and uncovering enigmas of the natural world, those in power successfully used religious dogma to control the circulation of ideas.43 In contrast, Mesoamericans’ religious beliefs developed around cults to creator deities related to sun, earth, water, wind, fowers, and lust, which observations of plants probably encouraged.44 Mesoamericans did not record botanical messages in a manner readily intelligible in the West. For instance, the horticulturists who established the Huaxtepec Garden discussed in this chapter’s introduction, performed rituals with blood, birds, and fowers to make plants “burst forth with fower and fruit.”45 While for Europeans, none of these elements evoked fruit production via pollination, for Mesoamericans they did. Page 53 of the pre-Columbian Codex Borgia features a ritual involving blood, birds, and fowers, which evoke pollination (Figure 1.3). The god of wind (Quetzalcoatl) and the god of fowers (Macuilxochitl)—both related to pollination—fank a maize plant growing out of an earth goddess. Each god sprinkles blood from his penis, which a bone awl emphasizes, onto cobs. The imagery draws attention to fowers—cobs (female inforescences), tassels (male inforescences)—and agents of pollination including birds and penises. Moreover, the maize plant splits into two new plants bearing cobs with red and yellow kernels. At the site where the maize plant bifurcates is a symbol for fower from whence emerge two new cobs, a yellow and a blue one with kernels etched in black ink, which presumably references a hybrid because all the other cobs are either red or yellow. In lieu of a tassel, a bird with outstretched wings appears perched atop these cobs.46 The plants that Mesoamericans domesticated not only demonstrate their notable contributions to global botany, but the maize plant alone elucidates Mesoamerican understandings of the basis of plant sexuality. To evoke a European parallel, maize was eventually recognized as ideally suited for the Mendelian study of inheritance in plants pioneered in the nineteenth century. As the evidence in this chapter indicates, Mesoamericans understood these concepts of reproduction and heredity earlier, and they used this knowledge to master cultivation practices and produce a variety of artifcial hybrids. Scientists currently recognize that European understanding of the concept of pollen and process of pollination required a few centuries of observations and collaborations, including with Amerindians. As Conway Zirkle remarked, scientists in Europe “were certainly informed of the work of the Americans,” adding, however, that “the very real contributions made by the latter, in felds other than taxonomy, have been, with a single exception, completely forgotten.”47 He credits one person from the Americas with frst perceiving

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Figure 1.3: Maize fanked by Quetzalcoatl (god of wind) and Macuilxochitl (god of fowers), each sprinkling blood from his penis onto maize cobs, Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 53 (detail). Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Image from fullcolor restoration by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers (1993), reproduced with permission of Dover Publications.

wind pollination and consequently uncovering the basis for understanding plant sexuality and genetics. However, the person Zirkle credits is the Reverend Cotton Mather, who is ironically best known for encouraging persecutions against “witches” in Salem, not botany. Of Mather, Zirkle admits: He was undoubtedly very credulous and believed on very scanty evidence much that was later shown to be false, he at least kept in touch with the scientifc progress of his time and contributed what he could to the advancement of knowledge.48 Mesoamericans, on the other hand, had long since unlocked the secrets of nature and how to wield horticulture to their advantage.

POLLINATION: REEVALUATING THE GOD OF WIND Conclusive evidence that the Nahuas recognized the process of pollination is the reverence they accorded wind, which they credited with causing offspring. I propose that the role wind plays in pollination explains why the Nahuas attached this element’s creative powers to Quetzalcoatl, a god who personifed it and whose most emblematic characteristics alluded to pollinators, fowers, and procreation. His name is made up of the Nahuatl words quetzal (a bird) and coatl (serpent or twin) thus

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translated as feathered serpent, plumed serpent, or precious serpent.49 The Nahua added the prefx Ehecatl, “wind or air” to link the creator god to the element.50 Wind had the ability to create life, as folio 8v of the Codex TellerianoRemensis explains: “Quetzalcoatl was the one they say made the world. And thus they call him lord of the wind, because they say that this Tonacatecuhtli [Lord of Our Sustenance], when it seemed right to him, blew and engendered this Quetzalcoatl.”51 Thus, Tonacatecuhtli, who himself reportedly lived in the air, engendered Quetzalcoatl by blowing. As wind personifed, Quetzalcoatl helped humans and plants to procreate. Quetzalcoatl was the driving force behind a number of critical events related to agriculture, including the creation of humans, rain, maize, sun, and calendar. The Nahua linked Quetzalcoatl to themes of pregnancy, birth, male/ female coupling, sustenance, abundance, fying, feathers, fowers, beaks, birds, work, creation, rulership, and the arts. While most Mesoamerican gods have multiple attributes, these are especially pronounced in Quetzalcoatl, whose many associations, at frst glance, appear to be incoherent.52 I argue that these are not nearly as disparate as they seem to us when considering that for the Nahua these coalesce under the concept of pollination. Quetzalcoatl’s insignia allude to the optimization of pollen transfer: his guise as bird suggests biotic pollination, his guise as wind suggests abiotic pollination, and his guise as snake evokes virility and renewal.53 As his name implies, Quetzalcoatl was part bird—a pollinator—and one of his most characteristic features was a buccal mask in the form of a beak, reinforcing the associations among wind, pollination, and birds.54 According to folio 42r in the Codex Tudela (c. 1540),55 Quetzalcoatl blew wind from his beak, and glosses describe him as a demon called Quetzalcoatl, which means feathered serpent, whom the Indians took for the god of wind, and the Indians painted half his face from the nose down with a wooden snout from where he blew wind.56 Folio 60v of the Codex Magliabechiano reiterates that Quetzalcoatl had a beak “below his nose like a trumpet, through which he blew the wind, the god of which they said he was.”57 Another prominent aspect of Quetzalcoatl’s iconography is a headdress featuring bones, feathers, and fowers with pollinating birds. The Codex Tudela explains that Quetzalcoatl’s headdress features “a bone from which hung much duck plumage . . . and attached at the end is a bird.”58 In the accompanying image, we see a bird precisely in the act of pollinating the fower in Quetzalcoatl’s headdress. No other costume element or accouterment is even mentioned in the gloss, suggesting that the primary message is to convey the importance of pollination. Numerous other sources feature Quetzalcoatl’s headdress with the same motif. In the Selden Roll, a sixteenth century document from the Coixtlahuaca Valley, Oaxaca, a bone tipped with a fower protrudes from Quetzalcoatl’s headdress and here, too, a bird appears with its beak inside the bloom. Similarly, in folio 60v of the Codex Magliabechiano, the bone in Quetzalcoatl’s headdress ends in a fower from which hangs a string of feather balls ending in yet another fower that a bird pollinates (Figure 1.4).59 Regarding the inclusion of bones in Quetzalcoatl’s headdress, the Nahua regarded them as material that generated life.60 Richard Haly calls attention to the Nahuatl word for marrow omiceyotl, arguing that it derives from the word for semen omicetl.61 Cecelia F. Klein notes that both omiceyotl (marrow) and omicetl (semen) relate to omitl (bone) and omio (skeleton).62 Ethnohistoric sources explain the creative power that bones had when combined with Quetzalcoatl’s semen or blood from his penis.63 The Postclassic Maya had similar conceptions of bones, believing they had the ability to impregnate. In the Popol Vuh, the K’iché-Maya sacred book of

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Figure 1.4: Bone, feathers, fowers, and pollinating bird in Quetzalcoatl’s headdress, Codex Magliabechiano, early colonial Aztec manuscript, mid-sixteenth century, fol. 60v. Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence.

creation that is pre-Columbian in origin and compiled in alphabetic text in the mid sixteenth century, Hun Hunahpu is sacrifced, and his head placed on a tree, which consequently bears fruit for the frst time.64 Later, Xquic, “Lady Blood,” approached the tree and was impregnated by it, and she walks away bearing twins.65 Consequently, the association between bones and semen was apparently a pan-Mesoamerican concept. In various pages of the Codex Borgia, Quetzalcoatl’s headdress of bones and blooms evokes these associations. On page 23, his headdress includes a bone tipped by a fower from which emerges a plume that alludes to pollen dispersal and growth (Figure 1.5). The feathers on Quetzalcoatl’s headdress further allude to pollination. An excellent example highlighting the associations of wind and feathers with sexual reproduction is the Nahuas’ assertion that Quetzalcoatl places the baby inside the woman’s womb, reiterated several times throughout the passage on marriage rites and pregnancy in Book VI of the Florentine Codex: “our Lord wishes to place inside her a precious stone and a rich feather, because the young woman is already pregnant; and it seems as if our Lord has placed offspring inside her.”66 When the pregnancy was certain, her family declared: “we have received from our Lord god (Quetzalcoatl) . . . riches . . . which is the offspring that is in the womb of the young woman.”67 When a newly wedded bride became pregnant, the community’s sages credited Quetzalcoatl with causing it, telling her, “Within thee he wisheth to place a life . . . he wisheth to provide thee with a precious feather.”68 The concept of feathers causing pregnancy is central in one of the most important and well-known Nahua stories, involving Coatlicue, who conceived Huitzilopochtli (“Hummingbird Left”), the Aztecs’ tutelary god, after collecting a fying feather ball that she placed in her bosom.69

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Figure 1.5: Quetzalcoatl’s headdress featuring bones and fower, Codex Borgia, pre-Columbian Aztec manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 23. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana. Image from full-color restoration by Gisele Díaz and Alan Rodgers 1993, reproduced with permission of Dover Publications. Often, pollinators and plants appear surrounded by tiny dots that I argue represent pollen dispersed by wind. In Primeros Memoriales, Quetzalcoatl, rendered as wind, appears covered with these dots, wearing his avian buccal mask, and holding a digging stick, a quintessential allusion to planting (Figure 1.6, left). Folio 43r of the Codex Telleriano-Remensis features a maize plant with these dots that glosses explain reference birds.70 I argue that birds, pots, and maize connote pollination. That the plant is rendered with silks and tassel that appear to sway in the wind further supports this interpretation. Durán reports that pots represent the idea that maize and beans would be available in the coming season. Every June, when he says rains began and “plants were growing and . . . beginning to bear fruit,” the Nahua celebrated a feast called Etzalcualiztli, “Day of Eating Cooked Corn and Beans,” represented as: “A hand holding a cornstalk in the water . . . [while] another hand held a small pot, which meant that the people could eat without fear of that food of beans and corn. There was to be no hunger, since the year was proceeding in a satisfactory way.”71 The German anthropologist Eduard Seler frst notes that late Postclassic Maya manuscripts depict birds with “a small circle surrounded by dots on the side of the bill about in the middle,” which he argues denotes

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Figure 1.6: Quetzalcoatl surrounded by pollen and holding a hoe, Primeros Memoriales, early colonial Aztec manuscript, c. 1558–61, fol. 282v (left), Biblioteca de la Real Academia de la Historia, Madrid; and pollen on maize plant, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, early colonial Aztec manuscript, mid-sixteenth century, fol. 43r (right), Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.

Figure 1.7: Dots surrounding hummingbirds’ beaks, Codex Madrid, page 34 (left), Codex Madrid, page 23 (center) (image in Seler 1996a: Figure 394), Maya manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), Museo de América, Madrid, Spain; and Codex Dresden, page 6 (left) (image in Seler 1996a: Figure 389), Maya manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), Saxon State University Library Dresden.

a hummingbird.72 Pages 23 and 34 of the Codex Madrid and page 6 of the Codex Dresden show hummingbirds with these dots around their beaks (Figure 1.7). The one on the Codex Madrid additionally depicts the pollination of a fower. A late Classic period (c. 650–900 CE) Maya vase with polychrome painting features a hummingbird with these dots on its beak, indicating that this was an ancient convention that by the Postclassic was standard (Figure 1.8). Karl Taube points out that the bird in this vase has

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Figure 1.8: Hummingbird with dots on beak, polychrome painting in Maya drinking vessel from Tikal Burial 196, late Classic (c. 650–900 CE), Museo Sylvanus G. Morley, Tikal, Guatemala. Photo by Justin Kerr, K8008, Justin Kerr Maya archive, Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University, Washington, D.C.

“serpent wings,” which he suspects “is a phonetic device providing a reading for ‘sky.’”73 Taube adds: “It is well known that the words for ‘sky’ and ‘serpent’ are generally homophonous in Mayan languages, and there are frequent substitutions between their respective signs in Classic Maya hieroglyphic texts.”74 Further suggesting pollination are the parallels the Nahua drew between sexual reproduction in plants and humans. The Nahua explained that females fguratively became pregnant from birds or things “dropping” from the sky, which equates pollen with semen. Page 30 of the preColumbian Codex Laud depicts a bird pollinating a human (Figure 1.9). The bird, shown with outstretched wings, descends to place its beak in the human’s mouth. Scholars have identifed this fgure as “a naked pregnant woman.”75 Indeed, the enlarged abdomen suggests pregnancy and, therefore, femaleness. Also, this fgure bears no explicit references to maleness, a penis or male clothing markers, for example. However, the fgure lacks breasts. Given what the Nahua reported about fowers’ role in procreating seeds, I argue that the fgure actually may refer to bisexuality in fowers: the torso evokes maleness, and the enlarged abdomen denotes femaleness. Such rendering mimics how the male and female fowers appear in the maize plant. Also, I argue that the fower in the Codex Laud is anthropomorphized to connote sexuality as it occurs in humans. Presumably, the human fgure’s interaction with the pollinating bird caused the pregnancy. Supporting my interpretation is that the fgure’s head is depicted tilted upward as if to enable and summon the bird’s visit.76 The Nahua associated fying or foating with sex and offspring. In the Florentine Codex, the Nahua explain: “when babies were conceived they were dropped [i.e., they fell in droplets] [from the heaven] their souls came from there; they entered into their [mother’s] wombs.”77 On page 11 of the Codex Borbonicus a baby “drops” onto the head of Tlazolteotl, “Goddess of Lust and Filth,” which I argue illustrates pollination.78 Footprints indicate the trajectory the baby she is about to

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Figure 1.9: Bird “pollinating” a human. Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. conceive takes, leading to the goddess’ head, mimicking maize pollination in which silks receive pollen. Moreover, Tlazolteotl appears squatting with legs wide open, assuming a parturient position and with a baby’s head emerging from her womb.79 Consequently, she is simultaneously conceiving and giving birth. The Nahuas’ association of the act of fying or foating through the air with sexual reproduction effectively parallels what occurs in pollination. Just as in plant reproduction pollen foats through the air or travels via wind (or animals that fy) before landing on females, the Nahua used the concepts of foating or fying to also describe human reproduction. By no means did the Nahua conceptualize the process as an immaculate conception. Tlazolteotl was identifed with flth because she was given to sexual promiscuity and correspondingly ruled over lust and debauchery.80 For example, on page 30 of the Codex Borbonicus, depicting the autumnal feast Ochpaniztli when the Nahua reenacted the birth of maize from grass, a retinue of men—whose overextended erections indicate unequivocally that the scene is intended as sexual—march towards

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Tlazolteotl (Figure 1.10).81 Various other manuscripts associate Tlazolteotl with sexuality. Signifcantly, in pre-contact ones, Tlazolteotl is linked to sexuality and wind. On page 39 of the pre-Columbian Codex Laud, for example, Quetzalcoatl appears with Tlazolteotl, explicitly associating wind and promiscuity. Quetzalcoatl appears as a personifed body of water pointing to Tlazolteotl, who stands before him with her breasts fully exposed and with spindles of unspun cotton, one in her right hand and one on her headdress.82 Spools of unspun cotton are one of Tlazolteotl’s most recognizable costume elements, and to the Nahua, they connoted pregnancy.83 On page 39, Tlazolteotl appears naked and with wide-open legs below Quetzalcoatl. Her breasts and vulva, clearly visible, evokes sexuality, promiscuity, and birthing.

Figure 1.10: Tlazolteotl simultaneously conceiving (through her hair as indicated by the black footprints, upper right) and childbearing, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 11. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris.

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Figure 1.11: Males with overextended erections marching towards Tlazolteotl (also Toci “Great Mother”) during the autumnal feast Ochpaniztli, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 30. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris.

Figure 1.12: Quetzalcoatl and Tlazolteotl, Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 39. Bodleian Library, Oxford University.

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Quetzalcoatl’s links with pollination can help us reevaluate small fgurines—featuring the beak buccal mask of the god of wind with an erect penis and thus dubbed “phallic representations of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl”— found in caves in the states of Puebla and Veracruz in Mexico. Regarding their signifcance, Lorenzo Ochoa points out: “the emphasis placed in its virile member leads us to think of a strong phallic cult to Ehecatl among the groups of that zone” adding: “unfortunately, for our case study, little to nothing is known.”84 Given that the fgurines were found in caves, Ochoa also offers: “the most likely scenario is that they must have had some sort of relationship with magic or religious ceremonies performed in those regions.”85 However, from the evidence this chapter presents, the associations the Nahua accorded wind and thus Quetzalcoatl suggest pollination—namely the new life that sexual relations beget—and not rampant “sexual degeneration” in Mesoamerica as early colonial chroniclers may have erroneously interpreted from this cult and iconography. Quetzalcoatl’s guise as snake requires a more profound examination of Nahua philosophy. Molina’s translation for bívora (Spanish for snake) is miauacoatl, literally, tassel (maize’s male fower) and snake, further linking maleness in fowers and plant reproduction to snakes and thus Quetzalcoatl.86 The Nahua associated certain types of serpents with fying and wind, and I argue that the Nahuas associated Quetzalcoatl with snakes because the reptiles evoked the maleness and virility expected of wind and pollen. The Florentine Codex describes another snake as “always accompanied by its female and the latter with its male, and when they want to join, one whistles and the other soon comes,”—this association explicitly links snakes with coupling.87 Moreover, in Nahuatl, coatl means snake and twins. Signifcantly, the maize plant, the archetypal model of plants for the Nahuas, produces up to two cobs, which I argue may explain the references to twins.88 Moreover, snakes have two penises. If indeed the Nahua understood this aspect of a snake’s anatomy, it would help explain the links to virility. In sum, the key to understanding Quetzalcoatl’s diverse associations rest with his role in plant reproduction as wind personifed. Pollination is the unifying principle. The Nahua perceived parallels between plant and human reproduction, explaining why plants are often anthropomorphized, and why they credited wind (or its manifestations) with impregnating newly wedded maidens, maize silks, unspun cotton, and fertility goddesses.

CONCLUSION Scientists have long identifed Mesoamerica as a premier cradle of plant domestication. As this chapter suggested, the Nahuas in the late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521) were clearly heirs of a venerable tradition. Evidence in Nahua pre-contact artworks and ethnohistoric evidence (post 1521) demonstrates their keen interest in plants in general and fowers in particular. This chapter has argued that the Nahuas’ focus on fowers, their properties, and function suggests knowledge of plant sexuality, which they likened to human reproduction. It further has argued that the Nahua used this knowledge to manipulate plants in a process now called artifcial selection. Indeed, the plants that the Nahua created, which began arriving in Europe in the early sixteenth century, are tangible evidence of their botanical prowess. To express the concept of plant reproduction (pollination) as sexual, the Nahua used iconographic references, including birds, fowers, bones, feathers, as well as gods and goddesses of wind, sex, lust, fowers, maize, and abundance. Perhaps the observations by Clément

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and other scholars about the widespread inability to consider Amerindian insights as referring to something more than superstition and magic explains the dearth of studies on botanical information in Mesoamerican material culture. Yet, approaching its study from the perspective that it refers to empirical data on plants helps in reevaluating poorly understood concepts, including the signifcance of wind (represented as Quetzalcoatl, one of Mesoamerica’s most important creator gods) and why they suffused discussions of plants with sexual themes. To zoom out, the evidence presented in this chapter might encourage historians to think more capaciously about historical ontology and the history of science. By moving beyond prose-based evidence alone to analyze more rigorously material culture including images, glyphs, and nature studies–especially biological creations or domesticates and hybrids by early horticulturists–we might expand our vision of proof and categories of analysis for evaluating premodern science.

NOTES 1 Acknowledgements: Foremost thanks to Mackenzie Cooley and Claudia Brittenham who have helped me so immensely. Mackenzie, it is a great joy to work with you. Claudia, you are one of the most thoughtful and giving scholars in our feld. I am also particularly grateful to Cecelia F. Klein, Charlene Villaseñor Black, Carolyn Dean, and Kevin Terraciano who have always provided me with so much feedback and encouragement not only with this work, but over the years. Finally, thank you Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım for your many long hours and so much hard work in conceptualizing and editing this unique, innovative, and pathbreaking volume. 2 Diego Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, trans. Doris Heyden (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 242. Heyden provides translations of these plants on footnote. Also, Aztec derives from Aztlan (Place of White Heron) and denotes place of origin, namely the fabled Chicomoztoc (Seven Caves). Describing origin and ensuing migrations is a common theme in Mesoamerica (comprising parts of Mexico and Central America where numerous advanced civilizations with similar culture developed starting with the Olmec c. 1800–400 BCE, followed by the Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, Aztec, and various other). In the early 1300s, the Aztecs founded their capital city at Tenochtitlan (Mexico City) and they would eventually become a vast empire with peoples in different polities and ethnic affliations. In English publications, Aztec is preferred to the lesser-known Nahua, denoting Nahuatl-speaking people. This chapter uses Aztec and/or Nahua in a general sense to refer to those in the empire sharing a common culture and Mexica and/or Tenochca to refer to those in Tenochtitlan. 3 Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, 245. 4 Ibid., 244. 5 Ibid., 245. 6 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane Mangan, trans. Frances López-Morillas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 218–19. 7 While intended to be thorough, this table excludes mentions of some private gardens. For example, in his letter to Charles V in 1522, Cortés described the Spanish monarch gardens in elite residences, specifying that each included: “very pleasant gardens of various sorts of fowers both on the upper and lower foors.” Hernán Cortés, Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico, trans. and ed. Anthony Pagden (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 107. 8 Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina’s botanical garden and recreational center survived for centuries, eventually becoming a national park. In 2015, the Mexican Social Security Institute (IMSS) sold it to Six Flags International Development Company and the latter turned it into their “frst water park outside the United States.” 9 In Nahuatl the plants are: centli or tlaolli, cacaoatl, tlilxochitl, ulli or olli (olquauitl, morning glory, to make rubber pliable), tomatl, aiotli, chilli, and etl. See

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10 11

12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22

23 24

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corresponding folios in: Alonso de Molina, Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana (Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1880 [1550s]). Also called artifcial selection, which Charles Darwin coined and others later popularized. Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species (London: Ward Lock & Co., Ltd., 1911), 93, 159. Christine Lehleiter, “Equilibrium Lost and Regained: Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter’s Attempts to Conceptualize Plant Hybridization,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 92, no. 2 (2017): 127–9; Ernst Mayr, “Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s Contributions to Biology,” Osiris, no. 2 (1986): 135; and Londa Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (London: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also W. J. Harshberger, “The Purposes of Ethno-Botany,” Botanical Gazette 21, no. 3 (1896): 146–54. Daniel Clément, “The Historical Foundations of Ethnobiology,” Journal of Ethnobiology 18, no. 2 (1998): 162–3. Kathleen Berrin and Virginia M. Fields, “Introduction,” in Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, ed. Kathleen Berrin and Virginia M. Fields (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 18–23. Writing began independently in Mesopotamia (Iraq) c. 3200 BCE among the Semite people, China c. 1400–1200 BCE in Shang Dynasty, and Mesoamerica among the Olmec frst c. 600 BCE and then the Maya c. 250 CE. See Stephen Houston, ed., The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Michael Coe and Mark van Stone, Reading the Maya Glyphs (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005). Bernal Díaz del Castillo, The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521, trans. Irving A. Leonard, ed. Genaro García (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), 211. Helen Burgos-Ellis, “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery: Science in the Central Mexican Codex Borgia” (PhD diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 2015), Ch. 1. Alfred M. Tozzer, ed., Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán, vol. 18 (Cambridge: Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1941), 169. Unless otherwise stated, all translations in this chapter are by author. “Hoy día lloran sus descendientes con mucho sentimiento, por haber quedado como á escuras sin noticia ni memoria de los hechos de sus pasados.” Juan Bautista Pomar, Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México. Pomar y Zorita. Relaciones antigüas, siglo XVI (Mexico City: Editorial Salvador Chávez Hayhoe, 1941), 4. Ellis, “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery,” Ch. 1, note 32. Diego Durán, Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar, trans. Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971), 64. Jennifer Frazier, “An Eye-Popping New Look at Flowers’ Highly Public Private Parts,” Scientifc American, August 15, 2014. Dioecious fowers contain either male or female parts. Monoecious angiosperms contain both male and female fowers, and can be further divided into monoclinous, plants bearing bisexual fowers with stamens and pistils; and diclinous, plants bearing unisexual fowers—with either stamens or pistils— in different locations. Schiebinger, “Gender and Natural History,” 164. Lincoln Taiz and Lee Taiz open their book with, “why did it take so long to discover sex in plants, and why, after its proposal and experimental confrmation in the late seventeenth century, did the debate continue for another 150 years?” They argue that Europeans thought of plants as female and that sexual bias kept them from accepting and exploring plant sexuality. Lincoln Taiz and Lee Taiz, The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants: Flora Unveiled (London: Oxford University Press, 2017). Records of the Royal Society of London from 1720, quoted in Conway Zirkle, “More Records of Plant Hybridization Before Koelreuter,” Journal of Heredity 25, no. 1 (1934): 10.

Chapter 1 • Pollen 26 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, The Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain, ed. and trans. Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 vols. (Santa Fe: University of Utah Press, 1950–82), bk. 11, ch. 13, 279–82. 27 Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la Tierra Firme, 2 vols., ed. Angel María Garibay Kintana (Mexico City: Biblioteca Porrúa, 2006 [1579]), 1:154. 28 Ibid., 1:155. 29 Ibid., 1:151. 30 Ibid., 1:151–8. 31 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Bk. 6, ch. 8, 34. 32 Ibid., Bk. 11, ch. 7, 214. 33 Ibid., Bk. 11, ch. 13, 283. 34 Ibid. 35 Dorothy McMeekin, “Representation on Pre-Columbian Spindle Whorls of the Floral and Fruit Structure of Economic Plants,” Economic Botany 46, no. 2 (1992): 176. 36 Edouard de Jonghe, ed., “Histoyre du Mechique, manuscrit français inédit du XVIe siècle,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Nouvelle Série 2 (1905): 31. 37 Xochipilli is usually male. Here, a female (regardless of her name) is likely intended. The Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas speaks of “Xochiquetzal, primera mujer de Piltzintecuhtli” (Xochiquetzal, Piltzintecuhtli’s frst wife) and reiterates, “At that time there was another god called Piltzintecuhtli and his wife was called Xochiquetzal.” Also, the text identifes her in the original Spanish as una diosa (a goddess) and therefore as female. In explaining her role as mother of maize, the text specifes the article la, thus a female: de la cual nació as opposed to del cual nació “from whom was born.” See Ángel María Garibay Kintana, ed., Teogonía e historia de los mexicanos: Tres opúsculos del siglo XVI, 2nd ed. (Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, 1973), 34, 109. The Maya had similar conceptions, see: Allen Christenson, ed., Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), 194. 38 See Garibay Kintana, Teogonía e historia de los mexicanos, 27. 39 “Abotonarse la for, o crecer el vientre de la que esta preñada,” in Molina, Vocabulario, fol. 56v. 40 Giorgio de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), 309. 41 Lehleiter, “Equilibrium Lost and Regained,” 127. Regarding Kölreuter’s method, Lehleiter comments: “Drawing on alchemical thought, Koelreuter is able to think plant reproduction as a unifcation of two seed matters. It might astonish twenty-frst-century readers that Koelreuter drew on alchemy to explain his botanical experiments for two reasons: frst, alchemical thought has often been considered outdated by the middle of the eighteenth century, and, second, it seems diffcult to compare metal and plant development. However, recent scholarship has shown that alchemic thought and knowledge was still widespread in the eighteenth century and that the species notion with which alchemy operated (inherited from Aristotle) made it possible to easily move between what we would call today organic and inorganic realms.” 42 Mayr, “Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s Contributions to Biology,” 135. 43 On the ongoing “Scientifc Revolutions” in Europe (from c. 1543 through the eighteenth century), see, for example, Peter Dear, “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Toward a Heuristic Narrative for the Scientifc Revolution,” Confgurations 6 (1998): 173–93; and Steven Shapin, The Scientifc Revolution, Second Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). Also pertinent is the discussion of Arabic medical authors and the international bezoar market on medicinally prized stones in Mackenzie Cooley’s essay “Bezoar: Medicine in the Belly of the Beast” in this volume. 44 As I have discussed elsewhere, in Nahua myth, creation is a collaborative and evolutive process with gods and humans participating in exerting transformation, especially of plants. Ellis, “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery,” Ch. 5. 45 Durán, The History of the Indies of New Spain, 245. 46 This interpretation coincides with Iris Montero Sobrevilla’s work. She contends that interpreting the empirical information on hummingbirds in Book XI

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of the Florentine Codex “as mere entries in an early modern compendium overlooks a central ambition . . . the management of the supernatural or divine.” See Iris Montero Sobrevilla, “Indigenous Naturalists,” in Worlds of Natural Histories, ed. Helen Anne Curry, Nicholas Jardine, James A. Second, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 112–30. Conway Zirkle, “Some Forgotten Records of Hybridization and Sex in Plants 1716–1739,” Journal of Heredity 23, no. 11 (1932): 434. Ibid. Quetzalli, “rich feather, long and green” and Coatl, “serpent or twin.” Molina, Vocabulario, fols. 23r and 89r. “Eecatl.viento, o ayre,” Molina, Vocabulario, fols. 28r. The Oxford English Dictionary defnes quetzal as: “Any of several Central and South American trogons of the genus Pharomachrus, the males of which are noted for their iridescent green plumage with red or yellow underparts; esp. (more fully resplendent quetzal) P. mocinno of Central America, the male of which has extremely long tail coverts, and which was venerated by the Aztecs.” Eloise Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 258, fol. 8v. Adding to the complexity is that in ethnohistoric sources Quetzalcoatl was simultaneously a creator god and a historic fgure. While Quetzalcoatl’s creative endeavors in his guise as wind have been relatively neglected, the extent of his historicity has been widely analyzed. See: Ellis, “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery,” Ch. 4 and 5; Henry B. Nicholson, Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001); and Enrique Florescano, Quetzalcóatl y los mitos fundadores de Mesoamérica (Mexico City: Santillana Ediciones Generales, Taurus, 2012). While biotic pollination is now widely understood, Julius von Sachs reported in his capacious oeuvre discussing botany’s milestones, the concept was unknown in Europe until 1761 when Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter “was the frst who recognized the great importance of the insect-world to pollination in fowers.” Julius von Sachs, History of Botany, trans. H. E. F. Garnsey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890), 409. For study of waterfowl genus to evaluate origin of Quetzalcoatl’s beak, see Scott O’Mack, “Yacateuctli and Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl: Earth-Divers in Aztec Central Mexico,” Ethnohistory 38, no. 1 (1991): 13–20. Juan José Batalla Rosado, El Libro Escrito Europeo del Códice Tudela o Códice del Museo de América (Madrid, España: Itinerarios, 2009), 9:84. Ibid., 101. The Codex Magliabechiano was, along with the Codex Tudela, made from a common prototype manuscript thought to date to c. 1528, now lost. Translation in: Elizabeth Hill Boone, The Codex Magliabechiano and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechiano Group (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 205. José Tudela de la Orden, El Códice Tudela (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1980), fol. 42r. Molina defnes uitzitzilin as “cierto paxarito” (a certain small bird). Molina, Vocabulario, fol. 157v. Batalla Rosado, El Libro Escrito Europeo del Códice Tudela, 83–115; and Boone, Codex Magliabechiano and Lost Prototype, 129–34. See Jill Leslie Furst, “Skeletonization in Mixtec Art: A Re-evaluation,” in The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982a), 207–25; Richard Haly, “Bare Bones: Rethinking Mesoamerican Divinity,” History of Religions 31, no. 3 (February 1992): 269–304; Cecelia F. Klein, “The Devil and the Skirt,” Ancient Mesoamerica 11, no. 1 (1972): 1–26; Leonardo López Luján, The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan, trans. Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano (New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 63–80, 131–226; and Debra Nagao, “Symbolism of the Two-Horned God in Offerings from the Templo Mayor,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 10 (1985): 5–27. Haly, “Bare Bones: Rethinking Mesoamerican Divinity,” 289. Klein, “The Devil and the Skirt,” 22. Among them the Leyenda de los Soles, the Florentine Codex, and the Codex Magliabechiano.

Chapter 1 • Pollen 64 Christenson, ed., Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya, 126. 65 Christenson, Popol Vuh, 128–9. 66 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6, ch. 24, 135–6. See FC, bk. 6, fol.114r, 115v, and 122v. 67 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6, ch. 24, 135–6. See also Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, Códice Florentino, 3 vols. (Florence: Giunti Barbéra and the Archivo General de la Nación, 1979), fols.114r, 115v, and 122v. 68 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6, ch. 25, 141. 69 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 3, ch. 1, 2. The Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas says that Coatlicue “took a few white feathers and placed them in her bosom” and thus conceived Huitzilopochtli. Garibay Kintana, ed., Teogonía e historia de los mexicanos, 43. 70 Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, 275 and fol. 43r. For discussion of hummingbirds and how the Aztecs linked their migration patterns (outlined in Book XI of the Florentine Codex) with religious and mytho-historic events (particularly the Aztec migrations from Aztlan), see: Montero Sobrevilla, “Indigenous Naturalists.” 71 Durán, Historia de las Indias, 1:259. 72 Eduard Seler, “The Animal Pictures of the Mexican and Maya Manuscripts,” in Collected Works in Mesoamerican Linguistics and Archaeology, ed. J. Eric Thompson and Francis B. Richardson (Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1996a), 5:231–7. Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos discusses the “hummingbird myth,” which he sees as the “representation of the mythical union of a woman with an insect,” but does not tie event to pollination. Instead, he concludes: “The iterations of themes such as weaving magic, insects and poisonous creatures, the magical transformations of the suitor, and the in-laws’ contempt toward him reinforce essential points of congruence that underline the nodal subject of the myth: the hierogamy that variously resulted in the birth of the sun, the moon, and human sustenance.” Oswaldo Chinchilla Mazariegos, “Of Birds and Insects: The Hummingbird Myth in Ancient Mesoamerica,” Ancient Mesoamerica 21 (2010): 46. 73 Karl Taube, A Representation of the Principal Bird Deity in the Paris Codex (Washington, DC: Center for Maya Research, Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 2–3. 74 Ibid., 2; and Stephen D. Houston, “An Example of Homophony in Maya Script,” American Antiquity 49 (1984): 790–805. 75 Pete Sigal, “Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos,” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (2010), 554; and Chinchilla Mazariegos, “Of Birds and Insects,” 53. 76 Bird “pollinating” a human. Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 30. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. 77 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 10, ch. 29, 169. 78 See Tlazolteotl simultaneously conceiving (through her hair as indicated by the black footprints, upper right) and childbearing, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 11. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Scholars continue to debate whether this manuscript is pre-Columbian or early colonial. Sources on Tlazolteotl include: Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 1, ch. 12, 23–27; Quiñones Keber, Codex Telleriano-Remensis, fol. 3r; Louise M. Burkhart, The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in SixteenthCentury Mexico (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989); Cecelia F. Klein, “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement:’ The Signifcance of ‘Holy Shit,’ in Ancient Mexico,” Art Journal 52, no. 3 (1993): 20–27; and Thelma Sullivan, “TlazolteotlIxcuina: The Great Spinner and Weaver,” in The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Mexico, ed. Elizabeth Hill Boone (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982), 7–35. 79 For discussion of parturient position see Cecelia F. Klein, “The Face of the Earth: Frontality in Two-dimensional Mesoamerican Art” Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts. New York: Garland Publishing (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1972), 6, 55–57; and Susan Milbrath, “Birth Images in MixtecaPuebla Art,” in The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture, ed. Virginia E. Miller (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988), 153–77. 80 Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 1, ch. 12, 23.

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Part I • Manipulated 81 You can see his as males with overextended erections marching towards Tlazolteotl (also Toci “Great Mother”) during the autumnal feast Ochpaniztli, Codex Borbonicus, Aztec manuscript, c. 1520s, page 30. Bibliothèque de l’Assemblée Nationale, Paris. Ellis, “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery,” Ch. 5. 82 Quetzalcoatl and Tlazolteotl, Codex Laud, pre-Columbian central Mexican manuscript, late Postclassic (c. 1250–1521), page 39. Bodleian Library, Oxford University. 83 A Nahua riddle asks, “What is that which becomes pregnant in only one day? The spindle.” Sahagún, Florentine Codex, bk. 6, ch. 42, 239. 84 Lorenzo S. Ochoa, “Representaciones Fálicas de Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl en el Centro de Veracruz,” Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 7a Época 2 (1971): 175. 85 Ibid., 178. 86 Molina, Vocabulario, fol. 55v. 87 Sahagún, Códice Florentino, bk. 11, ch. 5, fol. 78r. 88 Discussion of how maize plants produce one or two cobs, see David Webster, “Backward Bottlenecks,” Current Anthropology 52, no. 1 (February 2011): 77–104.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Acosta, Jose de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane Mangan and translated by Frances López-Morillas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Batalla Rosado, Juan José. “El libro escrito europeo del Códice Tudela o Códice del Museo de América, Madrid.” Itinerarios 9 (2009): 83–115. Berrin, Kathleen and Virginia M. Fields, “Introduction.” In Olmec: Colossal Masterworks of Ancient Mexico, edited by Kathleen Berrin and Virginia M. Fields, 18–23. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Boone, Elizabeth Hill. The Codex Magliabechiano and the Lost Prototype of the Magliabechiano Group. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983. Burkhart, Louise M. The Slippery Earth: Nahua-Christian Moral Dialogue in Sixteenth-Century Mexico. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1989. Chinchilla Mazariegos, Oswaldo. “Of Birds and Insects: The Hummingbird Myth in Ancient Mesoamerica.” Ancient Mesoamerica 21 (2010): 45–61. Christenson, Allen J., ed. Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Maya. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003. Clément, Daniel. “The Historical Foundations of Ethnobiology.” Journal of Ethnobiology 18, no. 2 (1993): 161–87. Coe, Michael and Mark van Stone. Reading the Maya Glyphs. London: Thames and Hudson, 2005. Cortés, Hernán. Hernán Cortés: Letters from Mexico. Translated and edited by Anthony Pagden. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986. Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. London: Ward Lock & Co., Ltd., 1911. Dear, Peter. “The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy: Toward a Heuristic Narrative for the Scientifc Revolution.” Confgurations 6 (1998): 173–93. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1517–1521. Translated by Irving A. Leonard and edited by Genaro García. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956. Durán, Diego. Book of the Gods and Rites and the Ancient Calendar. Translated and edited by Fernando Horcasitas and Doris Heyden. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1971. Durán, Diego. Historia de las Indias de Nueva España e Islas de la Tierra Firme, 2 vols. Edited by Angel María Garibay Kintana. Mexico City: Biblioteca Porrúa, 2006 (1579).

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Durán, Diego. The History of the Indies of New Spain. Translated by Doris Heyden. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994. Ellis, Helen. “Maize, Quetzalcoatl, and Grass Imagery: Science in the Central Mexican Codex Borgia.” PhD dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015. Florescano, Enrique. Quetzalcóatl y los mitos fundadores de Mesoamérica. Mexico City: Santillana Ediciones Generales, Taurus, 2012. Frazier, Jennifer. “An Eye-Popping New Look at Flowers’ Highly Public Private Parts.” Scientifc American, August15, 2014. Furst, Jill Leslie. “Skeletonization in Mixtec Art: A Re-evaluation.” In The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Central Mexico, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone, 207–25. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks Trustees for Harvard University, 1982. Garibay Kintana, Ángel María, ed. and trans. Teogonía e historia de los mexicanos: Tres opúsculos del siglo XVI, Second Edition Mexico City: Editorial Porrúa, Colección “Sepan cuantos,” 1973. Haly, Richard. “Bare Bones: Rethinking Mesoamerican Divinity.” History of Religions 31, no. 3 (1992): 269–304. Harshberger, W. J. “The Purposes of Ethno-Botany.” Botanical Gazette 21, no. 3 (1896): 146–54. Houston, Stephen D. “An Example of Homophony in Maya Script.” American Antiquity 49 (1984): 790–805. Houston, Stephen D., ed. The First Writing: Script Invention as History and Process. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Jonghe, Edouard de, ed. “Histoyre du Mechique, manuscript français inédit du XVIe siècle.” Journal de la Société des Américanistes. Nouvelle Série 2 (1905): 1–41. Klein, Cecelia F. “The Devil and the Skirt.” Ancient Mesoamerica 11, no. 1 (1972): 1–26. Klein, Cecelia F. “The Face of the Earth: Frontality in Two-dimensional Mesoamerican Art.” PhD dissertation, Outstanding Dissertations in the Fine Arts, Garland Publishing, Columbia University, New York, 1972. Klein, Cecelia F. “Teocuitlatl, ‘Divine Excrement:’ The Signifcance of ‘Holy Shit,’ in Ancient Mexico.” Art Journal 52, no. 3 (1993): 20–27. Lehleiter, Christine. “Equilibrium Lost and Regained: Joseph Gottlieb Koelreuter’s Attempts to Conceptualize Plant Hybridization.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 92, no. 2 (2017): 125–42. López Luján, Leonardo. The Offerings of the Templo Mayor of Tenochtitlan. Translated by Bernard R. Ortiz de Montellano and Thelma Ortiz de Montellano. New Mexico: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Mayr, Ernst. “Joseph Gottlieb Kölreuter’s Contributions to Biology.” Osiris, no. 2 (1986): 135–76. McMeekin, Dorothy. “Representation on Pre-Columbian Spindle Whorls of the Floral and Fruit Structure of Economic Plants.” Economic Botany 46, no. 2 (1992): 171–80. Milbrath, Susan. “Birth Images in Mixteca-Puebla Art.” In The Role of Gender in Precolumbian Art and Architecture. Edited by Virginia E. Miller, 153–77. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1988. Molina, Alonso de. Vocabulario de la lengua mexicana. Leipzig, Germany: B. G. Teubner, 1880 [1550s]. Montero Sobrevilla, Iris. “Indigenous Naturalists.” In Worlds of Natural Histories, edited by Helen Anne Curry, Nicholar Jardine, James A. Second, and Emma C. Spary, 112–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Nagao, Debra. “Symbolism of the Two-Horned God in Offerings from the Templo Mayor.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 10 (1985): 5–27.

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Nicholson, Henry B. Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl: The Once and Future Lord of the Toltecs. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2001. Ochoa, S. Lorenzo. “Representaciones Fálicas de Ehécatl-Quetzalcóatl en el Centro de Veracruz.” Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, 7a Época 2 (1971): 171–9. O’Mack, Scott. “Yacateuctli and Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl: Earth-Divers in Aztec Central Mexico.” Ethnohistory 38, no. 1 (1991): 13–20. Pomar, Juan Bautista. Nueva colección de documentos para la historia de México. Pomar y Zorita. Relaciones antigüas, siglo XVI. Mexico City: Editorial Salvador Chávez Hayhoe, 1941. Quiñones Keber, Eloise. Codex Telleriano-Remensis: Ritual, Divination, and History in a Pictorial Aztec Manuscript. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995. Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. Códice Florentino: El Gobierno de la República edita en facsimil el manuscrito 218–20 de la Colección Palatina de la Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Códice Florentino para mayor conocimiento de la historia del pueblo de México. 3 vols. Florence: Giunti Barbéra and the Archivo General de la Nación, 1979. Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. The Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. Edited and translated by Arthur J. O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, 12 vols. in 13 bks. Santa Fe: University of Utah Press, 1950–82. Santillana, Giorgio de. The Crime of Galileo. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955. Schiebinger, Londa. “Gender and Natural History.” In Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 163–79. London: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Seler, Eduard. “The Animal Pictures of the Mexican and Maya Manuscripts.” In Collected Works in Mesoamerican Linguistics and Archaeology, edited by J. Eric Thompson and Francis B. Richardson, vol. 5, 165–340. Culver City, CA: Labyrinthos, 1996a. Shapin, Steven. The Scientifc Revolution, Second Edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Sigal, Pete. “Imagining Cihuacoatl: Masculine Rituals, Nahua Goddesses and the Texts of the Tlacuilos.” Gender and History 22, no. 3 (2010): 538–63. Sullivan, Thelma. “Tlazolteotl-Ixcuina: The Great Spinner and Weaver.” In The Art and Iconography of Late Post-Classic Mexico, edited by Elizabeth Hill Boone, 7–35. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1982. Taiz, Lincoln and Lee Taiz. The Discovery and Denial of Sex in Plants: Flora Unveiled. London: Oxford University Press, 2017. Taube, Karl A. A Representation of the Principal Bird Deity in the Paris Codex. Washington, DC: Center for Maya Research, Dumbarton Oaks, 1987. Tozzer, Alfred M., ed. Landa’s Relación de las Cosas de Yucatán. Cambridge: Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, vol. 18, 1941. Tudela de la Orden, José. El Códice Tudela. Madrid: Ediciones Cultura Hispánica, 1980. Von Sachs, Julius. History of Botany. Translated by H. E. F. Garnsey. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1890. Webster, David. “Backward Bottlenecks.” Current Anthropology 52, no. 1 (February 2011): 77–104. Zirkle, Conway. “More Records of Plant Hybridization Before Koelreuter.” Journal of Heredity 25, no. 1 (1934): 3–18. Zirkle, Conway. “Some Forgotten Records of Hybridization and Sex in Plants 1716–1739.” Journal of Heredity 23, no. 11 (1932): 432–48.

Chapter 2

Bezoar Medicine in the Belly of the Beast Mackenzie Cooley

“The bezoar unites the histories of animals, medicine, and empire. Animals valued more when dead than when alive produced the stone, and those whose worth came from life consumed it.” Page 72

VISUALIZATION 2 Quadrupeds: Joannes Jonstonus, Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri: cum aeneis fguris (Amstelodami, Apud Ioannem Iacobi Fil. Schipper, 1657). Bezoar goat and bezoar crosssection: Pierre Pomet, Histoire générale des drogues, traitant des plantes, des animaux et des minéraux (Paris: J. B. Loyson et A. Pillon, 1694), 10. Map: Universalis Cosmographia, the Waldseemüller wall map (1507). Bezoar stones: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer 957, 958, 981, 996, 998, 1001, 3259. The shiny surface of a bezoar stone, rounded by polish and bedecked with gold, is a veneer for its history of violent extraction. This visual experiment juxtaposes a goat from a French treatise on medicine with the Waldseemüller map, which was published in 1507. In his search for the ultimate antidote, the European hunter has made a hole in the belly of these beasts.

Abstract: This chapter traces the relationship among bezoar stones, animals, and medical knowledge from 1500 to 1800. European physicians had believed in the power of the bezoar stone for so many generations that few needed empirical proof of its effects: it was the ultimate antipoison and the perfect gift for one who had everything. In the ancient and medieval periods, bezoar stones extracted from sheep and goats in the Indian Ocean world had a reputation for excellence. However, when Iberian trade opened new global sea routes, a supply of these natural things came directly to Europe from India, Brazil, Peru, and New Spain. Europeans brought their own vision of bezoars’ medical power to the Americas where they believed that they were encountering pre-existing indigenous traditions that, like the Mediterranean one, prized such stones for causing fertility in animals and curing maladies. By the late sixteenth century, merchants had fooded the bezoar market with stones pulled from the digestive tracts of New World animals, including llamas, vicuñas, guanacos, manatees, and even iguanas. Confronted with the merger of seemingly diverse bezoar traditions, naturalists, medical theorists, and practitioners wrestled with the boundaries of bezoarproducing animals and raised concerns about fraudulent substances. Intense demand led to bezoar bioprospecting and the slaughter of many bezoar-carrying animals in search of stones. Along its trajectory from essential animal cure and global super drug to taxonomic animal classifcation and fnally incurable malady, the bezoar became a changeling object, a natural thing whose many transformations led to ontological instability.

Every good husbandman must have bezoar stones on hand, urged Agostino Columbre. An acclaimed farrier from San Severo, deep in the heart of newly Spanish Southern Italy, equine health consumed Columbre’s days at the turn of the sixteenth century. In one of the earliest known veterinary treatises, which combined his experience as both husbandman and animal medic, Columbre published treatments for maladies all and sundry, from birth to death. Whether one’s horse fell victim to a venomous snake’s bite, amorphous pain, or scarring, an infusion of bezoar and wine would rid the animal’s “stupor and mania.” In place of oft-used mercury, the bezoar offered “a special cure to each venom or poison afficting animals in pasture and feld.”1 For those human and non-human animals who consumed its powder, the bezoar promised a panacea, a “lord of poison,” that dispelled maladies from melancholy to scurvy. As Columbre’s DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-5

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Figure 2.1: A bezoar-carrying goat jumping from rock to rock. In Pierre Pomet, Histoire générale des drogues, traitant des plantes, des animaux et des minéraux, Seconde Partie, Livre Premier, Des Animaux (Paris: J. B. Loyson et A. Pillon, 1694), 10. Open access via Gallica. veterinary treatise suggests, animals were both consumers and producers of the stones. A continent away from Southern Italy, animal populations famed as bezoar-producers—camelids, deer, and other ruminants (Figure 2.1)—consequently suffered sometimes signifcant losses as procurers slaughtered them in search of those few who carried stones in their gut. This chapter follows the bezoar stone in motion across early modern worlds. It was a quintessential early modern natural thing: a valuable extract of nature manipulated and fetishized by European consumers in search of cures. Recommendations like Columbre’s contributed to the intense demand for medicinal bezoars that grew in Europe in the early modern period. To meet this demand, European merchants sought to replace bezoars from the so-called Old World, which they sometimes called Eastern or oriental bezoars, with bezoar stones from the New World, which they called Western or occidental bezoars.2 This language intentionally obscured the local ecologies and medical cultures, from Persia to Mexico, from which bezoars were sourced. Such language, however, does bear witness to Europeans’ idea of an East and West Indies whose nature could provide substitute materia medica—or pharmacologically potent substances—for one another, thereby creating one world of global medicine out of many. Therefore, this case study is as much about European perceptions of global nature as its reality. By 1600, the bezoar had become a global medicine. While in Columbre’s day merchants had ostensibly sourced most stones from the East Indies, later that century a desire for their own supplies led the Spanish to uncover a whole new source of bezoars in South American llamas and vicuñas— domesticated and wild camelids, respectively—which collectors started to slaughter en masse. New World stones from Peru and Mexico fooded a market that was also increasingly saturated with artifcial stones that came from

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no animals at all. Once merely consumers, Europeans now began to act as suppliers and middlemen, transferring what they considered to be a universally recognized panacea to users like Columbre. Southern Italian horses might then have consumed stones from Persian goats, Indian rams, Andean camelids, Mexican deer, or any number of other creatures. Like other natural things, bezoar stones are “changeling objects,” to use a phrase coined by Daniela Bleichmar, objects whose many “trajectories and transformations bring into question . . . ontological stability.”3 Unlike the singular Mexican codex that she described, there are many bezoar stones in this essay; they all became, in different ways, changeling objects as they entered the early modern medical market. Called bezoar, bezahar, bezaar, lapis bezoarticus, bezardicum, and other variants across Latin and the Romance languages, the mythos behind the source of bezoar stones was quite as important to their value as their provenance, which was hard to verify.4 As José Pardo-Tomás has put it, “a bezoar extracted from a reptile and not a ruminant, coming from Yucatán and not from the mountains of Persia, was potentially a polemical object riddled with ambiguities. These very same ambiguities could make it valuable as a collector’s item.”5 The characteristics, history, and function of the bezoar stone changed slightly depending on who was touting its virtues. Still, the bezoar was chiefy valuable for the simple reason that it had already been accepted as a powerful medical object. Only as the market was fooded with New World and synthetic alternatives to Old World bezoars did it start to lose value.

WHAT’S IN A BEZOAR STONE? One animal’s cure came from another’s blockage. The bezoar itself—a mass of indigestible material—formed in the bellies of beasts. Modern medical texts characterize human gastrointestinal bezoars as “aggregates of inedible or undigested material found in the GI tract;” these could be phytobezoars (made of indigestible food particles from vegetables or fruits), trichobezoars (made of hair and bits of food), lactobezoars (made of milk protein), or pharmacobezoars (made of undigested medications).6 Early moderns, by contrast, emphasized that the bezoar came from a more-than-human world. It captured the power of nature to protect itself. The bezoar formed as an animal’s digestive defense against something pointed or noxious. Perhaps it was an herb, a pin, or a twig, but around that core layers of strata grew. Scholars disagreed about whether the medical qualities of the core determined the usefulness of the bezoar, but most agreed that the more layers around the core developed, the more resilience the stone provided. Many experts held that hardship engendered bezoars. Some asserted that camelids grazing in the lower elevations developed stones of lesser medicinal properties because their diet excluded plants essential to their formation.7 Similar animals in Europe did not seem to develop the stones at all.8 To be used, the stone had to be extricated from a slaughtered beast’s innards. The Spanish physician Nicolás Monardes, whose descriptions of New World wonders was quickly translated into English, described the butchery: “they open that garde of fesh being closed, and take out the stones, that surely it is a marvellous thing to see, what Nature hath created there, for our health and remedie of our evils.”9 Bezoars came from many animals, and in many shapes and sizes. Once extracted, the big ones were polished. Then, the stones became medicinal simples: cross-culturally intelligible, valuable, and tradable.10 Some were sold. Others entered the networks of elite gift exchange. Collectors acquired particularly large bezoars for European courts collections where they—along with birds of

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Figure 2.2: An Iberian bezoar stone with an ornate chain and gold adornment. Dated from 1500–1550. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 994.

Figure 2.3: A Spanish bezoar stone from the sixteenth century, wrapped in gold, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 958. “PEDRA . BESOHAR . FINISSIMA . PESA . OCHO . ONCAS”

paradise, unicorn horns, and coral—were “practically inescapable” across early modern pharmacopeias, inventories, and collections.11 Most were ostensibly destined for medical use. When grated and added into a liquid in small amounts, the bezoar was thought to cure epilepsy, melancholy, poisoning, and plague. One might even dip the stone into an elixir like a teabag.12 For this reason, elites hooked bezoars onto ornate chains with gold decorations, such as what we fnd on this rounded sixteenth-century Iberian bezoar preserved in the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna (Figure 2.2). At 21 centimeters in height, including its stand, this bezoar was large.13 Another sixteenth century bezoar stone in the same collection was not quite so big at 9 centimeters in length and nearly 5 centimeters in diameter, but it was labeled so that its owner would know its value: “the fnest bezoar stone, weighs eight ounces” (Figure 2.3)14

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European physicians had believed in the power of the bezoar stone for so many generations that no one needed empirical proof of its effects: it was the ultimate antipoison. Scholars, merchants, doctors, and patients chewed over the stone’s origins and sometimes devised explanations for why it worked. Persian medical authors such as Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni (973–1050), as well as Andalusi physicians like Ibn Zuhr (1091–1162) had described bezoar stones in their writings and medical practice.15 Scholars repeated strikingly similar descriptions of the bezoar stone from the frst millennium to the nineteenth century; over that time neither the bezoar itself nor its medical application changed much. Al-Biruni had compared the bezoar’s appearance and layered nature to that of an onion. He wrote that hajar al-tays (animal bezoar) is a Persian theriac. It is like acorn or unripe date, elongated and having peels like the onion, with something like green grass in the centre, something like a stone in the kernels of fruits. This is the central point of the peels and argues for the fact that these peels are arranged over each other.16 That image stuck, repeated in the many other treatises that came in its wake. Some of them cited Al-Biruni as an authority, others simply described the bezoar as an onion. As this visualization (Figure 2.4)—an

Figure 2.4: Onion of Knowledge. Black indicates works that explicitly compare the bezoar to an onion. Gray indicates similar imagery of building of layers but without the explicit onion reference. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann.

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intellectual history in the shape of an onion, or indeed a bezoar—suggests, layers of authors and their works built upon each other as the years passed, hardening ideas about the bezoar stone and consolidating an authority greater than the sum of its parts.17 In his writings about the Indian bezoar, Garcia Da Orta (1501?–1568) perpetuated this trope, noting that “this stone is engendered in the paunch of these he-goats on a very fne straw which is in the middle, and so it goes twisting and forming a rind like that of an onion.”18 By the sixteenth century, the bezoar stone had been perceived as a powerful, layered medicament for so long and by such authorities that few questioned its reputation; instead, they tweaked which animals could produce it and where they lived.

BEZOAR SOURCES IN THE EAST INDIES The history of bezoar sourcing, like that of other materia medica, such as balsam and aloe, captures how European merchants frst sought to access the materials mentioned throughout the Mediterranean in antiquity and the medieval period. Then, to circumvent trade routes controlled by other empires, they both sought direct access to Old World supplies and argued that medicaments from the New World could replace those from the Old World. Before Portuguese merchants arrived in India in 1498, Europeans had relied on a long chain of intermediaries for their bezoar supply. As such, they had little to do with the collection of bezoars or the animals that made them. Even Marco Polo, who had provided information about such an exotic substance as ambergris—a solid, waxy material excreted by sperm whales described in chapter 4—does not mention the stones.19 In a story of materia medica that parallels that of spices, Portuguese access to India suddenly brought Europeans to the ports from which bezoars had been frst acquired. Like spices, they had been an ideal trade good: high value, low weight, imperishable, easy to buy in Alexandria and sell again in Venice.20 With their new bases around the Indian Ocean, Portuguese merchants, naturalists, and physicians had ample opportunity to engage with the region’s nature and medicine. Then came the frst European discourse on bezoars printed in Goa, capital of the Portuguese Estado da Índia. Garcia da Orta, a New Christian physician who had been based in Goa for the previous three decades, published a set of discourses on the use of simples and other drugs with the Saint Paul’s College press.21 While ostensibly a debate among Orta himself, Ruano (an imaginary colleague), Antonia (Orta’s research assistant), Malpuga (an Indian physician), some patients, and enslaved persons opinions about bezoars seem to have already been decided before the deliberations ever began. Orta dispelled rumors that only Persian goats could produce the stone, citing its prevalence in the paunches of he-goats from the Ilha das Vacas near Cape Comorin, and in Pam near Malacca. Bezoars, Orta argued, grew from a digestive process surrounding tiny pieces of straw, not the enchanted bellies of any particular animal. He wrote from experience about how a feet discovered the stones in goats they killed on Ilha das Vacas, and how subsequently “those who occupied the island had the custom of killing many goats” to sell the stones to traders who passed through the island.22 As he had seen the killing, so Orta had also tried the stone. A dash of powder promised wonders, even to cure one from a rabid dog’s bite. Too much threatened permanent damage.

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The medicine was so frmly a familiar market drug that even its name refected its commercial viability. For Orta, the stone frst donned the name of the goats of Persia: Pazar. European and Indian tongues corrupted the word into bezar, from whence it came to mean “the stone of the market or fair,” a stone defned by a place of exchange (the bazaar). In Orta’s telling, the exchange erased the goat, and came to name the stone itself. In the European languages, then, bezoar came to refer to all antipoisons under the name bezedaricas.23 Orta’s writings had a major impact on ideas of materia medica in Europe. As Pardo-Tomás has shown, after the frst copies of the Colóquios arrived in the Iberian world, Iberian presses published a wide array of books about spices and exotic materia medica. Pardo-Tomás goes so far as to suggest that “it could be said that the Hispanic imperial agenda on the communication of materia medica deriving from the overseas territories was modifed by the arrival of the work of Garcia de Orta.”24 Orta’s book, along with descriptions of the Americas by Nicolás Monardes, Cristóbal Acosta, and later, José de Acosta was published, translated, and read by many in Iberia and beyond, shaping European readership on global pharmacopeia. Furthermore, as Pardo-Tomás argues, it seems probable that Orta’s text inspired the Spanish Crown to “stimulate the trade in spices and medicinal simples from America,” and therefore shaped the instructions given to the physician Francisco Hernández “in January 1570 to go and explore the medicinal herbs, frst in New Spain and subsequently in Peru.”25 Bezoars, like other powerful drugs, could be found both in the Portuguese East Indies and in the American West Indies. In the following section, I trace the invention or discovery of these New World bezoars through texts describing Mexico and Peru.

INVENTING NEW WORLD BEZOARS The bezoar stone’s value in the eyes of European physicians, however, preceded the Iberian publishing boom in materia medica. As Orta had been gathering his research in India, Europeans brought their own vision of stones’ medical power to the Americas, where they believed that they were encountering pre-existing indigenous traditions that, like the Mediterranean one, prized such stones for causing fertility in animals and curing maladies. Following the invasion of Hernán Cortes in 1519 and the fall of the Mexica-controlled, principally Nahuatl-speaking Valley of Mexico into Spanish control by 1521, Spaniards sought to create the European infrastructure with which they were familiar in the Americas. They built churches and schools, imposed tribute, and brought in European fora and fauna like sheep, cattle, chickens, and horses. Although the Spanish had set out to change the so-called New World radically, in the frst two to three decades after the Spanish invasion, Mesoamerica remained both culturally and environmentally an overwhelmingly indigenous place. To what extent Europeans impacted sixteenth-century Nahua pharmacoepia and medical practice remains an open question and one subject to considerable debate. This is a challenging issue because, despite the rich visual remains in sources like the Borgia Group Codices studied by Helen Burgos-Ellis in this volume, many Nahua documents had been destroyed before the Europeans’ arrival and after their invasion. I rely on SpanishNahuatl alphabetic documents produced in collaboration by indigenous Americans and Europeans during the frst century of European rule to

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capture snippets of medicine making.26 In the following section, I trace competing evidence that bezoar stones were prized by Nahua medical practitioners or, alternatively, that a desire for bezoar stones was a European imposition. Bezoar-like stones did medical work in the remedies proposed by the 1552 Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis, a manuscript also known as the Codex Badianus and the Cruz-Badiano Libellus.27 Composed in the Imperial Colegio de Santa Cruz de Tlatelolco, the Libellus was supposed to be a translation of Nahua cures into Latin for the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. To render raw Mexican nature comprehensible to a European audience, it seems that in this act of translation the authors of the Libellus ftted indigenous medical practices into a European neoclassical format. Juan Badiano, a native of Xochimilco who taught at the Imperial Colegio de Santa Cruz, now in the Mexico City urban area, a mile and a half north of the Zócalo, had completed the fnal book. However, the title page attributed the work to an “Indian physician of the College of Santa Cruz taught not by medical systems but instructed by experience alone.” Andrew Laird has suggested that this physician, identifed in the text as Martín de la Cruz, might have been the Nahua healer Martín Momahuti, who had worked under the protection of the outgoing viceroy.28 Contributors to the Libellus stood at the intersection of two medico-natural traditions: Nahua and European. However, it has proven challenging to ascertain how much came from overlapping aspects of these traditions and how much was the imposition of European ideas of medicine onto indigenous American ones.29 Scholars have grown increasingly skeptical that the Libellus provides a translation of Nahua knowledge rather than Neolatin invention. Alejando de Ávila has argued, the Nahuatl names of the plants in the Codex include “folk-generic” names; compound “folk-generic” names;“folk-specifc names,” composed of an epithet; and descriptive phrases.30 However, the nuances of these Nahuatl names were lost on audiences speaking European languages. In the Libellus, Nahuatl words function as “substantives, much in the way that Greek or Latin technical terms serve as loanwords in modern botanical textbooks,” as Laird has pointed out.31 Due to the many neologisms and ideas incommensurate with the indigenous paradigm contained within its pages, it seems doubtful that much of the text provides a direct translation of Nahua knowledge. Furthermore, there is no record of a preexisting Nahuatl document that was translated into Latin.32 The lay-out of the Libellus reads like a Dioscoridean-style herbal with classical references and depictions of individual plants dominating the page.33 However, this is a visual language that ought to be read in parallel to the Latin text, which often describes maladies and remedies with little to do with the images. The remedies had great variety, from the capitis curatio, or “treatment of the head,” scabies, and hiccups, as well as other instances of natural imbalance through lightning strikes, whirlwind, or crossing a river. Plant drawings aside, this structure is similar to other books of remedies from the Mediterranean world in the ffteenth and sixteenth centuries, as Debra Hassig has argued.34 Comparing the Libellus to a book of remedies like The .  .  . composition of venoms, and of their counters from the library of King Ferdinand I of Naples, described further in chapter 5, shows notable similarities.35 Both required ingredients, for instance, like human remains, animal entrails, ambergris, bezoars, pearls, and spices that would not be readily available in the average herb garden. Indeed, Paula de Vos has suggested

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that bezoar stones were among the simples of Mexican pharmacies introduced by Arabic authors: other substances included ambergris, bdellium, musk, and canafstula.36 In reading the Libellus as part of a longer history of pharmacopeias, scholars have seen bezoars in its pages, along with other animal materia medica. In her translation of the text Emily Walcott Emmart noted that like in Europe, “the use of bezoar stones appears to have been common to primitive medicine of China, Persia, India, Egypt, Peru, and Mexico and other countries.”37 She then cited the European gift exchange and the subsequent publications of Monardes and José de Acosta, among others, who contended that indigenous Americans used bezoar stones in their own medical traditions. Therefore she translates the text as describing bezoar stones from sparrows, swallows, roosters, hawks, doves, quail, parrots, and other birds. Birds carried a unique, religiously inflected status in Nahua society even as llamas stood at the center of Inca civilization.38 Emmart argued that the Libellus’ author “was able to translate the Aztec term for the bezoar stone of the cock (cock-stone) into Latin since he was familiar with Pliny’s Natural History, in which this stone is referred to as an ‘alectorius.’”39 Many of the birds that produced such stones could have been purchased in the market near to the Colegio. Swallow stones, in particular, which had been used by Europeans since antiquity to treat epilepsy, appear in the Libellus prominently alongside other animal and botanical simples. In this translation, the Libellus presented an extended list of birds that produced bezoar-like stones and the ailments such stones might treat. These stones offered powerful remedies when combined with additional ingredients, including bone, gallbladder, and moss to treat maladies ranging from fever to death itself. Tlahcalhuatzin has been commonly translated as the “bezoar of the huatzin” bird, or Opisthocomus hoazin.40 When combined with emerald, pearls, crystal, blood, and earthworms it could  be  rubbed on the head to treat a fracture; with gems and leaves, it could be applied to the ear to cure deafness; along with herbs, purple, and white earth it could be drunk to ease pain in the chest.41 The Latin text often connected the animal producer of the stone with the stone itself, as in “lapillum qui invenitur in avicula nomine molotolotl, lapillum tlahcalhuatzin et lapillum qui est in ventriculo Indici columbi” or “the stone found in the little bird called molotototl, the stone tlahcalhuatzin and the stone that is in the stomach of the Indian dove,” which were used in a treatment for sore eyes.42 In other cases, the term tlacalhuatzin was used without the Latin word for stone.43 As Emmart noted, dictionaries of classical Nahuatl did not include the word tlahcalhuatzin.44 Bernardino de Sahagún’s General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex did not mention bezoars in their entire twelve-book corpus with its many sections on nature and medicine.45 This leads to a bigger question: did Mesoamericans have a habit of collecting gizzards for medical use before the arrival of Europeans? Had they long believed such stones would aid in the recovery of a dying man, as one of the last remedies of the Libellus suggests, or was that just an insight designed to match the expectations of a European readership? The bezoar was increasingly becoming a global phenomenon. It appeared in writing on materia medica geared both to wide audiences and to small ones. Unlike Garcia da Orta’s writings, the Libellus did not have a large readership in the early modern period. The manuscript was brought to Europe and eventually found its way into the library of Diego Cortavila,

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King Philip II’s pharmacist. There, Cassiano dal Pozzo had a copy transcribed while he was on an embassy to the Spanish court. The Italian copy was subsequently used by the Accademia Lincei as they completed their edition of Francisco Hernández’s observations of New Spanish nature.46 By contrast, however, many early moderns read Nicolás Monardes’ published account of indigenous American medical traditions. We next turn to Monardes’s writings on Peru, which suggested that the Americas could procure new medical stones for European users. * According to his letter, on June 15, 1568, Pedro de Osma set off into the Andes for fve days of hunting. His party carried with them a book by Nicolás Monardes (1493–1588), a Spanish physician and reader of Orta. During their travel on the Incan roads, they thought back to the beasts of the East Indies. Osma’s party was on the lookout for bezoars, so they turned to the local animals that contemporaries had likened to sheep and goats. After all, goats from the East Indies produced classic bezoars. Osma and his friends opened the belly of the largest animal they had killed; it contained no stones. Though they might be called the carneros (rams) or ovejas (sheep) of the West Indies, Osma doubted that these were the “same kind of beasts with those of the East Indies.”47 Befuddled, they “asked of certain Indians that went to serve us where the beasts had their stones.” The indigenous servants denied Osma’s request “as they are our enemies” and did not want the Europeans to “know their secrets.” Osma continued that: they answered that they knew nothing of these stones, until one boy which was amongst them being an Indian of the age of twelve years, seeing that we were so delirious to know the same, showing us the secret of the caul and where the beast had the stones, and that we had there dead and they were in a certain little purse that the maw of the beast hath, which is where herbs that they feed on are, when they return to chew their cud. In Osma’s telling, the boy had shared a crucial secret: he revealed the animal origins of stones his people esteemed as highly as gold and silver, and which they used in their religious rites. The Indians, Osma also claimed, used the stones to cure poisons, claiming that they worked even against “the mortal herb that they themselves do use to kill one another, and also to kill us.” The importance of this discovery was evidenced by what happened to the young informant. “Afterward,” wrote Osma, “we understood that those Indians that went with us had sacrifced the boy” whom Osma’s party had forgotten as they continued hunting.48 Monardes subsequently published the letter he received from Osma detailing this venture in the next edition of his book. To return to the key question, Osma’s letter suggests that Andeans knew about bezoar stones before Europeans’ arrival. Medicine and good sense seemed to transcend East and West. Like other Europeans, for naturalist and missionary José de Acosta (1540–1600), everyone, even the isolated indigenous Americans of Peru, agreed that bezoars carried great medical power. Acosta cited the “opinion and tradition of the Indians, discovered by men of great experience in the kingdom of Peru” to prove his fabled trans-Atlantic consensus.49 Through a close reading of the publication history of Monardes’ Historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, Marcia Stephenson contends that Spanish colonizers frst celebrated Peruvian bezoars as antidotes to circumvent Portuguese monopolies on the global medical market; later, they became

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increasingly concerned about the use of bezoars in Andeans’ religious practices.50 Claudia Brosseder has argued that Andeans called bezoars ylla—a term at once tied to huaca, a site of reverence, and llamas—and that by the seventeenth century yllas circulated both as bezoar medicaments and to promote the fertility of livestock.51 The Peruvian Inquisition grew increasingly concerned about Andean households that kept “bezoar stones called illa . . . for the augmentation of livestock.”52 The Inquisition perceived indigenous bezoar use as problematically religious, not medical; this research contests Osma and Acosta’s notion that the stones were universally understood as a powerful antivenom. While a European noble might have a gold-wrapped stone in his home, an Andean doing so would be idolatrous. In the Andean case, who collected the stone and why decided whether its use was legitimate. Regardless of how Andeans originally used the stones, the bezoar craze turned out badly for Andean camelids—particularly the wild vicuñas and guanacos, cousins of domesticated llamas and alpacas. As José de Acosta wrote, without the “Inca Kings” to control their consumption, the invaders “have been given too much liberty to hunt the vicuñas, and by this means they are much diminished.”53 Conquistadors reallocated pasture in the coastal and highland valleys to sheep, goats, cattle, and pigs from Europe. The more accessible the pasturage, the more competition camelids met from Spaniards’ familiar livestock. Plague, the loss of Andean breeding practices, and failure to preserve Incan hunting grounds led the camelid populations to fall dramatically. To make matters worse, bezoar-hunting of camelids grew. Modern llama feece, coarse and irregular, differs greatly from the feece of the soft-haired creatures mummifed in the early sixteenth-century, indicating a population bottleneck that led llamas, alpacas, and their wild variants to interbreed.54 Both camelid diversity and abundance fell dramatically, in part because of the large number of animals harvested for bezoar stones rather than preserved for textile production. Bezoar-producing beasts held more value dead than alive. * The New World offered a seemingly endless supply of new beasts in which to search for stones. If vicuñas and llamas had useful bezoars, why not use stones from the heads of manatees and bellies of iguanas? Greedy for new medicines from his new territories, King Philip II of Spain (1527– 1598) dispatched protomédico Dr. Francisco Hernández (1514–1587) to seek out new cures. Tasked to write a comprehensive overview of herbal medicines from the Spanish colonies, the court ordered him to collect plants and medicinal seeds from New Spain, gather “all possible information from local doctors, healers, herbalists, indios, and other knowledgeable people,” relate the medicinal properties these plants possessed, and convey how to grow them in Europe.55 The bezoar was an obvious place to start.56 While he treated indigenous Mesoamericans dying from cocoliztli (pestilence) in the heart of New Spain, Hernández noted “precious stones” that often “fetched a great price” in the acitli duck (a western grebe) and the acuetzpallin (crocodile).57 Even the manatee contained a medicinal stone. In its “bulging head like goat’s” one could fnd a “pebble that when dusted and taken with water or another aperitive beverage is reputed to expel one’s retained urine.”58 As with Orta’s goats, the animals’ sex mattered: “the small stone that is found in the male is white and benefts men; that of the female is somewhat yellowish and useful for women.”59 He knew of Peruvian bezoars’ popularity and attempted to bill the Mexican supply

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as competitive with that source. Hernández used the Nahuatl neologism peruichatl to name the Andean camelids, “in the belly of these animals are sometimes found those stones that they have to counter poison, which are called bezoars by the Arabs.”60 By describing animals from thousands of miles south, Hernández jockeyed for control over the natural historical narrative; camelids merited depiction because he had “never seen them represented by another before.”61 However, it was the mazame (deer) of New Spain that captured his imagination. Hernández argued that New Spanish deer had the potential to become the most important local bezoar producers. He opened the description of the mazamae with the tempting phrase “it seems opportune to say on this occasion that some of the deer or fallow deer breed in their interior the stone called bezoar, that is, the lord of poison.” Many expert hunters, he reported, had found stones when they opened up these animals. Hernández argued that stones were just like those from the “hornless Peruvian sheep called vicuñas,” as well the leutlalmazame (goats of a medium size of gray, white, or tawny hair and white bellies), fallow deer (mázatl chichiltic or temamazame), chamois, Spanish deer, and hornless goats. The many ruminants that could produce bezoars, wrote Hernández, should not be a surprise because “there is hardly any deer or goat genus in whose stomach or internal cavity does not form and grow, little by little, this stone from the same residues of food.” The same process made the deposit in bulls and cows, creating a bezoar stone “composed of onion-like membranes that overlap and slowly adhere to each other.” The mystery for Hernández was not which animal could produce the stone— any ruminant of any place could—but the regions where the necessary plant matter on which the animal fed grew to produce a valuable deposit with medical utility. “A true stone, according to some opinions,” Hernández described, provided an effective remedy for all kinds of poisoning, cure syncope and epileptic seizures, that applied to the fngers conceive sleep, increase strength, excite reproductive activity, strengthen all the faculties and mitigate pains; by eating some portion of them and even having them only in their hands, they break the stones from the kidneys and bladder; relieve the fow of urine, help childbirth, favor conception. There is almost, in short, no disease that they do not cure.62 The great variety of animals from which bezoars came was at once a blessing and a curse. Hernández wrote: There are so many in New Spain that are already sold at a very low price—one or sometimes even two for a single escudo— while a few years ago a medium stone could not be bought with two hundred or more escudos.63 Likewise, José de Acosta reported that many blamed indigenous people for fooding the bezoar market.64 As “there [was] no frm rule as to the color or size to judge which is a fner stone,” verifable sourcing was all the more important.65 Hernández agreed; he cautioned “not a few of them are counterfeit.” Indeed, he had been warned to avoid falling victim to bezoar imposters who “live off theft and violate every right in order to increase their fortune.”66 As in the spice trade, once Europeans gained access to sources of abundant supply, they faced the problems of oversupplying the market. This led both to price collapse and concerns about quality. Through all of this, the search continued for real stones from the bellies of the right beasts.

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FROM GLOBAL SOURCES TO THE EUROPEAN MARKET Demand reached a crescendo. Rich patients begged. In 1586, in Renaissance Italy, when a dying man was consumed in a moment of “desperation for all human help,” bezoar powder offered the last of “all those remedies that could be done, and the doctors want oils . . . and the bezoar stone to strengthen their medicines, to extend life a few days, holding back evil.”67 While Renaissance Italians regularly suffered from malaria and typhus, the sudden death of prominent individuals invariably sparked rumors of poisonings. With our distance, we might see the stone as an imaginary cure to a largely imaginary problem. Regardless, elites imagined themselves to be vulnerable to poisoning, which seemed to offer a rational explanation for the otherwise mysterious sudden deaths; the bezoar seemed to offer a potentially powerful cure. Beset by mysterious but potentially deadly perils and captivated by the wondrous claims made for their utility, however, Renaissance elites requested that their contacts in major ports and distant colonies send them bezoars. Along with rare seeds and other wonders, nobles and merchants could regift the stones among European courts. Early moderns reveled in the details of provenance, such as the animal that produced the stone, its region of origin, who had possessed it before, and who had gifted it to them. While one could ostensibly use these gifts as medicines, they were as often simply collected in personal cabinets of curiosities. For example, the bezoar of the duke of Alba was so wrapped in gold that it would have been hard to rub off even the smallest bit of powder for medicine; it was instead meant to be dipped into liquids if used at all.68 Giant stones were certainly valuable, but average ones were by no means a prohibitively expensive luxury. One could expect to pay approximately six ducats a bezoar from the 1570s to early 1600s. Special variations, of course, might fetch a higher price, upwards to fve times the stone’s weight in gold. By the end of the sixteenth century, competing hierarchies of bezoar stones had emerged among European and American treatises on the subject [Table 2.1]. Authorities debated the exact value of

Figure 2.5: A bezoar stone covered in gold fligree stamped with the coat of arms of the Duke of Alba (1508–1582) from Goa, India. 16.2 cm in length. Dated to 1575–1600. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 998.

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Table 2.1 A bezoar hierarchy Value

Orta (1563) Hernández Monardes (1580) (c. 1575)

Acosta (1590)

Cobo (1653) Tavernier (1678)

Best

Persian goats; bigger stones; Khorasan bezoars Malaccan goats

EastIndian (olivecolored)

Artifcial bezoar; Peruvian bezoar

Middle Worst

No value claim

Persian cattle

No value claim No value claim

Malaccan goats

Peruvian tartuga (large, brown or white); Peruvian vicuña (orangesized, dark brown, white, purple) New Spain, Fradulent Moorish Many in tactics for the market; brocket deer identifying concerns (mazame) forgery about effcacy

Artifcial bezoar; Peruvian bezoar

East Indian goat Goat bezoars from Eastern cows

bezoar stones depending on the geography and animal from which they were sourced. Generally, Andean bezoars gained the second highest valuation, beneath East Indian goats, and above New Spanish deer. Expert procurers searched for bezoar stones across the world as Annemarie Jordan Gschwend has shown. For instance, Ruy Mendes, who worked for the Habsburgs, requested that his contacts from Ceylon and India bring back the stones on behalf of Catherine of Austria, queen of Portugal.69 Likewise, Hans Khevenhüller, the Imperial ambassador in Madrid, created networks that transported animals to menageries, paintings to court halls, and bezoars to cabinets.70 Major merchant banking families, like the Fugger and Welser, often handled imports from the colonies to European centers. Once the stones arrived in Europe, they were put to medicinal uses or displayed in collections.71 Bezoar stones became the perfect gift for one who had everything. By possessing the stones, elites believed themselves to have the protection they craved against the dangers of holding power, as well as an ultimate symbol of their status and wealth. At once exotic and suggesting concern for the recipient’s wellbeing, bezoars came to be regarded as a suitable gift for even a prince.72 Families like the Gonzaga, Habsburgs, and Medici passed the stones from one to another in case of poisoning or other illness. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, bezoars continued to be woven into the fabric of the early modern royal families as they changed hands from one family member to another through inheritance and a dynamic network of inter-royal gifting. The directed network depicted in Figure 2.5 shows how bezoars moved from person to person through the royal gifting network among the Gonzaga, Habsburg, and Medici households between the years 1571–1649. In this visualization, the edges are weighted by degree of connection. We can clearly see the strong link between the courts of Madrid and Prague.73 By viewing the

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same network through the bezoar-gifting relationships among early modern historical actors, as we see in Figure 2.6, we can see the role that certain super-gifters played in the exchange. Right at the center we fnd Holy Roman Empress Maria of Austria (1528–1603). In this network, the edges are lines that connect nodes that indicate people. The edges are weighted by degree of connection and the thickness of arrows illustrate the quantitative strength of connections. To emphasize the super-gifter, we have used blue edges to highlight the connections between Maria of Austria and her

Figure 2.6: The Circulation of Bezoars as Elite Gifts: Map. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann

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Figure 2.7: The Circulation of Bezoars as Elite Gifts: Royal Gifting Network. Visualization by Kathryn Biedermann. bezoar recipients. From this visualization, it is clear that the strongest connection forged by bezoar gifting belongs to Maria of Austria and her son Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552–1612), and more generally, Rudolf’s Imperial court. Indeed, Rudolf II had earned a reputation as a particularly fervent collector of bezoar stones in both history and historical fction.74 However, around them there are many other strong ties among actors in the gift exchange, including Anna of Austria (1549–1580), Ferdinando I Gonzaga (1587–1626), Hans Khevenhüller (1538–1606), Margarita of Austria (1584–1611), Philip II (1527–1598), Philip III (1578–1621), and others.75 If nothing else we can see how many early modern European nobles had bezoars in their coffers.

BEZOARS BEYOND THE ANIMAL By the seventeenth century, the number of creatures believed to produce bezoar stones had expanded from goats to most if not all of the animal kingdom. In 1638, a Roman pharmaceutical price list considered bezoars from the East and West as interchangeable and worth the same amount.76 By 1745, the bezoar still had not fallen out of use entirely; the same Roman apothecary guild listed prices for the Occidentale, Orientale, Gioviale, and Minerale. Of these, the oriental bezoar was worth more than twice that of the other varieties.77 Apothecaries often sold a variety of bezoar stones. For instance, iguana and human bezoars found their way to the Salvador Cabinet in Barcelona as six generations of apothecaries collected materia medica from 1626 to 1850.78 Such variety in shapes, sizes, animal sources,

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and provenance meant that assessing what would be an effective stone from the outside was more challenging than ever. In 1626, for instance, Italian apothecary Francesco Pona warned that the exterior often did not reveal the stones’ interior: “of 100 stones, 90 are falsifed, and even when they are legitimate I would not attribute much to them.”79 Hernández had argued that bezoar-producing animals took many forms, but effective stones came from animals. Other authorities countered that these animal products could be replicated, even perfected, by a human expert, some healthful herbs, and a few other ingredients. However, Jesuits in Lima and Goa cornered the market on creating bezoars sans beast. Jesuits at the College of San Pablo developed an extensive pharmacy on site and a Peruvian bezoar exporting business. In 1630, Antonio Robles of Spain transported a shipment of Peruvian bezoardicus lapis (bezoar stone) as many had been sent before. As they traveled between Lima and Rome, Jesuit representatives took shipments of stones weighing hundreds of pounds with them, often transporting the stone by way of Seville on their way to the Roman Curia.80 Perhaps it was the falling vicuña numbers, but this same community started to create stones from plant and mineral based medicaments by the mid-seventeenth century. Likewise, Jesuits in Goa crafted bezoars that ostensibly offered even more benefts than those drawn from animals.81 In his 1653 treatise on the History of the New World, Bernabé Cobo provided a recipe for artifcial stones that are “of more virtue than the natural ones.” These recipes included brandy, orange, rose water, amber, musk, pearls, and contra yerba powder alongside other ingredients. Adding these ingredients to a bit of tar water and egg white rendered vicuña and other animals useless, as Cobo promised that the artifcial stone would not crack.82 Perhaps the Jesuits in Goa became so oriented to artifcial bezoar production in reaction to the dramatic shrinkage of the Estado da Índia as the Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and English EIC (East India Company) picked off outpost after outpost. In the last years of Portuguese Malacca, the Dutch traded in pepper as bezoar stones continued to pour into Malacca from Patani to be sold at the Port of Siaca.83 However, half a century later, following the Dutch conquest, the Dutch VOC wearily avoided too much investment in the bezoar trade, and merchant houses did not formally trade the stones. The risks of fraud were so high, the governors suggested, that “stones weren’t worth the trouble.”84

BEZOARS IN ANIMAL TAXONOMY Finally, after centuries of consumption as a universal cure, by the eighteenth century the bezoar itself became a medical problem: a blockage in animals’ digestion. What a former medical system had held up as a valuable bit of materia medica extracted from an animal’s innards suddenly returned to the belly of the beast as a painful problem. While belief in its curative powers dissipated, the bezoar stone became calcifed in the taxonomic classifcation of a New World deer in the Linnaean name Cervus bezoarticus (now called the pampas deer or the Ozotoceros bezoarticus). The same global confict between Dutch rebels against Spanish Habsburg rule that validated the VOC’s violent appropriation of large swathes of the Portuguese Empire in the East underpinned the Dutch West India Company’s (Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie, WIC) attack on Portuguese Brazil.85 Remarkably, this short-lived Dutch incursion in North Eastern Brazil formed the backdrop for an infuential natural history that discussed bezoar-producing camelids and South American deer. During the brief era of New Holland, or Dutch Brazil (1630–1654), German

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naturalist Georg Marcgrave (1610–1644) and Dutch physician Willem Piso (1611–1678) aimed to disentangle the old Spanish confation of bovid and camelid by separating Peruvian and Chilean sheep. From their stronghold in the tropical, sugar-producing coast, the naturalists cast their attention

Figures 2.8 and 2.9: What’s in a sheep? The Sheep of Peru and Chile in Willem Piso, Georg Marcgrave, and Joannes de Laet’s Historia naturalis brasiliae (Lugdun. Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hakium; et Amestelodami: Apud Lud. Elzevirium, 1648). Appendix on the Peruvian Sheep,” 243–4. Public Domain via Biodiversity Heritage Library. Held by Missouri Botanical Garden, Peter H. Raven Library.

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Figures 2.8 and 2.9: (Continued)

inland, from Amazonia to the Andes, diluting the Iberian monopoly on South American nature. Citing Acosta on Peru in a text dedicated to the governor of Dutch Brazil, Marcgrave and Piso compared the anatomy of mountain goats and llamas. A later artist furthered the comparison by rendering both animals in parallel coloring.86

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Like the version of Hernández’s manuscripts published after his return to Spain, the Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (1648) became a touchstone for Swedish naturalist Carl Linneaus (1707–1778) in his system of binomial nomenclature. In Linneaus’ Systema Naturae, the animals that produced the most famous bezoars—the Blackbuck or Indian antelope—were named Antilope cervicapra; the stones did not determine their name. Counterintuitively, South American deer that had produced bezoars that were fewer in number and considered inferior to those of the East Indies were named for their bezoar production. Linneaus applied the category of Cervus bezoarticus (bezoar deer) to animals with smooth, straight, branching horns. This category included the Mazama deer, described by Francisco Hernández from his time in Mexico, and the Caguacu of Piso and Marcgraf’s Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. In short, by 1758, Linneaus had transformed the bezoar into a deer—Bezoarticus—defning the creature’s exterior taxonomy by its ability to produce a medicine thought increasingly dubious. Taxonomy concretized the bezoar in life, its “habitat in South America.”87 Today the Pampas deer (Ozotoceros bezoarticus) of the South American highlands still carries the name. Linnaeus’ world increasingly wrote about bezoar medicine in the historical tense. Samuel Johnson’s 1775 dictionary described Peruvian bezoars’ inferiority as dubious when all bezoars’ reputations were questionable. “At present,” Johnson wrote, the bezoar “begins to be discarded in the practice of medicine, as of no effcacy at all.”88 Bezoars had value only as they brought to mind various bezoarticos—purgatives that expelled poisons. These medicines performed a specifc function and their source, whether animal, botanical, or mineral, mattered little.89 Nonetheless, old practices die hard. As late as 1809, Bartholomew Parr’s London Medical Dictionary discussed over fourteen variations of bezoars and related recipes. However, despite widespread recognition of the “preternatural” nature of these “morbid concentrations,” the growing reliance on a new pantheon of medicines slowly erased the stone. Once extracted from the bellies of beasts for its medical and material value, the bezoar is now removed for very different reasons. It slowly disappeared from the discourse of remedy and emerged in gastrointestinal pathology, where it is now a familiar sample in the gross room, cut out of patients alongside cancerous tumors and other unwanted growths. Nearly three centuries after Augustino Columbre earned his fame as a blacksmith and horse medic, farriers worried more about bezoarinduced ailments rather than their curative power. In the late eighteenth century, Philippe Etiènne La Fosse warned that horses might fall victim to bezoar-induced colic, an incurable stomach ailment that would likely lead to the animal’s death. To Fosse, the bezoar was nothing more than “a type of calcifed deposit that the intestines generated from certain materials which little by little unite and with the progress of time harden.” Often found in the cecum, a pouch at the junction of the small and large intestines, the bezoar “compressed the blood vessels, held excrement, and caused infammation and colic . . . it is an incurable disease.”90 The common practice of Columbre’s time had waned. No veterinarians argued for using one animal’s bezoar to ward against bezoar colic in another. The bezoar unites histories of animals, medicine, and empire. Animals valued more when dead than when alive produced the stone, and those whose worth came from life consumed it. The latter obtained a relatively privileged position in Eurasian socio-natural hierarchy while the former, like most animal producers, were more interesting as material than living beasts. Like elephants to ivory and narwhal and rhinoceros to their horns, bezoar producers were seen as little more than an advanced

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pharmaceutical technology that processed fora to engender enhanced materia medica—they were like geese that ate magical beans to lay golden eggs or at least made foie gras. As encounters with New Worlds brought greater animal diversity to the pages of European natural history books, the medical-minded added bezoar-generating animal machines to their pharmaceutical toolkits. At once mineral, medicine, animal matter, curiosity, and cure, the bezoar’s many guises made it an ideal commodity in a world that valued talismans over inoculations. Its early modern history is riddled with experiential knowledge, aspirational inclusion of local ideas, commitment to universal medicine, and a global enthusiasm for natural diversity. European and American ideas about the medical utility of stones might have had parallel origins. More likely, perhaps, the simultaneous invention of bezoar medicine might have been a fantasmic universalism, produced by the combination of Europeans’ desire to substantiate true cures’ effcacy and colonial intermediaries’ eagerness to satiate European demand. As with gold, upon learning what the invaders searched for, local peoples eager to survive obliged by creating a new, parallel supply. As such, while the global collection and application of bezoars was robust, it is not clear how much early moderns learned from their prolonged engagement with the stones. They might have thought that they knew nature if they possessed it, but this paradigm reached its limits on shelves of inert animal simples waiting to be ground to powder and drunk.

NOTES 1 Acknowledgements: Foremost thanks to Kathryn Biedermann for her key contributions to the research and visualizations featured here. Likewise, I am grateful to Paula Findlen, Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Andrew Laird, Stephanie Shirilan, José Pardo Tomás, Nerissa Russell, Jessica Cooper, Usman Hamid, Alanna Radlo-Dzur, Thomas Anderson, and Brian Brege for advice and encouragement as I waded into this chapter of the history of early modern animal medicine. Thanks in particular to Diana Garvin who helped envision this chapter and to Sebestian Kroupa, whose forthcoming book provisionally titled Plants on the Move: Georg Joseph Kamel SJ and the Making of Cross-Cultural Knowledge in Southeast Asia, c.1650–1750 will launch a new generation of scholarship on bezoar stones across the early modern world. Thanks to feedback from audiences at the History of Science Society Conference (2017) and the Northeastern Nahuatl Group Annual Meeting (2021). This research was supported by Cornell University, Hamilton College, and I Tatti—The Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. Agostino Columbre, Incomincia il libro de Maistro Augustino Columbre Maneschalco de Sancto Severo, (Venezia, Stampata per Gulielmo de Fontancto de Monserra ad instantia de Hieronymo Gilberti da Padoa e Zuane Bresano compagni, 1518), “Prohemio deli bestie inuenenate di atóffcate di mordite. cap. xxxix; Deli animali che havessero preso argento vivo per alchuna causa. cap. xly; De lo cavallo acicutato. cap. xlyii; De lo nocimento che fa lo iusquiamo alo animale cap. xlviii.” Likewise, in the edition printed in Venice by Gulielmo da Fontaneto in 1504. 2 On materia medica from the “two indies” in the Iberian colonial World and its affliates, see the research of José Pardo-Tomás and Juan Pimentel Igea. See José Pardo-Tomás, El Tesoro natural de América: Oviedo, Monardes, Hernández: colonialismo y ciencia en el siglo XVI (Madrid: Nivola, 2002) and Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation du Savoir: Une histoire des plantes médicinales du “Nouveau Monde” (1492–1750) (Vaulx-en-Velin (Rhône): Les Éditiones des mondes à faire, 2016). 3 Daniela Bleichmar, “Amerindian Knowledge in the Atlantic World,” in Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science, ed. Jaime

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4 5

6

7

8 9 10

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Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 118. See “bezoar, n.,” OED Online, June 2022. Oxford University Press, https:// www-oed-com.ez.hamilton.edu/view/Entry/18525?redirectedFrom=bezoar (accessed August 6, 2022). José Pardo-Tomás, “Bezoar,” in New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, ed. Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel (London: University of London Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 2021), 195–200, esp. 197. This excellent essay focuses on the iguana bezoar in the Salvador Cabinet in Barcelona. Katharine Eng and Marsha Kay, “Gastrointestinal Bezoars: History and Current Treatment Paradigms,” Gastroenterology & Hepatology 8, no. 11 (2012): 776–8. Bezoars are a particular risk for people with abnormal digestion or who have taken to gnawing their hair. Thanks to GI pathologist Dr. Mary Bronner for pointing me toward this literature. Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the New-found Worlde. Wherein Are Declared, the Rare and Singuler Vertues of Divers Herbs, Trees, Plantes, Oyles and Stones, with Their Applications, as Well to the Use of Phisicke, as of Chirurgery . . . Also the Portrature of the Said Hearbs, trans. John Frampton (London: E Allde, 1596), fol. 65 and fol. 99. Hernando Castrillo, Historia y magia natural o ciencia de flosofa oculta (Madrid, 1692), 340–2. Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the New-Found Worlde, fol. 99. Among the treatises discussing the bezoar, see instance Caspar Bauhun, De lapidis bezaar orient et occident (Basilae: Apud Conr. Waldkirch, 1613); Pedro Teizeira, Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira del origen descendencia y succession dè los Reyes de Persia, y de Harmuz (Amberes: En casa de Hieronymo Verdussen, 1610), 157–61. Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150– 1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 75. See the description of the Ormuz-sourced, 9 centimeter-tall “bezoar in a fligree setting” in Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 996. in www.khm.at/de/object/87195/. An Iberian bezoar stone with an ornate chain and gold adornment. Dated from 1500–1550. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 994, www.khm.at/de/object/87193/. A Spanish bezoar stone from the sixteenth century, wrapped in gold, Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 958. “PEDRA . BESOHAR . FINISSIMA . PESA . OCHO . ONCAS” Maria Do Samerio Barroso, “The Bezoar Stone: A Princely Antidote, The Távora Sequeira Pinto Collection—Oporto,” Izcorni znanstveni članāk, Acta med-hist Adriat 12, no. 1 (2014): 77–98. See, Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad al-Biruni, The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones, trans. Hakim Mohammad Said (Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989); Cyril Elgood, Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), 369–71. Al-Biruni, Al-Beruni’s Book on Mineralogy: The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones, ed. and trans. Hakim Mohammad Said (Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989), 175. The “onion of knowledge” visualization relies on the following sources: José de Acosta, Historia natural y moral de las Indias (Madrid: Ramón Anglés, 1894), 451; Al-Biruni, Al-Beruni’s Book on Mineralogy: The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones, ed. and trans. Hakim Mohammad Said (Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989), 175; Francisco Hernández, The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández, ed. Simon Vary, trans. Rafael Chabrán, Cynthia L. Chamberlin, and Simon Varey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 218; Moses Maimonides, Treatise on Poisons and Their Antidotes, ed. Suessman Muntner (Philadelphia and Montreal: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966), 17; Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the New-Found Worlde, trans. John Frampton (London: William Norton, 1580); Garcia de Orta, Colloquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinaes da India (Lisbon: Imprensa

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22

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25 26 27

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Nacional, 1872), 168–9; Bartholomew Parr, The London Medical Dictionary (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White, 1819), 243; James Primerose, Popular Errours: Or the Errours of the People in Physick, First Written in Latine by the Learned Physitian James Primrose Doctor in Physick, trans. Robert Wittie (London: Printed by W. Wilson for Nicholas Bourne, at the South-Entrance of the Royall Exchange,  1651), 354; Johann Adrian Slevogt, Praelusio inauguralis de lapide bezoar (Jenae: Litteris Krebsianis, 1698), 2. The onion theme caught Kate Biedermann’s attention as we read Luis Millones Figueroa, “The Bezoar Stone: A Natural Wonder in the New World,” Hispanófla, no. 171 (Junio 2014): 139–56, especially the Garcia da Orta quote on 140. P. K. Gode, “History of Ambergris in India between about AD 700 and 1900,” Chymia 2 (1949): 51–56. Paul Freedman, Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). José Pardo-Tomás, “East Indies, West Indies: Garcia de Orta and the Spanish Treatises on Exotic Materia Medica,” in Medicine, Trade, and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India in Context, ed. Palmira Fontes da Costa. The History of Medicine in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 195–212. Garcia da Orta, Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India (Goa: Ioannes de Endem, 1563), 169v–170r. See also the fnal section on porcupine stones. On Orta’s methodology, see Juan Pimentel and Isabel Soler, “Painting Naked Truth: The Colóquios of Garcia da Orta (1563),” Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 102 (2014): 101–20. Orta, Colóquios, 170r. For another rendition of this origin story, Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull Newes Out of the New-Found Worlde. Wherein Are Declared, the Rare and Singuler Vertues of Divers Herbs, Trees, Plantes, Oyles and Stones, with Their Applications, as Well to the Use of Phisicke, as of Chirurgery . . . Also the Portrature of the Said Hearbs, trans. John Frampton (London: E Allde, 1596), 65–66. Pardo-Tomás, “East Indies, West Indies,” 195. The Fondo Canevari in the Biblioteca Civica Berio in Genoa, a model medical library from the early seventeenth century includes a Latin copy of Orta’s book, but no editions of Nicolas Monardes, José de Acosta, and few other major Spanish travel authors from this period. Pardo-Tomás, “East Indies, West Indies,” 197–8, 210–11 esp. Table 10.1. See Camilla Townsend, Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Emily Walcott Emmart and Henry E. Sigerist, The Badianus Manuscript: (Codex Barberini, Latin 241), Vatican Library: An Aztec Herbal of 1552 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940). Paula De Vos, “Methodological Challenges Involved in Compiling the Nahua Pharmacopeia,” Journal of the History of Science 55, no. 2 (2017): 210–33. See also Paula De Vos, Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain (Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), 149–183. Andrew Laird, “Nahua Latinists: Classical Learning and Indigenous Legacies in Sixteenth-Century Mexico,” in Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, ed. Matthew Duquès, Maya Feile Tomes, and Adam Goldwyn (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021), 209–41, esp. 225–6. See Andrew Laird’s forthcoming Aztec Latin. Alejandro De Ávila, “The Codex Cruz-Badianus: Directions for Future Research,” in Flora: The Aztec Herbal (London: Royal Collection, in Association with Harvey Miller Publishers, 2009), 45–50. Laird, “Nahua Latinists,” 226. Andrew Laird, “Nahuas and Caesars: Classical Learning and Bilingualism in Post-Conquest Mexico; An Inventory of Latin Writings by Authors of the Native Nobility,” Classical Philology 109, no. 2 (2014): 150–69, esp.155. Laird, “Nahua Latinists,” 226. Gregorio Hinojo Andrés, “Infuencias clásicas en el Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis,” in Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico. V. homenaje al profesor Juan Gil, ed. José Ma Maestre Maestre, et al. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 2015), 709–37.

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Part I • Manipulated 34 Debra Hassig, “Transplanted Medicine: Colonial Medical Herbals of the Sixteenth Century,” Res: Anthropology and aesthetics 17–18 (1989): 30–53. 35 BNM (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana) Gt. III, 17 (= 4963), Della natura, qualit., quantit., it compositione de veleni, it dille loro contraris, libri duoi havreti dalla libraria del R. Ferdinando I, fol. 12r-v. 36 De Vos, Compound Remedies, Table 1.12, 52. 37 Emmart, “Introduction,” Codex Badianus, 56–57. 38 Marcy Norton, “Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity,” in Early Modern Things, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2012). 39 Emmart, “Introduction,” Codex Badianus, 58. 40 Ibid., 59. 41 Emmart, Codex Badianus, Plates 12, 22–23, 46. 42 Ibid., Plate 14, 15. 43 Ibid., Plate 66. 44 Ibid., 216n2. Alexis Wimmer, Dictionnaire de nahuatl classique (2004), by contrast, seems to chalk up this interpretation to a bad transcription, rendering the word as tlah-cal-huaz-tzin in his dictionary, and translating it simply as “name of a stone that has medical virtues,” citing the Badianus 27v. www.ifrance. com/nahuatl/. 45 Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex. MS Med. Palat. 220, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. 46 On the Lincei’s Latin copy of the Codex Badianus, see Martin Clayton, Luigi Guerrini, and Alejandro de Ávia, Flora: The Aztec Herbal (London: The Royal Collection/Harvey Miller Publishers, 2009). 47 Despite an array of evidence that suggested otherwise, from their anatomy to their use, Spanish interlocutors insisted on calling Andean camelids sheep, goats, or livestock, but certainly not camels. Males became carneros (rams) and females ovejas (sheep), often followed by some variation of del Peru (of Peru) or de la tierra (of the land). Daniel Gade contended that “the sheep analogy that prevailed for more than two hundred years refected a European epistemology that honored its perception and discounted that of native peoples.” Daniel W. Gade, “Llamas and Alpacas as ‘Sheep’ in the Colonial Andes: Zoogeography Meets Eurocentrism,” Journal of Latin American Geography 12, no. 2 (2013): 221–43, esp. 221. For the impact of this ambiguity between camels, sheep, and Andean camelids on Iberian colonization and natural history, see Mackenzie Cooley, The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022), 153–75. 48 Monardes, Joyfull Newes out of the New-found Worlde, 65–66. This story also appeared in Antonio de la Calancha, Coronica Moralizada (Barcelona: Por Pedro Lacavalleria, 1638), 54–55 and other contemporary reports. 49 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Chapter XL and 248fn2. 50 Marcia Stephenson, “From Marvelous Antidote to the Poison of Idolatry: The Transatlantic Role of Andean Bezoar Stones during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,” Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (2010): 3–39; Jorge Manuel dos Santos Alves, “A Pedra-bezoar. Realidade e mito em torno de um antídoto (séc. XVI e SVII),” in Mirabilia Asiatica. Produtos raros no comercio marítimo/Produits Rares Dans Le Commerce Maritime/ Seltene Waren Im Seehandel (Maritime Asia) (French, German and Portuguese Edition), ed. Jorge Manuel dos Santos Alves, Claude Guillot, and Roderich Ptak (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlat & Fundação Oriente, 2003), 121–34; Maria do Sameiro Barroso, “Bezoar Stones, Magic, Science, and Art,” Geological Society London Special Publications 375, no. 1 (2013): 195–207. 51 Claudia Brosseder, The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2014), 168–169, 171, 241–2. 52 Ibid., 169. 53 José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies, ed. Jane E. Mangan (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), Chapter XL.

Chapter 2 • Bezoar 54 Jane C. Wheeler et al., “A Measure of Loss: Prehispanic Llama and Alpaca Breeds,” Archivos de Zootecnia 41, no. 154 (1992): 467–75 and Helen F. Stanley et al., “Molecular Evolution of the Family Camelidae: A Mitochondrial DNA Study,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 256, no. 1345 (April 22, 1994): 1–6. 55 Francisco Hernández’s orders from the King of Spain, January 11, 1570 in Jesus Bustamente Garcia, “Un Libro, Tres Modelos, y el Atlántico: Los Datos de una historia: los antecedentes y el proyecto,” in Il tesoro messicano: libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo mondo, ed. Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013), 27. Also in Archivo General de la Nación, México, Reales cedulas (Dup.) 47:262, Arts. 1–12. 56 For a parallel case of giant bones, Mackenzie Cooley, “The Giant Remains: Mesoamerican Medicine, Extinction, and Cycles of Empire,” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 112, no. 1 (2021): 45–67. 57 Francisco Hernández, Obras completas de Francisco Hernández (México: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, 1960), Tomo III. Capítulo CXXX, “del acitli o liebre acuática,” www.franciscohernandez.unam.mx/tomos/03_ TOMO/tomo003_26/tomo003_026_130.html; Capítulo V, “del acuetzpallin” www.franciscohernandez.unam.mx/tomos/03_TOMO/tomo003_27/ tomo003_027_005.html. 58 Hernández, Obras completas, Tomo III, Historia Natural de la Nueva España 2, Capítulo LI, “del manatï,” www.franciscohernandez.unam.mx/tomos/03_ TOMO/tomo003_29/tomo003_029_051.html. 59 Ibid. 60 Hernández, Obras completas, Tomo III, Historia Natural de la Nueva España 2, Capítulo XXXV, “del peruíchcatl,” www.franciscohernandez.unam.mx/ tomos/03_TOMO/tomo003_25/tomo003_025_035.html. 61 Ibid. 62 Hernández, Obras completas, Tomo III, Historia Natural de la Nueva España 2, Capítulo XXII, “de los mazame o ciervos,” www.franciscohernandez.unam. mx/tomos/03_TOMO/tomo003_25/tomo003_025_022.html. 63 Ibid. 64 Acosta, Natural and Moral History, ed. Mangan, 248. 65 Acosta, Historia natural, 4.40–42. 66 Hernández, Obras completas, Tomo III, Historia Natural de la Nueva España 2, Capítulo XXII, “de los mazame o ciervos,” www.franciscohernandez.unam. mx/tomos/03_TOMO/tomo003_25/tomo003_025_022.html. 67 Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato 5046, Folio 221. From Bongianni di Piero Gianfgliazzi (Madrid) to Francesco I de’Medici (Firenze), October 2, 1586. (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#14789). 68 A bezoar stone covered in gold fligree stamped with the Coat of Arms of the Duke of Alba (1508–1582) from Goa, India. 16.2 cm in length. Dated to 1575– 1600. Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, Kunstkammer, 998, www.khm.at/ de/object/87197/. 69 Letter from the Portuguese Factor Ruy Mendes to Emperor Ferdinand I, Antwerp, January 29, 1564. Vienna, Austria State Archives, Haus-, Hof- un Staatsarchiv, Habsburgisch-Lothringisches Hausarchiv Familenkorrespondenz A. Karton I, fol 216v-217r. Thank you to Annemarie Jordan for pointing me toward this document. Cited in the research of Annemarie Jordan Sabine Haag, ed. Echt tierisch!: Die Menagerie des Fürsten, Exhibition Catalogue (Innsbruck: Schloss Ambras. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, 2015), 288–9. On September 6, 1565 Ruy Mendes, who worked as a secretary of the Portuguese factory in Antwerp, wrote Catherine of Austira, asking the queen to intercede on behalf of her elder brother, Ferdinand I, in procuring bezoar stones for his health, which he was unable to supply from Antwerp. 70 Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Hans Khevenhuller at the Court of Philip II of Spain: Diplomacy and Consumerism in a Global Empire (London: Paul Hoberton Publishing Ltd, 2022). 71 Peter Borschberg, “The Euro-Asian Trade in Bezoar Stones (Approx. 1500 to 1700),” in Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400–1900, ed. Michael North (New York: Routledge, 2016), 29–43.

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Part I • Manipulated 72 Marine P. Stark, “Mounted Bezoar Stones, Seychelles Nuts, and Rhinoceros Horns: Decorative Objects as Antidotes in Early Modern Europe,” Studies in the Decorative Arts 11, no. 1 (Fall–Winter 2003–04): 69–94. 73 The data for this visualization relies in part from the following letters: ASF Mediceo del Principato 121, Part 5, Fol. 821, 1580 (bia.medici.org—MapDocID#4284); 831, Folio 770, Niccolò Listi (Firenze), Belisario di Francesco Vinta (Toscana), February 29, 1592. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#14652); 1212, Insert 3, Folio 468, Luigi Dovara (Setubal), Antonio Serguidi (Firenze), April 23, 1582. (bia.medici.org—MAP DocID#4254); 1234a, Insert: 4, Matteo Forestani (Livorno), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), May 6, 1587. (bia. medici.org—MAPDocID#15202); 2952, Ferdinando I Gonzaga (Mantova), Ferdinando II de’Medici (Firenze), September 3, 1621. (bia.medici.org— MAPDocID#5675); 2955, Insert: 10, Ferdinando I Gonzaga (Mantova), Cosimo II de’Medici (Toscana), January 29, 1621. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#5143); 4026 Fol. 4, from Rome to Florence, January 19, 1572. (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#26111); 4027a, Insert: 3, Folio 168, Rome, Firenze, 1649. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#19591); 4919, Folio 111, Giulio Battaglini (Madrid), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Firenze), February 6, 1588. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#8276); 4947, Folio 459, Zamora, unidentifed, April 1619. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#2921); 4957, Andrea di Giovanni Battista Cioli (Firenze), Averardo di Raffaello de’Medici di Castellina (Madrid), October 26, 1629. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#12030); 5113, Insert: 1, Folio 339, Augusto (da Castiglione) Tizio (Sevilla), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), January 13, 1585. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#15651); 5113, Insert: 1, Folio 399, Giulio Battaglini (Zaragoza), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), April 24, 1585. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#15637); 5113, Insert: 2, Folio 749, Giulio Battaglini (Madrid), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Firenze), November 30, 1586. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#15845); 5154, Folio 173, Giovanni di Cosimo I de’Medici (Livorno), Ferdinando I de’Medici (Pisa), March 17, 1592. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#8483); 6107, Folio 731, Caterina di Ferdinando I de Medici-Gonzaga (Siena), Maria Magdalena von Habsburg-de’ Medici (Firenze), September 8, 1628. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#6151). We also collected from two appendices created by Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend that contain transcriptions of cédulas, letters, and inventories from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries documenting the movements of collectables among the European nobility: Almudena Pérez de Tudela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Appendix A and B of “Luxury Goods for Royal Collectors: Exotica, Princely Gifts, and Rare Animals Exchanged Between the Iberian Courts and Central Europe in the Renaissance (1560–1612),” in Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen Im Spiegel Fü rstlicher Kunst- Und Wunderkammern Der Renaissance, vol. 3, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, ed. Helmut Trnek and Sabine Haag (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2001), 24–127. 74 For a skewering of Rudolf II’s bezoar and collecting habit in fction, see Deborah Harkness, All Souls Trilogy, Volume 2: Shadow of Night (New York: Penguin Books, 2012), 400, 414, 454, and 488. 75 Almudena Pérez de Tulela and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, “Luxury Goods for Royal Collectors: Exótica, Princely Gifts, and Rare Animals Exchanged between the Iberian Courts and Central Europe in the Renaissance (1560– 1612),” in Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen im Spiegel fü rstlicher Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Renaissance. Die Beitr.ge des am 19. und 20. Mai 2000 vom Kunsthistorischen Museum Wien veranstalteten Symposiums, Wien, eds. Helmut Trnek and Sabine Haag, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien 3 (Mainz: Zabern, 2001), 1–127, especially 1–22. 76 Tavola delli prezzi delle robbe di spetiaria, di Roma, & suo distretto, Fatta dall’Eccellentissimo Protomedico, & Consoli delli Spetialidir Roma, Avanti l’Illustrissimo, & Reverendissimo Monsign, Decano della Rever. Camera Apostolica, 1638 alli 27 Febraro (Roma: Nella stamperia della reve. Cam. Apost. 1638). The revealing phrasing is “lapis Bezoar, tanto orientale, quanto occidentale” worth “b. 5 il gran.” By contrast, “spetie d’Aromatico, & tutte l’atre con Ambra, & moscho, & gallia” was worth “b. 24 dram.”

Chapter 2 • Bezoar 77 Tavola de’ Prezzi Constitivi, alli Medicinali, e Robbe di Speziarie fuori di Roma, e suo Distretto, Dal Protomedico e Suoi Consiglieri, Avanti l’Eminentissimo, e Reverendissimo Signor Cardinale Annibale albani Camerlegno di S. Chiesa (Roma: Nella Stamparia della Reverenda Camera Apostolica, 1745). 78 On the iguana stone, Pardo-Tomás, “Bezoar,” 195–200. On the Salvador Cabinet, see José Pardo-Tomás, Salvadoriana: el gabinet de curiositats de Barcelona; The Cabinet of Curiosities of Barcelona (Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2004) and Julianna Morcelli Oliveros, From the New World to Barcelona: American Flora in the Salvador’s Cabinet. Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar (PhD Dissertation, 2018 «Cultura, Espaço e Memória»). 79 Francesco Pona, L’Amalthea Overa della Pietra Bezoar Orientale, Dialogo Primo (Venice, 1626), 37. 80 Luis Martin, The Intellectual Conquest of Peru: The Jesuit College of San Pablo, 1568–1767 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1968), “Medicine at San Pablo,” 100–101, Fn8. Cited in Stephenson, “From Marvelous Antidote,” 21. 81 Beate Fricke, “Making Marvels—Faking Matter: Mediating Virtus between the Bezoar and Goa Stones and Their Containers,” in The Nomadic Object: The Challenge of World for Early Modern Religious Art, ed. Christine Göttler and Mia Mochizuki (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 342–69. 82 Bernabé Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo por el Padre Bernabé Cobo de la Compañía de Jesús, 1653, A 331/102 Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla. On testing bezoar stones, Linda Newson, Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru: Apothecaries, Science and Society (Boston: Brill, 2017), 165. 83 This account comes from c. 1635, just before the Dutch conquered Malacca in 1641. W. George Maxwell, “Barretto de Resende’s Account of Malacca,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 60 (December 1911): 1–24, esp. 9. 84 Borschberg, “The Euro-Asian Trade in Bezoar Stones (Approx. 1500 to 1700),” 32fn10–11. 85 A.R. Disney, A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Vol. 1: From Beginnings to 1807 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 143–218. 86 Georg Marcgrave and Joannes de Laet’s, Historia naturalis brasiliae (Lugdun Batavorum: Apud Franciscum Hakium; et Amestelodami: Apud Lud. Elzevirium, 1648), 243–44. 87 Carolus Linneaus, Systema Naturae (Holmiae: Impensis Direct. Laurentii Salvii, 1758). “Bezoarticus. 6. C.cornibus ramosis teretibus erectis: rabis tribus. Mazama. Hern. mex. 324. Caguacu—&c. Marcgr. Bras. 235. Fis. Bras. 98. Rai quadr. 90. Habitat in America australi.” 88 “bezoar, n.s.,” A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, 1755, https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/bezoar_ns (accessed July 31, 2022). 89 See Benjamin Breen, Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 121. 90 Philippe Etiènne La Fosse, Guida del Maniscalco (In Pinerolo: Nella Stamperia di Pejras et Scotto, 1781), 149.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Acosta, José de. Historia natural y moral de las Indias. Madrid: Ramón Anglés, 1894. Acosta, José de. Historia natural y moral de las Indias en que se tartan las cosas notables del cielo, y elementos, metals, plantas, y animals dellas: y lost ritos, y ceremonias, leyes, y govierno, y guerras de las Indios. Compuesta por el padre Joseph de Acosta. Sevilla: Iuan de Leon, 1590. Acosta, José de. Natural and Moral History of the Indies. Edited by Jane E. Mangan and translated by Frances López-Morillas. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Al-Biruni, Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad. Al-Beruni’s Book on Mineralogy: The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones. Edited and translated by Hakim Mohammad Said. Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989.

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Al-Biruni, Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad. The Book Most Comprehensive in Knowledge on Precious Stones. Translated by Hakim Mohammad Said. Islamabad: Pakistan Hijra Council, 1989. Alves, Jorge Manuel dos Santos. “A pedra-bezoar. Realidade e mito em torno de um antídoto (séc. XVI e SVII).” In Mirabilia Asiatica. Produtos raros no comercio marítimo/Produits Rares Dans Le Commerce Maritime/ Seltene Waren Im Seehandel (Maritime Asia) (French, German and Portuguese Edition), edited by Jorge Manuel dos Santos Alves, Claude Guillot, and Roderich Ptak, 121–34. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlat & Fundação Oriente, 2003. Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 121, Part 5, Fol. 821, 1580 (bia.medici.org—MapDocID#4284). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 831, Folio 770, Niccolò Listi (Firenze), Belisario di Francesco Vinta (Toscana), February 29, 1592. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#14652). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 1212, Insert 3, Folio 468, Luigi Dovara (Setubal), Antonio Serguidi (Firenze), April 23, 1582. (bia.medici.org—MAP DocID#4254). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 1234a, Insert: 4, Matteo Forestani (Livorno), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), May 6, 1587. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#15202). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 2952, Ferdinando I Gonzaga (Mantova), Ferdinando II de’Medici (Firenze), September 3, 1621. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#5675). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 2955, Insert: 10, Ferdinando I Gonzaga (Mantova), Cosimo II de’Medici (Toscana), January 29, 1621. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#5143). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 4026 Fol. 4, from Rome to Florence, January 19, 1572. (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#26111). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 4027a, Insert: 3, Folio 168, Rome, Firenze, 1649. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#19591). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 4919, Folio 111, Giulio Battaglini (Madrid), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Firenze), February 6, 1588. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#8276). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 4947, Folio 459, Zamora, unidentifed, April 1619. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#2921). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 4957, Andrea di Giovanni Battista Cioli (Firenze), Averardo di Raffaello de’Medici di Castellina (Madrid), October 26, 1629. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#12030). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 5046, Folio 221. From Bongianni di Piero Gianfgliazzi (Madrid) to Francesco I de’Medici (Firenze), October 2, 1586. (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#14789). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 5113, Insert: 1, Folio 339, Augusto (da Castiglione) Tizio (Sevilla), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), January 13, 1585. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#15651). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 5113, Insert: 1, Folio 399, Giulio Battaglini (Zaragoza), Pietro di Francesco Usimbardi (Roma), April 24, 1585. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#15637). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 5113, Insert: 2, Folio 749, Giulio Battaglini (Madrid), Pietro di

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Francesco Usimbardi (Firenze), November 30, 1586. (bia.medici. org—MAPDocID#15845). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 5154, Folio 173, Giovanni di Cosimo I de’Medici (Livorno), Ferdinando I de’Medici (Pisa), March 17, 1592. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#8483). Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo del Principato (ASF MdP). 6107, Folio 731, Caterina di Ferdinando I de Medici-Gonzaga (Siena), Maria Magdalena von Habsburg-de’ Medici (Firenze), September 8, 1628. (bia.medici.org—MAPDocID#6151). Barroso, Maria do Sameiro. “Bezoar Stones, Magic, Science, and Art.” Geological Society London Special Publications 375, no. 1 (2013): 195–207. Barroso, Maria do Samerio. “The Bezoar Stone: A Princely Antidote, The Távora Sequeira Pinto Collection—Oporto.” Izcorni znanstveni članāk, Acta med-hist Adriat 12, no. 1 (2014): 77–98. Bauhun, Caspar. De lapidis bezaar orient et occident. Basilae: Apud Conr. Waldkirch, 1613. “bezoar, n.s.” A Dictionary of the English Language, by Samuel Johnson, 1755. https://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/1755/bezoar_ns (accessed July 31, 2022). “bezoar, n.s.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2022. https:// www-oed-com.ez.hamilton.edu/view/Entry/18525?redirectedFro m=bezoar (accessed August 6, 2022). Bleichmar, Daniela. “Amerindian Knowledge in the Atlantic World.” In Translating Nature: Cross-Cultural Histories of Early Modern Science, edited by Jaime Marroquín Arredondo and Ralph Bauer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Borschberg, Peter. “The Euro-Asian Trade in Bezoar Stones (Approx. 1500 to 1700).” In Artistic and Cultural Exchanges Between Europe and Asia, 1400– 1900, edited by Michael North, 29–43. New York: Routledge, 2016. Boumediene, Samir. La Colonisation du Savoir: Une histoire des plantes médicinales du “Nouveau Monde” (1492–1750). Vaulx-en-Velin (Rhône): Les Éditiones des mondes à faire, 2016. Breen, Benjamin. Age of Intoxication: Origins of the Global Drug Trade. Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Brosseder, Claudia. The Power of Huacas: Change and Resistance in the Andean World of Colonial Peru. Austin: The University of Texas Press, 2014. Bustamente Garcia, Jesus. “Un Libro, Tres Modelos, y el Atlántico: Los Datos de una historia: los antecedentes y el proyecto.” In Il tesoro messicano: libri e saperi tra Europa e Nuovo mondo, edited by Maria Eugenia Cadeddu and Marco Guardo. Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2013. Calancha, Antonio de la. Coronica Moralizada. Barcelona: Por Pedro Lacavalleria, 1638. Cobo, Bernabé. Historia del Nuevo Mundo por el Padre Bernabé Cobo de la Compañía de Jesús. 1653. Biblioteca de la Universidad de Sevilla. A 331/102. Columbre, Agostino. Incomincia il libro de Maistro Augustino Columbre Maneschalco de Sancto Severo. Venezia, Stampata per Gulielmo de Fontancto de Monserra ad instantia de Hieronymo Gilberti da Padoa e Zuane Bresano compagni, 1518. Cooley, Mackenzie. “The Giant Remains: Mesoamerican Medicine, Extinction, and Cycles of Empire.” Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society 112, no. 1 (2021): 45–67. Cooley, Mackenzie. The Perfection of Nature: Animals, Breeding, and Race in the Renaissance. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2022. Da Orta, Garcia. Colloquios dos simples e drogas e cousas medicinaes da India. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1872.

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Da Orta, Garcia. Colóquios dos simples e drogas da India. Goa: Ioannes de Endem, 1563. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 1998. De Vos, Paula. “Methodological Challenges Involved in Compiling the Nahua Pharmacopeia.” Journal of the History of Science 55, no. 2 (2017): 210–33. De Vos, Paula. Compound Remedies: Galenic Pharmacy from the Ancient Mediterranean to New Spain. Pittsburgh: The University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020. Disney, A. R. A History of Portugal and the Portuguese Empire, Vol. 1: From Beginnings to 1807. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Elgood, Cyril. Medical History of Persia and the Eastern Caliphate. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951. Emmart, Emily Walcott and Henry E. Sigerist. The Badianus Manuscript: (Codex Barberini, Latin 241), Vatican Library: An Aztec Herbal of 1552. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1940. Eng, Katharine and Marsha Kay. “Gastrointestinal Bezoars: History and Current Treatment Paradigms.” Gastroenterology & Hepatology 8, no. 11 (2012): 776–8. Freedman, Paul. Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. Gade, Daniel W. “Llamas and Alpacas as ‘Sheep’ in the Colonial Andes: Zoogeography Meets Eurocentrism.” Journal of Latin American Geography 12, no. 2 (2013): 221–43. Gode, P. K. “History of Ambergris in India between about AD 700 and 1900.” Chymia 2 (1949): 51–56. Haag, Sabine, ed. Echt tierisch!: Die Menagerie des Fürsten. Exhibition Catalogue. Innsbruck: Schloss Ambras. Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, 2015. Harkness, Deborah. All Souls Trilogy, Volume 2: Shadow of Night. New York: Penguin Books, 2012. Hassig, Debra. “Transplanted Medicine: Colonial Medical Herbals of the Sixteenth Century.” Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 17–18 (1989): 30–53. Hernández, Francisco. The Mexican Treasury: The Writings of Dr. Francisco Hernández. Edited by Simon Vary and translated by Rafael Chabrán, Cynthia L. Chamberlin, and Simon Varey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002. Hernández, Francisco. Obras completas de Francisco Hernández. México: Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México, 1960. Hinojo Andrés, Gregorio. “Infuencias clásicas en el Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis.” In Humanismo y pervivencia del mundo clásico. V. homenaje al profesor Juan Gil, edited by José Ma Maestre, et al. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 2015. Jordan Gschwend, Annemarie. Hans Khevenhuller at the Court of Philip II of Spain: Diplomacy and Consumerism in a Global Empire. London: Paul Hoberton Publishing Ltd, 2022. La Fosse, Philippe Etiènne. Guida del Maniscalco. In Pinerolo: Nella Stamperia di Pejras et Scotto, 1781. Laird, Andrew. “Nahua Latinists: Classical Learning and Indigenous Legacies in Sixteenth-Century Mexico.” In Brill’s Companion to Classics in the Early Americas, edited by Matthew Duquès, Maya Feile Tomes, and Adam Goldwyn, 209–41. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021. Laird, Andrew. “Nahuas and Caesars: Classical Learning and Bilingualism in Post-Conquest Mexico; An Inventory of Latin Writings by

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Authors of the Native Nobility.” Classical Philology 109, no. 2 (2014): 150–69. https://doi.org/10.1086/675699. Linneaus, Carolus. Systema Naturae. Holmiae: Impensis Direct. Laurentii Salvii, 1758. Maimonides, Moses. Treatise on Poisons and Their Antidotes. Edited by Suessman Muntner. Philadelphia and Montreal: J. B. Lippincott Company, 1966. Maxwell, George. “Barretto de Resende’s Account of Malacca.” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, no. 60 (December 1911): 1–24. Millones Figueroa, Luis. “The Bezoar Stone: A Natural Wonder in the New World.” Hispanófla, no. 171 (Junio 2014): 139–56. Monardes, Nicolás. Joyfull Newes Out of the New-Found Worlde. Translated by John Frampton. London: William Norton, 1580. Monardes, Nicolás. Joyfull Newes Out of the New-Found Worlde. Wherein Are Declared, the Rare and Singuler Vertues of Divers Herbs, Trees, Plantes, Oyles and Stones, with Their Applications, as Well to the Use of Phisicke, as of Chirurgery . . . Also the Portrature of the Said Hearbs. Translated by John Frampton. London: E Allde, 1596. Morcelli Oliveros, Julianna. “From the New World to Barcelona: American Flora in the Salvador’s Cabinet.” PhD dissertation, Centro de Investigação Transdisciplinar “Cultura, Espaço e Memória,” 2018. Moscardo, Lodovico. Note, overo, Memorie del museo di Lodovico Moscardo nobile veronese. Padova: Per Paolo Frambotto, 1656. Newson, Linda. Making Medicines in Early Colonial Lima, Peru: Apothecaries, Science and Society. Boston: Brill, 2017. Norton, Marcy. “Going to the Birds: Animals as Things and Beings in Early Modernity.” In Early Modern Things, edited by Paula Findlen. New York: Routledge, 2012. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv (SA), Vienna, Austria Haus-, Hof- un Staatsarchiv, Habsburgisch-Lothringisches Hausarchiv Familenkorrespondenz A. Karton I, fol 216v-217r. Letter from the Portuguese Factor Ruy Mendes to Emperor Ferdinand I, Antwerp, January 29, 1564. Pardo-Tomás, José. “Bezoar.” In New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities, edited by Mark Thurner and Juan Pimentel, 195–200. London: University of London Press, Institute of Latin American Studies, 2021. Pardo-Tomás, José. “East Indies, West Indies: Garcia de Orta and the Spanish Treatises on Exotic Materia Medica.” In Medicine, Trade, and Empire: Garcia de Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India in Context, edited by Palmira Fontes da Costa, 195–212. The History of Medicine in Context. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Pardo-Tomás, José. El Tesoro natural de América: Oviedo, Monardes, Hernández: colonialismo y ciencia en el siglo XVI. Madrid: Nivola, 2002. Pardo-Tomás, José. Salvadoriana: el gabinet de curiositats de Barcelona; The Cabinet of Curiosities of Barcelona. Barcelona: Ajuntament de Barcelona, 2004. Parr, Bartholomew. The London Medical Dictionary. Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames, and White, 1819. Pérez de Tudela, Almudena and Annemarie Jordan Gschwend. “Luxury Goods for Royal Collectors: Exotica, Princely Gifts, and Rare Animals Exchanged Between the Iberian Courts and Central Europe in the Renaissance (1560–1612).” In Exotica: Portugals Entdeckungen Im Spiegel Fürstlicher Kunst- Und Wunderkammern Der Renaissance. Vol. 3, Jahrbuch des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien, edited by Helmut Trnek and Sabine Haag, 24–127. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2001. Appendix A and B.

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Pimentel, Juan and Isabel Soler. “Painting Naked Truth: The Colóquios of Garcia da Orta (1563).” Journal of Early Modern History 18, no. 102 (2014): 101–20. Primerose, James. Popular Errours: Or the Errours of the People in Physick, First Written in Latine by the Learned Physitian James Primrose Doctor in Physick. Translated by Robert Wittie. London: Printed by W. Wilson for Nicholas Bourne, at the south-entrance of the Royall Exchange, 1651. Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. General History of the Things of New Spain: The Florentine Codex. MS Med. Palat. 220, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence. Santos Alves, Jorge Manuel dos. “A pedra-bezoar. Realidade e mito em torno de um antídoto (séc. XVI e SVII).” In Mirabilia Asiatica. Produtos raros no comercio marítimo, edited by Jorge Manuel dos Santos Alves, Claude Guillot, and Roderich Ptak, 121–34. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz: Lisboa: Fundaçāo Oriente, 2003. Slevogt, Johann Adrian. Praelusio inauguralis de lapide bezoar. Jenae: Litteris Krebsianis, 1698. Stanley, Helen F. et al. “Molecular Evolution of the Family Camelidae: A Mitochondrial DNA Study.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 256, no. 1345 (April 22, 1994): 1–6. Stephenson, Marcia. “From Marvelous Antidote to the Poison of Idolatry: The Transatlantic Role of Andean Bezoar Stones during the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries.” Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 1 (2010): 3–39. Teixeira, Pedro. Relaciones de Pedro Teixeira del origen descendencia y succession dè los Reyes de Persia, y de Harmuz. Amberes: En casa de Hieronymo Verdussen, 1610. “tlah-cal-huaz-tzin.” Alexis Wimmer. Dictionnaire de nahuatl classique, 2004. www.ifrance.com/nahuatl/ Townsend, Camilla. Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Wheeler, Jane C. et al. “A Measure of Loss: Prehispanic Llama and Alpaca Breeds.” Archivos de Zootecnia 41, no. 154 (1992): 467–75.

Chapter 3

Canal Cross-Cultural Encounters and the Control of Water Alexander Statman

“Canals created early modern ecologies of cross-cultural knowledge. They were plainly ecological in that they related living organisms—natural things like grain and water—to their physical surroundings, especially mountains and rivers. But they also maintained an ecology of knowledge, relating society to nature.” Page 102

VISUALIZATION 3 Photograph of canals: Écluses de Rogny (Canal de Briare). Embouchure du canal du Midi (1895). Bibliothèque nationale de France, PH391P. Straight lines: ‘Canal de Briaire— Schéma de la chaîne d’écluses au bief de partage,’ by MOSSOT. Curved lines: hand drawn by designer. Map: Xingshui jinjian 行水金鍵, Stanford University Libraries. Boats and people: William Alexander, The costume of China: Illustrated in forty-eight colored engravings (1805). This visual experiment depicts the Grand Canal and the Canal du Midi fowing together around rice paddy irrigation. If canals allow water to move naturally, they are still a product of human labor. A canal is a deeply unnatural thing designed to function like a natural one.

Abstract: Historians have traced roots of Enlightenment environmentalism to the encounter with supposedly conservationist approaches to nature in Asia; this chapter excavates the cross-cultural exchange of knowledge about canals during the eighteenth century in order to explore a competing vision in which nature was to be remade for human ends. Built in Europe and throughout the Indo-Pacifc world, canals are constructed natural things whose purpose is to manage, control, and direct other natural things. Canals put both natural things and knowledge about them in motion. The French traveler Pierre Poivre admired the irrigation techniques that watered the Mekong Delta, while the statesman Henri Bertin took China’s Grand Canal as a model for French transportation engineering. Their advocacy of an interventionist approach to the natural environment resulted from encounters with Asian contemporaries, including the Sino-Vietnamese prince Mạc Thiên Tứ and the Chinese priest Aloys Kô, as well as efforts to understand their natural knowledge. The Enlightenment discovered not only natural utopias in Asia, but also others that were man-made.

A signature aim of the Enlightenment was to transform nature for human ends. From the 1750s through the French Revolution, this ambition was particularly associated with the school of statesmen and philosophers known frst as the economists and later as the physiocrats. Their core belief was that all wealth came ultimately from the land, and that administrative policy could be reformed so as to increase it.1 If historians have loosely translated physiocracy as “Nature’s Government,” then nature for the physiocrats had two somewhat different senses: frst, there was the nature that was the true source of all economic value, and second, there was the nature that demanded a human response in the form of political organization.2 This was evident already in the title of Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours’ 1768 publication that gave the school its name, Physiocratie, or, natural constitution of the government most advantageous to the human species. For the physiocrats, there was no unbridgeable chasm between nature and society; the ideal society was, in fact, precisely that which was constructed according to the principles of nature. Put another way, physiocracy was both a theory and a praxis of natural things. Environmental historians have aptly interpreted the work of the physiocrats as developing new approaches to the management and conservation of resources DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-6

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in a particularly global context. They have traced both the global setting in which physiocratic ideas and policies took form, as well as the global sources of the plants, animals, and peoples that informed them. The ideas of physiocracy informed the state science pursued at the Jardin du roi in Paris and Kew Gardens in London and inspired colonial projects in the French Mascarene Islands and in British India. Evident in these well-studied examples is physiocrats’ interest in the practical techniques, embodied knowledge, and material culture—that is, the control, interpretation, and exchange of natural things—of the world beyond Europe. Going a step further, there has often been an implicit assumption that Asian knowledge about natural things, too, contributed to physiocratic-infected environmental thought. However, concrete examples of actual conversations between specifc European and non-Western thinkers or cross-cultural exchanges of particular ideas during the eighteenth century have remained largely obscure and generally diffcult to recover.3 The one exception has been knowledge from China. Indeed, the general importance of China for the physiocrats is well documented and has been known for quite some time. As Alexis de Tocqueville remarked: “I do not exaggerate when I affrm that every one of them wrote in some place or another an emphatic eulogium on China.”4 To give only two of the most evocative examples, François Quesnay, the doyen of the physiocrat school, was sometimes called “the Confucius of the West,” and both the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II and the future King Louis XVI ploughed their felds in ceremonies directly modeled after the grain sacrifce performed by the Qianlong emperor.5 Chinese knowledge has even been put forward as a possible source of inspiration for one of the most consequential components of eighteenth-century economic thought: the doctrine of laissez-faire (a term which, though it did not originate with the physiocrats, has often been associated with them). But an explanation of the origins of laissez-faire by reference to the Daoist doctrine of wu wei, literally “nonaction”—which seems, in theory, to be coherent with some sort of conservationist or environmentalist attitude—has been thoroughly discredited.6 The upshot is that while it remains clear that Asian approaches to nature informed Enlightenment environmentalism, it is now quite unclear exactly which approaches to nature those were. Fortunately, historians of Europe who want to know more about the global ideas that eighteenth century fgures actually encountered can draw upon new research on the environmental history of China. When, in a classic article published in 2010, an eminent historian raised the question, “Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature?” the answer, he suggested, was “no.”7 This should be no more surprising than the observation that there is no Western view of technology and nature, either. But as we narrow the feld of analysis within the specifc setting of late imperial China, various sets of answers to environmental questions do seem to emerge. For example, Confucian scholars privileged the environmental oversight of the imperial state, perhaps best exemplifed by the engineeroffcials who maintained the Grand Canal.8 Meanwhile, yin-yang masters focused on local environmental conditions, which would ensure harmonious relationships between society and the living land.9 Different environmental ideologies suited different social, political, and intellectual projects. Eschewing the implied oppositions of terms such as “Confucianism” and “Daoism” should not, however, be taken to imply that Chinese thinkers always agreed among themselves about environmental issues; it simply means that greater purchase on Chinese approaches to nature can often be found in the views of particular people or groups who found themselves dealing with specifc environmental problems.

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In the eighteenth century, one natural thing that directly linked French physiocratic and Chinese approaches to the natural environment was the canal. Some contemporary environmental critics have sought to problematize the conceptualization of rivers as “most of all a natural thing” by “presenting the river as a product of human intention rather than nature.”10 In early modern Europe, rivers were generally not seen in this way but canals, on the other hand, most certainly were. Built in Europe and throughout the Indo-Pacifc world, canals are constructed natural things whose purpose is to manage, control, and direct other natural things. Canals moved water to crops, and they brought crops to people— they put both natural things and knowledge about them in motion. Many chapters in this volume attest to the early modern ambition toward “possessing nature,” or bringing natural things together; to the contrary, canals were built most often in order to spread natural things around. Instead of searching for natural things, those who built canals aimed to create them. Furthermore, as fundamentally constructed natural things, canals were also a subject of genuine cross-cultural conversation and exchange in the realm of ideas. The very existence of a canal presupposes a great deal of knowledge, not least being the knowledge of how to build one. While canals themselves did not generally move, theories and techniques of hydraulic engineering required to build them in fact did. Canals transformed both the nature studies of the early modern world, and the ecologies of knowledge that put them into place. In this chapter, I revisit the question of Enlightenment engagement with Asian approaches to nature by excavating two connected stories about the exchange of knowledge pertaining to the control and manipulation of water—two stories about cross-cultural canals. Both involve conversations between French and Chinese fgures, at home and abroad, about the extent to which nature could or should be remade for human ends. First, I follow the traveler Pierre Poivre to the Mekong River Delta, where he admired a thriving city-state established by the Sino-Vietnamese prince Mạc Thiên Tứ on a marsh in the margins of the Chinese world and then back to France, where he contributed to the agricultural and economic program of the physiocrats. Second, I follow the Chinese Catholic priest, Aloys Kô, frst to France, where he observed the famous Canal de Briare under the patronage of a physiocrat sympathizer, Controller-General of Finances Henri-Léonard Bertin, and then back to Beijing, where he contributed to the translation of a Chinese hydrological treatise that eventually re-entered European conversations. Both of these connected stories locate specifc Chinese and European exchanges, showing how crossculture canals functioned in the Enlightenment world. Natural knowledge and technological expertise fowed in both directions, and it was through such exchanges that Enlightenment environmentalism emerged. ’ PIERRE POIVRE, MA ∙ C THIÊN TÚ , AND INDO-PACIFIC IRRIGATION

At the center of recent efforts to globalize the history of Enlightenment environmentalism sits the French traveler, administrator, and social and economic theorist Pierre Poivre (1719–1786). Though arguably not a core member of the physiocrat group, Poivre maintained personal and intellectual connections with its leaders, including Quesnay and Anne Robert Jacques Turgot. Eventually, he was inducted into their hall of fame by their publicist, Samuel du Pont de Nemours, who edited Poivre’s writings not long after his death in 1786. Since then, historians have been particularly interested in the time that Poivre spent as Intendant, or civil

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governor, of the French possessions of Isle de France and Isle Bourbon, now Mauritius and Réunion, off the eastern coast of Madagascar.11 During this brief period, between 1767 and 1772, Poivre displayed remarkable reformist zeal characterized by his administrative concern for natural things, instituting a broad policy of forestry conservation in order to maintain lumber resources and prevent soil erosion.12 Meanwhile, he also commissioned naval expeditions to the Dutch East Indies to steal spice plants, particularly cloves and nutmeg, with the intention of transplanting them on Isle de France.13 These environmental policies were successful to varying degrees, and they also set a model for other imperial administrators throughout the French and British empires. The conception and implementation of both forestry conservation and spice transplantation have been explained in part by Poivre’s exposure to Asian, including Chinese, Indian, Malay, and even Zoroastrian knowledge traditions. Richard Grove asserts that Poivre “was able to acquire a working knowledge of Chinese and consequently an unrivaled familiarity with Chinese writings on natural history, forestry, and agriculture.”14 Similarly, Dorit Brixius argues that Malay plant taxonomy, which distinguished between male and female specimens, was incorporated into colonial horticultural practices, resulting in the creolization of knowledge on Isle de France.15 But as true examples of the deployment or even the mere appreciation of non-Western knowledge, neither case is at all straightforward. For example, in the former, a book on Chinese gardens once attributed to Poivre now appears to have in fact been written by someone else. The signifcance of Malay terminology for the transplantation of nutmeg sits on far frmer evidentiary ground, but here, a major takeaway is that several key insights of Southeast Asian horticulture were lost or forgotten in the process.16 Knowledge that was not exchanged was as important as knowledge that was. Even so, we do have evidence attesting to Poivre’s direct and meaningful engagement with Asian knowledge of nature, and it comes from a remote corner of what is now Vietnam. During the 1740s and 1750s, before taking up his appointment on Isle de France, Poivre traveled widely throughout the Indo-Pacifc world. His journeys took him to Macao and Canton, Hué and Batavia, Pondicherry and Port Louis, as far as Mindanao, with several brief return visits to France in between. Refecting back on these formative experiences, Poivre explicitly recalled setting out from France as a young man “with the intention of going to China to learn the language of the country there.” This was to be the frst step toward two further stated goals: frst, to take vows as a missionary, and second, “to conduct research there on the productions of nature and the industry of the inhabitants.”17 Within a few years of his arrival in Asia, Poivre had given up on the frst ambition, but the second would remain with him for the rest of his life.18 Poivre never penetrated the Qing empire beyond the foreign merchant enclave at Canton, but he encountered many Chinese people almost everywhere else that he went. By the time of his arrival in Southern China in 1750, there were overseas Chinese communities throughout the China Sea region, as far East as Manilla and as far West as the Kingdom of Siam, many of them more than a century old and thriving. Some of these settlements were small merchant enclaves in European exclaves; others were full settler colonies in their own right.19 It was one such place, a node in the network of the Chinese diaspora that seems to have made the greatest impression of all upon Poivre. He described this place, along with the rest of his travels, in his most infuential published work, Voyages of a philosopher, or observations on the moeurs and the arts of the peoples of Africa, Asia, and America. First printed anonymously in 1768, just after he set out for Isle de

Chapter 3 • Canal

France, the book saw an English translation the very next year and four more French editions by the end of the eighteenth century.20 In a section of Voyages of a philosopher entitled “Power of agriculture: Origin of the Kingdom of Ponthiamas,” Poivre extolled a man-made paradise, tucked away in a wild corner of the Indochinese Peninsula. According to Poivre, it had been founded only 50 years earlier, when a Chinese merchant by the name of Kiang-tse “observed with sorrow the immense lands condemned to sterility” and “formed the project of making them valuable.” The merchant, having spent time in the Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, “took from the Europeans the best that they have” in establishing a new polity for which he “proposed only those laws which nature gave to men.” He distributed land freely to anyone willing to work it; “soon the forests were intelligently felled, the lands were open and seeded with rice, canals taken from streams inundated the felds, and abundant harvests furnished the cultivators.” This success was due in part to the wonders of Southeast Asian rice agriculture—which Poivre promised to describe later—but more importantly to the wise policies of Kiang-tse, especially the abolition of tax duties and land privileges. In sum, Ponthiamas was a place where nature was thus controlled, but society was set free. Having been established on the right track, it continued to thrive under the founder’s son, whom Poivre believed to be still regnant in his own day.21 This Sino-Western utopia in Southeast Asia was in fact based upon reality. Ponthiamas referred to a polity now known as Hà Tiên in what is today Vietnam. It had only ever before been described in the briefest terms in any European publication, suggesting that Poivre must have learned about it frst or second hand on the ground.22 The city-state, established towards the end of the seventeenth century, lay on the edge of the Mekong River Delta. Its founder was a Cantonese merchant named Mok Gau (1655– 1736), or Mạc Cửu in Vietnamese (it is a mystery where Poivre came by the name “Kiang-tse,” which would probably be jiangzi in today’s standard Chinese romanization).23 And, in contrast to Poivre’s Edenic description, it had emerged in a landscape of great political turmoil that had begun many thousands of miles away. In 1644, the Manchus had conquered Beijing. Though this marked the beginning of Qing rule over China proper, control in the south remained weak. Mok, a native of the far southern province of Guangdong, was a Ming loyalist. When a rebellion fnally broke out, rather than fght, he chose to fee. Traveling during the 1670s, he may have seen the European ports of Southeast Asia, as claimed by Poivre, but evidence is scant. All we know for sure is that by the early 1680s, he was living in Cambodia. There, he obtained permission to establish a settlement along the border with Vietnam, near or at a place called, in Khmer, Banteay Meas—probably the origin of Poivre’s name, Ponthiamas. He chose the site for its location along a small tributary of the Mekong or perhaps an old Khmer canal. Local legend held that a spirit had once manifested over the river there. The settlement was thus called Hà Tiên, literally “river spirit,” the name by which it is usually referred to today.24 During the monsoon season, this strategic location allowed maritime access to the Cambodian capital at Phnom Penh, about a hundred miles upriver. Now the prince of a semi-independent city state, Mok negotiated the power politics of the region with varying degrees of success. During the 1710s, Hà Tiên became a vassal of the Annam state with its capital at Hué, whereupon it was sacked by a Siamese army that had declared rebellion against the Nguyễn lords who would unify Vietnam a hundred years later. Yet, somehow, the city survived or was at least re-founded not long after. Still under the leadership of its original founder, it fourished.25

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According to independent Chinese and Vietnamese records, by the early eighteenth-century, Hà Tiên was a thriving center of commerce and culture.26 Mok Gau was said to have rekindled the old Ming ways— bedecked in the dragon robes of a Chinese emperor, he established a Confucian temple and instituted public education, attracting Chinese settlers from nearby enclaves in Cambodia and Vietnam, and perhaps even as far as Java. In 1735, Mok Gau was succeeded by his son, Mạc Thiên Tứ. Though born well outside the bounds of the Qing empire to a Vietnamese mother, Mạc maintained a strong connection to Chinese culture and came to identify with the Ming loyalism of his father.27 In a kind of cultural exchange program, he corresponded with similarly disgruntled literati in the provinces of southern China, now frmly under Qing control. The result was a suite of poems in Classical Chinese, Ten Songs of Hà Tiên, composed by Mac and completed in 1737.28 The Ten Songs of Hà Tiên provides a rare Sino-Vietnamese perspective on the relationship between nature and society in the very same place, and indeed at around the same time as that expressed in the somewhat fancifully French account written by Poivre. Hà Tiên was located on the border of the vast water frontier, a swampy land that in the seventeenth century had only recently been populated and integrated into the trade networks linking East and Southeast Asia.29 Recent historians have emphasized the importance of water in traditional Vietnam—in fact, whether this refects Sinitic infuences beginning from the Han period or a longstanding indigenous tradition refecting the aquatic geography of the Vietnamese lowlands, is hotly debated.30 Either way, the ten short poems proclaimed how the recent settlers had civilized the land and made it into a center of overseas Chinese culture. Each one was dedicated to a natural feature of the surrounding environment, such as a lake, a stream, or a cape. Consider, for example, the poem “Clear Waves on South Bay”: A stretch of vastness, a stretch so pure Clarity extending to the mooring bay; familiar feeling! The heavenly river concludes its rain, radiant mists form; A watery region without any winds, where wave-froth is calm. Approaching dawn, fshing boats part waters hurriedly; Following the tide, passenger boats carry clouds so light. I, too, know that in the eight, fsh-dragons hide; Radiant moon, glittering waves, at ease, I understand.31 The poem drew on the ancient Chinese tradition of landscape poetry and specifc tropes from the Chinese classics, such as the goldfsh turning into a dragon. But in the particular case of the South Bay of Hà Tiên, the division between nature and society was elided.32 This was just one part of an argument made explicit in the preface to the suite: to wit, that when it came to the natural surroundings of Hà Tiên, “cultural transformation has added to their strength and beauty.”33 Mạc Thiên Tứ’s odes to the nature of Hà Tiên are mirrored in Poivre’s earliest descriptions of Ponthiamas, penned in 1749. This was only a decade after Mạc Thiên Tứ composed his poems. It seems that Poivre never went to Ponthiamas himself, having heard about it rather from a Vietnamese Christian mandarin with whom he spoke at Hué.34 But he certainly knew places like it, for Hà Tiên was part of an increasingly connected IndoPacifc world, and if its founding prince had spent time in Guangdong, the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and peninsular Southeast Asia, so indeed had Poivre himself. For both Poivre and Mạc—whose existence at least Poivre alluded to as the son of the founder—natural things should be tamed, controlled, and civilized. In particular, Poivre lauded in particular

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the agricultural policy established by the recent Chinese settlers. Likewise, Mac’s preface to his poems explained: “Hà Tiên town, Annam had since ancient times been considered a wild place. From the time that my late father developed it, some thirty years ago, the populace began to settle down and gradually mastered plant cultivation.”35 For both men, the proper administration of agriculture was key to the social and cultural transformation of nature. This idea—which Poivre believed to be fundamental to Asian approaches to natural things more generally—was also at the very heart of his physiocratic sinophilia. Poivre explained the agricultural techniques of Ponthiamas in more detail in the sections of Voyages of a Philosopher which pertained to Vietnam, India, and China.36 Wet-rice agriculture normally requires extensive irrigation, fooding the paddies to drown out other plants and allow the seedlings to take root. In Vietnam, Poivre explained, this was an easy task, since the land was covered from one end to the other with springs and streams, “which come naturally to inundate the lands, so long as their course is directed.”37 But along the Coromandel Coast of India, for example, where water was a rarer commodity, it was necessary to build elaborate machines to feed the felds with well water. In China, where water was plentiful but not unlimited, there were terraced rice paddies, “appearing from afar as immense pyramids divided into multiple levels, which seem to mount to the sky.” The techniques used to accomplish this feat of terraforming were no less important than the result: “what is amazing is to see the water from a stream, canal, or fountain fowing to the foot of the mountain elevated from terrace to terrace all the way to the summit by a portable chain of buckets, which two men alone transport and make to move.”38 Each of these three Indo-Pacifc places used a different technique to manage their water for agriculture, since society had to be organized to refect nature. But throughout, the natural environment was most beautiful when it was most radically transformed for human ends. This was the lesson Poivre took back with him from the Indo-Pacifc world. After ffteen years of nearly constant travel, Poivre returned to France in 1757 and established himself near his hometown of Lyon at the chateau of La Fréta, two miles outside the city overlooking the Saône river. The estate benefted from a natural spring that bubbled up at the top of the hill, delivering a high-pressured fow that powered impressive fountains and water works.39 The spring also fed the canals that sustained La Fréta’s garden, where Poivre performed horticultural experiments, often with Chinese plants. Although Poivre was not himself the translator of any book on Chinese gardens, he surely drew inspiration from them. Ten years later, he avowed that the only “Chinese manuscript” he had ever borrowed from a friend was a “translation of poems on gardens.”40 Canals could be treated in many different ways: just as coffee moved between military, medical, and diplomatic spheres of knowledge as it was brought between cultures, so did the canals of Southeast Asia fnd new treatments from the perspectives of French agriculture, administration, and engineering.41 This was the beginning of Poivre’s physiocrat period, a time when he promoted the growing link between Chinese expertise and French agriculture and industry. As Melchior Grimm, the great biographer of the French Enlightenment put it, Poivre was “a man who attaches, like our voyager, such a great price to agriculture must be enchanted with the government of China; M. Poivre has this in common with a great number of our best minds.”42 Already a corresponding member of the Académie royale des Sciences, he joined the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres

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et Arts of Lyon in 1759. His frst lecture there was about China: “there I found agriculture fourishing and perfected above that which I saw in the rest of the world, and there is nothing in this that should be surprising.” In his description of Canton, we can see again just how unnatural he preferred his natural things to be: “When I entered Canton, I saw there an innumerable people who covered the land and the river, an active people, gentle, polite, industrious, considerate in their works.”43 He also promised the society further studies “on the different branches of Chinese industry,” including the manufacture of silk and porcelain, some of which were purported to be translations of Chinese books. If Chinese nature studies had been deployed to create a utopian society at Ponthiamas, then why not in France, too? Unfortunately, the transcripts of these later lectures were lost.44 Their very existence, however, indicates a new ambition of the physiocrat program, then rising to the highest reaches of French society and government.

ALOYS KÔ, HENRI BERTIN, AND THE GRAND CANAL OF CHINA On July 26, 1752, two Chinese teenagers disembarked at a port in Brittany. Known usually by their Christian names, Aloys Kô and Etienne Yang, they had been raised by French Jesuit missionaries in Beijing and arrived in France, just as Poivre had arrived not long ago in China, with the intention of joining the priesthood.45 In 1759, they were admitted to a Jesuit novitiate in Paris, but with the Society of Jesus about to be expelled from France, they switched over to the Congregation of the Mission. In 1763, the Jesuit colleges were shut down, and Kô and Yang were fnally ordained priests by the Archbishop of Paris. Their original aim having been thus satisfed, they began making plans to return to China to begin their ministry there. At this point, just in time it seems, they caught the attention of thenController-General of Finances, Henri-Léonard Bertin. One of Louis XV’s most powerful ministers, Bertin believed that the Qing state could provide a model for Bourbon reform. As a student of Quesnay, he also believed that China had much to teach Europe about social and agricultural administration.46 Eager to promote Sino-French exchange, Bertin managed to delay Kô and Yang’s departure by about a year and took them under his wing. He brought them to Versailles, where they made a great impression on many notable contemporaries. In a later letter to Dupont de Nemours, Anne Robert Jacques Turgot claimed that they had inspired him to compose his 1766 masterwork, Refections on the formation and distribution of wealth “without plan and without other objective than to render intelligible the questions that I put to the Chinese on their country.”47 With such enthusiasm not uncommon, Bertin easily secured a royal pension for the two Chinese students to study French industries, particularly those with Chinese analogues, such as porcelain, silk, and printing. This exposure, he thought, would make them more acute observers and better informants for the French throne after they returned to China. Preparing fnally for their departure, Bertin decided that Kô and Yang should see a little of France beyond Paris to complete their education. In the summer of 1764, Kô and Yang thus set out on a kind of economic and industrial tour of one of France’s great centers of innovation— Lyon—where, during their month-long visit, their host was none other than Pierre Poivre.48 “You have done, my dear sir, a very good thing in sending us your two Chinese students,” he wrote to Bertin upon their arrival in early November.49 Their itinerary had been personally charted out by the powerful minister in a “Memoir on what the Chinese should

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see in France before returning to China,” and it was very much in Poivre’s own political interest to please Bertin and accommodate Kô and Yang. As such, he escorted them on a tour of local mills, dyers, and embroiderers. He also took them to the Jesuit library, where they admired a 32-volume Chinese edition and French manuscript translation of the Outline and Details of the Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government, which would become the most important source on Chinese history in any Western language when it was published about a decade later.50 Poivre then bid his visitors farewell, but it was not the last time he would hear from them. On their way back to Paris from Lyon, Kô and Yang had been specifcally instructed to observe the Briare Canal, which linked the Loire with the Seine.51 This summit-level canal, built to ease the shipment of grain within France and completed in 1642, was one of the frst to connect two of Europe’s major watersheds.52 Long-distance summit-level canals were the ne plus ultra of premodern hydraulic engineering. They presented two major challenges, both related to the fact that watersheds are by defnition separated by higher elevation. First, water cannot generally be made to fow uphill. Therefore, the Briare Canal had to be maintained artifcially by means of a separate reservoir constructed above the canal’s highest point. But the water cannot be allowed to simply fow down into the canal, either, because then the reservoir would quickly empty. So the Briare Canal was built like a stagnant water staircase, with discreet sections holding still water at constant elevation separated by steep drops. The second

Figure 3.1: Plan du canal de Briare, premier canal à point de partage qui ait existé . . . J. Cartault, 1852. BnF Gallica. Note the step-like elevation gain of the sections below.

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Figure 3.2: Écluses de Rogny (Canal de Briare). Embouchure du canal du Midi. 1895. Cote: PH391P. BnF Gallica. The most impressive locks on the Briare Canal. challenge is that boats cannot traverse rapids or waterfalls. Thus, to make the Briare Canal navigable between these sections, engineers made use of the pound lock: a small section of a canal at one end of a constant-elevation section forming a chamber that can be sealed off on both ends. Thus, for example, to travel upriver, a boat enters the chamber from downstream and a gate is shut behind it. The gate in front is then opened, allowing water from upstream to fow in. When the water level inside the chamber has risen to the higher level, the boat exits the chamber on the upstream end. The downstream gate can then be reopened, emptying the chamber and returning the lock to its original position. Now, although France was one center of early modern canal technology, canals were also a subject to which late imperial Chinese engineers paid particular attention.53 Many of the earliest Chinese records from the classical period already attested to extensive canalization, both for irrigation and for transportation purposes. Shen Kua even described the double-gate pound lock in his Dream Pool Essays of 986, predating the frst conclusive evidence of pound locks in Europe by several centuries.54 The Yuan period saw the completion of traditional China’s second great engineering feat, the Grand Canal—often called the “Imperial Canal” by early modern Europeans, and known simply as the Canal or Yunhe in Chinese— which effectively linked the Yangzi and Yellow River systems. This was arguably the frst fully realized artifcial summit canal built anywhere in the world.55 It linked the economically vital and agriculturally productive south with the militarily important and politically dominant north. In particular, just as the Briare Canal was used to transport grain from the Loire Valley to Paris, the Grand Canal was primarily maintained to facilitate the

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shipment of tribute grain from the Yangtze Delta to the capital at Beijing. Originally, the Grand Canal had also made use of pound locks, but as the size of tribute barges decreased, it became increasingly diffcult to haul them between canal sections, and the locks gradually fell into disrepair. Nevertheless, the canal itself was maintained, sometimes at great social and environmental cost, until tribute grain shipments were discontinued during the fnal days of the imperial system in 1909.56 The extraordinary waterworks of imperial China fascinated early European observers dating back all the way to Marco Polo.57 The most infuential account was probably that of the late seventeenth century Jesuit missionary, Louis le Comte. He described a vast canal system spreading all over the country, to the beneft of both transportation and irrigation alike, “such that this water so pure and abundant .  .  . makes not only the most fertile, but furthermore the most beautiful country of the world.” Like Poivre a few decades later, Le Comte had particularly noticed the extent to which the natural landscape of China was transformed, and he  admired its canals on precisely this account.58 He even saw value in the unusual and later much disparaged technique that had supplanted the pound lock for getting a boat between canal sections of differing elevation: attaching the boat to a rope and using a capstan to

Figure 3.3: “Manière de faire passer une barque d’un Canal dans un autre de diffèrent niveau.” Louis Le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état présent de la Chine, 1696.

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pull it up over a slipway.59 In 1735, the Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Halde’s Description of China, certainly the most cited work on China throughout the Enlightenment, heaped praise upon the Grand Canal, describing in addition how elevation changes between rivers were overcome not by reservoirs, but rather by diverting minor rivers to the feed the summit point.60 In sum, by 1764, it was well-known in France that China had knowledge of summit-level canals, and that these were maintained using various familiar technologies, which the missionaries translated as dikes, locks, slipways, and so on. The reason, then, for which Bertin had thought that Kô and Yang should be interested in the Briare Canal was that hydrological engineering was an area in which cross-cultural exchange was potentially promising, precisely because it was already of interest to both parties. In his instructions to them, he simply assumed that “the science of watershedcrossing canals with locks, this matter is very interesting to study for the Chinese.”61 On their way back from Lyon, Kô and Yang duly visited the canal and mailed a brief comment about it back to Bertin: In passing by Briare, we considered with care the locks of the canal. We found them hardly considerable in comparison with those we have passed through on the imperial canal. Leaving China, we had to pass through more than 30. They are more spacious and better constructed.62 It seems that Bertin had fgured wrong; in the eyes of his two Chinese students, French canals, for all their careful craftsmanship, simply could not compete with those of China in either quantity or quality. In a sense, given what we now know about the history of canals in China, it is hardly surprising that Kô and Yang were so unimpressed by the hydrological knowledge of Europe; but it is remarkable that through them, the canals of China became interesting to one of the most famous engineers in all of France. At this very moment, December of 1764, Jean-Randolphe Perronet had just been appointed as frst engineer of France; he would later go on to build one of Paris’ most iconic bridges, redesign the Burgundy Canal, and direct the École nationale des ponts et chaussées.63 He was already in communication with France’s greatest sinophile, Bertin, who earlier that year had charged him with evaluating various canal projects throughout the country.64 Just after Kô and Yang returned to Paris, Perronet wrote to them with his own list of questions to be addressed after their return to China. In this fascinating letter, he went right to the heart of the technological issue: “A great canal, such as the Imperial Canal of China, cannot be level throughout its extent: it must be divided into many parts, some of which are higher than others.”65 The question, then, was how this had been accomplished in China. Did there exist double-pound locks anywhere in the country? If not, how was the water level of canals maintained? With natural waters, or with artifcial reservoirs? How were boats moved over differing elevation? What kinds of dikes were used, and what machines had built them? Unfortunately, we do not know if Perronet ever received a reply from Kô and Yang to his letter.66 But what we do know is that French interest in Chinese canals was signifcant and sustained, and that it had the result of bringing more information on the topic into Enlightenment conversations. This was made possible by the cross-cultural canal—an ecology of knowledge—that was then opening up between China, France, and the Indo-Pacifc world. When Kô and Yang returned to China in 1765, they seem to have encountered great diffculty in re-acculturating to

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the land of their birth. They never managed to reintegrate into Beijing society outside the small community of French Jesuits in the North Church, but they did remain well-connected with their new physiocrat friends back in Paris.67 Facilitating the correspondence between them was, again, Pierre Poivre, who had left France two years later to assume his position as Intendant of Isle de France. This station in the western Indian Ocean was a usual port of call for the ships of the French Compagnie des Indes, aboard which correspondences between Paris and Beijing typically were carried. Thus, during the late 1760s and early 1770s, Poivre came to direct all kinds of natural things going in both directions: money, plant samples, art objects, and, not least, books, upon which he often commented.68 It was also through this cross-cultural canal that a complete, original edition of a Chinese work on canals arrived in France. The Xingshui jinjian, or Golden Mirror of the Flowing Waters had been composed by a Qing offcial, Fu Zehong, and published in 1725.69 It was essentially a compilation, taken from a wide variety of earlier sources, from dynastic histories to technical manuals, and thus constituted the most comprehensive treatment of China’s waterways to date.70 It was divided into sections, each focused on the history of their control: the Yellow River, the Huai, the Han and Yangzi, the Qi, and fnally, the Yunhe or the Grand Canal, inconspicuously treated alongside these other more natural things. The frst volume also included a collection of images depicting each, along with the

Figure 3.4: “Image of the High Weir” Gao yan tu高堰圖; depicting the weir built along the edge of Lake Hongze, the site where the Huai River meets the Yellow River. Fu Zehong, 傅澤洪, Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑.

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Figure 3.5: A section of the Grand Canal in Shandong province, showing fash locks (labeled zha閘), with additional channels fowing in front the mountains and out into the felds. Fu Zehong, 傅澤洪, Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑.

various channels, dikes, levies, and locks that formed the foundations of late Qing hydraulic engineering. Summing it all up at the end of the book, the author concluded: Mencius says, Yu the Great making the water fow means making it fow without incident. Making it fow without incident means not struggling with the water. Only the Yellow River and the Grand Canal are not like this, and the Grand Canal especially.71 Of course, these were China’s two most important waterways, so the comment could also be taken as a basic critique of Mencius. To beneft society, some waters had to be struggled with. About ten years later, a short section and précis of this book was also published in French. The translators were an ex-Jesuit missionary, Pierre Martial Cibot, and his collaborator—none other than Aloys Kô, now living in Beijing. Calling it by its Chinese name, Xingshui Jinjian, they cited the Golden Mirror of Flowing Waters primarily to make the point that hydraulic engineers had accomplished more in China than they had in Europe.72 By the second century CE, they explained, “all the great rivers were connected to each other by canals and were navigable almost everywhere.”73 The Grand Canal was constructed, modifed, and maintained during the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties. Finally, coming to the section on the present day, “it says expressly that ten thousand barges of rice ordinarily arrive, at the end of the summer, each year.” They concluded their discussion with a comment on the Grand Canal: It is probably unique in the world, especially in its intention to assure for centuries to come a detailed knowledge of the efforts

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and enterprises, the failures and successes, the accidents and contretemps, the new inventions and ancient practices, the expenses and works, & c., which compose our History of the conduct of water for more than two thousand eight hundred years. A translation, they maintained, would be invaluable “if one ever had a real taste, in Europe, for great objects that interest society.”74 Even if the Great Divergence was perhaps already underway for Cibot as for his North Church confrère Joseph de Grammont, who was then writing about the ingenuous use of coal in kang stoves, Chinese commercial and industrial techniques needed to be studied. Their lesson was the same one that Poivre had taken from his travels in Vietnam: that what Asia had to offer France was a model for the manipulation and control of nature. In the following decades, the call of Cibot and Kô was in fact taken up by various Western engineers. Many French, British, and American publications on canals from the period began by invoking the Chinese example.75 For example, the astronomer Jérôme Lalande, in his On Navigation Canals of 1778, declared that “China is the country of the world where there are the most canals, according to all the reports; since the most distant times, the Chinese were occupied with the conduct of canals, the distribution and communication of rivers.” To evidence this claim, Lalande carefully collected quotations on Chinese canals from all the principle sources, including Le Comte and Du Halde and concluded with a two-page quotation from the most recent—the extract of the Golden Mirror of Flowing Waters translated by Kô and Cibot.76 British publications of the late eighteenth century tended to be more cursory in their discussions, but few left any doubt that Chinese canals remained broadly admired.77 A few decades later, in the United States, the example of the Grand Canal animated debates about transforming the vast and undeveloped interior. The eventual result was the construction of the famed Eerie canal.78 Meanwhile, the correspondence between Kô and Yang, Bertin, and Poivre had continued. Kô and Yang wrote to Bertin regularly until their deaths decades later. After Poivre arrived at Isle de France in 1767, he, too, continued to communicate with Bertin about Chinese natural things, from squash seeds to Asian sheep. When Poivre returned to Lyon in 1773, his interest in Chinese natural things only increased. For example, he and Bertin discussed a specimen of Chinese cabbage using the Chinese name, bai cai, which Poivre had grown in his garden at La Fréta and gifted to Antoine Laurent de Jussieu at the Jardin des Plantes. There also exists in the archives of Institut de France a brief note suggesting that Bertin occasionally asked Poivre for help with Chinese translations. One particular passage that they were apparently discussing turned out to be from Mencius, the same author cited at the end of the Golden Mirror of Flowing Waters.79

CONCLUSION: FROM NATURE’S GOVERNMENT TO HYDRAULIC DESPOTISM What natural knowledge was exchanged through this series of Indo-Pacifc Enlightenment encounters? Among the positive answers are both specifc technologies for the control and direction of water through canals, and more general ideas about the relationship between human society and the natural landscape. But not all of these cross-cultural canals fowed equally strongly in all directions. For the duration of the eighteenth century, Europeans were more interested in Chinese natural technologies than the other way around. This was not, however, because of a more curious, open, or even scientifc worldview. It was simply that Asian agricultural practices

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were widely—and probably correctly—considered to feed more people with less land than European ones. Chinese travelers in France learned as much about European water conservation as French travelers in China did. They just concluded that it was retrograde by comparison. And this conclusion was not totally rejected by French observers, either. What is conspicuous, though, is that there were more instances of Europeans praising the value of non-Western nature studies than concrete examples of them knowingly putting it to use. Canals nevertheless created early modern ecologies of cross-cultural knowledge. They were plainly ecological in that they related living organisms—natural things like grain and water—to their physical surroundings, especially mountains and rivers. But they also maintained an ecology of knowledge, relating society to nature. In many parts of the early modern world, the relationship between nature and society was conceived in different ways than it was in Europe. The role of the bezoar in Peruvian religious practices spoke to religious and cosmological frameworks that struck Europeans as bizarre and confusing. But the canals of East and Southeast Asia did not. To the contrary, European observers found them perfectly understandable and familiar because they related nature and society in very familiar ways. That was exactly why canals could create cross-cultural channels through which knowledge about canals could also move. Throughout the Indo-Pacifc world, people put knowledge of water into cross-cultural conversation, but they only sometimes understood themselves as doing so. For example, what was the cultural identity of Mạc Thiên Tứ, whose father had left China as a young man, whose mother was Vietnamese, and who governed a principality that was functionally independent? What about Aloys Kô, who was born to Chinese parents, raised speaking French inside a self-governing church in Beijing, then spent most of his twenties living in France? The missionary Cibot, who collaborated with him on translating the Golden Mirror of Flowing Waters, referred to himself as Chinese; but the settlement that Poivre governed on the Isle de France was never considered anything other than French. The same questions might be asked of the knowledge such people produced. Canals for eighteenth-century engineers, like China root for physicians in India, pollen for nature studies in Aztec Mesoamerica, or armadillos for poets in Britain, suggest that not all knowledge is necessarily indigenous to any one place in particular. In light of this profusion of ideas and identities, perhaps it is more accurate to say that knowledge was not exchanged between cultures but produced at their points of intersections. What can be said with even more certainty is that divisions between cultures were far more porous in the eighteenth century than they would later appear. In the later story of the creation of those divisions, too, cross-cultural canals would play a surprising part. Already at the height of the French Enlightenment, Montesquieu was writing about the trope of “oriental despotism.” The autocratic structure of the late imperial Chinese state was indeed one of the things that the staunchly monarchist physiocrats admired most about it. But gradually, this became an ever-greater liability in the views of European social theorists, both of China in particular and of Asia more generally. In 1957, Karl Wittfogel published the infuential study, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, which argued that it was precisely the building of large-scale waterworks in “hydraulic civilizations” like China and India that required an extreme concentration of state power, and thus led to the formation of the eponymous oriental despotism.80 It is ironic that China’s extraordinary success in controlling nature on behalf of society through extensive irrigation and large-scale

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canals, so deeply admired and even emulated by the physiocrats of the Enlightenment, was exactly the thing that later social scientists would blame for blocking Asia along the road to modernity.

NOTES 1 For an introduction to the physiocrats, see Liana Vardi, The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 2 Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 70. 3 For an overview, see Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakirshnan, “Science, Environment and Empire History: Comparative Perspectives from Colonial India,”  Environment and History 14, no. 1 (2008): 41–65; On the physiocrats Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 168–473; Drayton, xi–128; On pre-eighteenth century exchange, Richard Grove, “Indigenous Knowledge and the Signifcance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature,” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 121–43. 4 Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the Revolution, trans. John Bonner (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856), 198. 5 The standard citation remains Lewis A. Maverick, “Chinese Infuences Upon the Physiocrats,” Economic History (1938): 54–67; see also Stefan Gaarsmand Jacobsen, “Physiocracy and the Chinese Model,” in Thoughts on Economic Development in China, ed. Ma Ying and Hans-Michael Trautwein (London: Routledge, 2013), 12–34. 6 Jacobsen, “Physiocracy and the Chinese Model,” 28–29. 7 Peter C. Perdue, “Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature,” The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, ed. Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010): 101–19. 8 Randall A. Dodgen, Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in the Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001). 9 Tristan G. Brown, “The Deeds of the Dead in the Courts of the Living: Graves in Qing Law,” Late Imperial China 39, no. 2 (2018). 10 Dilip da Cunha, The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 1. 11 Louis Malleret, Pierre Poivre (Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1974), 267–579. 12 Grove, Green Imperialism, 84–215. 13 Dorit Brixius, “A Hard Nut to Crack: Nutmeg Cultivation and the Application of Natural History between the Maluku Islands and Isle de France (1750s–1780s),” British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 4 (2018): 585–606. 14 Grove, Green Imperialism, 187. 15 Brixius, “A Hard Nut to Crack,” 599–605. 16 The book, Le Cityoen du monde; ou lettres d’un philosophe chinois à ses amis dans l’orient, was in fact a French translation of a satire by the Irish author Oliver Goldsmith modeled on Montesquieu’s Persian letters; although Poivre is listed as the translator in the catalog of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, it seems that his was an error. 17 Pierre Poivre, “Voyages de Pierre Poivre, de 1748 jusqu’à 1757,” ed. Henri Cordier. Mélanges d’histoire et géographie orientale 3 (1922): 57. 18 Malleret, Pierre Poivre, 29–34. 19 Léonard Blussé, “Chinese Century: The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea Region,” Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29. 20 Pierre Poivre, Voyages d’un philosophe ou observations sur les mœurs et les arts des peuples de l’Afrique, de l’Asie et de l’Amérique (Yverdon, 1768). 21 Ibid., 71–75. 22 For example. Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies . . ., vol. 2 (London: Hitch and Millar, 1744), 195.

104 Part I • Manipulated 23 Chinese characters, 鄚玖, Mo Jiu in modern standard Chinese. 24 Hà Tiên, Chinese pronunciation, He Xian河僊. 25 The defnitive study, including reproduction of the main primary sources in Vietnamese and Chinese, is by Émile Gaspardone, “Un Chinois des Mers du Sud: Le fondateur de Hà-Tiên,” Journal Asiatique 240 (1962): 363–85. 26 Gaspardone, “Un Chinois des Mers du Sud,” 364. 27 Chinese name, Mo Tianci 鄚天賜. 28 Ten Songs of Hà Tiên 河僊十咏; Claudine Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization: Ming Loyalist Ambitions on the Mekong Delta,” T’oung Pao 104 (2018): 626–71. 29 Tana Li, “Preface,” in Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880, ed. Tana Li (Singapore: National University of Singapore Publishing, 2004), xi–xiii; see also David A. Biggs, Quagmire: NationBuilding and Nature in the Mekong Delta (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010). 30 For example, Benedict Kiernan, “Stretching the Sinitic Interpretation of Vietnamese History,” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 15, no. 23 (2017). 31 南浦澄波一片蒼茫一片清/ 澄連夾浦老秋情 / 天河畢雨烟光結/ 澤國無風浪 沫平 向曉漁帆分水急/ 趂潮客舫載雲輕/ 也知八海魚龍匿 /月朗波光自在明; I borrow the translation from Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization,” 55. 32 Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization,” 640. 33 風化之行，增其壯麗; Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization,” 632. 34 Gaspardone, “Un Chinois des Mers du Sud,” 370. 35 安南河僊鎮，古屬荒陬。自先君開創以來，三十餘年，而民始獲安居，稍知栽 植; Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization,” 640. 36 Poivre, Voyages, 74. 37 Ibid., 86. 38 Ibid., 117–8. 39 Malleret, Pierre Poivre, 223–8. 40 Pierre Poivre to Henri Bertin, September 9, 1777, in Henri Cordier, ed., “Les Correspondants de Bertin, Secrétaire d’État au XVIIIe siècle, IV. Pierre Poivre,” T’oung Pao, Second Series 15, no. 3 (1914): 326. 41 For more on the movement, diffusion, and conception of coffee as a natural thing and cultural object, see Duygu Yıldırım, “Coffee: Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences.” 42 Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, ed. Taschereau and Chaudé (Paris: Furne, 1829–1831), 454, ARTFL Project: https://artfl-project.uchicago.edu/content/grimms-correspondance-litt% C3%A9raire. 43 Pierre Poivre, “Discours de reception de Pierre Poivre, May 1, 1759,” Archives de l’Académie de Lyon, MS 187. Transcribed by Jean-Paul Morel, 9, www.pierrepoivre.fr/doc-59-5-1.pdf. 44 Malleret, Pierre Poivre, 238–44. 45 Their Chinese names were Gao (Kô) Leisi高類思 and Yang Dewang 楊德望, but these names were rarely used; Leisi was probably a transliteration of Aloys or Louis anyway. 46 Gwynne Lewis, “Henri-Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy: The ‘Chinese Connection’,” in Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, ed. Malcom Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004); Georges Pédro, “Henri-Léonard Bertin et le développement de l’agriculture au siècle des Lumières,” Comptes Rendus Biologies 335, no. 5 (2012): 325–33. 47 Anne Robert Jacques Turgot, Oeuvres de Turgot, ed. Gustave Schelle, vol. 3 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919), 375. 48 The most complete study remains Henri Bernard-Maître, “Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle à l’École des Physiocrates Français,” Bulletin de l’Université Aurore, 3rd series, no. 10 (1949): 151–97. 49 Pierre Poivre, ed. Henri Cordier, “Les Correspondants de Bertin,” 307. 50 Zizhi tongjian gangmu 資治通鑑綱目; Nicolas Standaert, “Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and their Chinese Sources,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 35 (2012): 65.

Chapter 3 • Canal 105 51 Henri Bertin, “Mémoire sur ce que les Chinois doivent voir en France avant de retourner à la China” (1764), in Bernard-Maître, 173. My thanks to John Finlay for pointing me to the source. 52 Chandra Mukerji, Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 4. 53 Ma Junya and Tim Wright, “Sacrifcing Local Interests: Water Control Policies of the Ming and Qing Governments and the Local Economy of Huaibei, 1496–1949,” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (2013): 1348–1376; Dodgen. 54 Dream Pool Essays, Meng xi bitan 夢溪筆談; Joseph Needham and Lu GweiDjen, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology, Pt. 3: Physical Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge: Cambridge University. Press, 1962), 352. 55 Needham and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, 318–19. 56 Ibid., 360. 57 Ibid., 211. 58 Louis le Comte, Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état present de la Chine, vol. 1 (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1696), 222–45. 59 Needham and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, 350. 60 Jean-Baptiste du Halde, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise, vol. 1 (Paris: P. G. Le Mercier, 1735), 32–33. 61 Henri Bertin, “Mémoire sur ce que les Chinois doivent voir en France avant de retourner à la China” (1764), ed. Bernard-Maître, “Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle,” 173. 62 Aloys Kô and Étienne Yang, “Remarques sur différentes manufactures que nous avons vues dans le voyage de Lyon” (1764), ed. Bernard-Maître, “Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle,” 180. 63 The most complete biography is Claude Vacant, Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708– 1794), premier ingénieur du Roi et directeur de l’École des Ponts et Chaussées (Paris: Presses de l’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 2006). 64 Émiland Gauthey, Mémoires sur les canaux de navigation . . . (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1816), 373. 65 “Jean-Randolphe Perronet to Bertin, December 29, 1764,” Institut de France, MS 1526,” 48. 66 Perronet, 47–50. 67 Bernard-Maître, “Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle,” 195–7. 68 Henri Cordier, “Les Correspondants de Bertin.” 69 Fu Zehong, 傅澤洪, Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑 (Yuyi tang: 1725). The copy sent to France is catalogued as MS Chinois 1847. 70 Needham and Lu, Science and Civilisation in China, 325. 71 Fu Zehong, juan shou. 72 Cibot and Kô, “Remarques sur un écrit de M. P**, intitule: Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois,” Mémoires Concernant les Chinois 2 (1777): 543. 73 Ibid., 544. 74 Ibid., 550. 75 Craig R. Hanyan, “China and the Eerie Canal,” The Business History Review 35, no. 4 (1961): 560–2. 76 Jérôme Lalande, Des Canaux de navigation, et spécialement du canal de Languedoc (Paris: Desaint, 1778), 529; 534–6. 77 For example, Edmund Leach, A Treatise of Universal Inland Navigations (London: Alexander Hamilton, 1791), 9–12; Robert Fulton, A Treatise on the Improvement of Canal Navigation (London: I. and J. Taylor, 1796), 6–7. 78 Hanyan, “China and the Eerie Canal,” 560–6. 79 Pierre Poivre, ed. Henri Cordier, “Les Correspondants de Bertin,” 333–6. 80 Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ang, Claudine. “Writing Landscapes into Civilization: Ming Loyalist Ambitions on the Mekong Delta.” T’oung Pao 104 (2018): 626–71.

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Bernard-Maître, Henri. “Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle à l’École des Physiocrates Français.” Bulletin de l’Université Aurore, 3rd series, no. 10 (1949): 151–97. Biggs, David A. Quagmire: Nation-Building and Nature in the Mekong Delta. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2010. Blussé, Léonard. “Chinese Century: The Eighteenth Century in the China Sea Region.” Archipel 58 (1999): 107–29. Brixius, Dorit. “A Hard Nut to Crack: Nutmeg Cultivation and the Application of Natural History between the Maluku Islands and Isle de France (1750s–1780s).” British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 4 (2018): 585–606. Brown, Tristan G. “The Deeds of the Dead in the Courts of the Living: Graves in Qing Law.” Late Imperial China 39, no. 2 (2018). Da Cunha, Dilip. The Invention of Rivers: Alexander’s Eye and Ganga’s Descent. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Dodgen, Randall A. Controlling the Dragon: Confucian Engineers and the Yellow River in the Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001. Drayton, Richard. Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Gaspardone, Émile. “Un Chinois des Mers du Sud: Le fondateur de HàTiên.” Journal Asiatique 240 (1962): 363–85. Grove, Richard. Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Grove, Richard. “Indigenous Knowledge and the Signifcance of SouthWest India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature.” Modern Asian Studies 30, no. 1 (1996): 121–43. Hanyan, Craig R. “China and the Eerie Canal.” The Business History Review 35, no. 4 (1961): 558–66. Jacobsen, Stefan Gaarsmand. “Physiocracy and the Chinese Model.” In Thoughts on Economic Development in China, edited by Ma Ying and Hans-Michael Trautwein, 12–34. London: Routledge, 2013. Kiernan, Benedict. “Stretching the Sinitic Interpretation of Vietnamese History.” The Asia-Pacifc Journal 15, no. 23 (2017): 1–13. Lewis, Gwynne. “Henri-Léonard Bertin and the Fate of the Bourbon Monarchy: The ‘Chinese Connection’.” In Enlightenment and Revolution: Essays in Honour of Norman Hampson, edited by Malcom Crook, William Doyle, and Alan Forrest, 69–90. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2004. Li, Tana, ed. Water Frontier: Commerce and the Chinese in the Lower Mekong Region, 1750–1880. Singapore: National University of Singapore Publishing, 2004. Ma, Junya and Tim Wright. “Sacrifcing Local Interests: Water Control Policies of the Ming and Qing Governments and the Local Economy of Huaibei, 1496–1949.” Modern Asian Studies 47, no. 4 (2013): 1348–76. Malleret, Lous. Pierre Poivre. Paris: École française d’Extrême-Orient, 1974. Maverick, Lewis A. “Chinese Infuences Upon the Physiocrats.” Economic History (1938): 54–67. Mukerji, Chandra. Impossible Engineering: Technology and Territoriality on the Canal du Midi. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009. Needham, Joseph and Lu Gwei-Djen. Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology, Pt. 3: Physical Engineering and Nautics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962. Pédro, Georges. “Henri-Léonard Bertin et le développement de l’agriculture au siècle des Lumières.” Comptes Rendus Biologies 335, no. 5 (2012): 325–33.

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Perdue, Peter C. “Is There a Chinese View of Technology and Nature?” In The Illusory Boundary: Environment and Technology in History, edited by Martin Reuss and Stephen H. Cutcliffe, 101–19. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010. Sivaramakirshnan, Kalyanakrishnan. “Science, Environment and Empire History: Comparative Perspectives from Colonial India.” Environment and History 14, no. 1 (2008): 41–65. Standaert, Nicolas. “Jesuit Accounts of Chinese History and Chronology and Their Chinese Sources.” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine 35 (2012): 11–87. Vacant, Claude. Jean-Rodolphe Perronet (1708–1794), premier ingénieur du Roi et directeur de l’École des Ponts et Chaussées. Paris: Presses de l’École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées, 2006. Vardi, Liana. The Physiocrats and the World of the Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Wittfogel, Karl August. Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957. Works Written Before 1900 Bertin, Henri-Léonard. “Mémoire sur ce que les Chinois doivent voir en France avant de retourner à la China.” In Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle, edited by Bernard-Maître, 167–74, 1764. Cibot, Pierre-Martial and Aloys Kô. “Remarques sur un écrit de M. P**, intitule: Recherches sur les Egyptiens et les Chinois.” Mémoires Concernant les Chinois 2 (1777): 365–574. Du Halde, Jean-Baptiste. Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique, et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise. Paris: P. G. Le Mercier, 1735. Fu, Zehong, 傅澤洪. Xingshui jinjian 行水金鑑. Yuyi tang, 1725. Gauthey, Émiland. Mémoires sur les canaux de navigation . . . Paris: Firmin Didot, 1816. Grimm, Friedrich Melchior. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique. Paris: Furne, 1829–1831. https://artf-project.uchicago.edu/ content/grimms-correspondance-litt%C3%A9raire. Hamilton, Alexander. A New Account of the East Indies . . . London: Hitch and Millar, 1744. Kô, Aloys and Étienne Yang. “Remarques sur différentes manufactures que nous avons vues dans le voyage de Lyon.” In Deux Chinois du XVIIIe siècle, edited by Bernard-Maître, 176–80, 1764. Lalande, Jérôme. Des Canaux de navigation, et spécialement du canal de Languedoc. Paris: Desaint, 1778. Le Comte, Louis. Nouveaux mémoires sur l’état present de la Chine. Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1696. Mạc Thiên Tứ 鄚天賜. Ten Songs of Hà Tiên 河僊十咏. Edited by Claudine Ang, “Writing Landscapes into Civilization,” 1737. Perronet, Jean-Randolphe. Letter to Henri-Léonard Bertin, December 29, 1764. Bibliothèque de l’Institut de France, MS 1526: 47–50. Poivre, Pierre. “Discours de reception de Pierre Poivre, May 1, 1759.” Archives de l’Académie de Lyon, MS 187. Transcribed by Jean-Paul Morel. www.pierre-poivre.fr/doc-59-5-1.pdf. Poivre, Pierre. “Les Correspondants de Bertin, Secrétaire d’État au XVIIIe siècle, IV. Pierre Poivre.” Ed. Henri Cordier. T’oung Pao, 2nd series 15, no. 3 (1914): 307–38. Poivre, Pierre. Letter to Henri Bertin, September 9, 1777. Ed. Henri Cordier. “Les Correspondants de Bertin,” 326.

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Poivre, Pierre. “Voyages de Pierre Poivre, de 1748 jusqu’à 1757.” In Mélanges d’histoire et de géographie orientales, edited by Henri Cordier, vol. 3. Paris: Jean Maisonneuve & Fils, 1922. Poivre, Pierre. Voyages d’un philosophe ou observations sur les mœurs et les arts des peuples de l’Afrique, de l’Asie et de l’Amérique. Yverdon, 1768. Tocqueville, Alexis de. The Old Regime and the Revolution. Translated by John Bonner. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1856. Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques. Oeuvres de Turgot. Edited by Gustave Schelle. Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919.

Chapter 4

Ambergris From Sea to Scent in Renaissance Italy Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann

“This particular cure brings an ounce and a dram of musk ambergris (muschio ambracane) into communion with precious ingredients, such as an ounce each of small white pearls, fragments of sapphire, hyacinth, topaz, and emerald. Two ounces of cinnamon and two drams of mace mark two other ingredients known for both their fragrant and medicinal utility.” Page 123

VISUALIZATION 4 Florals (hyacinths, rose): Joris Hoefnagel, Mira calligraphiae monumenta (1561–1562) . The J. Paul Getty Museum Collection. Gems (pearl, topaz, emerald): George Frederick Kunz, Gems and Precious Stones of North America (1890). Renaissance hands: Francesco del Cossa, Saint Lucy (c. 1473/1474), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Civet cat and lynx: Francisco Hernández, Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, seu, Plantarum animalium mineralium Mexicanorum (1651). Vase: Jean Charles Delafosse, Vuurbok in vorm van een rookvat Chenet, IIe Volume De l’Oeuvre de J. Ch. Delafosse (1771). Whale: Johannes Wierix, Three Beached Whales (1577). Squids: Ippolito Salviani, Aquatilium animalium historiæ, liber primvs (1544), 164, 165, 169. How can such a peculiar bit of animal waste smell so alluring? The aroma of ambergris—or is it just amber or something else entirely?— foats around this perfuming instrument, conjuring to mind other pleasant fragrances. But look deeper into the vessel and we see the whales from which the ambergris was emitted, the squid they ate, and the civet musk this odor resembles.

Abstract: Ambergris is a solidifed mass of undigested foodstuffs that gathers in a sperm whale’s intestinal tract. Once dispelled into the sea, it garners a strong, musky scent rarely experienced in modern smellscapes. This chapter weaves together early modern natural histories, practical manuals, and noble correspondence to recount the making of a natural thing from creation to commodifcation and reception in Renaissance Italy. However, just as a scent diffuses through the air, losing its pungency along the way, so, too, does the history of ambergris. This natural thing, once harbored in the entrails of a whale, disassociates from its source entirely as it passes through different hands and distillations. Rubbed onto gloves, worn on bodies, and employed as medicine, the mysterious aquatic product pleased and protected early moderns.

A strange, suspiciously large mass bobbed on the water’s surface in the middle of the night. It was July of 1565 and a Genovese galley had just departed from the port at Livorno. With their vision obscured by the darkness, the crew believed they had stumbled across an overturned vessel. The men readied their weapons and fred. Despite their valiant effort, what the sailors had judged to be a threat was revealed to be no danger at all; they wasted their artillery on a big fsh.1 The sperm whale, reeking of rotting fesh, had probably died a few days ago. The galley presumably continued on its way. Florentine soldier and diplomat Luigi Dovara recounted the story to Francesco I de’ Medici (1541–1587) soon afterwards, claiming to have witnessed the incident frsthand. Dovara explained how the galley men made the foolish mistake of battling a dead “whale or oil head” (balena o capo d’oglio).2 Oil head narrows the whale’s identifcation specifcally to the sperm whale, nicknamed capo d’oglio after the highly valuable spermaceti oil harvested from the large, barrel-shaped organ inside the whale’s head.3 Dovara reportedly sent men out to observe the animal, and the crew attested to the whale’s great size and bad smell. Curiously, there is no trace in the correspondence about arranging to have a look inside the whale. One might have hoped to extract something valuable. The head of oil might not have been its only hidden gem; perhaps ambergris would have been found inside or foating nearby along the docks of Livorno. Some compare the scent to fne tobacco with a slight fecal hint.4 Others recall that it is like an old friend, half-forgotten from childhood. Still others note that it resembles Brazil nuts.5 A whiff brings one back as a reminder of comfortable familiarity, conjuring to mind an earthy past of nonspecifc contentment, which stirred the passions of many.6 Such is the power of ambergris once distilled from DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-7

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Figure 4.1: Beached sperm whales, Johannes Wierix, Three Beached Whales (Antwerp, 1577), etching 22.20 mm × 30.50 mm, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. This etching’s two captions identify the large aquatic beings as “sea monsters” (seemonsters in Dutch on the left and monstres de mer in French on the right). Flemish engraver Johannes Wierix depicted boats haphazardly abandoned on the beach and frightened seafarers running away from the whales. The imagery and the captions failed to broach the possibilities of fortuitous extractions or embedded treasures.

a solidifed mass of undigested foodstuffs that gathers in a sperm whale’s intestinal tract. Dispelled into the sea, the rock-like substance can bob along the ocean surface for years, garnering its strong, musky scent over time.7 Collected at sea and along the shore, prized as a foam of the whale, ambergris became the ultimate disassociated source of comfort throughout the sixteenth century.8 Nearly always linked to some other substance, ambergris provided a composite ingredient. If forals were the soprano tones, then animal scents provided base notes. In perfumes, ambergris featured alongside other animal essences like civet (glandular secretions from an array of civet genera), castoreum (the yellow secretion from beavers’ castor sacs), or musk (glandular secretions from a wide array of creatures including deer, duck, ox, lynx, etc.).9 Like the repeating throb of a bass, these odors linked together more complex concoctions, acting as the perfume fxative that could give the wafting foral scent of hyacinth, lilac, or honeysuckle strength and longevity.10 More than any other sense, smell conjures up human memory. An odor stimulates the olfactory complex, passing information about the smell to connected areas of the limbic system. In turn, in humans, just as in the frst mammals, the limbic system plays a powerful role in emotion,

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memory, and mood.11 Olfactory pathways make smell the most directly connected sense to the brain. Today, scientists argue that the olfactory cortex’s anatomical connection to the hippocampus means that smell ignites episodic memories and spatiotemporal recognition—a feld of study dubbed aromachology.12 A highly emotive sense, smell triggers long-forgotten experiences, and it is into that emotional paneling that an industry of oils, soaps, and perfumes connected to ambergris and other olfactory products built their foundations.13 Ambergris fxed and preserved sensual and healthful scents that conjured to life memories of the familiar and the sacred. This chapter weaves together early modern natural histories, pharmacopoeias, practical medical manuals, and noble correspondence to recount the making of a natural thing from creation to commodifcation and reception in Renaissance Italy. It begins with the origins of ambergris among cephalopods and cetaceans and the construction of amber’s identity by natural histories and apothecary texts alike. Ambergris is then explored through perfuming, a practice that was contemporaneously controlled by different Italian states in an effort to defne class differences. Beyond the scent’s cultural prestige alone, medical experts likewise turned to ambergris to preserve the health of their elite patients. Far from the sea, the chapter concludes with the substances’ use in female medicine, wherein doctors wafted fair-smelling ambergris concoctions into women’s vaginas to bring their uteri back to their proper place. In short, this product that exited a whale’s rear end as a debilitating irritant was blown back into a woman’s rear end as a source of healing. To trace ambergris in early modern Europe means reckoning with uncertainties and unstable meanings. Ambiguities surround the substance, long confused with the color and odor of the amber formed from fossilized tree resin and confated with a different waxy cetacean substance altogether dubbed spermaceti (oil from the sperm whale’s head). Ambergris typifes the ontological challenges inherent in object histories; just as a scent diffuses through the air, losing its pungency along the way, so, too, does the history of ambergris. In Paula Findlen’s study of early modern Italian collecting and museum culture, she defned nature as “the object that collectors strove to contain and display.”14 This chapter seeks to complicate Findlen’s defnition by expanding the natural thing beyond a material embodiment of natural knowledge. Ambergris, born of the natural world and harbored in the entrails of a whale, disassociates from its animal source entirely as it leaves the sea and passes through different hands and distillations.15 Rubbed onto gloves, worn on bodies, and employed as medicine, the mysterious aquatic product pleased and protected early moderns far beyond the confnes of the cabinet.

WHALES, SQUIDS, AND AN AMBERGRIS SEA The dead sperm whale off the coast of Livorno may have produced ambergris. Prior to its death, perhaps it had taken to swimming deep in the currents of the Mediterranean on its never-ending quest for food. Eyeing the familiar silhouette of a school of squid, whose many bodies moved together as a mass, one unidentifable from another, the whale would have attacked.16 It took no time to chew, swallowing the squid right away. The cephalopods were then siphoned into the belly of the whale, whose stomach had four compartments, not unlike that of the ruminants whose bellies created bezoars (stones of undigested foodstuffs valued for their medicinal properties). The squids truly met their demise in the frst compartment, where they would have been crushed by the contractions of the

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Figure 4.2a, 4.2b and 4.2c: Early modern squids in Ippolito Salviani, Aquatilium animalium historiæ, liber primvs (Romae: Medicinam Proftente Auctore, 1544), 164, 165, 169. Italian physiciannaturalist Ippolito Salviani (1514–1572) personally observed and studied the Mediterranean Sea creatures described and illustrated in his Aquatilium animalium historiæ (1544). Pictured above are the three squid species that Salviani studied, all of which would have served as a Mediterranean sperm whale’s diet. Note the visible squid beak on the center squid, embedded in the rounded opening surrounded by the squid’s arms, which would have caused the greatest irritation to the whale’s digestion.

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muscular strata.17 While the whale body would have digested much of the squid for caloric energy, the indigestible parts—rigid eye lenses, internal shells (called “pens”), and beaks—are commonly expelled through a sperm whale’s mouth back into the sea. Squids need beaks to digest food, as discussed by Barlow Robles’s chapter 5 of this volume; however, that beak presented a real hindrance to the digestive processes at the next trophic level. Sperm whale digestion has changed little in the elapsing centuries, although a growing human commitment to spying on whales means that our understanding of them has.18 Given that a thirty-ton sperm whale eats about a thousand medium-sized squids each day, it does not take long for hundreds or thousands of these pesky obstacles to accumulate in a whale body at any moment in time.19 Sperm whales typically vomit about once a week to rid their stomachs of such indigestible remains. The rectum regularly expels only liquid feces, so the whale’s health depends on vomiting as an important defense mechanism against its dietary byproducts. Nonetheless, sometimes beaks pass through the stomach compartments and into the intestines, where undigested matter slowly forms a semi-blockage.20 Perhaps the Livorno sperm whale had beaks mixing with its sloshy feces; over time the mass would have morphed into a smooth, layered block.21 Layers built as more indigestible solids wound their way through the intestinal tract, mixing with the sludge of food waste, bile, and bacteria. The accumulation of layers would have been slow, taking years of gastrointestinal malfunctions to reach a point at which the fecal mass became problematic. Lucky whales manage to pass the coprolith, remaining largely unscathed save for perhaps a stretched rectum wall. The Genovese sailors may have encountered a less fortunate whale; its intestinal walls could have continued to dilate to the point of no return, causing a rectal rupture that expelled the mass at the cost of killing the great mammal.22 The production of ambergris is thus an unglamorous story of deathly constipation yielding a valuable treasure.

TAXONOMIES OF UNCERTAINTY Ambergris, or more commonly the elusive Latin ambra, confused early moderns. While apothecaries sold a wide array of ambergris for medicinal use, natural historians struggled with how to categorize this substance.23 Some accounts consistently erected boundaries between the different types of amber, thus defning yellow amber, most commonly written as ambra citrina or ambra gialla, as a substance ontologically separate from ambergris. Yet in other texts, the identities of ambergris and yellow amber were indiscriminately absorbed into the umbrella category of ambra. Naturalists haphazardly stitched together disparate origin stories that raised a plethora of hypotheses derived from a laundry list of leading texts in natural history. Perhaps ambergris was spawned from the testicles of a whale, from the belly of a fsh, or from a bituminous fountain in the sea, they speculated. However, despite the genealogical uncertainties, naturalists proceeded to taxonomize amber as part of the larger effort to defne and order nature. In the third century BC, the physician Serapion of Alexandria correctly identifed ambergris as a product of the whale’s belly. Dioscorides, and later Mesue, Avicenna, and the Antidotarium Nicolai offered medicinal prescriptions with ambergris, which writers continually referenced, revised, and repeated throughout the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. French naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) published

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his translation of Antidotarium in 1561 and offered two distinct amber entries: yellow amber (ambra citrina) and scented amber (ambra odorifera).24 Clusius declared that yellow amber was a liquid bitumen, today known as asphalt, that falls into the sea and thereby congeals into the solid found along German shores. He stated the attributes of the natural product, including a scent similar to bitumen when burned. He left its medical utility undiscussed, although yellow amber was frequently used in scented concoctions prescribed to ward against outbreaks of the plague from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries.25 Scented amber came second. Ontologically distinct from yellow amber, it was “commonly found in the stomachs of fsh,” likely confrming that scented amber was ambergris.26 Some apothecaries had created ambergris substitutes. Clusius incorporated a recipe of a forgery that included perfuming ingredients such as musk, civet, aloeswood, styrax, and labdanum, which clearly illustrated the strong odorous properties of the true substance. Later in the Antidotarium, a treatment for thrashing paired ambergris with musk and a range of additional fragrant substances including cinnamon, mace, and rose water.27 Refecting the height of Renaissance textual recycling and excerpting, Clusius’s later work Exoticorum (1605) correctly noted that whales expelled ambergris as an excrement from their stomachs and that hunks of the substance contained beaks of polyps (here meaning cuttlefsh and especially squid).28 Exoticorum offered Latin translations of texts authored by Spanish physician Nicolas Monardes and Portuguese physician Garcia da Orta; thus, by folding in the Iberians’ work, Clusius’s later revelations peered even deeper into the belly of the whale and this hidden natural process. Some naturalists such as Clusius included ambergris in their taxonomies, while others did not. Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner (1516–1565) published Book IV of Historiae animalium in 1604, in which he went so far as to taxonomize the sperm whale according to its valuable extraction, naming it the “amber whale” (ceto ambari), whereas the resinous amber was distinctly classifed as “pine amber” (ambrae pinealis).29 On the other hand, scholars such as Ulisse Aldrovandi, Juan Fragoso, Nicolas Monardes, and Garcia da Orta cited the claims of different scholars past and present, always including some reference to an aquatic animal origin, whether it be attributed to the sperm of a whale or the stomach of a fsh; however, each ultimately failed to include ambergris in their artifcial natural order.30 Thus, their vision of one amber prevailed in their taxonomies despite the complexities they highlighted. For many authors, ambergris remained a hypothesis rather than a substance, a possibility rather than a material reality. A physician’s yellow amber recipe highlighted the paradoxical nature that characterized the early modern category of amber. In the winter of 1614, a recipe for yellow amber oil to apply along the top of one’s scalp was among a handful of pharmaceutical recipes that physician Giacomo Macolo sent to the Florentine secretary of state Andrea Cioli (1573– 1641).31 The recipes were simple, but the few ingredients listed could be hard to come by.32 The yellow amber oil necessitated only two ingredients: ambergris (ambragrisa) and musk (moscho). Macolo’s recipe attests to the greater fuidity in the classifcation and conception of amber in the vernacular sphere. According to the physician, one could make their own medicinal yellow amber at home by simply combining ambergris with the similarly aromatic musk.33 Ambergris and the omnipresent ambra became increasingly ontologically indistinguishable when considered as a commodity, thus rendering the already muddy terminology of ambra rather arbitrary.

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HOW APOTHECARIES MADE AMBRA No matter how natural historians managed to complicate things, apothecaries turned to the functional value of ambra rather than its place in the order of nature. For example, the Ricettario forentino was a continually edited and re-published late-ffteenth/sixteenth-century vernacular pharmacopoeia compiled by Florentine apothecaries and physicians.34 As Valentina Pugliano explores in her scholarship on the early modern Italian pharmacy, “the authors of Renaissance pharmacopoeias present themselves as both creators and reenactors,” thus actively engaged in both reproducing and tweaking the recipes passed down through centuries-old paradigms for practitioners of the present.35 The term evolved across the many editions, all of which began with a list of necessary ingredients in the apothecary’s shop. The frst edition of the Ricettario, published in 1498 before the establishment of the long-lived Medici ruling court, listed ambra after musk and emphasized the differences between white varieties (pale and fragile with a comforting favor) and black (breakable with a bad taste). The real ambra would stretch on the hand like wax and fakes could be identifed if they failed this test.36 When the project was revived for a new publication in 1550, the authors specifed ambra gialla (yellow amber) from ambra odifera (fragrant amber). The frst was described as liquid bitumen that was distilled from the sea onto nearby shores and linked to substances imported from Germany. By contrast, the authorities continued, “fragrant amber was brought from ‘happy Arabia,’ and from India, is still, according to some, born of bitumen, in the same way as the yellow amber of Germany, and is often found in the belly of fsh, and which die.”37 The 1574 edition, like the 1567 edition, continued a tradition of the further delineation of amber that would continue across editions into the seventeenth century. This list identifed substances such as aloe and myrrh, but for amber one fnds three different descriptive categories: yellow amber (ambra gialla), which the text identifes as also called carabe in the Arab world, black amber (ambra nera), and odoriferous amber (ambra odorifera). To complicate matters more, the Ricettario drew from natural histories to disambiguate these substances.38 The text stated that there are two sorts of odoriferous amber—one possessed the superior scent and looked like a truffe while the other was simply gray. Since both attributes characterized ambergris (ambra grigia), it seems likely that both odoriferous ambers were variants of sperm whale excrement. Contributing to the confusion, in the subsequent pages of recorded recipes, the foreword’s taxonomic categories were sometimes maintained and at other points broken down in favor of the ambiguous ambra. While the more taxonomically specifc designations of ambra gialla, carabe, ambracane, ambra grigia, and ambra odorifera can be found in some ingredient lists, the explicit ambra grigia is used twice despite its absence in the foreword.39 Likewise, the allencompassing term ambra is listed twelve times even though the forward failed to identify which physical substance could be abbreviated to simply ambra. The result is a perfect early modern muddle. The Ricettario forentino explicitly compiled its prescriptions from classical and medieval authorities, ranging from Galen to Persian physician Mesue and beyond. Indeed, the mismatch of terms stemmed from the parent texts’ terminologies, which were haphazardly excerpted and requoted without much scrutiny. For example, Mesue’s recipe for an electuary of gems (medicinal sweet liquid with ground gem powder) includes both the specifc designations of yellow amber and odoriferous amber.40 Within this recipe, the two ambers seem to have served distinct purposes, thus necessitating the taxonomic specifcity. A later edition of the

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Ricettario forentino frst published in 1597 employed musk and ambra grigia together as fxatives in an elixir recipe (elisire vite, aka. acqua vite).41 There is a lengthy list of ingredients as well as step-by-step directions for the elixir’s preparation, a rare inclusion for this text. Curiously, the cure calls for a dose of diambra (an electionary of amber often with other scents) as well as ambergris proper, similar to how “good musk” is called for in addition to two different confections of musk along with some diamusco, another electionary.42 The amber and musk are added at the end as preservatives, but notably ambra is recorded in place of ambra grigea.43 This could have been an abbreviation since the ingredient list clearly specifed ambergris, but it does call into question whether the other non-identifable ambers in the text refer to ambergris, especially since carabe, which the foreword defned as yellow amber, is found in several recipes. Ultimately, it remains unclear. The foreword erected porous taxonomic boundaries between three different types of amber that quickly crumbled when it came to the recorded prescriptions either because the author worked with assumptions pertaining to what ambra signifed to their readers or because they also could not glean with certainty what substance their own sources had envisioned. Conversely, some authors in the vernacular succeeded in clearly defning the amber they prescribed amid market confusion. Working in Venice during the mid-sixteenth century, cartographer, mathematician, and alchemist Girolamo Ruscelli (1518–1566) offered an illustrious example of unambiguously defning amber in his Secrets of Alessio Piemontese (1561). In Book II, Ruscelli provided a variety of scented recipes for simultaneously adorning oneself and protecting one’s health. His frst recipe gives directions for concocting an aromatic oil to apply to one’s hair or beard and to grease one’s hands and gloves. The frst ingredient enumerated is written as ambracane, and Ruscelli immediately followed the ingredient with a description: “Take ambracane, which is otherwise called whale amber, which is the dull gray odorous amber used in perfumes.”44 In this way, there would be no confusion for the readers trying to prepare their own perfume at home. By reassociating the substance with the whale, Ruscelli cleared the persistent fog looming over the capacious category of amber.

PERFUMES AT HOME AND COURT An explosion of printed books written in vernacular languages shared apothecaries’ secrets with a reading public, thus making the art accessible beyond licensed professionals. The Venetian text The Most Notable Secrets of the Art of Perfuming published in 1560 listed detailed recipes for a variety of scented concoctions principally ranging between different oils, liqueurs, soaps, and perfumes. Notable Secrets is purportedly the earliest printed book dedicated solely to perfumery, and the foreword boasted recipes of virtuous ingredients that could at once beneft the body, comfort the mind, and protect one from pernicious humors.45 Recipes for perfumed oils and distilled waters commonly paired ambergris with musk and civet, all of which were harvested from animal bodies. Animal odors formed part of the courtly persona, fashionably adopted by elite wives clothed in gold silk sleeves and leather gloves. Indeed, Notable Secrets included fve distinct recipes for different ways of curing gloves with scent; each called for ambergris. One such recipe orders a woman to frst soak her gloves of goat, calf, or deerskin in sweet-scented water for three days and three nights. Then, she must combine some tepid goat tallow with musk, ambergris (ambracan), and civet.46 Next, add oil to the mixture and proceed

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by taking a sponge and greasing the gloves on the interior and exterior. Optionally, some aloeswood powder and sugar would add a ladylike fare.47 The animal extractions, civet and musk, commonly accompanied ambergris in practical recipe manuals like Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria. Besides glove perfuming, the three fragrant ingredients were paired in recipes ranging from “a ball of odoriferous and excellent soap,” to “a fne and perfumed water,” or a “damask rose-scented water.”48 Works of secret knowledge garnered a large, predominantly female, audience and rested upon the practicality of the recipes.49 This vernacular genre of alchemical literature, dubbed “secrets,” catalyzed increased accessibility to the growing culture of experimentation in the scientifc revolution, especially for upper-class female audiences. As Meredith Ray posits, books of secrets dispensed advice for “tending to women’s bodies, women’s health, and women’s worlds,” ultimately culminating in a gendered form of knowledge, yet commonly conveyed by male authors.50 Ambergris, along with civet and musk, must have been available to the Venetian woman who purchased Notable Secrets; however, the author failed to include any description as to where or from whom one might purchase the ingredients. It must have been common knowledge that one would simply visit a local muschier or apothecary.51 It remains doubtful that this class of consumers on the streets of Venice would have accessed unadulterated ambergris straight from the entrails of the sperm whale; rather, they may have encountered liquidized ambergris, highly diluted with cheaper scented materials, or an ambracan that in fact had no trace of ambergris. In the marketplace as in natural histories, ambergris was subject to great fexibility. In this way, the fuidity of amber’s identity extended beyond abstract taxonomies and into the practical realm: a woman could walk into a local apothecary and buy herself some ambergris, or rather some substance simply labeled ambracan, with the intention of whipping up some homemade perfume later. However, she never really knew the contents of her vial. The only essential concern was the scent with which her peers would come to associate her. Women at court likewise worked with scent themselves. In 1553, Eleonora di Toledo (1522–1562) requested that, during his stay in Alexandria,

Figure 4.3: Civet cat and the secretory perineal glands in D. Fabio Columna Lynceo, “Animalis Zibethici Maris Icon,” in Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae, eds. Francisco Hernández and Federico Cesi (Romae: Superior permissu Ex Typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, 1651), 580.

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Paolo Baccegli purchase musk and amber for her (del muscho et dell’ambra), along with a male lion for her husband Cosimo I’s growing menagerie.52 Meanwhile, Eleonora was engaged with a very different type of project— the alchemical art of cures. The duchess was learned in pharmacy, and Sharon Strocchia posits that she infuenced the Medici court’s medical culture. Eleonora commonly received valuable medicinal ingredients and recipes from the Spanish court in Naples and other diplomatic connections spanning continents.53 In this case, she notably requested the substances themselves from Baccegli, rather than products scented with musk and amber, likely to incorporate in some cosmetic or medicinal recipe. She was in good company, as ample archival evidence suggests that other Renaissance women, such as Isabella d’Este, Marie de’ Medici, and Bianca Cappello, similarly experimented with ingredients and created recipes for signature beauty products, perfumes, and cures, which they circulated within their gifting networks.54 Whether in the form of perfume or scented goods, fashionable luxury accessories doubled as healthful preservatives. In 1580, Sebastián de Santoyo, the personal aide of King Philip II, sent Francesco I a shipment of exotic gifts including a mother-of-pearl chest with a silver lock, fve swords, a silver-mounted coconut from the Maldives, a dozen and a half pairs of ambergris gloves (guantes de ambargris), in addition to a dozen fower-scented gloves from Valençia, among other things.55 In a similar fashion, in January 1585, the Roman secretary at the Spanish court, Augusto Tizio, wrote to Pietro Usimbardi with news of Philip II’s travels, as well as an assurance that he had sent a servant from Seville to deliver a medically-themed gift of amber-scented gloves, balsam, and bezoar stones. He was also sending along a gift for Ferdinando, consisting of seeds from India and an unspecifed antidote (un poco di contraierva) from New Spain.56 Two years later in 1589, a particular shipment from the Medici court traveled the same diplomatic path to carry opulent gifts to Madrid. Don Fernando de Toledo (1507–1582) received a red and gold robe lined with a perfumed cotton of ambergris and musk along with some expensive bed furnishings.57 These gifts were most often collectible exotica, which could be ingested, displayed, or even worn; as nobility adorned themselves with amber via gloves or perfume, so also were bezoar stones worn in rings or pendants. In the case of the 1580 Spanish shipment to the Medici court, the duality of curative and luxurious commodities was quite clear. Francesco received bezoar stones—some decorated for display, others small and ungarnished destined for medicinal use—alongside many pairs of ambergris-scented gloves for both fashion and protection.58

SUMPTUOUS SCENTS While ruling nobility continued to expand their collections of scented products amidst the widespread vernacular democratization of perfuming, a new wave of legislation in the mid-sixteenth century effectively challenged the right to scent. European states passed sumptuary laws with renewed fervor to curtail luxurious indulgences and solidify class divides amongst their subjects. In 1565, thirty years after the Milanese Duchy fell to Spanish Habsburg rule, Milan passed a sumptuary law that instituted new levels of strictness by order of the Spanish governor.59 The law distinctly addressed different classes of Milanese society and regulated ritual proceedings, food, and clothing akin to other European sumptuary laws. Milanese men and women were prohibited from wearing clothing with gold or silver threading as well as extravagant ornamental touches

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such as pearls or gold buttons. Furthermore, elite women could not wear accessories like bracelets and crowns flled with pastes of amber, as well as accessories perfumed with musk or other scents.60 These prescriptions were not unique to Milan; the 1560s witnessed a boom in sumptuary laws either passed anew or simply reiterated. Sumptuary laws passed in Bologna in 1561 and then Venice in 1562 also regulated apparel and accessories for both men and women. Clothing and accessories like gloves, hats, and belts had to be plain and therefore without perfume, again specifcally targeting the desirous fragrances of musk and amber.61 Contemporaneously, the Portuguese passed similar legislation over the course of 1565–1566 that expanded restrictions against men’s wearing of scent, especially perfumed leather.62 On December 3, 1562, Cosimo I and the Florentine Senate issued a reform of the 1546 sumptuary laws to “restrain luxury.”63 In particular, the revision cracked down on clothing and accessories. Under “general prohibitions,” it forbade all Florentines from adorning themselves with pearls and “other jewels of that sort,” gold, velvet of any kind, fur pelts, and so on. The general perfuming of oneself was strictly prohibited: “every person in the city of Florence, women and men, are prohibited from wearing musk, perfumes, and amber.”64 However, for certain classes, explicit exceptions followed. Married noblewomen came frst. They might wear a gold necklace, so long as it was valued at no more than 50 scudi, or a pair of rosary beads worth no more than 20 scudi. The law further excused scented gloves for only noblewomen, if they could purchase a pair for 3 scudi or less. The allowance was ambiguous, stating that “musky or perfumed gloves, or other things of musk” were acceptable so long as they were below the price ceiling. The list of prohibited items did not explicitly reference scented gloves, instead bluntly stating that one was not allowed to wear scents of musk, amber, and the like. Cheap ambergris products thus appear to have been protected by these feminine allowances, and many women may have resorted to perfuming their gloves and other accessories at home with the help of manuals like Ruscelli’s Secrets of Alessio Piemontese. Early modern scented accessories were both elite and increasingly commonplace. Noble Italian families often ordered perfumed gloves from Spanish and Portuguese commercial artisans, besides the notable exception of Vincenzo Gonzaga, who in 1590, patronized one Mantuan artisan for all his scent-related needs. Simultaneously, popular guides to perfumery, and alchemy more generally, continued to disseminate through different vernaculars, including The Most Notable Secrets, signifying unhampered interest in perfumed products as well as the availability of the necessary ingredients, ambiguous though they were.65 The democratization of scent continued despite sumptuary laws, and by the seventeenth century the same Venetian perfumers supplied both the Medici court and common shops with scented gloves, although of notably different quality and, perhaps, potency.66

POISONS AND PRESERVATIVES Some scents held the power to heal, others the potential to kill or at least to cause some harm. As the industry for perfumed items expanded, so also did the collection of anecdotes for airborne poisons. During the Elizabethan Era, English legislation identifed a specifc kind of poisoning conferred through smell, called amhelitu. In perhaps the most famous example, French Protestants accused Catherine de’ Medici of poisoning and killing the Huguenot Queen of Navarre Jeanne d’Albret in 1572, the

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year of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre. A popular anonymous pamphlet published in 1575 alleged that the Catholic queen had her Florentine perfumer Renato Bianco, or Master René, craft poisoned perfumed collars for Jeanne.67 Christopher Marlowe’s 1594 The Massacre at Paris depicted the same poisoning but with scented gloves instead; this has remained the most popular narrative still in circulation today.68 In the Breviary of Healthe published in 1552, Welsh physician Andrew Boorde illustrated the double-edged sword of scent in his discussion of memory issues, or “the wits of man”: Let him use odiferous savours and no contagious ayres .  .  . drink wine and smell to Amber de grece, every thing which is odiferous doth comfort the wits, the memory and the sences, and all evill savours doth hurt the sences and the memorie.69 The memory and the senses responded to the infuence of scent, odiferous characterizing the healthful pleasant scents and evil signifying those with the power to harm one’s mind, as compared to explicitly physical harm. Boorde showcased ambergris as the sole example of the fragrant, comforting scent. The reader might recall that the Ricettario forentino, published two decades later in 1574, labeled ambergris as odoriferous amber. In this way, odoriferous did not merely mean scented, but rather carried the further connotation of good scent, promoting and preserving one’s health and well-being. However, Boorde attested to the seemingly contradictory workings of scent and smell. He frst divided the senses into three categories: natural, animal, and rational. The rational sense was the faculty of reason unique to humans, and scent was categorized as an animal sense, shared amongst beasts and men alike.70 This animalistic sense of smell paradoxically wielded incredible infuence over the core of what separated man from his counterparts in the natural world—the mind, inherently connected with the rational soul. Besides their aromatic value, ambergris and musk functioned like a glue that bound and preserved the effcacy of ingredients in curative confections. Unlike the anonymous Notable Secrets, Girolamo Calestani, a licensed apothecary practicing in Rome, published the frst book in Venice defnitively authored by an apothecary in 1562.71 In his Observations, Calestani asserted that aromatic concoctions were the most common of regularly used medicinal powders.72 Musk and amber were the principal preservative ingredients that could prevent evaporation or subsumption; Calestiani wrote “musk and amber, which are dense and oily substances, are suitable and virtuous [ingredients] to conserve other grounded scents by retaining those that are weak.”73 Furthermore, as long as a mixture had “enough gum, or dense juices, or musk, or amber, they have the power to keep and conserve themselves for a long time.”74 Early moderns relied upon a wide variety of powders and pastes, electionaries and distilled waters to preserve their health, but even preservatives needed preserving. Throughout the ffteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, ambergris was an essential ingredient invariably linked to other medicinal substances. In an early modern Italian manuscript titled Of the nature, quality, quantity, and composition of venoms, and of their counters, two books housed in the library of King Ferdinand I, one recipe called for musk and ambergris in a medicinal drink.75 The author of the manuscript and the date remain unknown, but the manuscript was likely written or copied for the King of Naples Ferdinand I (1423–1494).76 The mysteriously titled “Very wonderful water to turn against any poison and plague” called for a variety of ingredients with suggested measurements, yet the author explicitly acknowledged that the production of cures necessitates an inherent

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fexibility due to the availability of different supplies and ingredients at different moments. This particular cure brings an ounce and a dram of musk ambergris (muschio ambracane) into communion with precious ingredients, such as an ounce each of small white pearls, fragments of sapphire, hyacinth, topaz, and emerald. Two ounces of cinnamon and two drams of mace mark two other ingredients known for both their fragrant and medicinal utility. The recipe was designed to be fexible. For example, the author suggested that one might add a greater measure of the common ingredients listed, excepting particularly rare substances like Bole Armoniac (bolo armeno, which is an astringent clay often used in antidotes), gold, and the fne powder of pearl. It appears that powders of the other gemstones mentioned along with musk and ambergris were not terribly diffcult to come by, and perhaps not of great expense, at least for a king. The paired scents were the last ingredients added. Like the icing on a cake, the ambergris and musk were last but certainly not least, providing the fnishing touch of preservation to the antidote. The directions ordered all ingredients to be combined in a corked glass vase with rose water, white vinegar, and a perfectly distilled acqua vite acting as the liquid base. The musk and ambergris would be added last and subsequently left to infuse for a half an hour. The process advanced with distillation—which fltered the substance through a linen cloth to draw out any grainy waste—and then further infusion. The recipe ended with a strong declarative: “this is a very precious water against every poison and plague.”77 The addition of ambergris and musk was “a necessity” to fxing and preserving the virtues of the remedy and, by extension, the consumer’s health. Amber and musk were a formidable duo in the plethora of recipes that preserved both the cures and the bodies of early modern elites. On September 11, 1544, Cosimo I’s butler Pierfrancesco Riccio received a letter from the granducal physician Andrea Pasquali containing a prescription for a poultice. The physician instructed Riccio to send both a drawing and dosage instructions for the poultice to his apothecary.78 Cosimo had hired Pasquali as court physician almost immediately after gaining power in 1537 at only seventeen years old.79 The recipe called for an ounce of cordial and one scruple each of musk and amber.80 Pasquali directed the apothecary to encase the fragrant cure in a sachet of grainy taffeta, porous enough to allow the healthful medicinals to seep into the afficted area.81 Poultices or epithems were made from powdered drugs mixed with a liquid and applied to the body in some type of cloth or sponge. A very common poultice remedy treated problems of the heart with a mixture of some herbal cordial, musk, and amber, just as prescribed by Pasquali.82 The ailment remained unidentifed in the prescription, but Cosimo was most likely suffering from some chest pains or another heart-related complaint, also indicated by the heart-shaped poultice in Pasquali’s sketch.83 The heart-shaped poultice embodied sympathetic magic; the material representation of a heart ensured that the medicine would affect Cosimo’s own heart, since the cure had to be applied externally while the heart lay inside the body. Through sympathetic magic, the duke’s heart may have experienced the healing effects of the earthy scents.84

OLFACTORY WOMBS The curative properties of odoriferous substances like ambergris were not solely dependent upon the nose’s sensory reception of smell—the womb was another sensory organ endowed with the same faculty. Treatises on

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female health by Classical Greek physician Hippocrates began circulating in print in the early sixteenth century and subsequently exercised a strong infuence in the feld of female reproductive health into the eighteenth century. These centered the uterus in the female body; the woman suffered if her womb deviated from its rightful position. Movement, elucidated by the “wandering womb” theory, and the power of smell were the defning features of the womb in the medical discourse from medieval Latin texts to the early modern vernacular. The womb was likened to an animal being since the time of Plato—hungry, restless, but most importantly capable of sensory reception.85 The prevalence of aromatic remedies to preserve the health and order of the female body refected the womb’s sensitivity to odors.86 In his 1574 medical treatise Medicines associated with women’s infrmities, physician Giovanni Marinello wrote at length about the aromatherapeutic practice of suffumigi, which essentially entailed fumigating oneself with healthful vapors to decongest some part of one’s body. One such fumigatory mixture consisted of amber and aromatic gum resins, including galbanum, bdellium, opoponax, gallia muscata, and myrrh. The woman sat on a chair, legs open but perhaps bound to restrain movement, while her medical practitioner (levatrice or midwife) heated the aromatic compound to travel as smoke directly into the mouth of the vagina.87 Marinello reminded his readers that when performing this kind of fumigation for ailments associated with female reproductive health, it was best that the woman not smell her treatment; “when you do suffumigi, and most of all with odoriferous things, turn the woman’s head very well so that she cannot smell it because they would make her head hurt and give her pain.”88 To mitigate the possible side effects, it was likewise best to put some fetid substance over the woman’s nose to overpower her nasal olfactory receptors and ensure that only the womb would inhale the powerfully-scented remedy. Some women faced diffculties expelling their afterbirth. Marinello deemed this a grave problem; if the placenta did not come out, it would rot inside the uterus and malignant, noxious vapors would ascend into the body, ultimately attacking the heart and brain leading to death.89 Aromatic fumigation could prompt the placenta to descend along with the dead parts. Once again, the scents were not for smelling in the traditional sense: it will be extremely valuable to fumigate the womb with sweet smells, like those of musk, civet, amber, gallia muscata, and aloeswood, and place it on coals, but in a manner that [the scent] does not go to the nose.90 Marinello again instructed the practitioner to whip up an olfactory distraction by burning fetid human hair, peacock feathers and “other things” in order to make a “stinking smoke” separate from that diffusing through the vaginal opening.91 Hippocrates had directed the use of sweet-smelling substances to entice the uterus back down if it wandered upwards, and likewise the burning of bad-smelling things would catalyze upward movement by the repulsed womb away from the source of the scent by the vaginal opening, or in this case, the nose and throat.92 One might wonder how scent could exercise its powers on the placenta unless it did so through the conduit of imagined uterine olfactory receptors, then begging the question as to why the uterus itself would not have descended in response to the aromatic treatment. The power that smell wielded was diverse and at times contradictory.

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BEYOND THE AGE OF AMBERGRIS By the eighteenth century, pharmacists across Europe had mimicked the Ricettario forentino’s approach to civic pharmacopeia. The long lists of alphabetized substances that every apothecary needed to stock had been split into animals, plants, and minerals. The authorities listed ambergris in the fnal category. Its name had been simplifed across Latin, English, French, and German. The differences between black and white no longer merited mention. The name “ambra gialla” simply directed the reader to see next for ambergris. The authorities wrote that “it is a fammable, compact substance that becomes liquid with mild heat and spreads a very pleasing odor. It comes from Asia. The best is found above the coasts of Madagascar, and Sumatra, and again on the coasts of Malabar, in Moluche Islands, and Ethiopia.” One could fnd it on the shore, but these authorities suggested that one could also mine it in Germany, France, and Hungary.93 Ambergris had become a mineral. The story of ambergris is characterized by a duality of ephemerality and longevity. Scent wears off. The stench of premodernity made ambergris and its aromatic properties, and by extension curative properties, extremely attractive. The strength of its smell and its imagined hint of sea offered the power to protect oneself from the unsavory breezes carrying plague. Ambergris was also valued as a fxative, capable of preserving the nuances of a complex scent or prolonging a cure’s shelf life. Linked and mutually reinforcing like ambergris and musk, this case study shows how natural history developed in tandem with the pharmaceutical and medical tradition. However, the substance’s history is anything but fxed. Taxonomic uncertainties abound, muddying descriptions and recipes presented in both Latinate and vernacular discourses. Parallel ambers fostered parallel interest around the Mediterranean. Most early moderns who used or prescribed ambergris for their perfumed concoctions described in this chapter lacked a sense of ecological consciousness in relation to this necessary ingredient. Did the European nobility receiving ambergris gloves as an extravagant gift know of the extraordinary lengths behind sourcing the natural substance? Ambergris as passed through elite gifting networks was prized for its pleasant effect on leather gloves and its medicinal effcacy rather than chiefy serving as a naturalist’s exotic curiosity. Alienated from the entrails of the whale, the oily substance was prized for its utility rather than its origins. Whereas natural histories and apothecary texts struggled to pin down the substance from an ontological perspective, practitioners understood how to use ambergris in the fumigations of ailing wombs and everyday cures such as poultices. Emphasizing a nature studies approach over the common emphasis on taxonomy and natural history allows this chapter to present an ecology of an early modern sensory experience. To study a natural thing is not to reenact the work of a naturalist. In place of order, we have followed the appearances of a vague substance whose very value came from the most uncertain sense of smell. Ambergris took on new forms and meanings amid the human and nonhuman actors—squids, whales, naturalists, apothecaries, elite women, and nobility at the Medici court—involved in its transmission. Thus, this essay takes seriously the uncertainties of ambergris, messily entwined with musk, civet, resinous amber, and more. By purposefully ending far from where it started, this chapter attempts to escape the confnes of natural history, which often erased the utility and very reality of ambergris.

126 Part I • Manipulated

Sperm whales are now considered a vulnerable species by the International Whaling Commission and are (mostly) no longer hunted.94 It is diffcult to distinguish the valuable hunks of ambergris from regular rocks along the shoreline, and few scan the ocean surface for the bobbing substance today. Thus, that sea-worn scent ubiquitous in the smellscapes of the early modern world rarely entices modern noses, and almost certainly not wombs. Yet, the synthetic production of the naturally occurring chemical ambroxide began during the 1950s with the intention of replacing ambergris. Sold as ambroxan, the chemical compound is said to have a musky sweet odor with subtle animal tones, similar in description to ambergris, and is quite commonly added to modern perfumes as a fxative. Ambergris lives on—sort of.

NOTES 1 This paper emerged from Kathryn Biedermann and Mackenzie Cooley’s collaboration on the bezoar research earlier in this book. We are grateful for the careful feedback of Whitney Barlow Robles on this chapter’s historical arguments and the biological wisdom of Lauren Cooley, who advised us on all things cetacean and sepiolidae. Thanks also to Naima Akter, Isabelle Crownhart, Carter Myers-Brown, and Isabella Roselli, members of the Hamilton College Summer 2022 New World Nature research team, for their work on the Ricettario forentino. The modern reader knows that whales are cetaceans and not fsh, but see Dupré’s exploration of the legitimacy of “folkbiological” taxonomies: John Dupré, “Are Whales Fish?” in Humans and Other Animals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 42–55. 2 Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato 516a, fol. 709. From Luigi Dovara (Livorno) to Francesco I de’ Medici (Firenze). July 11, 1565 (bia. medici.org—MAPDoc ID#20615). 3 Dale W. Rice, “Spermaceti,” in Encyclopedia of Marine Animals, 2nd ed., ed. William F. Perrin, Bernd Würsig, and J. G. M. Thewissen (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009), 1098–1099. There are current debates in the scientifc community as to whether the spermaceti organ’s main function is echolocation or buoyancy regulation. See Patrick J. O. Miller, Mark P. Johnson, Peter L. Tyack, and Eugene A. Terray, “Swimming Gaits, Passive Drag and Buoyancy of Diving Sperm Whales Physeter Macrocephalus,” Journal of Experimental Biology 207 (2004): 1953–1967. 4 Günther Ohloff, “The Fragrance of Ambergris,” in Fragrance Chemistry: The Science of the Sense of Smell, ed. Ernst T. Theimer (New York: Academic Press, 1982), 536. 5 In the words of perfumer Tony Morris recounted by Christopher Kemp in Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), 75. 6 See Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Grey (London: Ward, Lock and Co, 1891). 7 Assia Kovatcheva et al., “Combinatorial QSAR of Ambergris Fragrance Compounds,” Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences 44, no. 2 (February 2004), 582; Nigel Groom, The Perfume Handbook (Suffolk: Springer, 1992), 6. 8 For early modern sensory histories of scent, see Kate Mulry, “The Aromas of Flora’s Wide Domains: Cultivating Gardens, Aromas, and Political Subjects in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic,” in Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America, Early American History Series, ed. Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite, vol. 8 (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017), 255–99; Andrew Kettler, “‘Ravishing Odors of Paradise’: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America,” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 4 (November 2016): 827–52, as well as Kettler’s Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020); Mark Smith, “Transcending, Othering, Detecting: Smell, Premodernity, Modernity,” Postmedieval 3, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 380–90.

Chapter 4 • Ambergris 127 9 For more on musk outside of the early modern European context, see Anya H. King, Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017). 10 Steffen Arctander, Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin (Published by the author, printed in Denmark by Det Hoffensbergske Etablissement, 1960), 57. On the modern art of perfuming, see Mandy Aftel, Essence & Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume (Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2004), 33–34. 11 Jennifer Peace Rhind, Listening to Scent: An Olfactory Journey with Aromatic Plants and Their Extracts (London and Philadelphia: Singing Dragon, 2014), 15–16. 12 See Betty Bridges, “Fragrance: Emerging Health and Environmental Concerns,” Flavour and Fragrance Journal 17, no. 5 (2002): 361–71. 13 On the extensive literature on smell and memory in psychology, see Wolfe et al., Sensation and Perception (2006); Rachel Herz, The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell (New York: Harper Collins, 2009). Likewise, perfuming guides and histories have found their place in recent popular literature, see for example Mandy Aftel’s modern-day manual for healthful perfuming at home, Scents & Sensibilities: Creating Solid Perfumes for Well-Being (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2005), and Christopher Kemp’s popular history of ambergris in Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). 14 Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 153. 15 Note that Holly Dugan argues that despite their invisibility and ephemerality, scents themselves are material objects—“cultural materials worthy of historical investigation” in The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 2. 16 In English, squid, like fsh or sheep, is often used in the singular to speak to a larger group. So the school defnes the squid, whose individual identity, outside of the giant squid discussed in the next chapter, are often lost as the whale consumes them all as a mass. 17 Hiroshi Hosokawa and Toshiro Kamiya, “Some Observations on the Cetacean Stomachs, with Special Considerations on the Feeding Habits of Whales,” The Scientifc Reports of the Whales Research Institute, no. 23 (September 1971): 100. 18 See Nick Pyenson, Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018). 19 Ilias Foskolos et al., “A Taste for Squid: The Diet of Sperm Whales Stranded in Greece, Eastern Mediterranean,” Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 115 (January 2020): 2. See E. W. Gudger, “The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology,” Isis 22, no. 1 (1934): 21–40. Further note that Gudger argues that ichthyology (the zoological study of fshes) was the frst branch of natural history to develop as an isolated realm of study in the mid-sixteenth century. 20 Robert Clarke, “The Origin of Ambergris,” Latin American Journal of Aquatic Animals 5, no. 1 (June 2006): 14, 18. 21 Ibid., 16. 22 Ibid., 18. 23 Valentina Pugliano, “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop,” in Worlds of Natural History, ed. H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 44–60. 24 Carolus Clusius, Antidotarium (Antverpiae: Ex Offcina Christophori Plantini, 1561), 9. 25 See John M. Riddle, “Pomum Ambrae: Amber and Ambergris in Plague Remedies,” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften Bd. 48, H. 2 (Juni 1964): 111–22. 26 Clusius, Antidotarium, 9. 27 Ibid., 34. 28 Karl H. Dannenfeldt, “Ambergris: The Search for Its Origin,” Isis 73, no. 3 (September 1982): 390.

128 Part I • Manipulated 29 Conrad Gessner, Historiae animalium Liber IV qui est de Piscium & Aquatilium animantium natura (Francofurti: In Bibliopolio Andreae Cambieri, 1604), 204. 30 Several authors have traced the historical debates concerning the origins of ambergris. See Clarke, “The Origin of Ambergris,” 7–21; Dannenfeldt, “Ambergris: The Search,” 382–97; Monica Azzolini, “Talking of Animals: Whales, Ambergris, and the Circulation of Knowledge in Seventeenth-century Rome,” Renaissance Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 297–318; Cristina Brito, Vera L. Jordão, and Graham J. Pierce, “Ambergris as an Overlooked Historical Marine Resource: Its Biology and Role as a Global Economic Commodity,” Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 93, no. 3 (2015): 585–96. 31 ASF Mediceo del Principato 1354, fol. 244bis. From Giacomo Macolo (Unidentifed) to Andrea Cioli (Firenze). February 1614. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#10539). “Ricetta Olio di Ambra Gialla 3 oncia ambragrisa e moscho an. 3 grani.” 32 ASF Mediceo del Principato 1354, fol. 244. From Niccolò di Mario (Firenze) to Andrea  Cioli (Firenze). February 22, 1615. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#15770). Here Niccolò Sisti of Florence alerts Andrea Cioli of the Medici court that he could not come by certain ingredients needed to prepare Macolo’s recipes, but ambergris and musk were not mentioned. 33 ASF Mediceo del Principato 1354, fol. 244bis. From Giacomo Macolo (Unidentifed) to Andrea Cioli (Firenze). February 1614. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#10539). Future research might include the creation of falsifed amber using early modern recipes, akin to the fruitful experiments of Pamela Smith’s Making and Knowing Project. 34 See Leonardo Colapinto, “The Beginning of the Pharmacopoeia between 15th and 17th Centuries. From the Ricettario Fiorentino to the Pharmacopea Bergamensis and the Antidotaria,” Medicina nei secoli 1 (1993): 39–50. Emily E. Beck, “Authority, Authorship, and Copying: The Ricettario Fiorentino and Manuscript Recipe Culture in Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World, ed. Joseph M. Gabriel and Matthew James Crawford (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 45–62. For the longer history of materia medica, empire, and the Tuscan work, see the work of Ashley Buchanan. 35 Valentina Pugliano, “Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, no. 2 (2017): 233–73. 36 Nuovo receptario composto dal famosissimo chollegio degli eximi doctori della arte et medicina della inclita cipta di Firenze (Firenze: Per la Compagnia del Dragho, 1498), 12. 37 El Ricettario dell’arte, et vniversita de medici, et spetiali della citta di Firenze. Rivedvto dal Collegio de medici per ordine dello illvstrissimo et eccellentissimo signore dvca di Firenze (Stampato in Fiorenza: appresso Lorenzo Torrentino stampator dvcale del mese di settemb, 1550), 12. 38 Ricettario forentino (Fiorenza: Nella Stamperia dei Giunti, 1574), 16–17. Il ricettario medicinale necessario à tutti i medici, & speziali (In Fiorenza: Nella Stamperia de i Giunti, 1567), 15. 39 Note that the defnitional foreword designates the terms ambra gialla and carabe as synonyms, and likewise ambracane, ambra grigia, and ambra odorifera are defned as synonyms by contemporaneous sources. 40 Ricettario Fiorentino, 1574, 169. Yellow amber is grouped with red coral and ivory and the recipe calls for two scopoli of each, thus one would assume that the amber gemstone is the referenced substance. Dissimilarly, the odoriferous amber is listed alongside musk, and both are measured by drams, grouped in the prescription by both proximity and unit of measurement. 41 Il Collegio de’Medici, Ricettario forentino di nuovo illustrato (Firenze: Appresso Pietro Cecconcelli, 1613), 292–4. The two ingredients are also paired in a cordial recipe, 260. 42 Ricettario Fiorentino, 1613, 293. 43 Ibid., 1613, 294. 44 Girolamo Ruscelli, La Prima [-terza] parte de’ secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese (Pesaro: Appresso gli Heredi di Bartolomeo Cesano, 1561), 38. “Pigliate ambracane, che alcuni chiamano Ambra balen, cioè l’ambra bigia

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45 46

47 48 49

50

51

52

53

54 55 56 57

odorata, che si adopera ne i profumi, & tagliatela minuta piu che potete, & sia meza oncia.” (Note that this work was written under Ruscelli’s pseudonym, “Alessio Piemontese.”) Note that John Florio defned ambracane as ambergris. See John Florio, “Ambracane,” in Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie of the Italian and English Tongues (London: Melch Bradwood, 1611), 23. The validity of Florio’s ambracan defnition should rightfully be called into question, since his defnition of ambra associated amber with spermaceti. See the appendix “Origins of Perfume Literature” to Edward Sagarin, The Science and Art of Perfumery (New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1945). The Rerum medicarum cites Italian philosopher-physician Andrea Bacci’s treatise on therapeutic waters De thermis (1571) that amber was an animal excrement, then consciously connected ambergris, civet, musk, and castoreum via their animal origins. “Non dissimile autem veri ft in quit, quod relatum ab Indis audivi a viro principe: ambar piscis quoddam esse excrementum, ut Zibethum Catti Indici, & Moschus & Castorium, qui quarundam adnascentium herbarum pabulo satur, gignat aliquando abseessum in ventre intimo,” 567. Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria (Venetia: Appresso Francesco Rampazetto, 1560), 60. “Se li vorreti poner legno aloe in polvere e zuccaro sarà signorile.” Notandissimi secreti, 4, 44r, and 69, respectively. See Katharine Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006) and William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) for more on the early modern conception of “secrets.” Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 52. See especially Ray’s chapter “The Secrets of Isabella Cortese: Practical Alchemy and Women Readers,” 46–72, for a more detailed discussion of sixteenth-century books of secrets and a critical analysis of the dissemination of gendered knowledge in the Scientifc Revolution. This is rather different from the narrative of amber and ambergris’ high expense during the medieval period. John M. Riddle infers in “Pomum Ambrae” (1964) that the high price of the substances resulted in their relative scarcity in prescriptions, especially against plague, from medieval manuscripts wherein the addition of the amberous ingredients would have made relative sense. Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato 5922b, fol. 17. December 30, 1553. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#3333). See Angelica Groom, Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018) for more on animals and diplomatic gifting. Sharon T. Strocchia, Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy, I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019), 41–43. In a similar vein, Meredith Ray’s scholarship explores the role of noble Italian women in alchemical experimentation with scent, cosmetics, and medicines in the Scientifc Revolution; see Meredith K. Ray, Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015). For a broader examination of the practice of alchemic experimentation in the early modern world, see Bruce T. Moran, Distilling Knowledge: Alchemy, Chemistry, and the Scientifc Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Strocchia, Forgotten Healers, 43. ASF Mediceo del Principato 1212, Ins. 5, Fol. 821, 1580 (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#4284). ASF Mediceo del Principato 5113, Ins. 1, Fol. 339, Augusto Tizio (Madrid), Pietro Usimbardi (Roma), January 13, 1585. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#15651). ASF Mediceo del Principato, Vol. 4919, Fol. 901, Vincenzo Alamanni (Madrid), Pietro Usimbardi (Firenze), April 29, 1589. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#8756). Fernando de Toledo was a Spanish nobleman and illegitimate son of the Grand Duke of Alba Don Fernando Álvarez de Toledo.

130 Part I • Manipulated 58 See Dugan, “Oiled in Ambergris: Ambergris, Gloves, London’s Luxury Markets,” in The Ephemeral History of Perfume, 126–53. Spanish artisans and nobles frequently exported scented gloves; the English dubbed gloves heavily scented with ambergris as prepared in the Spanish style, which fetched a high price and were appreciated by Elizabeth I. Dugan furthermore notes the transformative role ambergris played in the leather industries of both England and continental Europe, since the cured material carried a strong, repugnant odor. Ambergris was a good solution thanks to its strong smell and its easily applicable greasy texture. 59 The Spanish Empire also enacted sumptuary legislation in their New World holdings. Within a decade of the legislation passed in Milan, sumptuary laws governed inhabitants of the viceroyalty of Peru under Don Francisco de Toledo. See Rebecca Earle, “Race, Clothing, and Identity: Sumptuary Laws in Colonial Spanish America,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800, ed. Giorgio Riello and Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 325–45. 60 Catherine Kovesi, “Defending the Right to Dress: Two Sumptuary Law Protests in Sixteenth-Century Milan,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, 188–9. 61 Luca Molà and Giorgio Riello, “Against the Law: Sumptuary Prosecutions in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Padua,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, 216–17. 62 See Francisco Brethencourt, “Sumptuary Laws in Portugal and Its Empire from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Century,” in The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, 273–98. 63 Carlo Carnesecchi, Cosimo I e la sua legge suntuaria del 1562 (Firenze: Stabilimento Pellas, 1902), 5. See Elizabeth Currie, “The Court on Show,” in Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence (London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016) for more on Florentine sumptuary laws. 64 Carnesecchi, Cosimo I e la sua legge suntuaria, 40. “Sia prohibito a qualunque persona della citta di Firenza, cosi donna come huomo, di . . . portare muschi, profummi et ambra.” 65 Evelyn Welch, “Scented Buttons and Perfumed Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy,” in Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, ed. Bella Mirabella (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011), 22. 66 Ibid., 23. 67 Ibid., 27–28. 68 See Discours merveilleux de la vie, actions et deportements de Catherine de Médicis, Royne-mère (1575). 69 Andrew Boorde, The Breviary of Healthe (London: In Flete-Strete at the Sygne of the George Next to Saynt Dunstones Churche by Wyllyam Powell, 1552), Fol. C iiiir. 70 Ibid., Fol. C iiii. 71 Sean David Parrish, “Marketing Nature: Apothecaries, Medicinal Retailing, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Venice, 1565–1730,” (PhD. diss., Duke University, 2015), 262. 72 Girolamo Calestani, Osservationi nel comporre gli antidoti (Venetia: Appresso Francesco Senese, 1562), 247. “Tra tutte le polvi, che giornalmente s’osservano ad uso medicinale sono principali quelle delli confetti aromatici.” 73 Calestani, Osservationi, “Et questo per lo muschio, & l’ambra, che sono di sostanza densa, & grassa, atta, & virtuosa à conservare l’atre spetie deboli, con ritenere, che non eshalino da esse, ne svaporino quelle parti piu sottili, & deboli al mantenersi.” 74 Calestani, Osservationi, 248. “Che questo habbiamo noi detto in favore di quelle spetie, Che per la grossezza c’hanno bastante ò di gomme, ò di suchi densi ò di moscho, ò d’ambra, hanno facoltà di tenersi, & conservarsi a lungo.” 75 BNM (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana) Gt. III, 17 (= 4963), Della natura, qualità, quantità, it compositione de veleni, it dille loro contraris, libri duoi havreti dalla libraria del Ré Ferdinando I, fol. 12r-v. 76 Operating under the judgement that the manuscript was compiled for King Ferdinand I of Naples, the document was most likely written towards the end of the ffteenth century.

Chapter 4 • Ambergris 131 77 BNM, Della natura, fol. 12r. “ .  .  . questa è una acqua pritiorissima con ogni veleno, et peste.” 78 ASF Mediceo del Principato 1171, Fol. 232r, Andrea Pasquali (Arezzo), Pier Francesco Riccio (Firenze), September 11, 1544. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#6539). 79 Strocchia, Forgotten Healers, 15. 80 One scruple equaled about 1/24 of an ounce according to the Ricettario forentino (1574). 81 ASF Mediceo del Principato 1171, Fol. 233r. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#6539). 82 James Shaw and Evelyn Welch, Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence, The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine (Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B. V., 2011), 252. 83 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 1171, Fol. 232v. (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID# 6539). 84 ASF, Mediceo del Principato 1169, ins. 3, fol. 72, September 1, 1538, Bono Cappelli to Pier Francesco Riccio (bia.medici.org — MAP Doc ID#5435). 85 Ursula A. Potter, The Unruly Womb in Early Modern Drama: Plotting Women’s Biology on the Stage, ed. Late Tudor and Stuart Drama (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019), 20. 86 Note also that sexual stimulation was also employed heavily in the effort to right the uterus. See Monica Green’s scholarship and the emphasis on regular sexual relations as a key to protecting female health throughout the medieval period and Renaissance in Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 87 Giovanni Marinello, Le medicine partenenti alle infermità delle donne (Venetia: Appresso Giovanni Valgriso, al Segno della Vittoria, 1574), 114. 88 Ibid. For further reading on Marinello’s works, see M. Gadebusch Bondio, “Piacevoli ragionamenti e medicina per le donne. Giovanni Marinello, medico galante del tardo Cinquecento,” Medicina nei secoli 11, no. 1 (1999): 55–84. 89 Marinello, Le medicine, 289r. 90 Ibid., 290r. 91 Ibid., 290r. 92 Potter, The Unruly Womb, 27–28. 93 Ricettario Fiorentino nuovamente compilato e ridotto all’uso moderno (Firenze: Per Gaetano Cambiagi Stampatore Granducale, 1789), 4. 94 See Hal Whitehead, “Estimates of the Current Global Population Size and Historical Trajectory for Sperm Whales,” Marine Ecology Progress Series 242 (October 2002): 295–304. The International Whaling Commission (IWC) placed a moratorium on all commercial whale hunting in 1986 due to the threatened endangerment of whale populations across species as a result of over-hunting. Japan in particular has often made headlines for defying the international ban on commercial whaling under the guise of scientifc research, and the country recently removed itself from the IWC. See Hirata for more on why Japan continues to hunt whales: Keiko Hirata, “Japan’s Whaling Politics,” in Norms, Interests, and Power in Japanese Foreign Policy, ed. Yoichiro Sato and Keiko Hirata (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 175–210.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Aftel, Mandy. Essence & Alchemy: A Natural History of Perfume. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2004. Aftel, Mandy. Scents & Sensibilities: Creating Solid Perfumes for Well-Being. Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith Publisher, 2005. Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 516a, fol. 709. From Luigi Dovara (Livorno) to Francesco I de’ Medici (Firenze). July 11, 1565 (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#20615). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 1169, ins. 3, fol. 72, September 1, 1538, Bono Cappelli to Pier Francesco Riccio (bia. medici.org—MAP Doc ID#5435).

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Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 1171, fol. 232r. Andrea Pasquali (Arezzo) to Pier Francesco Riccio (Firenze). September 11, 1544 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID#6539). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 1212, Ins. 5, fol. 821. 1580 (bia.medici.org—MAPDoc ID#4284). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 1354, fol. 244bis. From Giacomo Macolo (Unidentifed) to Andrea Cioli (Firenze). February 1614 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID#10539). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 1354, fol. 244. From Niccolò di Mario (Firenze) to Andrea Cioli (Firenze). February 22, 1615 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID#15770). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 4919, fol. 901. From Vincenzo Alamanni (Madrid) to Pietro Usimbardi (Firenze). April 29, 1589 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID#8756). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 5113, Ins. 1, fol. 339. From Augusto Tizio (Madrid) to Pietro Usimbardi (Roma). January 13, 1585 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID# 15651). Archivio di Stato di Firenze (ASF), Mediceo del Principato. 5922b, fol. 17. December 30, 1553 (bia.medici.org—MAP Doc ID#3333). Arctander, Steffen. Perfume and Flavor Materials of Natural Origin. Published by the author, printed in Denmark by Det Hoffensbergske Etablissement, 1960. Azzolini, Monica. “Talking of Animals: Whales, Ambergris, and the Circulation of Knowledge in Seventeenth-century Rome.” Renaissance Studies 31, no. 2 (2017): 297–318. Beck, Emily E. “Authority, Authorship, and Copying: The Ricettario Fiorentino and Manuscript Recipe Culture in Sixteenth-Century Florence.” In Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Joseph M. Gabriel and Matthew James Crawford. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana (BNM) Gt. III, 17 (= 4963). Della natura, qualità, quantità, it compositione de veleni, it dille loro contraris, libri duoi havreti dalla libraria del Ré Ferdinando I. Bondio, M. Gadebusch. “Piacevoli ragionamenti e medicina per le donne. Giovanni Marinello, medico galante del tardo Cinquecento.” Medicina nei secoli 11, no. 1 (1999): 55–84. Boorde, Andrew. The Breviary of Healthe. London: In Flete-Strete at the Sygne of the George Next to Saynt Dunstones Churche by Wyllyam Powell, 1552. Bridges, Betty. “Fragrance: Emerging Health and Environmental Concerns.” Flavour and Fragrance Journal 17, no. 5 (2002): 361–71. Brito, Cristina, Vera L. Jordão, and Graham J. Pierce. “Ambergris as an Overlooked Historical Marine Resource: Its Biology and Role as a Global Economic Commodity.” Journal of the Marine Biological Association of the United Kingdom 93, no. 3 (2015): 585–96. Calestani, Girolamo. Osservationi nel comporre gli antidoti. In Venetia: Appresso Francesco Senese, 1562. Carnesecchi, Carlo. Cosimo I e la sua legge suntuaria del 1562. Firenze: Stabilimento Pellas, 1902. Cazauran, Nicole, ed. Discours Merveilleux de la vie, actions et deportements de Catherine de Médicis, Royne-mère. Droz: Genève, 1995. Clarke, Robert. “The Origin of Ambergris.” Latin American Journal of Aquatic Animals 5, no. 1 (June 2006): 7–21. Clusius, Carolus. Antidotarium sive de exacta componendorum miscendorumque medicamentorum ratione. Antverpiae: Ex Offcina Christophori Plantini, 1561.

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Colapinto, Leonardo. “The Beginning of the Pharmacopoeia between 15th and 17th Centuries. From the Ricettario Fiorentino to the Pharmacopea Bergamensis and the Antidotaria.” Medicina nei secoli 1 (1993): 39–50. Columna, Fabio. “Animalis Zibethici Maris Icon.” In Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae, edited by Francisco Hernández and Federico Cesi. Romae: Superior permissu Ex Typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, 1651. Currie, Elizabeth. Fashion and Masculinity in Renaissance Florence. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “Ambergris: The Search for Its Origin.” Isis 73, no. 3 (September 1982): 382–97. Dugan, Holly. The Ephemeral History of Perfume: Scent and Sense in Early Modern England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Eamon, William. Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. El Ricettario dell’arte, et vniversita de medici, et spetiali della citta di Firenze. Rivedvto dal Collegio de medici per ordine dello illvstrissimo et eccellentissimo signore dvca di Firenze. Stampato in Fiorenza: appresso Lorenzo Torrentino stampator dvcale del mese di settemb, 1550. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Florio, John. Queen Anna’s New World of Words, or Dictionarie. London: Printed by Melch Bradwood, 1611. Foskolos, Ilias, Niki Koutouzi, Lysimachos Polychronidis, Paraskevi Alexiadou, and Alexandros Frantzis. “A Taste for Squid: The Diet of Sperm Whales Stranded in Greece, Eastern Mediterranean.” Deep Sea Research Part I: Oceanographic Research Papers 115 (January 2020): 103–64. Gessner, Conrad. Historiae animalium Liber IV qui est de Piscium & Aquatilium animantium natura. Francofurti: In Bibliopolio Andreae Cambieri, 1604. Green, Monica. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine: The Rise of Male Authority in Pre-Modern Gynaecology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Groom, Angelica. Exotic Animals in the Art and Culture of the Medici Court in Florence. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Groom, Nigel. The Perfume Handbook. Suffolk: Springer, 1992. Gudger, E. W. “The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology.” Isis 22, no. 1 (1934): 21–40. Herz, Rachel. The Scent of Desire: Discovering Our Enigmatic Sense of Smell. New York: Harper Collins, 2009. Hirata, Keiko. “Japan’s Whaling Politics.” In Norms, Interests, and Power in Japanese Foreign Policy, edited by Yoichiro Sato and Keiko Hirata, 175–210. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Hosokawa, Hiroshi and Toshiro Kamiya. “Some Observations on the Cetacean Stomachs, with Special Considerations on the Feeding Habits of Whales.” The Scientifc Reports of the Whales Research Institute, no. 23 (September 1971): 91–101. Il Collegio de’Medici. Ricettario forentino di nuovo illustrato. Firenze: Appresso Pietro Cecconcelli, 1613. Il ricettario medicinale necessario à tutti i medici, & speziali. In Fiorenza: Nella Stamperia de i Giunti, 1567. Kemp, Christopher. Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Kettler, Andrew. “‘Ravishing Odors of Paradise’: Jesuits, Olfaction, and Seventeenth-Century North America.” Journal of American Studies 50, no. 4 (November 2016): 827–52.

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Kettler, Andrew. Smell of Slavery: Olfactory Racism and the Atlantic World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. King, Anya H. Scent from the Garden of Paradise: Musk and the Medieval Islamic World. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Kovatcheva, Assia, Alexander Golbraikh, Scott Oloff, Yun-De Xiao, Weifan Zheng, Peter Wolschann, Gerhard Buchbauer, and Alexander Tropsha. “Combinatorial QSAR of Ambergris Fragrance Compounds.” Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling 44, no. 2 (February 2004): 582–95. Marinello, Giovanni. Le medicine partenenti alle infermità delle donne. Venetia: Appresso Giovanni Valgriso, al Segno della Vittoria, 1574. Miller, Patrick J. O., Mark P. Johnson, Peter L. Tyack, and Eugene A. Terray. “Swimming Gaits, Passive Drag and Buoyancy of Diving Sperm Whales Physeter Macrocephalus.” Journal of Experimental Biology 207 (2004): 1953–1967. Mulry, Kate. “The Aromas of Flora’s Wide Domains: Cultivating Gardens, Aromas, and Political Subjects in the Late Seventeenth-Century English Atlantic.” In Empire of the Senses: Sensory Practices of Colonialism in Early America, Early American History Series, vol. 8, edited by Daniela Hacke and Paul Musselwhite, 255–99. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2017. Notandissimi secreti de l’arte profumatoria. Venetia: Appresso Francesco Rampazetto, 1560. Nuovo receptario composto dal famosissimo chollegio degli eximi doctori della arte et medicina della inclita cipta di Firenze. Firenze: Per la Compagnia del Dragho, 1498. Ohloff, Günther. “The Fragrance of Ambergris.” In Fragrance Chemistry: The Science of the Sense of Smell, edited by Ernst T. Theimer, 535–74. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Park, Katharine. Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection. Brooklyn: Zone Books, 2006. Parrish, Sean David. “Marketing Nature: Apothecaries, Medicinal Retailing, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Venice, 1565–1730.” PhD. dissertation, Duke University, 2015. Potter, Ursula A. The Unruly Womb in Early Modern Drama: Plotting Women’s Biology on the Stage. Late Tudor and Stuart Drama. Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2019. Pugliano, Valentina. “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 44–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pugliano, Valentina. “Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 91, no. 2 (2017): 233–73. Pyenson, Nick. Spying on Whales: The Past, Present and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2018. Ray, Meredith K. Daughters of Alchemy: Women and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Rhind, Jennifer Peace. Listening to Scent: An Olfactory Journey with Aromatic Plants and Their Extracts. London and Philadelphia: Singing Dragon, 2014. Rice, Dale W. “Spermaceti.” In Encyclopedia of Marine Animals, Second Edition, edited by William F. Perrin, Bernd Würsig, and J. G. M. Thewissen, 1098–99. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009. Ricettario Fiorentino. Fiorenza: Nella Stamperia dei Giunti, 1574.

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Ricettario Fiorentino nuovamente compilato e ridotto all’uso moderno. Firenze: Per Gaetano Cambiagi Stampatore Granducale, 1789. Riddle, John M. “Pomum Ambrae: Amber and Ambergris in Plague Remedies.” Sudhoffs Archiv für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften Bd. 48, no. 2 (Juni 1964): 111–22. Riello, Giorgio and Ulinka Rublack, eds. The Right to Dress: Sumptuary Laws in a Global Perspective, c.1200–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Ruscelli, Girolamo. La Prima [-terza] parte de’ secreti del reverendo donno Alessio Piemontese. Pesaro: Appresso gli Heredi di Bartolomeo Cesano, 1561. Sagarin, Edward. The Science and Art of Perfumery. New York and London: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1945. Salviani, Ippolito. Aquatilium animalium historiæ, liber primvs. Romae: Medicinam Proftente Auctore, 1544. Shaw, James and Evelyn Welch. Making and Marketing Medicine in Renaissance Florence. The Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine. Amsterdam and New York: Editions Rodopi B. V., 2011. Smith, Mark. “Transcending, Othering, Detecting: Smell, Premodernity, Modernity.” Postmedieval 3, no. 4 (Winter 2012): 380–90. Strocchia, Sharon T. Forgotten Healers: Women and the Pursuit of Health in Late Renaissance Italy. I Tatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Welch, Evelyn. “Scented Buttons and Perfumed Gloves: Smelling Things in Renaissance Italy.” In Ornamentalism: The Art of Renaissance Accessories, edited by Bella Mirabella, 13–39. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2011. Whitehead, Hal. “Estimates of the Current Global Population Size and Historical Trajectory for Sperm Whales.” Marine Ecology Progress Series 242 (October 2002): 295–304. Wierix, Johannes. “Three Beached Whales.” Etching 22.20 mm x 30.50 mm, Antwerp, 1577, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco. Wolfe, Jeremy M., Keith R. Kluender, Dennis M. Levi, Linda M. Bartoshuk, Rachel S. Herz, Roberta L. Klatzky, and Daniel M. Merfeld. Sensation and Perception, Sixth Edition. New York and Oxford: Sinauer Associates, Oxford University Press, 2020.

PART II

Felt

Chapter 5

Squid Natural History as Food History, c. 1730–1860 Whitney Barlow Robles

“Although, biologically, this empty breadfruit is a kingdom away from the squid specimen consumed by Cook’s crew, the squid and the fruit were aligned in their fates: both were deemed exotic Pacifc food curiosities and entered the cabin of a voyage that would drastically extend the reach of the British Empire, measurably propelled by scientifc enterprise.” Page 160

Abstract: The history of natural history and the history of food have largely been narrated as separate stories. But many natural things in the early modern period were, at their core, consumable. Natural histories documented the viability of plants and animals as foodstuffs; trying circumstances could force naturalists to eat their specimens instead of preserving them; and naturalists used food itself—from rum to oats to bread—to prepare and transport specimens. While food historians and material culture scholars rightly lament the scarcity of historical foodstuffs preserved in archives (given food’s transient nature), the collections of natural history museums offer tangible evidence of early modern foodways. Objects’ simultaneous status as curiosities and as foods drove the material practices of nature studies, particularly in British imperial investigations of so-called new worlds in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic and Pacifc. By retracing the journey of a squid that fed crew members of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage, this chapter argues that the framework of nature studies offers a unique means of connecting food history and the history of science, as it also uncovers long-lasting hierarchies that underwrote natural history investigations.

VISUALIZATION 5 Breadfruit illustration (in color): Sydney Parkinson, Bread fruit (1769). National Library of Australia. Background water scene: James Augustus St. John, Views in the Eastern Archipelago (London, 1847). Squid (both): Pierre Denys de Montfort, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques (1802). Squid and breadfruit both have layered histories as contentious food objects and scientifc curiosities encountered on eighteenth-century voyages. This visualization’s central image deconstructs the hybrid nature of breadfruit as both a specimen and foodstuff transported across the globe to feed enslaved populations in the Americas. Meanwhile, a hungry cephalopod lunges from the corner, threatening to upend the human world. Breadfruit specimen © The Trustees of the British Museum.

At the Hunterian Museum of London’s Royal College of Surgeons, a monstrous wedge numbered 308 hovers alone in a jar.1 Unappetizing as it may look, this decontextualized beak is a food object in more ways than one. Members of James Cook’s Endeavour voyage, which circumnavigated the globe from 1768 to 1771, reportedly found the massive squid it belonged to foating in the ocean somewhere at the edge of the world between Cape Horn and Australia.2 And they did what many a naturalist would do when faced with a natural thing: they ate it. By the end of the meal, only a few stray body parts remained, including this squid’s beak, made of a hard substance called chitin, nestled within surrounding muscle, which the voyagers ferried back to London to quench the curiosity of the anatomist John Hunter.3 But these humans were not the only beings with a taste for squid. When Cook’s men discovered the specimen on March 3, 1769, seabirds busily feasted upon its fesh. Joseph Banks, the larger-than-life English naturalist aboard the expedition with a penchant for eating the scientifc specimens he encountered across the Pacifc, wrote of the now personifed squid: I found also this day a large Sepia cuttle fsh laying on the water just dead but so pulld to peices by the birds that his Species could not be DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-9

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determind; only this I know that of him was made one of the best soups I ever eat.4 While the appetites of birds confounded the squid’s species identifcation, no such certainty was required to test it as a meal—one likely prepared by John Thompson, the Endeavour’s one-handed cook. Severed from the animal body it nourished, this singular beak embodies the entangled trajectories of food and natural history in the early modern period. Several overlapping patterns of consumption can be extrapolated from the specimen: that of the birds who picked at the squid’s fesh; that of the voyagers who reduced its body to a stew; and that of the squid, which fed itself using this parrot-like beak. This beak’s association with food would persist over time. The paleontologist Richard Owen, when reassigning the Latin name of the specimen to one of his own devising (Enoploteuthis cookii) in an 1881 article, could not help but

Figure 5.1: Squid beak from 1769 at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSHC/308). © Museums at the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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consider the squid as a culinary curiosity more than a century later.5 Owen celebrated that portions of the animal were “rescued from the cookinggalley” of Cook’s ship and “put into spirits for the anatomist at home,” allowing him intimate contact with “such débris of this remarkable Cephalopod.”6 He proceeded to paint a picture of the lost animal as a thoroughly hungry being through thick descriptions of its powerful mandible, tongue-like radula, salivary glands, esophagus, and remarkable retractable hooks on its arms, which in lieu of suckers allowed it to snare prey like a submarine cat, a fact that also enchanted Banks. Owen even used the specimen’s fate as food in an attempt to reverse-engineer the absent animal’s basic anatomy, both in an illustration and in writing: “Considering that so much of the feshy part of the great hooked Squid was cooked as to

Figure 5.2: Owen’s reconstruction of the squid (left). From Richard Owen, “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda,” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 11 (June 1881).

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serve the appetites of at least three, and perhaps four, of those at table in the Commander’s cabin, I infer that a goodly proportion of the body anterior to the fns went to the culinary galley, and that the basal attachments of the fns did not extend . . . to the fore margin of the mantle.”7 Intersections of food and science have only recently started to receive attention from historians of the early modern period, even though many of the objects studied by naturalists—animals, plants, and some minerals— were consumable.8 Moreover, naturalists sustained colonial expansion by recording the edibility of plants and animals in foreign regions, thereby assessing the potential of such landscapes to feed settlers or produce agricultural commodities, which would often be grown through the exploitation of enslaved laborers.9 Within the broader feld of material culture studies and this volume’s focus on natural things, however, the historical study of food as a physical artifact is haunted by its transitory nature. How does one tell an object-centered history of objects meant to disappear? Such archival scarcity can assume an air of fatalism among food studies scholars. As historian Sara Pennell writes, “Material historical investigation of food is fraught by its very ephemerality.”10 Similarly, Lauren F. Klein opens her pathbreaking An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States with the premise that “there is no eating in the archive,” by which Klein means not merely the inability of researchers to eat their lunches in the reading rooms of libraries, but also a “methodological challenge” in that “there is, quite literally, no eating—or at least no food—preserved among the books, letters, newspapers, manuscripts, and other documents that constitute the archival record.”11 Historical special collections brim with cookbooks, probate inventories, artistic renderings of food, and menus that shed light on past eating habits. Vessels and tools used to cook, cut, spoon, and serve meals have been preserved by museums and studied by historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists to reconstruct historical foodways.12 But aside from subtle residues, the food that flled these objects is usually lost.13 Centuries-old food that has survived is often truly exceptional, as in the case of a relic of tea leaves gathered in the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party, now preserved in a glass bottle as a specimen at the Massachusetts Historical Society as much for its political patina as for the tea’s place in food history at large.14 Specimens of meals from the early modern period—or even the basic ingredients used to make those meals—are understandably scarce given that food is the defnition of perishable.

Figure 5.3: Tea leaves in a glass bottle gathered on the shore of Dorchester Neck the morning of December 17, 1773. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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But what if scholars of food have simply been searching for it in the wrong places? Such scarcity only holds true if we limit our focus to traditional historical archives. By expanding our defnition of what might count as a food institution, we can begin to consider animal and plant specimens stored in natural history museums and scientifc collections as robust shadow archives of early modern foodstuffs, dietary preferences, food rituals, and culinary meanings. Many extant scientifc specimens, like the squid’s beak, bear overlapping traces of historical consumption— human and otherwise—that illuminate the conjoined pathways of scientifc collecting and comestible colonialism. In particular, an animal studies framework shows the interconnectedness of food history and natural history and the ecologies that bound the two: unlike minerals, and unlike most plants, animals such as squid moved about and actively pursued and consumed food in a manner similar to humans.15 They, too, were alimentary actors, and they were recognized as such by early modern naturalists. In studying animals, humans had to weigh their hungry minds against their own famished animal bodies when deciding whether to eat a creature or preserve it for scientifc study. They had to protect the specimens they did preserve from other animals, such as insects that sought to devour those bodies. And on occasion, animals forced naturalists to remember their own potential as hungered-for prey. The double status of natural things as curiosities and as foodstuffs thus underpinned the material practice of science, as this dynamic frequently shaped what knowledge got preserved, what knowledge got lost, and who won or lost as a result. As Rebecca Earle contends in her study of food’s role in defning early modern Spanish conceptions of the body, colonization was “as much a physical enterprise as an economic or ideological one.”16 Naturalists who studied curiosities as part of this colonial project were fundamentally hungry bodies in motion, dependent on food for their survival even when they professed to lead a life of the mind, and subsuming their objects of study—ranging from plant and animal specimens to unfamiliar Indigenous foodways—into their own being.17 This duality produced a recurring tension between preserving and destroying, observing and consuming, and remembering and forgetting. Food preservation techniques offered a precedent for preserving scientifc specimens, but scientifc specimens were also threatened by their very virtue of being edible, save for a poisonous pufferfsh or manchineel fruit.18 Moreover, since the day-to-day labor of cooking often fell on the lowest strata of colonial society, including women, enslaved Africans, and Indigenous people, food became a foundational tool by which colonizers sought to organize people into hierarchies.19 Merging food history and natural history, then, offers yet another means of pluralizing our scope of who performed the actual labor that generated natural historical knowledge in the early modern period, all while crystallizing how European classifcation of plants and animals fed concurrent efforts to classify people.20 Using extant specimens alongside printed, manuscript, and visual sources that document the physical practices of natural history and cookery, I frst uncover the importance of food consumption and nature studies to one another. Next, I examine how these practices sat in tension, as the appetites of insects, squid, humans, and others threatened the production of scientifc knowledge. I conclude by returning to the Endeavour voyage and food’s role as a locus of cultural critique, especially in the realm of consuming cephalopods. As my guide, I follow the wielder of this beak, the absent squid, to pry open larger mappings of imperial food politics and natural historical investigation. Along the way, this squid’s hooked tendrils will pull other food-nature hybrids into its orbit throughout the

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Anglo-Atlantic and Anglo-Pacifc worlds, including the breadfruit— another Pacifc food curiosity collected by the Endeavour voyagers with grave consequences for people on the other side of the globe. By regarding squid, breadfruit, and other natural things as both curiosities and food, the hierarchies that underwrote the colonial practices of scientifc study and food production—and natural history’s complicity in associated systems of oppression—begin to congeal.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EDIBLE The squid found by the crew of the Endeavour was a beast worthy of remark. Diagnosing the species of centuries-old specimens using centuries-old scientifc descriptions amidst a morass of changing names over the years is always a challenge and sometimes near impossible—even with digital tools like WoRMS, a comprehensive classifcation database of marine life that would make the likes of Linnaeus drool, and one intended for allaying the Babel of zoological nomenclature.21 Identifcation can be all the more thorny for pelagic squid; recent biologists describe the taxonomy of certain species and groups as “complicated and colorful” on the optimistic end, and in “systematic disarray” on the other.22 This particular beak, a fragment of a much larger creature, cannot be positively identifed without disassembling the historic specimen or shipping it to another institution for CT scanning. But one educated guess is that it belonged to Taningia danae, commonly called the Dana octopus squid after a twentiethcentury research ship.23 This species can exceed an adult human in size, as can several of its kraken cousins of the deep: the Humboldt squid, the robust clubhook squid, the colossal squid, and the famed giant squid. Beyond its remarkable frame, the body of Taningia danae is a thing of wonder in itself. In addition to its sharp talons that snagged the attention of Joseph Banks and Richard Owen, as well as large triangular fns that propel the animal forward and backward, two of the creature’s arms terminate in luminescent photophores that are the largest known light-emitting organs in the animal kingdom. The lemon-sized orbs blink like eyes with the help of dark membranous lids, creating a fashing effect that biologists speculate may be used to confuse prey, communicate with other squid, or even measure distances in the depths.24 These are not strange, exotic features only to be found in a species that inhabits one of Earth’s remote and isolated corners: although rarely seen, Taningia danae is, along with several other species of large squid, what zoologists like Malcolm Clarke have called a “cosmopolitan” species: one that circumnavigates the waters of the globe.25 Thus, the squid’s blinking beacons may illuminate the depths of the ocean wherever they roam in search of sustenance, just as the humans aboard the Endeavour once traveled the planet to encounter—and as fate would have it, eat—all the world had to offer. As captivating as Taningia danae and other globetrotting squid may be, however, most of these fantastical facts about the beasts were unknown to Cook and his crew in the eighteenth century when they turned this creature’s lifeless body into a soup. Indeed, what little we know now of elusive deep-sea squid like Taningia danae depends largely on ecologies of consumption. Such squid are a favorite meal of sperm whales. The indigestible squid beaks retrieved from the bellies of these whales often provide the only frm data points for plotting the global distribution of Taningia danae and several other species of squid.26 Humans thus owe their knowledge of this creature’s watery world to both predation and to the material hardiness of squids’ chitinous

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beaks, which are, in turn, the consumption apparatus of these predatory cephalopods.27 Moreover, squid beaks like the one preserved at the Hunterian Museum appear to be the main stimulus in the production of ambergris: a fragrant, waxy substance that forms within the digestive tract of sperm whales, allowing the whales to encase and then evacuate these irritating beaks, as explored by Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann earlier in this volume. Ambergris, as a marine mirror of the bezoars also discussed by Cooley, was another belly-of-the-beast commodity valued for its role in medicine, in perfumery, in cooking, and as a general curiosity in the early modern period.28 Consumption—in its alimentary, epistemological, and commercial sense—thus set the stage for natural historical study of animals, and ecological approaches to the history of natural history allow scholars to trace the consumption of bodies and natural things across species lines. That is why fshers and whalers proved to be some of the best sources for squid knowledge in the Age of Sail. As food actors in their own right, they encountered large species like Taningia danae in the course of their labors more frequently than self-described naturalists or natural philosophers did. For instance, Franz Xavier Schwediawer noted his reliance on fshers for understanding the lifeways of large squid in a letter read to London’s Royal Society in 1783, in which he identifed squid beaks as the source of ambergris. In recounting the story of a 27-foot-long cephalopod arm found partly digested in the mouth of a sperm whale, Schwediawer maintained that “the fshermen could not have been mistaken” on the arm’s description, “as they themselves often feed upon the smaller sort of the same Sepia.” (Early moderns often described what we now call squid using the terms “cuttle-fsh” and “sepia,” versions of the latter meaning cuttlefsh in Latin and Greek; they used the word “calamary” for squid, too).29 Schwediawer’s tract is only one of thousands of examples of how early modern natural history rested on the shoulders—and, in this case, the tastes—of people on the ground and in the sea, be they fshers, women, Native Americans, bondspeople, slaveholders, surgeons, or merchants.30 Beyond the realm of cephalopods, food and consumption continued to inform nature studies writ large as naturalists and travelers of all stripes produced accountings of nature in the so-called new worlds of the Atlantic and Pacifc. Natural historical treatises, correspondence, and illustrations depicted an almost unfathomable bounty of fora and fauna—and that abundance surfaced in English descriptions of these lands’ bounty of favors, as well. Mark Catesby, who published a multivolume natural history of the Bahamas and what is now the southeastern United States in the 1730s–40s, would often add a culinary fourish to his descriptions of the size, shape, coloring, and habits of animals he documented. While he did not feature squid, Catesby had a keen eye for other marine edibles. Of a type of herring he called a “Fat-back,” which “the Pursuit of Porposses and other voracious Fish” drove ashore in droves, Catesby noted: “It is an excellent sweet Fish, and so excessive fat that Butter is never used in frying, or any other Preparation of them.”31 He also topped off his natural history of now-endangered sturgeons with recipes for pickling the fesh of these massive fsh and for making caviar from their roe. “Speculative Knowledge in Things meerly curious, may be kept secret without much Loss to Mankind,” Catesby wrote. But sturgeon, though curious, were apparently not merely so, prompting him to circulate sturgeon recipes on the reasoning that concealing Things of real Use is derogating from the Purposes we were created for, by depriving the Publick of a Beneft

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designed them by the Donor of all Things. It is on this Motive I here insert a Receipt for pickling Sturgeon and Caviair, which . . . is not known to many, especially in America, where it can be of most Use.32 These dual descriptions of animals as both curiosities and as food were not solely utilitarian, either: naturalists took a certain somatic delight in evoking for readers just how delicious their subjects of study could be. Sydney Parkinson, an artist aboard the Endeavour who worked under Banks, said of a skate or ray he encountered: “white belly, which tasted like veal; some other parts like beef; and the entrails as agreeable as turtle.”33 Here, as in many similar cases, taxonomies of nature operated alongside taxonomies of favor. Moreover, food played a practical role in the institutional development of European and Euro-American natural history, providing an infrastructure for building, preserving, and maintaining specimen collections. Collecting guides, which often repackaged and remixed the instructions of existing sources, provide a wealth of references to contemporary cuisine. Such guides urged naturalists to seek specimens of fsh and other animals at food markets.34 Innovations in food preservation, and food itself, were used to prepare, transport, and preserve articles of natural history.35 For example, naturalists coopted oats and barley as packing materials and used salt to preserve not only foodstuffs but specimens themselves.36 Egg yolks served many roles, such as being used to soften skins and make them more pliable for manipulation.37 Collectors submerged animal bodies like the squid’s beak in rum, brandy, whiskey, and wine to forestall putrefaction.38 Food could even become a stand-in for specimens. One instructional text from 1817 shared a half-baked scheme for using bread, milk, cream, and the culinary technique of kneading to take impressions of objects such as antiquities in curiosity cabinets. The author, George Graves, wrote: [T]ake a quantity of the crumb of bread that has been baked at least twelve hours, knead this with the thumb and fnger in the palm of the hand, till it is quite soft and acquires the consistency of half melted wax; this will require a considerable time, perhaps an hour or more; the bread thus kneaded will have acquired an opake [sic] whiteness, and will readily admit of colouring by mixing a small quantity of Vermillion or any other red pigment, with a little milk or cream, and kneading it with the prepared bread, when this is suffciently soft, it will admit of the slightest indentation, and may be applied to the gem, seal, or coin, and its impression will be most perfectly taken off.39 Graves recommended letting the resulting bread specimen dry for several days until it acquired “almost a stone-like hardness,” and then brushing it with olive oil or almond oil to prevent cracking.40 In addition to kitchen ingredients, naturalists frequently used kitchen instruments in their practice. Ovens proved especially popular, either for drying out specimens or killing insects whose appetites might otherwise destroy a prized collection. In 1820, naturalist Sarah Bowdich Lee recommended “artifcial heat” for removing moisture from specimens in “humid countries and seasons.” By offering instructions for placing packets of specimens “in a stove or oven, after the bread is taken out,” she illustrated how a single device could tag-team for natural history and for cooking.41 Likewise, John Ellis, a fellow of the Royal Society who worked

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across the animal-vegetable boundary through his studies of zoophytes in the middle of the eighteenth century, said the mangosteen of the East Indies was “the most pleasant fruit of any yet known,” but that “[w]ith us, in these temperate regions, it could only be preserved in stoves, as an object of curiosity.”42 Time and again, the kitchen encroached on the naturalist’s study, sometimes happily so. In fact, the very acts of eating and cooking generated discoveries. In 1734, the Reverend William Barlow informed the Royal Society of a 500-pound sunfsh taken near Plymouth, Devon. Using a naturalist’s eye, Barlow observed that the fsh’s form “nearly answers that given by Mr. [Francis] Willoughby;” but of equal interest to Barlow was how the fsh turned into a kind of jelly if boiled for consumption. When Barlow put a spoonful to his mouth for a taste, his lips stuck together, as did his fngers when he touched the substance. This sensory experience sparked Barlow’s epiphany: he recalled that ancient writers used fsh to make glue. “I then tried it upon Paper and Leather,” wrote Barlow, “and found it to answer the Use of Paste very well.”43 So too, a kitchen encounter led a specimen of the ladyfsh (Elops saurus) to fnd its current home in the Linnean Society of London and to its vaunted status as a type specimen.44 Alexander Garden, a Scottish naturalist based in South Carolina who supplied Carl Linnaeus with a steady stream of specimens, received the ladyfsh from a local gentleman who had “ordered it to be dressed for supper,” quite possibly by an enslaved cook, before the man realized Garden might appreciate the specimen. Garden certainly did—as this species was news to him—but much to his chagrin, the animal had already

Figure 5.4: Ladyfsh (Elops saurus), LINN 90, the Linnaean Fish Collection. Permission of the Linnean Society of London.

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been descaled in preparation for the meal, making for quite the atypical type specimen given the centrality of counting scales within Linnaean fsh taxonomy.45 An inspection of the specimen today shows it indeed lacks scales, apart from a few that still stubbornly cling to the fsh’s side. Stored in the hermetic basement vault of a scientifc society rather than a food history collection, this ladyfsh offers yet another example of how extant natural history specimens might be read as material markers of past food worlds, bearing traces of the historical hands that manipulated these bodies toward very different ends. Thus, as Barlow’s encounter with the sunfsh shows, tasting and taste served as critical senses for the naturalist. Taste in this period could denote both physical gustatory taste and an aesthetic sensibility possessed by polite persons.46 One satirical print of Joseph Banks parodied the slippery line between food and curiosity, specimens and meals, and tastefulness and tastelessness. The caricaturist Thomas Rowlandson created the etching around 1788, titling it Sir Joseph Banks about to Eat an Alligator (‘The Fish Supper’). It features a portly and self-satisfed Banks enjoying a feast of exotic animals, evoking events like the impromptu conversion of the squid into a soup. In the caricature, a mutilated walrus skull sits on the table as the main dish, while a man next to Banks foregoes his cutlery to bite right

Figure 5.5: Thomas Rowlandson, Sir Joseph Banks about to Eat an Alligator (‘The Fish Supper’), 1788 or later, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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into a writhing animal—either an eel or snake—with his bare hands. An alligator arrives as the next course, posed like a specimen of taxidermy. Meanwhile, cases of natural history specimens adorn the walls, drawing a visual parallel with the specimens of food on the table. As Emma Spary has argued, the standards of taste—in its physical, moral, and aesthetic sense—were never fxed or immutable in the early modern period. Taste was always contested.47 The grotesque specimens sampled by Banks and company throw the men’s status as supposed tastemakers and tasteful consumers into question. The image parodies the Enlightenment connoisseur while also explicitly revealing how contemporaries drew connections between the collecting of zoological specimens and the consumption of food. But Banks, ever epicurious, may not have entirely objected to the caricature: in his journal from the Endeavour voyage, he routinely touted his willingness to sample foods that disgusted many of his shipmates, such as shark stew, of which he wrote: and very good meat he was, at least in the opinion of Dr Solander and myself, tho some of the Seamen did not seem to be fond of him, probably from some prejudice founded on the species sometimes feeding on human fesh.48 Banks rather prided himself on his readiness to try anything once, including a predator of his own species. Exchange between the worlds of food and natural history was never a one-way street: just as food informed natural history’s practice and cultural representation, natural history also shaped the science of cookery. William Hughes, a British writer publishing under the name Piscator— meaning fsherman or angler—wrote several treatises on catching and cooking fsh. In his 1843 Fish, How to Choose and How to Dress, Hughes drew on his own experience angling and preparing fsh, but he also cited the authority of British naturalists. For instance, he frequently quoted the zoologist William Yarrell, whom he called “a very high authority,” and said of the ghastly sea wolf: Mr. Hoy, Mr. Low, and Mr. Donovan, three eminent ichthyologists have borne their testimony to the excellence of its fesh, which the latter pronounces delicious. How absurd then, is it thus to cast away a valuable article of food, because its external covering is unpleasing to the eye?49 So too, Peter Lund Simmonds, the author of an 1859 tract called The Curiosities of Food that catalogued the animal products “eaten by other people in foreign countries,” decided to arrange his entire text “scientifcally under natural history divisions” rather than take the more expected culture-byculture approach.50 Like Hughes, Simmonds relied heavily on naturalists, as well as other published travelers, maintaining that “[m]any of the articles of food named are so outrageously repulsive . . . that I have preferred citing authorities in all instances, so as to relieve myself from the charge of exaggeration.”51 Yet despite the frequent fusion of these two realms of knowledge, Hughes also observed that taxonomies of natural history and food were not always commensurable. Of the freshwater and saltwater pike, for instance, he wrote: “These fshes, though ranked by ichthyologists as belonging to the same family, have no resemblance in favor.”52 In certain cases, Hughes ultimately sided with the classifcation system derived from his own lineage of expertise rather than the authority of naturalists, though he remained ever careful to never ignore the interconnected fates of taste and natural history.

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ANIMAL APPETITES Even as the worlds of food and natural history richly supported one another, the status of natural things as food also caused considerable trouble for naturalists. The appetites of animals—moving foodstuffs who were also alimentary actors themselves—particularly vexed the work of natural history. Moreover, it was often diffcult to distinguish between humans and animals in a philosophical sense, as both were moving, sensing, respiring beings who needed to consume to survive.53 Responding to this tension, Enlightenment naturalists and philosophers attempted to use the notion of appetite as one wedge between the human and animal world. Thomas Hobbes, among others, maintained that reason and curiosity set humans apart from other animals. Hobbes believed the passion of hunger governed nonhuman animals, and that “the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by prædominance, take away the care of knowing causes” among them, whereas a distinctly human “Lust of the mind .  .  . exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnall Pleasure.”54 In short, Hobbes used appetite to try to liberate the human mind from the demands of the animal body. While his views would have substantial sticking power over the next two centuries, humans were enveloped in the competition of stomachs more than they liked to admit. Indeed, in identifying animals as appetite-driven, Hobbes and other philosophers recognized them as powerful forces in the contests of food and curiosity. On a practical level, the appetites of some of the smallest animals—insects—posed the ultimate threat to natural history collections. In the words of María Eugenia Constantino and Antonio Lafuente, “the true predators were hidden not in the jungle, but in the cupboard or cellar.”55 Insects proved particularly challenging in tropical and subtropical settings, where much collecting took place given the imperial avarice in these regions coupled with their rich biodiversity. The naturalist John Coakley Lettsom wrote: “In hot climates, the insects are very rapacious; and I have seen the fnest fan-corals, and others of a soft texture when frst taken out of the sea, almost devoured by ants.”56 As a deterrent, he recommended sprinkling specimens with powdered corrosive sublimate, now known as mercuric chloride (and, due to its toxicity, no longer used to preserve new specimens). Without always realizing it, many collectors put their own bodies at risk as they fought off insect epicures. Not even representations were safe from insects. Swarms of fies threatened Sydney Parkinson’s drawings and paintings during the Endeavour expedition, which served to document the ephemeral fora and fauna encountered on the circumnavigation. Banks wrote that these fies “eat the painters colours off the paper as fast as they can be laid on, and if a fsh is to be drawn there is more trouble in keeping them off it than in the drawing itself.”57 The utility of this natural historical knowledge depended on its survival, which animal appetites threatened. Yet such appetites still held creative possibilities for collections despite the destruction they occasioned. For instance, the naturalist William Swainson suggested that animal skeletons could be prepared into specimens “through the agency of insects.” He recommended burying carcasses in a hole-flled box near an ant hill, allowing ants to enter the box and “eat away all the feshy parts, leaving only the bones and connecting ligaments.”58 In a similar fashion, modern-day natural history museums use fesh-eating beetles to clean specimens down to the bone. The appetites of animals were equal parts frustrating and frightening, as some animals threatened to consume not only specimens and

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Figure 5.6: From Pierre Denys de Montfort, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques (Paris, 1802), Vol. 2.

natural historical artworks, but basic human food supplies and, occasionally, humans themselves. Joseph Banks indulged in describing the unfortunate sharp mustard favor of insects lodged in the Endeavour’s bread supply, where one bite sometimes flled his mouth with “20 [insects] at a time.”59 Even more alarming, the squid beak brought to London by the Endeavour uncomfortably recalled the legendary

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kraken—now thought to be a giant squid—offering an open-mouthed omen of how humans, much as animals, might be repurposed as foodstuffs.60 Stories of massive squid or squid-like beasts appeared in the tales of Homer, natural histories from Aristotle to Pliny to Linnaeus, Norse legend, and the lived experience of fshers from Africa to Polynesia.61 They constituted a truly global anxiety. Exacerbating these fears, the minds of cephalopods, particularly octopuses, reign supreme among invertebrates, making them skilled and crafty hunters and thus formidable adversaries.62 Pierre Denys de Montfort’s second volume of Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques (1802) featured one of the most famous renderings of a giant cephalopod in its day. The image depicts a beast that reportedly tried to take a slave ship to the watery abyss with its leviathan arms before being maimed by the ship’s crew near Angola—a coast from which millions of people would be shipped into brutal bondage in the Americas, routinely through the aid of surgeons, naturalists, and other collectors of natural history.63 Should de Montfort’s story or one like it be true, everyone on board, from the privileged to the oppressed, would have been forced to reckon with their potential fate as a meal.64 Not only did naturalists have to worry about nonhumans when fending off appetites; some lost their specimens to hungry humans who had their own plans in mind for these natural things.65 Animal bodies were “boundary objects,” to borrow a concept from Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, with divergent purposes, meanings, and potential uses in the kitchen versus the naturalist’s repository.66 Alexander Garden, for example, complained about losing a rather interesting rockfsh to the fshers he relied on for obtaining such specimens. He wrote to Linnaeus in 1763: “I never had but only one to examine, and the company who permitted me to make out the description, insisted on their having the pleasure of eating it, otherwise I would have preserved the specimen for you.”67 Such vignettes suggest that many collectors did not have the ultimate authority to decide the fate of specimens—a fact that further illustrates natural history’s dependence on (and fragility within) a much larger ecosystem of early modern commerce, consumption, and appetite.

CEPHALOPOLITICS As revealed by Garden’s commentary, food’s intimate relationship to scientifc curiosity stoked cultural collisions in an era of European exploration and ethnography, particularly when it came to the edible yet enigmatic cephalopods. Like other cases in this volume illustrate—such as how colonial physicians sought to understand Indigenous knowledge of manchineel poison, for instance—European naturalists studied the diversity of the human world as much as the nonhuman one. While Joseph Banks was busy eating his way through the animals of the Pacifc, he also took stock of how Indigenous Pacifc peoples cooked and ate animals. And they would do the same of him. The journals produced by various travelers aboard the Endeavour can be described as provision obsessed. This was partly a byproduct of periods of food scarcity, or at times simple food boredom and food disgust, that punctuated the expedition despite the Endeavour’s comparatively large cache of sustenance.68 Cook’s voyages are likewise known for their on-board experiments to reduce scurvy through consumption of foods like citrus, sauerkraut, and portable soup—and for Cook’s general megalomania when it came to nutrition and provisioning with foods including

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hardtack, oatmeal, salted meats, and liquor.69 In fact, early modern specimens of portable soup and ship’s biscuit—hardy voyage foods—still survive, true to their intended purpose, in the collections of imperial institutions like the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.70 Within this food-focused context, Banks routinely assessed Pacifc peoples’ sciences of cookery, or what he interpreted as their lack thereof, as a means of assessing their overall level of civilization. “Cookery,” wrote Banks of South Sea Islanders, for example, “seems to have been little studied here: they have only two methods of applying fre, broiling, or baking as we calld it.”71 (He did, however, admit that this technique made food juicier than the methods of European cookery.) So too, of the Māori in Aotearoa or New Zealand, Banks commented: “Simple as their food is their Cookery as far as I saw is as simple: a few stones heated hot and laid in a hole, their meat laid upon them and coverd with Hay seems to be the most difcult part of it.”72 Banks routinely simplifed or misunderstood Indigenous culinary methods and food knowledge systems in these descriptions of Pacifc cookery, which Marcy Norton has identifed as a common trope among European writers in her study of subaltern technologies.73 In highlighting the perspectives of Banks and the other Endeavour voyagers, I seek not to reify these colonial viewpoints—as anthropologist Anne Salmond has argued, many scholars narrate Cook’s voyages as “epics in which only the Europeans are real.”74 Instead, such accounts, when read against the grain, can serve as specimens of the reciprocal relationship between food and curiosity. For example, despite the derisive assessments penned by Banks, he couldn’t help but enjoy himself when sampling Pacifc cuisine. His and other European descriptions of Pacifc cooking methods, in spite of their initial intent to display these culinary traditions as primitive, end up offering on-the-ground documentation of their technical and ritual complexity to the modern historian. For example, Parkinson, the expedition’s artist, took special note of how Banks relished new foods. Parkinson noted of the Tahitians they met while preparing to observe the transit of Venus, one of the primary objectives of the expedition: “These people also are fond of dog’s-fesh, and reckon it delicious food, which we discovered by their bringing the leg of a dog roasted to sell. Mr. Banks ate a piece of it, and admired it much. He went out immediately and bought one.”75 Parkinson described in detail how they killed the animal acquired by Banks, singed off its hair, prepared its skin by rubbing it with shells and coral, and engaged in a multistep cooking process that lasted several hours. Parkinson wrote: I ate a little of it. It had the taste of coarse beef, and a strong disagreeable smell; but Captain Cook, Mr. Banks, and Dr. Solander, commended it highly, saying it was the sweetest meat they had ever tasted; but the rest of our people could not be prevailed on to ate any of it.76 Banks, for his part, admitted of the experiment of elaborately cooked dog: “A most excellent dish he made for us who were not much prejudicd against any species of food.”77 While Rebecca Earle has shown how humoral conceptions of bodies as porous and unstable caused considerable anxieties to Europeans who ate non-European foods—as some believed that these strange aliments threatened to transform Europeans into Natives—the crew of the Endeavour ate liberally of unfamiliar foods, often due to the dependencies produced by maritime hunger.78 “Hunger is certainly most excellent sauce,” wrote Banks in November of 1769, such that “[f]resh provision to a seaman must always be most acceptable if he can get over the small

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prejudices which once affected several in this ship, most or all of whoom are now by vertue of good example compleatly curd.”79 As a result of bouts of hunger and the monotony of foods available on the ship, the journals of Banks, Parkinson, Cook, and other men aboard the Endeavour read as a culinary tour of the Pacifc: time and again they sampled local cuisine and were welcomed to break bread with the leaders of Indigenous nations or trade their own goods for foodstuffs.80 Recurring vignettes like that of the roasted dog, typically a verboten victual in English fare, show that explorers were utterly reliant on the hospitality and complex culinary expertise of the peoples they met.81 While Banks would insist on the simplicity of his hosts, the voyage journals in fact betray meetings of sophisticated cultural food systems and complex culinary protocols. Cooking technologies, techniques, and the ingredients themselves were all topics of discussion in European assessments of Indigenous foodways—and in Indigenous assessments of European ones, as well. Squid and their cephalopod brethren created one point of tension for the English both in terms of their own cuisine and their evaluation of Indigenous alimentary practices. In the company of their Pacifc hosts, the Endeavour travelers learned several methods for eating cephalopods. According to Parkinson, when the crew’s repast of pork pie proved unimpressive to their company in Tahiti, the English had a “large cuttle-fsh” brought to the meal. Tubora Tumaida, a Tahitian chief also known as Te Pau (and christened Lycurgus by the Europeans), at once “seized on it as if it had been a dainty morsel, and, with another man, ate much of it quite raw.” Parkinson relayed how the Tahitians roasted other portions of the cephalopod and saved the rest for later in hollowed-out coconuts that acted as to-go boxes. Parkinson concluded of the cephalopod: “to all appearance, they value this fsh, as much as some Englishmen do turtle, or a haunch of venison.” He compared its favor to stewed oysters and said it reportedly made “excellent soup.”82 Parkinson thus expressed a tentative cultural relativism in his comparison of Tahitian culinary preferences with English ones. Squid and other cephalopods appeared in Pacifc, Mediterranean, and other regional cuisines in the early modern period. The artist Elena Recco of Naples featured several starkly white squid in her seventeenthcentury still life Fruits of the Sea, their fesh so supple it can nearly be felt with a glance.83 A. van Doeff’s Stilleven met vissen (Still Life with Fish), from the same century, features a hanging squid, its body centered as the image’s focal point and set perpendicularly to the other specimens of sea foods and sea textures on the table to emphasize the cephalopod’s elongated form and draping tentacles, all while two otherworldly eyes stare squarely at the viewer. But throughout the long eighteenth century, squid occupied a precarious space in English food taxonomies, exemplifying the pliable cultural meanings that could be ascribed to certain animal foods. In a 1791 tract on the eating habits of the ancients, Richard Warner wrote with disdain: “The animals also, which the Roman epicure devoured, would now be eaten only in a time of famine; for surely it would be esteemed preferable, to suffer something from hunger, than to load the stomach with dormice, polypi, hedge-hogs, and cuttle-fsh.”84 Decades later, an 1836 London article still noted British rejection of cephalopod consumption, while also subtly questioning that norm. “Though neglected in the British islands, [cephalopods are] brought to table in other countries,” the article observed. “The arms, cut into portions and prepared for cookery, are to be frequently seen in the Neapolitan market. . . . That the naked Cephalopods formed a favourite dish with the antients, and were considered not unworthy of the most exquisite cookery, there is no doubt.”85

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Figure 5.7: Elena Recco, Fruits of the Sea, seventeenth century, oil on canvas, private collection. Image from Wikimedia Commons.

In fact, not all squid were seen as equal: cephalopod diversity became a barometer of cultural status in the Anglophone early modern world. Simmonds, in The Curiosities of Food, noted that cephalopods did not form a standard part of British fare, though he claimed: “In recent times, and in some parts of the Levant even now . . . the cuttle-fsh of different species were used as articles of food; and we know from the works of travellers, that in other parts of the world, when cooked, they are esteemed as luxuries.”86 Simmonds gave one species—quite plausibly Taningia danae by another name—high marks when he wrote of it: “This fsh is of a delicate taste, but is not very common.”87 Simmonds then created a hierarchy of cephalopods that mirrored a hierarchy of people. He claimed that Barbados was “frequented by a species of the order Cephalopoda, which is used as an article of food by the lower classes of the inhabitants, namely the bastard cuttle-fsh, or calmar,” while in England he had himself “seen the poor people collect assiduously the Sepiæ and employ them as food.” Simmonds conceded that squid entered the diets of a large portion of the globe—he referenced its consumption in the Caribbean, India, China,

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Figure 5.8: A. van Doeff, Stilleven met vissen (Still Life with Fish), c. 1625–1675, oil on canvas, Rijksmuseum (SK-A-1407). Polynesia, the Mediterranean, and England itself—yet he still esteemed it “as indigestible and unnutritious as it is certainly tough and uninviting.”88 As revealed by this commentary from Simmonds, texture and touch recurred in English assessments of squid, often explaining such aversions. The ship surgeon Thomas Beale, for instance, experienced the misfortune of having a squid fasten to his arm near shore on the Ogasawara Islands south of Japan—the same watery region where a live giant squid would be photographed for the frst time a century and a half later, and also the site where the frst live images of Taningia danae were captured. Beale lamented of the squid: “Its cold slimy grasp was extremely sickening, and I immediately called aloud to the captain, who was also searching for shells at some distance, to come and release me from my disgusting assailant.”89 Sara Ahmed has characterized disgust as a “contact zone”—not an inherent quality of any object or being in the world, but arising from “how things come into contact with other things.”90 According to Ahmed, disgust “sticks” and “clings,” squid-like, to objects through “sensuous proximity,” becoming “crucial to power relations” by stacking tastes, sensations, and peoples against one another in the wake of cultural collision.91 As Tahitian disappointment with the English pork pie shows, Europeans did not have a monopoly on taste making or on feeling disgust.92

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Indigenous people simultaneously studied and judged the foods eaten by the Endeavour crew and assessed the Europeans themselves. While Parkinson bristled at roasted dog, for example, he and his comrades instead “invented a new dish” of fried Tahitian rats. But, he noted it was “as much disliked by the natives, as any of theirs is by us.”93 And much as the crew of the Endeavour delighted in sampling new foods and culinary practices, Parkinson noted that the Tahitian men “seemed to like the manner of our eating, and handled knives and forks very well.”94 (They mastered those supposed instruments of civility better than Banks’s dining companion did in the satirical print.) Later in the expedition, Banks likewise noted that the Māori turned these European voyagers into curiosities, writing: “Young and old crowded to see us, actuated by the same curiosity as made us desirous of seing [sic] them.”95 In fact, Banks claimed he found it diffcult to document Māori cooking practices due to this mutual curiosity. For whenever Banks tried to observe the Māori in this regard, he could never be a fy on the wall or the “imperial eye” described by Mary Louise Pratt, since his “approach generaly [sic] made a holiday where ever we went; men women and children focking to us either to satisfy their curiosity or trade with us for whatever they might have.”96 His own unplanned mutation into a curiosity, then, prevented Banks from fully making Māori men and women into ethnographic subjects.97

CODA: THE SQUID AND THE BREADFRUIT Banks’s extensive commentary on Pacifc cuisine was not innocuous observation. Scientifc study of specimens and foodways on this voyage tangibly affected subjugated people halfway across the world in the West Indies, seen most forcefully in the case of the breadfruit: a ponderous yellow-green fruit with starchy fesh and copious protein beneath its prickly exterior that Banks mentioned dozens of times in his Endeavour journal.98 The voyagers encountered breadfruit throughout the Pacifc and especially in Tahiti, planting a seed in Banks’s mind that would later, in the 1780s and 1790s, grow into a scheme to cheaply provision enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. During the Endeavour voyage, Indigenous peoples across the Pacifc world offered breadfruit as a diplomatic gesture to the crew. While in Tahiti, Banks marveled that “ever since we have been here we have had more breadfruit every day than both the people and hogs can eat.”99 Of the South Sea Islanders, he wrote: “scarcely can it be said that they earn their bread with the sweat of their brow when their cheifest sustenance Bread fruit is procurd with no more trouble than that of climbing a tree and pulling it down.”100 Banks was ignorant of the careful selective breeding Pacifc peoples performed in order to hone the plant into its current form over the course of many centuries (not to mention the labor, maintenance, and knowhow that went into growing and preparing breadfruit).101 After Banks became President of the Royal Society, and urged by the lobbying of West Indian planters, he embarked on a scheme to transplant breadfruit to the Caribbean as an economical means of feeding enslaved Africans and, by extension, sustaining their output of commodities, chief among them food products such as sugar.102 As the British Empire worked to provision its multi-hemispheric colonial holdings—all the more urgent due to the American Revolution’s disruption of trade—it looked to natural history.103 Banks’s breadfruit project resulted in one of the most famous mutinies of all time. William Bligh’s Bounty expedition was tasked by Banks

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Figure 5.9: “A Sketch of part of the Sheer, and Middle-deck of His Majesty’s Ship Providence, Shewing the disposition and number of Pots contained in the Garden, for the Reception of the BreadFruit Plants,” 1791, Joseph Banks Papers, Section 9, Series 49.12, State Library of New South Wales.

and George III with transporting breadfruit from Tahiti to the West Indies. But on April 28, 1789, Bligh’s men threw the ship’s precious cargo of more than a thousand young breadfruit plants overboard and sent Bligh and eighteen loyal followers afoat on a small boat.104 The archive from Bligh’s second (and at least nominally successful) attempt at this transplant

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assignment includes a 1791 sketch showing pots for breadfruit stored in orderly rows aboard the HMS Providence. The image hauntingly resembles depictions of the Middle Passage. These plants, however—tenderly overseen by gardeners James Wiles and Christopher Smith, given water even when the crew went thirsty—almost certainly received better care than the African women, men, and children similarly packed into rows and fastened with shackles on slave ships bound for the New World.105 When Bligh fnally transported breadfruit to islands like Jamaica and St. Vincent, enslaved people did not readily embrace it. As rendered by the Guyanaborn poet Maggie Harris: You have writye me into Historye Booke! I, Breadfruit, am bound for Stomach of black Men First Jamaica Man not love Me Because he not free Black Men Lip seal like Liberty.106 After casting the initial rejection of breadfruit as an act of protest, Harris’s poem proceeds to narrate how the food has since become a staple of Caribbean cuisine. Even so, breadfruit remains continually contested in the region. In Jamaica Kincaid’s words: Perhaps Antiguan children sense intuitively the part this food has played in the history of injustice and so they will not eat it. . . . In a place like Antigua the breadfruit is not a food, it is a weapon.107 Today, a resurgence of interest in breadfruit has led several organizations to hail it as a panacea for world hunger without much refection on its violent history—a history that spouted a similar hope for the fruit to solve food shortages among marginalized groups in its day. Recent headlines range from “Breadfruit: The Next Superfood to End World Hunger?” to

Figure 5.10: “Specimen of Dried Breadfruit,” late eighteenth century, British Museum (Oc,TAH.71). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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“Productive, Protein-Rich Breadfruit Could Help the World’s Hungry Tropics.”108 And yet, at the time of writing this chapter, the “Breadfruit History” page of the Breadfruit Institute, based at the National Tropical Botanical Garden in Hawai’i, narrates Bligh’s mutiny without a single mention of slavery.109 That is why a lone breadfruit from an unspecifed voyage of Captain Cook, now held at the British Museum, is deceptively simple at frst glance. The object shares much more in common with the beak of the squid than appearances might suggest. Labeled “Specimen of dried breadfruit,” this orb was not merely a specimen: the fruit was at once a diplomatic tool, a cultural mediator, a food source for Tahitians, weary Europeans, and enslaved Africans alike, a culinary curiosity, a failed dream of Caribbean planters, a weapon, and an idea. Now, it is a mere outline of this past. But the inseparable histories of natural science, slavery, and consumption stick to its rind.110 Although, biologically, this empty breadfruit is a kingdom away from the squid specimen consumed by Cook’s crew, the squid and the fruit were aligned in their fates: both were deemed exotic Pacifc food curiosities and entered the cabin of a voyage that would drastically extend the reach of the British Empire, measurably propelled by scientifc enterprise. Both objects, too, found a resting place in the collections of imperial scientifc institutions. In fact, every artifact linking food history and natural history featured in this chapter has appeared alone and fxed in a museum photograph, decontextualized on a white, beige, or black backdrop. That any object stands alone is an illusion. The offcial museum designation of squid parts, fsh skins, and fruits as specimens of natural history gives

Figure 5.11: The Kitchen in the Cabinet visualization. Food specimens—many of them centuries old—peer out from the shelves, tables, and storage vessels of an eighteenth-century workshop. Adapted from the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert, this scene shows the entanglements of knowledge production and food production. It likewise restores isolated museum artifacts back to an ecology of other objects, bodies, and craft practices. Visualization by Katie Dean.

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them an air of permanence and inevitability: a subtle message that they will always be there and perhaps were always meant to be there, obscuring a former life in which these animals and plants were torn with teeth, grabbed, grown, licked, smelled, washed, baked, cut in two, and above all, placed in context with other objects and bodies. Natural history may have been the frst destination of these artifacts, but will it be their last? The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science, a digital exhibition and companion website to this book chapter, hopes to be a small gesture of return, a step toward reversing the early modern alienation of natural things, and especially foodstuffs and specimens, enumerated in this volume’s introduction. The exhibition gathers many of the objects discussed in the preceding pages—and some additional centuries-old food artifacts entangled with histories of colonialism, science, and slavery—together in one craft scene, one ecosystem of edible objects.111 That scene, based on a print from Denis Diderot and Jean-Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert’s famed eighteenth-century Encyclopédie, also serves as the website’s navigation: when users hover their cursor over an artifact, it glows, encouraging them to click through to a page with the object’s individual biography. The exhibition would not have been possible without three undergraduate researchers at Dartmouth College—Fatema Begum, Lauren Dorsey (who also expertly coded the image), and C. C. Lucas—as they scoured digital repositories in the midst of a pandemic to excavate extant food artifacts and write their histories. By taking specimens that are for the most part currently held in natural history collections out of a scientifc or museum context and re-inserting them back into an early modern artisanal space, the exhibition stresses the contingency of an object’s categorization, and hence its survival through the ages. The visualization centers the labor and craft behind scientifc knowledge production, food production, and food preservation through using a sealing wax workshop as its basis. Each individual object entry also features a rollover image function. With a hover of their cursor, users can make the photograph fip from a picture of the specimen to a picture of the natural thing prepared as a food, thus showing the uncertainty of what the object ultimately became and the instability of the object’s status as specimen instead of victual. Finally, by scattering objects throughout the scene, the homepage asks visitors to reenact the scavenger hunt of our team’s research process, fnding thought-to-be-lost food specimens hidden in plain sight. It offers a visual testament to the persistence of food in the archive and a reminder that the history of food and the history of science cannot be narrated separately, for they are the same story.112 Objects that embody the imbricated pasts of food, nature, and conquest lie dormant in archives and the storehouses of nature if only we know where to look for them—for now, at least. As a variety of museums move to deaccession objects in their collections, for reasons ranging from fnancial stress to repatriation claims, a few are considering the removal of organic food artifacts that attract insects and other animals, thereby threatening other objects in these spaces.113 The natural in these natural things makes them an unnatural ft for certain archives. Such objects thus reveal that museums are not only a place where, as the adage would have it, objects come to die.114 They are also a place where objects come to life.

NOTES 1 “RCSHC/308—beak, Organs of Digestion—Teeth and Similar Parts, Mounted Wet Tissue,” Royal College of Surgeons, http://surgicat.rcseng.ac.uk/Details/ collect/2656 (accessed June 21, 2022). I would like to thank Carla Cevasco,

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Catherine Peters, Simon Sun, and Pete Pellizzari for reading early drafts of this chapter. I received valuable feedback on this essay through the Natural Things Workshop and especially thank Mackenzie Cooley, Celeste Day Moore, Anna Toledano, Shireen Hamza, Taylor Moore, Elaine Ayers, Duygu Yıldırım, Rebecca Woods, Alex Statman, Claire Sabel, Florencia Pierri, and Julia Heideklang for their insightful questions and comments. A Baird Society Resident Fellowship at the Smithsonian Institution Libraries made much of the research for this project possible. I am particularly grateful to Leslie Overstreet and Alexandra Newman at the Smithsonian’s Cullman Library of Natural History for their expertise and shared obsession with natural history preservation, and to Ashley Rose Young at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History for helping me understand the tenuous place of food artifacts in contemporary curatorial practice. I also thank José C. Xavier and Yves Cherel for their guidance on squid beak identifcation. The Royal College of Surgeons associates this beak with the squid soup eaten aboard the Endeavour. Evidence that this specimen is the same beak collected by the crew is strong, with corroboration ranging from nineteenth-century accounts of the specimen that connect it to Cook’s voyage to secondary scholarly assessments. See, for instance, Thomas Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale (London, 1839), 63; P. J. P. Whitehead, “Zoological Specimens from Captain Cook’s Voyages,” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5, no. 3 (1969): 179; William Frame with Laura Walker, James Cook: The Voyages (Montreal, Kingston, and Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018), 31. The specimen appears to have arrived at Hunter’s collection via Banks, who donated zoological material to Hunter. But whether Banks caught and prepared the specimen is dubious and not clarifed by extant documents. Banks was accompanied by the naturalist Daniel Solander, but someone lower on the ship’s hierarchy may have performed the technical labor of collecting. Joseph Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, 1768–1771, ed. John C. Beaglehole, vol. 1 (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1962), 236. While the beak’s bottle still bears an old label with the Latin name Onychoteuthis banksii, Owen explains the naming confusion as follows in reference to a different, smaller squid specimen: “The specifc name [banksii] was given by Dr. Leach, under the impression that the small hook-armed Cuttle caught off the coast of Africa might be the species noted in ‘Cook’s Voyage’ above cited.” See Richard Owen, “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda. (Part II.),” Transactions of the Zoological Society of London 11 (June 1881): 148. Owen, “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda,” 152 and 147. Ibid., 155. For examples of scholarship uniting the history of early modern food and science, see Emma C. Spary, “Self-Preservation: French Travels between Cuisine and Industrie,” in The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770– 1820, ed. Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009), 355–86; E. C. Spary, Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670–1760 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); E. C. Spary and Anya Zilberstein, “On the Virtues of Historical Entomophagy,” Osiris 35 (2020): 1–19; Anita Guerrini, “A Natural History of the Kitchen,” Osiris 35 (2020): 20–41; Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018); Anya Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change,” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 1 (January 2015): 127–58; Samantha Snively, “How 17thCentury Women Replicated the Natural World on the Table,” Atlas Obscura, February 28, 2018, www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-science-naturetable-17th-century (accessed January 15, 2019). On food history and the history of medicine, see Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience in Spanish America, 1492–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Steven Shapin, “‘You Are What You Eat’: Historical Changes in Ideas About Food and Identity,” Historical Research 87, no. 237 (August 2014): 377–92; Robert Appelbaum, Aguecheek’s Beef, Belch’s Hiccup,

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and Other Gastronomic Interjections: Literature, Culture, and Food Among the Early Moderns (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Valentina Pugliano, “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop,” in Worlds of Natural History, ed. H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 44–60. While drink is largely beyond the scope of this chapter, see Duygu Yıldırım’s essay in this volume on the natural history of coffee and the role of culinary expertise in its study. On the importance of natural history to colonialism, see Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Cameron B. Strang, Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018). On natural history’s importance to the Atlantic slave trade and the output of New World plantations, see Christopher P. Iannini, Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Kathleen S. Murphy, “Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic,” Atlantic Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 29–48. While not about natural history specifcally, one classic account of food and plantation slavery is Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Penguin, 1985). Sara Pennell, “The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England, 1650– 1750,” in The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain, ed. Sarah Tarlow and Susie West (London: Routledge, 1999), 37. Archaeologists face a similar conundrum, as Marijke van der Veen writes: “The distinguishing characteristic of food in comparison to other forms of material culture is that food is transient: it is eaten and thus largely disappears from the record.” See Marijke van der Veen, “When Is Food a Luxury?” World Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2003): 416. Lauren F. Klein, An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020), 1. See, for instance, James Deetz, In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life (New York: Anchor Books, 1977); Carla Cevasco, “This Is My Body: Communion and Cannibalism in Colonial New England and New France,” The New England Quarterly 89, no. 4 (December 2016): 556–86; Sara Pennell, “‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England,” Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (1998): 201–16; Anne E. C. McCants, “Porcelain for the Poor: The Material Culture of Tea and Coffee Consumption in Eighteenth-century Amsterdam,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2013), 316–41; Laurier Turgeon, “The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter, 1997): 1–29. As Paul Freedman observes: “Amid all the turns that have taken place in the study of history, that towards material culture has been the most important for the growth of interest in food.” See Paul Freedman, “Preface,” in Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, ed. Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala (Oakland: University of California Press, 2014), xiii. See also Carolin C. Young, “The Soup that Went into the Tureen: Connecting the Dots Between Food and Material Culture,” in Food & Material Culture: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013, ed. Mark McWilliams (Totnes: Prospect Books, 2014), 33–47. On the need to center food as a historical subject in its own right, see Michael A. LaCombe, “Subject or Signifer?: Food and the History of Early North America,” History Compass 11, no. 10 (2013): 859–68.

164 Part II • Felt 13 Marcy Norton, for example, discusses “vessels with identifable residue of theobromine” in her study of Mesoamerican chocolate. See Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 7. 14 In her Jane Grigson Memorial Lecture at the 2013 Oxford Food Symposium, Joan Smith, in a talk titled “Eating History: The Perishable Art of Food,” meditates on how infrequently food survives the ravages of history and looks at a few exceptional cases, such as “a carbonised loaf of bread which was apparently baking in an oven at the very moment when the pyroclastic surge engulfed Herculaneum in 79 AD.” See http://politicalblonde.com/index. php/jane-grigson-lecture-2013/ (accessed January 15, 2019). 15 For one glaring botanical exception—carnivorous plants—see the chapter in this volume by Elaine Ayers on the pitcher plant. On how live animals vexed naturalists in another context, see Florencia Pierri’s chapter on transporting armadillos in this volume. 16 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 2. 17 For ruminations on the consumption of natural history specimens by specifc naturalists, see Kathryn E. Holland Braund, “William Bartram’s Gustatory Tour,” in Fields of Vision: Essays on the Travels of William Bartram, ed. Kathryn E. Holland Braund and Charlotte M. Porter (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2010), 33–53; Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 153; Elizabeth Gawthrop Riely, “John James Audubon’s Tastes of America,” Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 29–37; Diana Noyce, “Charles Darwin, the Gourmet Traveler,” Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 45–52. On the embodied nature of early modern science more generally, see Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), and especially Steven Shapin’s essay, “The Philosopher and the Chicken: On the Dietetics of Disembodied Knowledge.” On the infuence of “hunger knowledges”—culturally divergent strategies for dealing with food scarcity in colonial contexts—see Carla Cevasco, “Hunger Knowledges and Cultures in New England’s Borderlands, 1675–1770,” Early American Studies 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 255–81. 18 See the essay in this volume on manchineel by Thomas C. Anderson. 19 On how women and enslaved laborers aided natural history through their expertise in catching and cooking fsh, see Whitney Barlow Robles, “Natural History in Two Dimensions,” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life 18, no. 1 (Winter 2018), http://commonplace.online/article/vol-18-no-1robles/ (accessed March 11, 2020). On race, slavery, cooking, and eating, see Klein, An Archive of Taste; Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012); Kelley Fanto Deetz, Bound to the Fire: How Virginia’s Enslaved Cooks Helped Invent American Cuisine (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2017). On the gender dynamics of medical cookery in particular, see Londa Schiebinger, “Women’s Traditions,” in The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 [1989]), 112–16. On the centrality of West African knowledge to the spread of rice cultivation in the Americas, see Judith Carney, “Out of Africa: Colonial Rice History in the Black Atlantic,” in Colonial Botany, 204–20 and Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 20 For a small sampling of this pluralization, see Susan Scott Parrish, “Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge,” in Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 281–310; Sara Gronim, Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); James Delbourgo, “Divers Things: Collecting the World under Water,” History of Science 49, no. 163 (June 2011): 149–85; Iris Montero Sobrevilla, “Indigenous Naturalists,” in Worlds of Natural History, 112–30; Britt

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Rusert, Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2017). WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species), www.marinespecies.org/ (accessed March 9, 2020). On natural history, and particularly botany, as “the science that strives to undo the mischief of Babel,” see Lorraine Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientifc Memory,” Critical Inquiry 31, no. 1 (Autumn 2004): 153. Clyde F. E. Roper and Michael Vecchione, “A Geographic and Taxonomic Review of Taningia danae Joubin, 1931 (Cephalopoda: Octopoteuthidae), with New Records and Observations on Bioluminescence,” in Recent Advances in Cephalopod Fisheries Biology, ed. Takashi Okutani, Ron K. O’Dor, and Tsunemi Kubodera (Tokyo: Tokai University Press, 1993), 442; K. S. Bolstad, “Two New Species and a Review of the Squid Genus Onychoteuthis Lichtenstein, 1818 (Oegopsida: Onychoteuthidae) from the Pacifc Ocean,” Bulletin of Marine Science 83, no. 3 (November 2008): 481–529. The offcial entry from The Hunterian Museum/Royal College of Surgeons lists Owen’s scientifc name, Enoploteuthis cookii, as the specimen’s scientifc name. See “RCSHC/308,” Royal College of Surgeons, http://surgicat.rcseng. ac.uk/Details/collect/2656 (accessed July 21, 2022). According to WoRMS, the currently accepted name for Enoploteuthis cookii is Taningia danae. See “Enoploteuthis cookii Owen, 1881,” WoRMS, www.marinespecies.org/aphia. php?p=taxdetails&id=748569 (accessed March 9, 2020). The descriptions by Banks, Owen, and others of the unusual retractable hooks on its arms likewise support the identifcation as Taningia danae. Squid beak experts Dr. José Xavier and Dr. Yves Cherel note that Taningia danae has a diagnostic ridge on the side of its lower beak; however, that ridge, if present, is obscured in this specimen by the extant fesh. See email correspondence with the author on March 4, 2020, and J. C. Xavier and Y. Cherel, Cephalopod Beak Guide for the Southern Ocean (Cambridge: British Antarctic Survey, 2009), 65. While the species name, danae, derives from a research vessel named the Dana, the genus name Taningia derives from Åge Vedel Tåning, a biologist and frequent occupant of the Dana. The species is called an octopus squid because its two tentacles shrink throughout its lifetime and often disappear entirely (octopuses have eight arms—and technically no tentacles—while most squid have eight arms and two long tentacles). Tsunemi Kubodera, Yasuhiro Koyama, and Kyoichi Mori, “Observations of Wild Hunting Behaviour and Bioluminescence of a Large Deep-Sea, EightArmed Squid, Taningia danae,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274, no. 1613 (February 2007): 1029–34. Malcolm R. Clarke, “Cephalopods as Prey. III. Cetaceans,” Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 351, no. 1343 (August 1996): 1057. Roper and Vecchione, “A Geographic and Taxonomic Review,” 441. For further readings on the vibrancy or resistance of objects deemed “inanimate” by European colonial scientifc frameworks, see Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, ed. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017); Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). See also Zoe Todd, “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism,” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (March 2016): 4–22; Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). See especially Christopher Kemp, Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). Franz Xavier Schwediawer, “An Account of Ambergrise, by Dr. Schwediawer; Presented by Sir Joseph Banks, P. R. S.,” Philosophical Transactions 73 (1783): 237. These categories frequently overlapped: many Africans, for instance, were skilled fshers (including of cephalopods) as explored by Kevin Dawson in Undercurrents of Power: Aquatic Culture in the African Diaspora (Philadelphia:

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University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 81–82. On how the knowledge of whalers informed natural historical debates, see also D. Graham Burnett, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007). For a comparative study of British and French natural history practice given differential state support, see Christopher M. Parsons and Kathleen S. Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in EighteenthCentury French and British Atlantics,” Early American Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 503–39. Mark Catesby, The Natural History of Carolina, Florida and the Bahama Islands (London, 1731–1743 [1729–1747]), Vol. 1, xxxiii. Ibid., xxxiv. Sydney Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas (London: Printed for Stanfeld Parkinson, 1773), 146. Samuel Kettell, Manual of the Practical Naturalist, or, Directions for Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Subjects of Natural History (Boston: Lilly & Wait & Carter, Hendee & Babcock, 1831), 32. For a longer history of scientifc collecting in the marketplace, see Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature:  Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), 175–6. On preserving ephemeral nature more generally, see Paula Findlen and Anna Toledano, “The Materials of Natural History,” in Worlds of Natural History, 151–69; Robert McCracken Peck, “Alcohol and Arsenic, Pepper and Pitch: Brief Histories of Preservation Techniques,” in Stuffng Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730–1860, ed. Sue Ann Prince (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), 27–54; Parsons and Murphy, “Ecosystems under Sail”; Whitney Barlow Robles, “Flatness,” in The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766– 1820, ed. Ethan W.  Lasser (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 190–209. See, for instance, René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, “Divers Means for Preserving from Corruption Dead Birds, Intended to be Sent to Remote Countries, so that They May Arrive There in a Good Condition . . .,” Philosophical Transactions 45, no. 487 (1748): 310. On salt in particular, see Edward Bancroft, An Essay on the Natural History of Guiana, in South America (London, 1769), 183; Whitney Barlow Robles, “Salt,” in The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science (2021), https://kitcheninthecabinet.com/salt/ (accessed June 27, 2022). For one example, see the letter from Manasseh Cutler to the Massachusetts Historical Society, May 30, 1794, Massachusetts Historical Society, Call # Misc. May 30, 1794. On using alcohol as a preservation medium, see, for instance, George Humphrey, “Directions for Collecting and Preserving All Kinds of Natural Curiosities,” 1776, Collection 371, Academy of Natural Sciences, 12. Richard Owen learned from William Clift, the frst Conservator of the Hunterian Museum, that Banks used “wide-mouthed stoppered bottles, containing alcohol, for the preservation of such marine animals in a state ft for dissection [by Hunter], as might be captured in the circumnavigatory voyage about to be undertaken by Lieut. Cook.” See Owen, “Descriptions of Some New and Rare Cephalopoda,” 147. George Graves, The Naturalist’s Pocket-Book, or Tourist’s Companion . . . (London: Printed by W. and S. Graves, 1817), 327–8. Ibid., 328. Sarah Bowdich Lee, Taxidermy: Or, the Art of Collecting, Preparing, and Mounting Objects of Natural History (London, 1820), 148. See also Mary Orr, “Women Peers in the Scientifc Realm: Sarah Bowdich (Lee)’s Expert Collaborations with Georges Cuvier, 1825–33,” Notes and Records 69, no. 1 (November 2014): 37–51; Emma Le Pouésard, “Bread as Mediating Material: Tactile Memory and Touch in Ms. Fr. 640,” in Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France: A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, ed. Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena

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Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano (New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020), https://edition640.makingandknowing. org/#/essays/ann_050_fa_16 (accessed March 12, 2020). John Ellis, A Description of the Mangostan and the Bread-Fruit: The First, Esteemed One of the Most Delicious; the Other, the Most Useful of all the Fruits in the East Indies (London, 1775), 5. William Barlow, “A Paper Concerning the Mola Salu. or Sun-Fish, and a Glue Made of It; Communicated by the Rev. Mr. William Barlow to the President of the Royal Society,” Philosophical Transactions 41, no. 456 (1739–1741): 343–4. For more on this specimen, see my previous discussion of it in Robles, “Natural History in Two Dimensions.” See also Robles, “Ladyfsh,” in The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science (2021), https://kitcheninthecabinet. com/ladyfsh/ (accessed June 27, 2022). Garden to Linnaeus, June 2, 1763, in A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, and Other Naturalists: From the Original Manuscripts, ed. James Edward Smith (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), Vol. 1, 313; Robles, “Flatness,” 195. On the history of type specimens and their frequently atypical form, see Daston, “Type Specimens and Scientifc Memory.” See also Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 196. In Spary’s words, “past and present scientifc or medical models of taste cannot be treated as objective, disinterested, or politically neutral.” See Spary, Eating the Enlightenment, 239. See also Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, “The Sense of Taste,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011): 371–84. Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 168. Piscator [William Hughes], Fish, How to Choose and How to Dress (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1843), 33 and 142–3. See also Barbara Ketcham Wheaton, “Cookbooks as Resources for Social History,” in Food in Time and Place. Peter Lund Simmonds, The Curiosities of Food: Or the Dainties and Delicacies of Different Nations Obtained from the Animal Kingdom (London: Richard Bentley, New Burlington Street, 1859), iii–iv. Ibid., iv–v. Hughes, Fish, How to Choose and How to Dress, 87. On the place of nutrition and digestion (alongside motion, sensation, reproduction, and physiology) in Aristotle’s defnition of animals, see Susannah Gibson, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 46. Aristotle was a touchstone for many eighteenth-century naturalists. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; or, The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-Wealth, Ecclesiasticall and Civil (London, 1651), 26. Naturalists such as Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, similarly investigated the divergences between human and animal appetites According to Elizabeth A. Williams, Buffon viewed human appetite as less developed and discerning than that of animals, given the latter’s perceived connection to the lower senses and humanity’s connection to higher mental faculties; see Elizabeth A. Williams, Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020), 56–57 and 65. María Eugenia Constantino and Antonio Lafuente, “The Hidden Logistics of Longinos’s Novohispanic Cabinet,” Nuncius 27, no. 2 (2012): 352–3. The authors thus argue that stymieing vermin depended on the culinary and domestic expertise of women and servants. I am grateful to Anna Toledano for this source. John Coakley Lettsom, The Naturalist’s and Traveller’s Companion [. . .] (London, 1774), 26–27. Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 260. The threat of so-called pest species to human representations has a long history that continues today. For example, David D. Hall has written of a seventeenth-century contraption that suspended documents in air to protect them from hungry mice and rats; see David D. Hall, Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania

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Press, 2008), 47. (I am grateful to Pete Pellizzari for drawing my attention to Hall’s anecdote.) On the nonhuman life—especially insects—that continue to consume human archives with their appetites for parchment, leather, and other materials, see Zeb Tortorici, “Animal Archive Stories: Species Anxieties in the Mexican National Archive,” in The Historical Animal, ed. Susan Nance (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015), 83–84. William Swainson, Taxidermy; with the Biography of Zoologists, and Notices of Their Works (London, 1840), 62. Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 322. Banks later described a solution for the privileged few: “Our bread  indeed is but indifferent, occasiond bv the quantity of Vermin that are in it, I have often seen hundreds nay thousands shaken out of a single bisket. We in the Cabbin have however an easy remedy for this by baking it in an oven, not too hot, which makes them all walk off, but this cannot be allowd to the private people who must fnd the taste of these animals very disagreable, as they every one taste as strong as mustard or rather spirits of hartshorn.” Ibid., 393. For one examination of the cultural obsession with giant squid via Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Kraken” (and a brief commentary on the squid beak from Cook’s voyage), see Kelly P. Bushnell, “Tennyson’s Kraken under the Microscope and in the Aquarium,” in Underwater Worlds: Submerged Visions in Science and Culture, ed. Will Abberley (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018), 52–70. On humans and their predators, see Brett L. Walker, “Animals and the Intimacy of History,” History and Theory 52 (December 2013): 45–67; David Quammen, Monster  of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003); Harriet Ritvo, “Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” Children’s Literature 13 (1985): 72–93. For the classic eighteenth-century account of the kraken, see Erik Pontoppidan, The Natural History of Norway (London, 1755). On cephalopod intelligence, see Peter Godfrey-Smith, Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016); Alan Mikhail, The Animal in Ottoman Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 1. Pierre Denys de Montfort, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière des mollusques, vol. 2 (Paris, 1802), 271. On the Angolan slave trade, see Daniel B. Domingues da Silva, “The Atlantic Slave Trade from Angola: A Port-by-Port Estimate of Slaves Embarked, 1701–1867,” International Journal of African Historical Studies 46, no. 1 (2013): 105–22. See also Kathleen S. Murphy, “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2013): 637–70. While aspects of de Montfort’s account were debated after its publication, slave ships became entangled with a variety of dangerous sea creatures. On the sharks that followed slave vessels from West Africa to the Americas and ship captains’ use of these sharks to instill terror in their enslaved captives, see Marcus Rediker, “History from Below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade,” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (August 2008): 285–97. Some naturalists and travelers feared losing their own bodies to humans, too. While the vexed history of cannibalism is beyond the scope of this chapter, it was a topic of increasing concern during Cook’s three voyages. See especially Anne Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Kelly L. Watson, Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World (New York: New York University Press, 2015). Susan Leigh Star and James R. Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39,” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (August 1989): 387–420. For more on animals as culinary boundary objects, see also Whitney Barlow Robles, Curious Species: How Animals Made Natural History (forthcoming with Yale University Press).

Chapter 5 • Squid 169 67 See the letter from Garden to Linnaeus, June 2, 1763, in A Selection of the Correspondence of Linnaeus, vol. 1, 312. I also discuss this letter in Robles, “Natural History in Two Dimensions.” 68 Joyce E. Chaplin, Round About the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 122. For one entertaining account of recurrent longings for familiar foods like roast beef among the crew, see Tony Horwitz, Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before (New York: Picador, 2002). 69 On scurvy, see, for example, Christopher Lawrence, “Disciplining Disease: Scurvy, the Navy, and Imperial Expansion, 1750–1825,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 80–106; Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 136. For a more general resource on the role of food in Cook’s voyages, see the essays in Fish and Ships! Food on the Voyages of Captain Cook (Whitby: Captain Cook Memorial Museum, 2012). On Cook’s passion for gardening during his voyages, particularly as a way of modeling what he deemed “civilized” agriculture to the Māori and other Indigenous peoples, see Nicholas Thomas, Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook (New York: Walker & Company, 2003), xxi–xxiii. 70 See “Portable soup” (Object AAB0012) and “Ship’s biscuit” (Object AAB0010), National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, Royal United Service Institution Collection. 71 Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 344. 72 Ibid., vol. 2, 20. 73 Marcy Norton, “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38. 74 Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog, xix. 75 Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 20. For an Indigenous studies approach to Cook’s voyage and the observation of the transit of Venus, see Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). 76 Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 20. 77 Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 293. 78 Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, 3. 79 Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 430. 80 On early modern food diplomacy in a British imperial context, see Michael A. LaCombe, Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Rachel B. Herrmann, “‘No Useless Mouth’: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy in the American Revolution,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 20–49. 81 For example, Banks wrote that “salt beef we had with us but nothing of the bread kind, for that we depended on the natives who had on all former occasions been both able and willing to supply us with any quantity of Breadfruit.” Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 298. For extensive commentary on the consumption of dog during Cook’s voyages, see Salmond, The Trial of the Cannibal Dog. On food exchange as “a rite of arrival” in American colonial encounters between Europeans and Natives, see Joyce E. Chaplin, Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500–1676 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003 [2001]), 150. For a comprehensive study of hunger as a site of cultural encounter, confict, and exchange in the early American northeast, see Carla Cevasco, Violent Appetites: Hunger in the Early Northeast (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2022). 82 Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 20. 83 On Recco, see Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work (London and New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2001), 232. 84 Richard Warner, Antiquitates Culinariæ, or Curious Tracts Relating to the Culinary Affairs of the Old English (London, 1791), viii. “Polypi” in this instance may refer to octopuses or squid. 85 The Penny Cyclopædia of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, vol. 6 (London, 1836), 425.

170 Part II • Felt 86 Simmonds, The Curiosities of Food, 351–2. 87 Ibid., 352. Simmonds here wrote of “the ungulated cuttle-fsh (Sepia unguiculata),” which is a frequent synonym for Taningia danae. See Cephalopods of the World: An Annotated and Illustrated Catalogue of Cephalopod Species Known to Date, vol. 2 (Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2010), 265. 88 Simmonds, The Curiosities of Food, 352–3. On similar texture-based assessments of squid in the Renaissance, see Ken Albala, Eating Right in the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 96. On cephalopods as “bloodless” fshes, and thus their reputation as diffcult to digest, see Ken Albala, Food in Early Modern Europe (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2003), 76–77. On how prohibitions against eating certain animals emerged along individualized rather than species lines within the Amerindian framework of iegue—denoting a tamed being, human or nonhuman—see Marcy Norton, “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange,” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (2015): 28–60. 89 Beale, The Natural History of the Sperm Whale, 68. 90 See Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 87. On disgust’s role in establishing colonialist scientifc authority, see Ahmed Ragab, “Two Students and a Corpse: The Semantics of Disgust in the Making of Colonial Knowledge,” History and Technology 34, no. 1 (2018): 79–88. 91 Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 85 and 87–88. 92 Similarly, Ahmed analyzes Charles Darwin’s reaction of disgust toward a Native man at Tierra del Fuego who touched Darwin’s meal of cold meat with a clean hand (the man, in return, expressed disgust at the feel of the meat). Ahmed writes: “Food is signifcant not only because disgust is a matter of taste as well as touch—as senses that require proximity to that which is sensed— but also because food is ‘taken into’ the body. The fear of contamination that provokes the nausea of disgust reactions hence makes food the very ‘stuff’ of disgust. Of course, we must eat to survive. So the very project of survival requires we take something other into our bodies.” See Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 82–83. On the two-way nature of disgust in the early American northeastern borderlands, see Carla Cevasco, “‘Nothing Which Hunger Will Not Devour’: Disgust and Sustenance in the Northeastern Borderlands,” Early American Studies 19, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 264–93. 93 Parkinson, A Journal of a Voyage to the South Seas, 20–21. 94 Ibid., 17. 95 Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 2, 21. 96 Ibid., 33. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 97 See also Thomas, Cook, xx. 98 The case of breadfruit is one food history/natural history crossover that has been well documented. See, for example, Richard A. Howard, “Captain Bligh and the Breadfruit,” Scientifc American 188, no. 3 (March 1953): 88–95; Zilberstein, “Inured to Empire,” 129 and 147; Timothy Fulford, “The Taste of Paradise: The Fruits of Romanticism in the Empire,” in Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, ed. Timothy Morton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 41–58; and Elizabeth DeLoughrey, “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 8, no. 3 (Winter 2007). 99 Banks, The Endeavour Journal of Joseph Banks, vol. 1, 260. 100 Ibid., vol. 1, 341. 101 See also Vanessa Smith, “Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacifc in the Eighteenth Century,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 53–75. On the selective breeding of breadfruit, see Nyree J. C. Zerega, Diane Ragone, and Timothy J. Motley, “Complex Origins of Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, Moraceae): Implications for Human Migrations in Oceania,” American Journal of Botany 91, no. 5 (May 2004): 760–6. 102 On the complex motivations for the transport, see DeLoughrey, “Globalizing the Routes of Breadfruit and Other Bounties.” Among other factors, DeLoughrey identifes the scheme to relocate breadfruit as a self-styled

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“humanitarian” bulwark—on the part of planters—against abolitionism and the rise of slave resistance. The fruit itself, DeLoughrey argues, was meant to quell slave revolt. On breadfruit as a means of increasing slave productivity, see Jamaica Kincaid, “The Breadfruit,” The Harvard Advocate (Winter 2015), https://theharvardadvocate.com/content/the-breadfruit (accessed July 15, 2019). For further background on Banks and breadfruit, see John Gascoigne, Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). On continuing efforts to provision this far-fung empire into the late nineteenth century—particularly when it came to meat—see Rebecca J. H. Woods, “From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible: Building an Empire of Sheep in New Zealand, ca. 1880–1900,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 1 (May 2015): 117–36. For an analysis of the mutiny, see Chaplin, Round About the Earth, 142–4. For one recent scholarly analysis of the experience of the Middle Passage, with specifc attention to gender and kinship, see Jennifer L. Morgan, “Four. Accounting for the ‘Most Excruciating Torment’: Transatlantic Passages,” in Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 141–69. Maggie Harris, “I, Breadfruit,” Selected Poems (Guyana: The Caribbean Press, 2011), 18. My thanks to Catherine Peters for bringing this poem to my attention. Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden (Book) (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 136–7. For a broader analysis of imperial consumption of the Caribbean—including its foods, enslaved peoples, and cultural productions—see Mimi Sheller, Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). Carla Herreria, “Breadfruit: The Next Superfood to End World Hunger?” HuffPost, November 14, 2013, www.huffpost.com/entry/breadfruit-worldhunger_n_4271436 (accessed June 27, 2022); Liza Gross, “Productive, ProteinRich Breadfruit Could Help the World’s Hungry Tropics,” NPR, August 9, 2016, npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/08/09/487094806/productive-proteinrich-breadfruit-could-help-the-worlds-hungry-tropics (accessed June 27, 2022). “Breadfruit History,” National Tropical Botanical Garden, https://ntbg.org/ breadfruit/about-breadfruit/history (accessed June 27, 2022). On “the historical ontology congealed within objects” and the tendency of this history to reanimate—particularly with reference to slavery and the breakdown of the person/thing binary—see Bill Brown, “Reifcation, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 175–207. To view the digital exhibition, visit kitcheninthecabinet.com (for full functionality, use a desktop computer or laptop). Some text from this chapter also appears in the exhibition. For another digital research collaboration devoted to early modern food history, see the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Before ‘Farm to Table’: Early Modern Foodways and Culture project (https://beforefarmtotable.folger.edu/). On the growing movement in the museum world to deaccession food objects, see author’s email correspondence with Ashley Rose Young, Historian of the American Food History Project at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, March 19, 2020. See also Gary Edson and David Dean, The Handbook for Museums (New York: Routledge, 1994), 106–7. See, for example, Norman Bryson, Looking at the Overlooked: Four Essays on Still Life Painting (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 128.

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Ferguson, Priscilla Parkhurst. “The Sense of Taste.” The American Historical Review 116, no. 2 (April 2011): 371–84. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994. Findlen, Paula and Anna Toledano. “The Materials of Natural History.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 151–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Fish and Ships! Food on the Voyages of Captain Cook. Whitby, UK: Captain Cook Memorial Museum, 2012. Frame, William with Laura Walker. James Cook: The Voyages. Montreal, Kingston, and Chicago: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018. Freedman, Paul. “Preface.” In Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, edited by Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala. Oakland: University of California Press, 2014. Fulford, Timothy. “The Taste of Paradise: The Fruits of Romanticism in the Empire.” In Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, edited by Timothy Morton, 41–58. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Gascoigne, John. Science in the Service of Empire: Joseph Banks, the British State, and the Uses of Science in the Age of Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Gibson, Susannah. Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? How Eighteenth-Century Science Disrupted the Natural Order. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016. Greer, Germaine. The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Their Work. London and New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2001. Gronim, Sara. Everyday Nature: Knowledge of the Natural World in Colonial New York. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009. Gross, Liza. “Productive, Protein-Rich Breadfruit Could Help the World’s Hungry Tropics.” NPR, August 9, 2016. www.npr.org/sections/ thesalt/2016/08/09/487094806/productive-protein-rich-breadfruitcould-help-the-worlds-hungry-tropics (accessed June 27, 2022). Guerrini, Anita. “A Natural History of the Kitchen.” Osiris 35 (2020): 20–41. Hall, David D. Ways of Writing: The Practice and Politics of Text-Making in Seventeenth-Century New England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Harris, Maggie. “I, Breadfruit.” In Selected Poems. Guyana: The Caribbean Press, 2011. Herreria, Carla. “Breadfruit: The Next Superfood to End World Hunger?” HuffPost, November 14, 2013. www.huffpost.com/entry/breadfruitworld-hunger_n_4271436 (accessed June 27, 2022). Herrmann, Rachel B. “‘No Useless Mouth’: Iroquoian Food Diplomacy in the American Revolution.” Diplomatic History 41, no. 1 (January 2017): 20–49. Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New York: Picador, 2002. Howard, Richard A. “Captain Bligh and the Breadfruit.” Scientifc American 188, no. 3 (March 1953): 88–95. Iannini, Christopher P. Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

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Kemp, Christopher. Floating Gold: A Natural (and Unnatural) History of Ambergris. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012. Kincaid, Jamaica. “The Breadfruit.” The Harvard Advocate, Winter 2015. https://theharvardadvocate.com/content/the-breadfruit (accessed July 15, 2019). Kincaid, Jamaica. My Garden (Book). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999. Klein, Lauren F. An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020. Kubodera, Tsunemi, Yasuhiro Koyama, and Kyoichi Mori. “Observations of Wild Hunting Behaviour and Bioluminescence of a Large DeepSea, Eight-Armed Squid, Taningia danae.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B 274, no. 1613 (February 2007): 1029–34. LaCombe, Michael A. Political Gastronomy: Food and Authority in the English Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. LaCombe, Michael A. “Subject or Signifer?: Food and the History of Early North America.” History Compass 11, no. 10 (2013): 859–68. Lawrence, Christopher. “Disciplining Disease: Scurvy, the Navy, and Imperial Expansion, 1750–1825.” In Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, edited by David Philip Miller and Peter Hanns Reill. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Lawrence, Christopher and Steven Shapin, eds. Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Leong, Elaine. Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science, and the Household in Early Modern England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018. McCants, Anne E. C. “Porcelain for the Poor: The Material Culture of Tea and Coffee Consumption in Eighteenth-century Amsterdam.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, edited by Paula Findlen, 316–41. London: Routledge, 2013. Mikhail, Alan. The Animal in Ottoman Egypt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Miller, David Philip and Peter Hanns Reill, eds. Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Mintz, Sidney W. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Viking, 1985. Montero Sobrevilla, Iris. “Indigenous Naturalists.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 112–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Morgan, Jennifer L. Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Murphy, Kathleen S. “Collecting Slave Traders: James Petiver, Natural History, and the British Slave Trade.” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 4 (October 2013): 637–70. Murphy, Kathleen S. “Translating the Vernacular: Indigenous and African Knowledge in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic.” Atlantic Studies 8, no. 1 (2011): 29–48. Norton, Marcy. “The Chicken or the Iegue: Human-Animal Relationships and the Columbian Exchange.” American Historical Review 120, no. 1 (February 2015): 28–60. Norton, Marcy. Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Norton, Marcy. “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World.” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38.

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Noyce, Diana. “Charles Darwin, the Gourmet Traveler.” Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 12, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 45–52. Orr, Mary. “Women Peers in the Scientifc Realm: Sarah Bowdich (Lee)’s Expert Collaborations with Georges Cuvier, 1825–33.” Notes and Records 69, no. 1 (November 2014): 37–51. Parrish, Susan Scott. “Diasporic African Sources of Enlightenment Knowledge.” In Science and Empire in the Atlantic World, edited by James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. Parsons, Christopher M. and Kathleen S. Murphy. “Ecosystems under Sail: Specimen Transport in Eighteenth-Century French and British Atlantics.” Early American Studies 10, no. 3 (Fall 2012): 503–39. Peck, Robert McCracken. “Alcohol and Arsenic, Pepper and Pitch: Brief Histories of Preservation Techniques.” In Stuffng Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730– 1860, edited by Sue Ann Prince. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003. Pennell, Sara. “The Material Culture of Food in Early Modern England, 1650–1750.” In The Familiar Past? Archaeologies of Later Historical Britain, edited by Sarah Tarlow and Susie West. London: Routledge, 1999. Pennell, Sara. “‘Pots and Pans History’: The Material Culture of the Kitchen in Early Modern England.” Journal of Design History 11, no. 3 (1998): 201–16. Pouésard, Emma Le. “Bread as Mediating Material: Tactile Memory and Touch in Ms. Fr. 640.” In Secrets of Craft and Nature in Renaissance France: A Digital Critical Edition and English Translation of BnF Ms. Fr. 640, edited by Making and Knowing Project, Pamela H. Smith, Naomi Rosenkranz, Tianna Helena Uchacz, Tillmann Taape, Clément Godbarge, Sophie Pitman, Jenny Boulboullé, Joel Klein, Donna Bilak, Marc Smith, and Terry Catapano. New York: Making and Knowing Project, 2020. https://edition640.makingandknowing. org/#/essays/ann_050_fa_16. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. Prince, Sue Ann, ed. Stuffng Birds, Pressing Plants, Shaping Knowledge: Natural History in North America, 1730–1860. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003. Pugliano, Valentina. “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 44–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Quammen, David. Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003. Ragab, Ahmed. “Two Students and a Corpse: The Semantics of Disgust in the Making of Colonial Knowledge.” History and Technology 34, no. 1 (2018): 79–88. Rediker, Marcus. “History from Below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade.” Atlantic Studies 5, no. 2 (August 2008): 285–97. Riely, Elizabeth Gawthrop. “John James Audubon’s Tastes of America.” Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies 11, no. 2 (Summer 2011): 29–37. Ritvo, Harriet. “Learning from Animals: Natural History for Children in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Children’s Literature 13 (1985): 72–93. Robles, Whitney Barlow. “Flatness.” In The Philosophy Chamber: Art and Science in Harvard’s Teaching Cabinet, 1766–1820, edited by Ethan W.

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Lasser. New Haven, CT and Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press and Harvard Art Museums, 2017. Robles, Whitney Barlow. “Ladyfsh.” In The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science (2021), https://kitcheninthecabinet.com/ladyfsh (accessed June 27, 2022). Robles, Whitney Barlow. “Natural History in Two Dimensions.” Commonplace: The Journal of Early American Life 18, no. 1 (Winter 2018). http:// commonplace.online/article/vol-18-no-1-robles/ (accessed March 11, 2020). Robles, Whitney Barlow. “Salt.” In The Kitchen in the Cabinet: Histories of Food and Science (2021), https://kitcheninthecabinet.com/salt/ (accessed June 27, 2022). Roper, Clyde F. E. and Michael Vecchione. “A Geographic and Taxonomic Review of Taningia danae Joubin, 1931 (Cephalopoda: Octopoteuthidae), with New Records and Observations on Bioluminescence.” In Recent Advances in Cephalopod Fisheries Biology, edited by Takashi Okutani, Ron K. O’Dor, and Tsunemi Kubodera. Tokyo: Tokai University Press, 1993. Rusert, Britt. Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2017. Salmond, Anne. The Trial of the Cannibal Dog: The Remarkable Story of Captain Cook’s Encounters in the South Seas. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Schaffer, Simon, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds. The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, A Division of Watson Publishing International LLC, 2009. Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991 [1989]. Schiebinger, Londa. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Schiebinger, Londa and Claudia Swan, eds. Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Shapin, Steven. “‘You Are What You Eat’: Historical Changes in Ideas About Food and Identity.” Historical Research 87, no. 237 (August 2014): 377–92. Sheller, Mimi. Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. Smith, Joan. “Eating History: The Perishable Art of Food.” 2013 Oxford Food Symposium, http://politicalblonde.com/index.php/jane-grigson-lecture-2013/ (accessed January 15, 2019). Smith, Vanessa. “Give Us Our Daily Breadfruit: Bread Substitution in the Pacifc in the Eighteenth Century.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 35 (2006): 53–75. Snively, Samantha. “How 17th-Century Women Replicated the Natural World on the Table.” Atlas Obscura, February 28, 2018. www.atlasobscura.com/articles/women-science-nature-table-17th-century (accessed January 15, 2019). Spary, E. C. Eating the Enlightenment: Food and the Sciences in Paris, 1670– 1760. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014. Spary, Emma C. “Self-Preservation: French Travels between Cuisine and Industrie.” In The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820, edited by Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, 355–6. Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, a division of Watson Publishing International LLC, 2009.

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Spary, Emma C. and Anya Zilberstein. “On the Virtues of Historical Entomophagy.” Osiris 35 (2020): 1–19. Star, Susan Leigh and James R. Griesemer. “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations’ and Boundary Objects: Amateurs and Professionals in Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, 1907–39.” Social Studies of Science 19, no. 3 (August 1989): 387–420. Strang, Cameron B. Frontiers of Science: Imperialism and Natural Knowledge in the Gulf South Borderlands, 1500–1850. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press and the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2018. TallBear, Kim. “Beyond the Life/Not-Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking, and New Materialisms.” In Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, edited by Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017. Thomas, Nicholas. Cook: The Extraordinary Voyages of Captain James Cook. New York: Walker & Company, 2003. Todd, Zoe. “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take on the Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word for Colonialism.” Journal of Historical Sociology 29 (March 2016): 4–22. Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century. New York and London: New York University Press, 2012. Tortorici, Zeb. “Animal Archive Stories: Species Anxieties in the Mexican National Archive.” In The Historical Animal, edited by Susan Nance. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2015. Turgeon, Laurier. “The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object.” Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 1–29. Van der Veen, Marijke. “When Is Food A Luxury?” World Archaeology 34, no. 3 (2003): 416. Walker, Brett L. “Animals and the Intimacy of History.” History and Theory 52 (December 2013): 45–67. Watson, Kelly L. Insatiable Appetites: Imperial Encounters with Cannibals in the North Atlantic World. New York: New York University Press, 2015. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. “Cookbooks as Resources for Social History.” In Food in Time and Place: The American Historical Association Companion to Food History, edited by Paul Freedman, Joyce E. Chaplin, and Ken Albala. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014. Whitehead, P. J. P. “Zoological Specimens from Captain Cook’s Voyages.” Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5, no. 3 (1969): 161–201. Williams, Elizabeth A. Appetite and Its Discontents: Science, Medicine, and the Urge to Eat, 1750–1950. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2020. Woods, Rebecca J. H. “From Colonial Animal to Imperial Edible: Building an Empire of Sheep in New Zealand, ca. 1880–1900.” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35, no. 1 (May 2015): 117–36. WoRMS (World Register of Marine Species), www.marinespecies.org/. Xavier, J. C. and Y. Cherel. Cephalopod Beak Guide for the Southern Ocean. Cambridge: British Antarctic Survey, 2009. Yokota, Kariann Akemi. Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Young, Carolin C. “The Soup that Went into the Tureen: Connecting the Dots Between Food and Material Culture.” In Food & Material Culture: Proceedings of the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery 2013, edited by Mark McWilliams, 33–47. Totnes: Prospect Books, 2014.

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Zerega, Nyree J. C., Diane Ragone, and Timothy J. Motley. “Complex Origins of Breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis, Moraceae): Implications for Human Migrations in Oceania.” American Journal of Botany 91, no. 5 (May 2004): 760–6. Zilberstein, Anya. “Inured to Empire: Wild Rice and Climate Change.” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 1 (January 2015): 127–58.

Chapter 6

Coffee Of Melancholic Turkish Bodies and Sensory Experiences Duygu Yıldırım

“Coffee was characterized by its innate dark nature, which made it challenging for Europeans to disinvest all of its attributed meanings and reinvest new ones.” Page 184–185

VISUALIZATION 6 Coffee: Library of the University of Bologna [Ms.1044_87-D, c. 33]. © Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna— University Library of Bologna. Detail from “an Ottoman lady drinking coffee,” Pera Museum, Istanbul. Ottoman nature studies had botanical illustrations, too. Although rare, such images were often in circulation among European naturalists, physicians, and merchants due to their demand for visuals to add to their collections. The assumed lacuna of representations of the natural world in the Ottoman Empire also stems from our own rigid modern perceptions of the archive, which was indeed netted as in the mirror refection in the collage. The colored image in the Ottoman manuscript was turned into a dull, ambiguous, or even unintelligible representation in a European printed book.

Abstract: What is knowledge’s affect? Is it bitter like coffee or melancholic like the bodies that consume it? This essay examines the paradoxical relationship between sense and scientifc sensibility in the making of knowledge about coffee. As an iconic beverage of early modern globalization, coffee belied easy categorization. Baffed drinkers of coffee— from naturalists and physicians to merchants—tried to come up with a suffciently expansive defnition of this new and ambiguous plant from the Ottoman lands. Europeans had to rely on their senses, particularly gustatory, while creating an embodied knowledge of coffee. This sensational encounter with the Turkish drink, however, brought new anxieties to occlude the fellow feeling among coffee drinkers across religions, resulting in a differentiation of the innately melancholic Turkish body. Inter-cultural encounters of the senses around coffee thus embodied the tension between alienating the self from the object of inquiry and peering into sensations as an epistemic practice.

Throughout the early modern world, the meanings of natural things changed because different people had different interests in them.1 In circulation, new and precarious natural things became global products that connected once foreign and distant geographies—Asia, Europe, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire. Efforts to defne and incorporate these new commodities gave rise to a sense of urgency among learned elites to gatekeep opportunistic individuals who claimed to be holders of novel knowledge in this transitionary era. Motivated with such intentions, the famous Italian physician and naturalist Francesco Redi (1626–1697) resisted the idea of consuming the well-known Turkish drink, coffee, in his famous poem about wine: That chocolate might not yet Be taken up, or even tea, Medicines like this Would never do for me I would rather take poison Than a glass brim full of Bitter harmful coffee A brew for Arabs And Janissaries So repulsive DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-10

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Dark and turbid That even slaves choke on it.2 Such controversies incited over new natural things were both about the things themselves and about the contested domains of knowledge. The poem also gestures beyond the vociferous medical debates within learned communities on whether the new beverages were poisonous for Europeans. Note the charged emphasis on certain words: “poison,” “bitter,” “harmful,” “Arabs,” “Janissaries,” “dark,” “slaves.” The tone refects contemporary questions about embodiment, race, and class that aligned well with elite white men’s view of former coffee drinkers, the Ottomans. Coffee was not just a curious thing or a promoted substitute for wine in Europe, but the very means and practice of defning intersubjectivity in cross-cultural settings: can human beings from different religions, races, and classes consume the very same beverage? How does this shared human experience create fellow feeling, and why was shared taste a dangerous idea in the mind of an elite European man? Historiography has directed our attention to coffeehouses rather than to coffee on its own merits. As a representative of the Habermesian public sphere, the coffeehouse has become a valued metonym for information exchange, sociability, and political dissent especially in discussing eighteenth-century Europe.3 Likewise, Ottoman studies has followed this topos for early modern sociability in the Islamic world.4 The intersection between coffeehouses and information fow is indeed both persuasive and problematic. It is by all accounts too obvious—and uncomplicated—to consider the coffeehouse as only a space for sociable encounters. In many ways, this reckoning reveals our own modern assumptions more than a multi-layered understanding of what early modern people talked about when they drank coffee. Beyond the self-evident issue of coffee’s own expendability in the historiography is the binary structure between the individual and the social on the one hand, and the fow of information and social resistance on the other. One way to pry this picture apart is to grant a much-needed historiographical focus to an iconic natural thing: coffee. A history of coffee at the crossroads of the Ottoman Empire and Europe destabilizes this doubled framework and showcases how its own elusive and fuid nature troubled European men over the course of the seventeenth century. The ancient dictum of “you are what you eat” resonated for these European elites who were discontent with coffee’s resistance to boundaries. Yet, articulating why coffee was “bitter and harmful” to European bodies necessitated a paradoxical stance: the stronger the anxiety to draw boundaries between distinct people who were consuming coffee, the deeper the European sensational engagement with coffee became. The quest for knowledge about coffee—whether to advocate for or against its consumption— made gustation and sensory experience more broadly an epistemic medium. Embodied experiences were at work to defne coffee’s appearance, taste, smell, and texture with a full sensory label. Coffee then became the taste of knowledge. Once tasteless in the literal meaning as a result of its obscurity, coffee gradually obtained a metaphorical sense relating to the questions of refned taste. Should an elite, white, Christian man consume the Turkish coffee that was becoming the beverage of choice for commoners as well?5 What were the risks involved in the possibility of common feelings being evoked in coffee consumption? How did coffee disrupt this community of feeling? Triggered by coffee’s acute foreignness, any discussion of coffeedrinking implied the penetration of a strange natural thing into Europe rather than its sudden displacement and alienation from its own local environment in Ottoman lands. Coffee was characterized by its innately dark nature, which made it challenging for Europeans to disinvest all of

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its attributed meanings and reinvest new ones. Yemen, where coffee was considered to have originated, was a distant and unknown place far from European colonialist aspirations of the time. Rather than directly moving toward acculturation in its new European setting, coffee created a struggle between the tasting self and the knowing self. That bodily engagement with objects, matter, and things was a crucial part of experiential knowledge making, empiricism, and observation in the early modern period is now a familiar argument.6 In recent years, historiographically devalued sensory experiences in the making of scientifc knowledge such as touching, smelling, and tasting have come to the fore in the scholarship.7 Likewise, Jessica Riskin has shown that even the French Enlightenment, which has been conventionally associated with the age of reason, was indeed inseparable from sensibility, emotion, and intuition.8 A sensuous and embodied approach was key in the making of the empirical sciences. Moving forward along these recent discussions at the nexus of an anthropological history of the senses and the history of science, this chapter demonstrates the constant tension between intersubjectivity and the sensory dimensions of experience through the specifc case of coffee.9 Such a sensorial history of coffee illustrates the existence of both know-how and knowing that in elite male making sense of natural things. Rather than going with the overfow of affective experiences with coffee, naturalists and physicians strove for options to channel their sensations while morphing themselves into an unfeeling knowing self. Ultimately, the struggle to demarcate the precious immediacy of sensations evoked when consuming coffee failed the enterprise of renaming coffee. Undeterred, learned European men instead set about redefning Turkish bodies as melancholic, fat, and feminized—unmistakably different from their own. A coffee-like approach to the history of science suggests that elite knowledge makers were disturbed both by the natural things on the move and by the exigencies of sensory perceptions to acquire knowledge. However, coffee lingered on the margins of canonical natural history, since European naturalists and physicians faced challenges to fnd trueto-nature illustrations of this unfamiliar plant. Abstracting and alienating coffee were necessary to transform it into an intellectual commodity. Now lost to the standard renderings of what Western-infected natural history should look like, Ottoman nature studies indeed had botanical illustrations, albeit rare. Coffee was precarious; all the more so was the taste of knowledge. Knowledge makers conceived of the obscure nature of coffee as productively strange precisely because it demanded new discursive strategies. As such, coffee translated embodied knowledge into textual knowledge. With the changing defnition of taste from a prescription to a subjective experience, recreational beverages created new mediums for self-fashioning in Europe.10 The bodies of the Turks, in turn, became more familiar to the minds of Europeans as they began to seem simultaneously threatening and fragile.

THE NINE LIVES OF COFFEE Foodways have always been a fundamental element of traveling, commerce, and cultural encounters.11 Deciding what was distasteful and to be avoided was a boundary maker between distinct human cultures. During the early modern period, European travelers to the Ottoman lands paid particular attention not only to the variety of food and drink consumed, but also to the manners in which they were prepared and served.

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European travelers used foodways to draw stark differences between the Ottomans and themselves by creating strict characterizations. For example, the humanist-educated travelers, such as the royal geographer to Henri II, Nicholas de Nicolay (1517–1583), depicted the excessive consumption of meat in Ottoman cuisine within the dichotomy between civilization and barbarity.12 Using food to distinguish between human cultures was a common trope in the writings of humanist travelers who alluded to their Greco-Roman precedents. Similarly, culinary practices were a means by which to discuss cultural boundaries in Ottoman travel literature. The renowned Ottoman traveler Evliya Çelebi (1611–1682), who authored one of the longest frstperson narratives of the early modern period, presented detailed accounts of food and drink ranging from papaya to kebabs in his book of travels. His curiosity often went to the extremes, as when he described the foodways of the Kurds in Mardin by calling them “corpse-eaters.”13 In a similar vein, cannibalism, a prevalent trope of the time, emerged in the narrative when Evliya tried to make sense of the human diversity in the Kipchak Steppe. Elsewhere in his account, Evliya Çelebi complained of the lack of social etiquette when his hosts in Austria offered “neither water nor sherbet nor coffee.”14 His heartbroken and thirsty complaint indicates the rising popularity of coffee in Europe over the course of the seventeenth century. Offering coffee was a convention of sociability in the mind of the Ottoman traveler, who expected to fnd it in foreign lands, too, as a shared sign of gentlemanly manners. Evliya did not take it lightly, either, when he looked for a decent cup of coffee in Dalmatia, to no avail.15 After all, coffee was destined to be a universal beverage sooner or later. Coffee consumption expanded in Europe in the mid-seventeenth century, but European travel accounts of voyages to Ottoman lands had already identifed it as a crucial aspect of daily life a century earlier. Learned travelers such as Pietro della Valle (1586–1652) and physicians such as Prospero Alpini (1553–1617) mentioned Turks drinking a beverage called “Cavau” in their travel accounts, publications, and correspondence. Drawing on such learned travelers’ experiences, the very frst references to coffee appeared in medical accounts, as in the case of Carolus Clusius’ (1526–1609) Aromatum et simplicium aliquot medica mentorum apud Indos nascientum historia (1575). Sparking interest frst as a medicinal curiosity that would beneft “all ages and all sexes,” coffee then became a commodity in Western Europe.16 In contrast, in the early modern Ottoman Empire, coffee had a much more chaotic story.17 It was both a “blessing and a curse,” since it had become the object of conquest when the Ottomans seized Yemen in 1538.18 Coffee was indigenous to Ethiopia and then introduced to Yemen in the ffteenth century, yet the diffculty of cultivating and transporting it continued. This obstacle was even stratifed with political geography in the succeeding century. The central highlands of Yemen where the coffee tree grew were inhabited by Isma’ili Shi’ite tribes whose allegiances posed diffculties for Ottoman control over the newly conquered lands. To become involved in the coffee trade, Ottoman notables had to negotiate with local tribes. The troublesome story of Ottoman coffee did not end there. The joys of drinking coffee in the urban centers of the empire such as Istanbul were often disrupted by successive offcial bans against coffee. Coffee and its drinkers, however, were resilient. As European merchants began to sail directly to Yemen in the 1660s, they gradually superseded Arab and Indian traders of coffee. As the trade networks were expanding and becoming more intertwined, coffee was often mentioned alongside other signifcant commodities of the time, namely tea and chocolate.19 When people talked about coffee, they often

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Figure 6.1: Steeped beverages: coffee, tea, and chocolate.20 The tacit visual messaging here does not forge a sense of empathy for the original drinkers of exotic beverages. Instead, it dialectically consolidates their difference in contrast to Europe’s own self-fashioning. The Oriental Other, stereotyped as an Ottoman and an Asian, is depicted as a cross-legged fgure sitting on the ground. The seated positions imply that their bodies are emasculated and stunted.21 The American in the frontispiece stands in an erect position, in contrast to the assumed civility of their European counterparts.

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Figure 6.2: The frontispiece to the section on coffee.22 The image is giving hints about the origins of the new and curious substances by racial coding attached to three fgures. The mesmerizing impact on these drinkers is obvious. This state of bewilderment does not necessarily stem from a moderate use of the beverages, but from an abuse. The sensation evoked by overdrinking stands in sharp contrast to refned taste associated with moderate drinking.

talked about tea and chocolate as well, and the evidence from scholarly publications suggests that tendency, too. One of the best-sellers of the time, De l’usage du caphé, du thé et du chocolate by the French apothecary Philippe Sylvestre Dufour (1622–1687), displays the close connection between members of the trio in its illustrations. The quest for knowledge about coffee was shaped by willful efforts to suggest affnities between these exotic natural things. In his work on materia medica, A description of simple medicines generally us’d in physick, the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) classifed coffee, tea, and chocolate as “stomachical and worm-destroying medicines.”23 The defning characteristics of these medicinal substances are that they are “bitter and acrimonious.” Tournefort did not consult any illustrations, yet he willingly trusted inferences drawn on the basis of affnities with other well-known plants: It is a tree resembling our common cherry tree, as to its leaves, branches and bigness; but we have no certain account of its fowers. The seeds or berries are brought out of Arabia into Europe, being contained in a shell resembling an olive, of a brown color, and small, being about half an inch long, and a quarter of an inch thick, having but one seed-vessel or coffn: The seeds are hard, of an ash-color, inclining to a white, upon one side convex, and upon the other fat, and a little concave; they are of a mealy taste, and without any notable smell. Coffee seeds or berries are roasted, made into a fne powder, and gently boil’d in water; and the hot liquor being

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Figure 6.3: The coffee plant and the utensils for preparing the drink.24 While the curiosity about coffee, tea, and chocolate was connected, the natural history illustrations of these substances were unbalanced and disparate. Pictorial and textual representations could create taxonomic identities, yet Ottoman coffee posed distinct challenges. European naturalists and physicians hardly saw a live specimen in Ottoman lands. Moreover, Ottoman nature studies were intrinsically textual with only few, if any, illustrations. The illustration here represents almost impossible efforts to fll this pictorial void. Unlike the illustrations of tea and chocolate with their denaturalized environment in the background, the coffee plant remains entirely alienated on a white and invisible landscape.

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sweetened with a little sugar, is commonly drunk in most countries of the world, not only in private, but also in publick houses, to strengthen the stomach, and help the concoction of the foods, as also for the sake of diversion, converse, and passing away the time. Liquor is very usefully and effectually drunk after a surfeit of hard drinking, in a headache, sleepiness, and hypochondriack or hysterick distempers.25 Despite the fact that Tournefort visited Ottoman lands, he did not necessarily name coffee as a Turkish drink; instead, he assigned it a kind of universality. He pursued the codifcation of a uniform description of preparing this hot beverage by suggesting “a little sugar” to sweeten the taste. In the Ottoman case, in contrast, coffee was generally consumed without mixing it with any sweeteners. In a similar vein, tea and chocolate were consumed without adding sugar in their own indigenous settings, but Tournefort mentioned adding sugar while making tea, and the mixing of corn and sugar in the making of chocolate, to be dissolved in water or in milk.26 Coffee was thus displaced and alienated not only from its origins, but also from its taste. Unsweetened, bitter coffee had a coarse taste that was to be refned for its European drinkers. This sweetening operation catalyzed symbolic assessments of distaste and taste. Not all descriptions of coffee were in such a state of alienated abstraction or buried in abstruse associations in early modern Europe. Eyebrows were raised over this foreign Turkish drink since it allegedly offended cultural sensibilities. Consider, for example, an anonymous pamphlet, A broadside against coffee; or the marriage of the Turk (1672), in which coffee appears as a brown Turkish renegade whose embodiment is both racialized and sexualized.27 The satire represents the anxiety of “turning Turk,” though paradoxically its printed copies might have already been in wide circulation in coffeehouses. COFFEE, a kind of Turkish Renegade, Has late a match with Christian water made; At frst between them happen’d a Demur, Yet joyn’d they were, but not without great stir; For both so cold were, and so faintly met, The Turkish Hymen in his Turbant swet.28 The poem also portrays coffee as a slave who “must be beaten.” The aggressive penetration of Turkish coffee, with “the smell and taste of the mock China bowl,” into English water within the imagery of marriage is destined to be destructive for the English society. As Nabil Matar aptly observed, for many writers of such polemic texts, “coffee-drinking was dangerous because it prepared Englishmen for apostasy to Islam.”29 Whether in the image of an “ugly Turkish Enchantress” or a Turkish renegade, the secret ingredients of coffee could conquer the soul and the body of Christians, turning them “faithless as a Jew or infdel.”30 Coffee created a new way of representing acute anxieties during this time of religious turmoil and globalization. This trope was at the heart of contemporary medical writing across Europe. In Castile, the physician Isidro Fernández Matienzo deliberately avoided appraising the medicinal benefts of drinking coffee. Defning coffee’s taste as bitter or altogether absent, he claimed that if the drinker felt any better in the aftermath of consumption, it was not because of the effcacy of coffee; instead, improvement was due to the local hot water with which it had been prepared.31 The exotic beverage, despite the curiosity it provoked, allegedly posed

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risks both for bodily and moral health as well. Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, for example, warned his readers against the sulfur inherent in coffee, which supposedly had an effeminizing effect on the mind and the body.32 Coffee’s effects eventually migrated in the minds of the unconvinced from its oversexualized associations to infertility. Some even believed that the Ottomans consumed it as a form of birth control.33 In the face of this multilayered display of assertions that sowed doubt about its foreignness, coffee nevertheless remained a resilient substance while continuing to evolve in meaning.

AMONG THE MELANCHOLIC BODIES OF THE TURKS Coffee talks were where divergent narratives were marshaled to different ends. Thinking with and through coffee was a means to imagine what Ottoman bodies were like. The curious history of coffee was thus the history of the body, too. Even those fattened histories of cross-cultural interactions help us see the intertwined ways of making sense of human diversity. In its many luminous moments, Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s (1658–1730)— aristocrat, naturalist, military general, and the founder of Institute of Arts and Sciences in Bologna—account of his experiences in Ottoman lands reveals the double process in which elite knowledge of nature redefned the main subjects of his natural inquiry, that is, Ottoman bodies.34 Marsigli both joined and expanded upon a longer convention oriented toward the Islamic world. For one, he underscored the limits of European knowledge about the Ottomans despite their geographic proximity. In Marsigli’s view, a holistic understanding of a distinct culture was vital, beginning with its military order and culminating in its nature. Thinking both with and beyond the persistent narrative loops about the Ottomans, Marsigli insisted on the urgency of a new narrative trajectory, paying special attention to Ottoman military, religious, and cultural traditions, as well as to their history and natural environments, in the same manner that ancient philosophers described: the air in which we live, the foods that nourish us, the beverages which quench our thirst, the motion that keep us, the houses that protect us, the diseases that ruin us, the affects and the passions of the mind that change us.35 The Ottoman World offered varied possibilities for thinking about human diversity anew. Marsigli traveled to Istanbul for the frst time in 1679 with the Venetian diplomatic corps, and, living among the Ottomans, Marsigli was convinced that they both revealed and hid information about themselves. His fascination with all things Ottoman resulted in a series of manuscript drafts, translations, illustrations, and feld notes. As he delved into understanding Ottoman nature and culture in more nuanced ways, he also pondered how to defne their bodily differences. The idea of human diversity came enrobed in his writings in foodways; food and drink were not only the linchpin of cultural difference, but they also told much about the bodies that consumed them. Setting out to portray how the quality and characteristics of the food and drink consumed in Istanbul had an impact on the bodies and minds of the Turks, Marsigli claimed that the humid and hot “humors circulating in the bodies of Turks” were the reason behind their “fat, well-formed bodies.” Likewise, the souls of the Turks, he asserted, were universally subjected to melancholy, which stemmed from their food and from “holding other sordidness [that] buried the hilarity, which one

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can hardly fnd in a dirty soul.”36 So as to rise from this deplorable state, the Turks served “bestial means of the drunkenness,” in the form not of wine or aqua vita but of other compound beverages. These characteristics—abusive and depressed—of the Turks, Marsigli further claimed, could be attributed to the humid food they ate and their continuous practice of not drinking wine. In support of his view, Marsigli brought to the fore prohibitions on certain foods and drinks, and religious duties in the Qur’an. The effects of not drinking wine and of performing regular ablutions were of particular interest to him in his quest to understand what was distinctive about the Ottoman Muslims: “this Mohammedan law, which founds its commands in superfcial ablutions, has the aim of making the use of the bath familiar to both sexes.”37 These practices caught Marsigli’s eyes for another reason as well. By observing Ottoman foodways and daily practices such as bathing, he could envision certain activities practiced in antiquity: “these Mohammedan peoples, in imitation of the ancient Romans, have established the use of cold, frozen, hot, simple & compound drinks.” Ottoman Istanbul was a live portal between times and cultures, haunted by its own temporality. Regarding Ottoman beverages both as curiosities and through the lens of potus, the shared practice of drinking, Marsigli’s gaze embodied the entangled trajectories of travel literature and medical debates. Following in the footsteps of the learned travelers and naturalists who had preceded him in journeying to Ottoman lands, Marsigli educated his travel gaze and reoriented some perennial questions regarding the climate and nature of Istanbul. His experiences of plague in the imperial city of the Ottomans provided opportunities to test the validity of the earlier European accounts. Learned European travelers frst came to explain the nature of the Ottoman plague by appeal to the climate in the capital; other explanations would focus on the dietary, medicinal, and public responses to the plague. In order to build on this argument, Marsigli made Pietro della Valle’s Viaggi (1658) a point of reference. While his depiction of Istanbul’s air quality more or less resonated with Della Valle’s account, Marsigli was not quite satisfed with the Renaissance traveler’s statements on the relation between inconsistent air quality and plague.38 Della Valle had also mentioned the use of inebriating liquors, such as burnt wine, in cultures he encountered during his travels, yet he did not refer to Ottoman practices of wine drinking. Hence, Marsigli had to look to another source to formulate his ideas on the subject, and that was the French naturalist Pierre Belon’s (d. 1564) Les Observations de plusieurs singularitez et choses mémorables, trouvées en Grèce, Asie, Iudée, Egypte et autres pays estranges, rédigées en trois livres (1553). According to Belon, the Turks had long lives since their bodies were not of delicate nature, which was indeed a result of not drinking wine or drinking it rarely.39 Belon asserted that the Turks, among all other nations, were the least haunted at times of plague, and they did not do anything to defend themselves. While Marsigli avers the idea of Turkish reluctance to act against the plague in his writings, he underscores the importance of health preservation and dietary practices at times of plague. Therefore, one strand of his interest in Ottoman foodways stems from his experiences of plague in Istanbul, which he compares to the plague outbreaks in Europe. The other strand of Marsigli’s interest lies in his contemporaries’ ongoing discussions of chemical and mechanical explanations for digestion. Followers of iatrochemistry were mainly in favor of hot beverages, including the exotic ones, especially due to their effciency in digestion. The rise of mechanical

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physiology, on the other hand, showed a less favorable take on these new beverages. Marsigli’s mode of thinking was driven by his studies in iatrochemistry, especially his attendance at one of the most renowned chemists of his time, Herman Boerhaave’s (1668–1738), lectures on chemistry and work in the latter’s laboratory.40 Iatrochemistry brought about a novel focus on food and beverage consumption in relation to the emerging theories of digestion; exotic hot beverages, such as coffee, chocolate, and tea became subjects of scholarly interest, particularly when it came to exploring iatrochemical reactions in the body. While the defense of coffee mostly came from physicians and naturalists engaged in iatrochemistry, its opponents were mainly attracted to the mechanist program in natural philosophy. For example, Antonio Vallisneri (1661–1730), who practiced medicine according to the mechanical philosophy, prohibited coffee and wine for his patients.41 Vallisneri’s contemporaries in Paris, such as Philippe Hecquet (1661–1737), who was a supporter of medical mechanism, similarly refrained from recommending coffee.42 The rise of mechanical physiology, however, did not result in a dismissal of chemical explanations of digestion.43 Instead, the boundaries between iatrochemical and mechanical investigations became blurred or even compromised. Merging chemistry with mechanical philosophy, physician and physiologist Thomas Willis (1621–1675) advocated for coffee against its harsh opponents. Within ongoing disputes over hot beverages in light of new theories of fermentation and digestion, scholarship of the seventeenth century produced numerous treatises on this subject. Antonio Vallisneri published his Dell’uso, e dell’abuso delle bevande, e bagnature calde, o fredde in Modena in 1725, fve years after his uncle Giovanni Battista Davini’s De potu vini calidi dissertatio (1720). Davini emphasized the role of hot wine in digestion during the transformation of food into chilo. He cited Thomas Willis and Robert Boyle in elaborating on the chemical process within the body and claimed that the effects of hot wine were similar to those of other hot beverages, such as tea, coffee, and chocolate, which were likewise good for the stomach.44 In fact, the question of whether to use hot drinks or not animated frantic arguments between physicians and philosophers starting in the last decades of the sixteenth century in Italy. In 1593, the Telesian philosopher, Antonio Persio (1542–1612) published a medical treatise, Del beuer caldo costumato de gli antichi Romani, in which he advocated drinking hot liquids as an enjoyable and benefcial habit also adopted by the ancient Romans.45 The tract included a chapter in which Persio made comparisons between drinking cold wine and wine heated according to different techniques.46 The renowned philosopher of the late Renaissance, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639), who had a life-long friendship with Persio, penned a brief work, now lost, in defense of Persio’s treatise.47 By the early seventeenth century, the penetration of exotic hot drinks into Europe had revived these discussions from new perspectives. The consumption of hot beverages during the time of plague was another subject of discussion, as exemplifed by Ludovico Antonio Muratori (1672–1750), a notable scholar who penned the acclaimed Governo della Peste. In his letters to Giovanni Battista Davini, Muratori gave reference to various authors, both ancient and contemporary, who were in favor of hot beverages. These drinks—namely tea, coffee, and chocolate—were benefcial not only for the preservation of health, but also for recovery from contagious diseases.48 Theories of digestion were prevalent in the discussion of pathology. One of the concerning diseases of the time was hypochondria, a depressive condition that was diffcult to defne; was it a new disease or a subcategory of melancholy?49 The thorny road to defnition exposed itself only

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in slightly distinct manifestations of what was considered the same condition, which was the effect of the lower body on the brain and the mind. The digestive issues in the organs beneath the diaphragm interfered with the governing of the upper body, causing inexplicable sadness, overthinking, and obsession. Since this nervous disorder was closely linked to nutrition theories, physicians time and again debated about what to consume to avoid this condition. Some medics even considered hypochondria a serious endemic that could only be overcome by new beverages such as coffee and chocolate. To stress the impact of coffee on this condition, Sylvestre Dufour claimed that a digestion problem named hydropsy (“hydropisie”) could cause hypochondria, yet this alarming disease was little known among the Turks since they drank coffee on a daily basis.50

Figure 6.4: “A Coffee Drinker” in the Dryden Album.51 The Dryden Album showcases a drawing of a begging dervish with severe cuts on his chest and arms, but the dervish is misidentifed as a coffee drinker. This misrepresentation implies the earlier Western associations between dervishes and coffee in the Ottoman Empire before the popularization of coffee in Europe. By the seventeenth century, however, the forlorn image of an Ottoman coffee drinker had expanded from erratic, unruly, and self-harming wandering dervishes to any Turkish body consuming coffee. The embodied knowledge of coffee imbued with the Western gaze redefned Turkish bodies while overlooking and occluding human diversity in Ottoman lands. Melancholy as a discursive strategy staved off threats emerging from using the very same natural thing.

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He further claimed that in cities like London in which people were quick to adopt coffee, hypochondria gradually disappeared over the years. The intensifcation of the idea that hypochondria, digestion, and coffee were entwined offered a new means to reidentify and differentiate the Turkish body. When coffee was no longer a marker of cultural difference given its expanding popularity, it helped the cultivation of a certain mode of thinking about bodies. The European gaze looked for a more defnitive metaphor for the Ottomans—once considered uncanny, sturdy, and fearsome. Despite consuming the very same substance as Europeans now, Ottoman bodies were seen as essentially different, as they were inherently prone to melancholy. Coffee was a remedy for hypochondria, but could it metamorphose their inborn melancholic nature? Hypochondria was a disease that could be cured, yet innate melancholy was untransmutable, rendering the Turkish body more fragile and less intimidating. Consider, for example, the image of the coffee drinker in the sixteenth-century Ottoman costume album. This new overarching melancholic image was both dramatically present and often ineffective in differentiating shared sensory experiences with Ottomans. The supposed difference of the Turks set the tone, yet the uncertainty regarding the most effective method of coffee preparation brought about further emphatic relationships with the coffeedrinking Turkish bodies and their material culture. Preserving, roasting, and making coffee beans drinkable required a certain kind of Ottoman knowledge. Marsigli was well aware of this thirst for information. In 1685, he published a treatise on the medical history of coffee, which includes a bilingual section on coffee translated from the renowned Ottoman polymath Hezarfenn Hüseyin’s (d. 1692) pharmacopeia.52 Marsigli acquired the Ottoman text from Hezarfenn in Istanbul, where they frst met in 1679. The lack of empirical knowledge about the coffee plant posed challenges for botanical classifcation in the European scholarship of the time. Marsigli highly valued Hezarfenn’s work not only due to the scholarly trust he had built with the Ottoman polymath, but also due to Hezarfenn’s hands-on experience with the coffee plant in Yemen. This exchange of knowledge was rooted in their shared interest in experience.53 To a certain extent, Bevanda asiatica can be considered a captivity narrative, too. In 1683, Marsigli participated in the Battle of Vienna against the Ottomans, in the service of Emperor Leopold (1640–1705). This quest ended in disaster for him; he was wounded and captured, and was sold to an Ottoman pasha. His main duty at the pasha’s tent was to prepare coffee as a slave-cook, which he “learnt at the cost of being frequently whipped.”54 When he fnally succeeded in regaining his freedom in 1684, he transformed his traumatic memories and experiences with coffee into scholarly works. Marsigli had emotional bonds with coffee. For Marsigli the captive, it was a metaphor for his daunting experiences. For Marsigli the naturalist, it was a curious thing that fueled his scholarly ambitions. For Marsigli the human, it was an equivocal beverage whose taste was unidentifable. Perhaps because of these multilayered meanings, coffee continued to haunt Marsigli’s mind throughout his life. He was dedicated to composing a whole history of coffee exploring this natural thing through various means. Challenging in many ways, for Marsigli writing a sensory history of coffee required understanding the environmental origins of the plant, conversations with local scholars and informants, the best usage of material culture, and botanical classifcation. To this end, his scholarly methods ranged from translating Ottoman texts to

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observations with a microscope to further understand the plant’s intricate structure. Admittedly, understanding coffee was a diffcult and perilous journey. While Bevanda asiatica was imbued with scholarly ambitions to introduce its medicinal benefts, Marsigli began to pay more attention to the botanical features of the coffee plant and its beans in his later writings. The textual information presented in Hezarfenn’s work was useful, yet the scarcity of illustrations in Ottoman natural studies posed further challenges to established modes of natural knowledge and representation in the European context. Marsigli often worked with the circulated images of coffee plants designed by Ottoman artists for their European customers.

Figure 6.5: An Ottoman illustration of a coffee plant from Yemen.55 © Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna—University Library of Bologna

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Working through such rare images, Marsigli shifted his focus to the microscope to further understand the plant’s botanical complexity. His initial fascination with the beverage led him to taxonomy, as Marsigli came to suggest that “plants could be classifed based on their proper structures, and this was especially useful for the plants which belonged to other natural environments.”56 The jargon he used for the description of coffee plant is different from the language he adopted in Bevanda asiatica, in accordance with his botanical turn. Apparently, he aimed at using the more concrete vocabulary—cortex, placenta—employed in contemporary botanical literature.

Figure 6.6: Marsigli’s observations on coffee beans.57 © Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna—University Library of Bologna

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To reveal the characteristics of the bean’s internal anatomy, Marsigli conducted a simple observation by leaving “the fruit of coffee” in water for many days. He concluded that its cortex and other internal membranes soon returned to their natural state, allowing him to provide an anatomical description.58 Following this description, Marsigli portrayed the stages of his inspection of the parts after he had placed coffee beans in water. He completed this detailed description by noting that the grains of the fruit of the coffee plant were those “used in the hot drink invented by the Arabs, and introduced by the Turks, and then adopted by Christians after the siege of Vienna.”59 In his notes, Marsigli continued to discuss the preparation of the beverage and the conservation of the coffee grain to consume as a drink. Marsigli depicted how to prepare the coffee grain by using a copper tambour (tambureto) in which the roasting was done. He also noted that there were three stages of roasting and calcination, as articulated by Arabs and Turks. The grinding of coffee also occurred in three stages, which could be distinguished by their distinct colors. The frst two stages were associated with the colors dargim and aseli.60 The third stage, Marsigli remarked, was described with the phrase geismister (geçmiştir, “it has passed”). When these stages were completed, the coffee grain could be preserved in a Damascene leather bag for more than two months. The way coffee was conserved infuenced its smell and accordingly its taste. However, coffee’s taste also hinged on environmental characteristics such as where the coffee had been preserved. Marsigli claimed that the coffee in Istanbul was much better than the coffee in cities such as London and Amsterdam since coffee did not travel from Mecca to Istanbul by ships, but by camels.61 Since the coffee was transported by ships to these European cities, it developed an unpleasant smell. Marsigli’s revised account on coffee ended with a section entitled “various chemical experiments for a better investigation of the nature of coffee.” He noted his observations on coffee in various states, such as infusion in water and extraction of its volatile salt and oil. As in contemporary medical accounts on coffee, Marsigli touched upon the acids and alkali within the coffee, and the impact of calcination on the stomach. For further experiments using salt to determine the nature of coffee, he suggested a consultation of Hezarfenn’s statements, rather than disregarding him. As in the Bevanda asiatica, Marsigli aimed to show that Ottoman and European discourses on the medicinal effects of coffee were complementary rather than one having more signifcant value than the other and needed to be read together. With Marsigli’s holistic approach informed by both his scholarly engagements with and experiences as a captive in the Ottoman World, coffee evolved into an object of knowledge. Embodied experiences with coffee nonetheless lacked a systematic vocabulary to defne its texture, smell, and taste. Tapping into peculiar Ottoman terminology, Marsigli aimed to build an exhaustively detailed account of the stages of coffee making and tasting to fll this scholarly gap. Naming and describing the properties and taste of coffee with Turkish vocabulary suggested that Europeans and Ottomans experienced the very same sensations. Aligning one’s very own sensations with those of the Ottomans was potentially destabilizing. It thus became necessary to develop strategies for overcoming and occluding this unprecedented state of intersubjectivity. The fellow feeling was to be disrupted by attributing an innate melancholic characteristic to Turkish bodies beyond the sensory operations of coffee.

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CONCLUSION Assuming the singular category of recreational drink for coffee only takes us so far. Coffee encounters showcase histories melded into one another, histories of coffee, knowledge, science, and human difference. The long road to the sensory knowledge of coffee was where the defnitional methods of European science often went awry. The binary oppositions between the West and the East and between master and slave commingled, as in the case of Marsigli’s obsession with coffee. If sensory experience and empiricism were to be the foundation for global nature studies, management of feelings had to be redefned for the sake of truth. For Marsigli, sensory experience had a broad defnition combining scholarly passion and distressing memories. The provocation of the senses was not a dispassionate exercise of reason detached from one’s own subjectivity. Instead, Marsigli insisted on the centrality of feeling while he constantly changed his own subjectivity from a naturalist to a slave and vice versa. Despite these sensory engagements, the male elite production of knowledge about coffee led to ever sharper disputes on what made the Muslim Ottomans different than other coffee drinkers. European knowledge makers acknowledged what they probably did not know about the Ottomans, yet they nevertheless reveled in the failures of their own knowledge systems. The initial ambiguity of coffee reached a peculiar resolution with the melancholic image of the Turks when Europeans came to uphold the innate nature of these bodies. The anxieties created by the embodied knowledge of coffee brought sensations to the fore to differentiate and racialize human bodies. The quest for a delicately balanced taste of coffee was a risky and biased enterprise often constrained by willful endeavors to occlude. Assigning taste to coffee oriented embodied knowledge toward a reconsideration of the body politic in an increasingly globalized world. A coffee-like approach to the history of natural things then draws us from commodities to ecologies of knowledge. Perhaps not surprisingly, despite the efforts to sweeten its taste, coffee stands in its naked, bitter truth.

NOTES 1

2

Acknowledgements. I would like to thank Shahzad Bashir, Paula Findlen, Shireen Hamza, Alan Mikhail, and Taylor Moore for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter. I am also grateful to those who have had conversations about coffee with me during coffee breaks and helped in developing and clarifying my ideas over the past years. Quoted and translated by Gillian Riley in The Oxford Companion to Italian Food (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 127. In Italian: “Beverei prima il veleno Che un bicchier, che fosse pieno Dell’amaro e reo caffè: Colà tra gli Arabi, E tra i Giannizzeri Liquor sì ostico, Sì nero e torbido Gli schiavi ingollino. Giù nel Tartaro, Giù nell’Erebo L’empie Belidi l’inventarono, E Tesifone e l’altre Furïe A Proserpina il ministrarono;

200 Part II • Felt E se in Asia il Musulmanno Se lo cionca a precipizio, Mostra aver poco giudizio” in Francesco Redi, Bacco in Toscana (1685), 310. 3 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999). 4 On the social history of coffee in the early modern Ottoman World, see Cemal Kafadar, “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul,” in Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, ed. Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014), 243–69; Alan Mikhail, “The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the Ottoman Coffee House,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dana Sajdi (London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007), 133–70. 5 I am using the term “Turk” as it was used by the historical actors upon whose accounts I draw here: to refer to Muslim Ottoman subjects generally, and sometimes specifcally to Turkish-speaking Muslims in the Ottoman Empire. 6 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); Steven Shapin, “The Sciences of Subjectivity,” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 17–184. 7 For example, Milena Ivanova and Steven French, eds. The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding (New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2020); Alexander Wragge-Morley, Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 8 Jessica Riskin, Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002). 9 On sensory experiences as connected to social systems, see Constance Classen, “Foundations for An Anthropology of the Senses,” International Social Science Journal 49 (1997): 401–12; Steven Shapin, Changing Tastes: How Things Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now (Uppsala: Salvia Småskrifter, Tryck Wikströms, 2011). 10 On the changing meaning of taste in early modern Europe, see Luca Vercelloni, The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight, and Disgust in Fashion, Food, and Art, trans. Kate Singleton (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017); Viktoria Von Hoffmann,  From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 11 Rebecca Earle, The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012). 12 Eric R. Dursteler, “Bad Bread and the ‘Outrageous Drunkenness of the Turks’: Food and Identity in the Accounts of Early Modern European Travelers to the Ottoman Empire,” Journal of World History 25 (2014): 203–28. 13 Eric R. Dursteler, “Infdel Foods: Food and Identity in Early Modern Ottoman Travel Literature,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 39 (2012): 143–60. 14 Evliya  Çelebi,  Evliya  Çelebi  Seyahatnâmesi, ed. Orhan Şaik Gökyay, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Yücel Dağlı, vol. VII (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, [1996] 2007), 115. On Ottoman food culture in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme see, Mary Işın, “Evliyâ Çelebi’nin Diliyle 17. Yüzyıl Yiyecek Manzaraları,” in Çağının Sıradışı Yazarı Evliyâ Çelebi, ed. Nuran Tezcan (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2009), 189–202. 15 Cemal Kafadar, “Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia: An Ottoman Traveler’s Encounters with the Arts of the Franks,” in Dalmatia and the Mediterranean, ed. Alina Payne (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 59–78. 16 Domenico Magri’s (1604–1672) letter (written in 1665) addressed to Cardinal Brancacci was published as Le virtù del caffè: Bevanda Salutifera in Rome in 1671. Magri notes: “[Il Caffè] Vien molto lodata, giovando universalmente a tutte le età, e a tutti i sessi; e però si prende in tutto L’Oriente, nell’Africa e nell’India, ed anche dai nostri Europei, da sani e ammalati, da giovani e da vecchi” (16).

Chapter 6 • Coffee 201 17 Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1985). 18 Jane Hathaway, “The Ottomans and the Yemeni Coffee Trade,” Oriente Moderno 25 (86) no. 1 (2006): 161–71. 19 For a comparative history of chocolate and the cross-cultural transmission of its taste, see Marcy Norton, “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics,”  The American Historical Review  111 (2006): 660–91. On the campaign against its use in the Mexican province by the Jesuits, see Danielle Terrazas Williams, “The Inconvenience of Chocolate: Disciplining the Society of Jesus in Seventeenth-Century Mexico,” History of Religions 60 (2021): 325–57. 20 Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, Traitez nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate (Lyon: J. B. Deville, 1688), https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k855985n/f29. 21 Here I take inspiration from Omar W. Nasim’s analysis of crossed-legged postures in the history of astronomy, Omar W. Nasim, The Astronomer’s Chair: A Visual and Cultural History (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), 129–66. 22 Dufour, Traitez nouveaux. 23 Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Materia Medica; or, A Description of Simple Medicines Generally Us’d in Physick (London: Printed by W. H. for Andrew Bell at the Cross-keys and Bible in Cornhill, 1716), https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/tysjmz42. 24 Ibid. 25 Tournefort, Materia Medica, 322–3. 26 Ibid., 323. 27 For a further discussion of this poem, see Emily M. N. Kugler, Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century (Leiden and London: Brill, 2012), 29–30. 28 Anonymous, A Broadside Against Coffee; or the Marriage of the Turk (London: J. L., 1672). Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership 2022, https:// quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/B01792.0001.001/1:1?rgn=div1;view=fulltext. 29 Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain, 1558–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 112–13. 30 Ibid., 113. 31 Isidro Fernández Matienzo, Discurso medico y phisico agradable a los medicos ancianos y despertador para los modernos contra el medicamento caphè (Madrid: Melchor Alvarez, 1693), “Al Lector.” 32 Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, De l’usage du caphé, du thé et du chocolate (Lyon: Jean Girin & Barthelemy Riviere, 1671), 28–29. 33 Scott K. Taylor, “Coffee and the Body: From Exoticism to Wellness in Eighteenth-Century Europe,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54 (2021): 633–50 [636]. 34 On Marsigli’s scholarly interactions with the Ottoman World, see Duygu Yıldırım, “The Age of the Perplexed: Translating Nature and Bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650–1730” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 2021). On Marsigli’s life, see John Stoye, Marsigli’s Europe 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994). 35 Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna (hereafter BUB), MS Marsili 51, c. 269r. 36 BUB, MS Marsili 51, c. 260r. 37 BUB, MS Marsili 51, c. 256r. 38 “L’aria in Costantinopoli è incostantissima: onde in un giorno medesimo si sente bene spesso gran caldo e gran freddo, assai più che in Roma. [. . .] E certo la peste che regna in Costantinopoli quasi continuamente, se ben l’aria non è infetta, pur in qualche parte da questa intemperie dell’aria deve nascere, e parte anche dalla poca cura che si ha della sanità in molte cose. [. . .] Perché non solo non si fanno guardie per la peste, né si usa diligenza alcuna di far fare quarantene a chi viene di fuori, o far purgar le robe: ma gli stessi panni di quei che son morti di peste si vendono subito in piazza,” G. Gancia, Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino (Brighton, 1843), 40. 39 Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieures singularitez . . . trouvées en Grece, Asie . . . (Paris, 1588), 402.

202 Part II • Felt 40 Marta Cavazza, “The Editorial Fortune of Bolognese Scientists in Holland,” in Italian Scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, ed. C. S. Maffoli and L. C. Palm (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1989), 186; Anita McConnell, “A Proftable Visit: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s Studies, Commerce and Friendships in Holland, 1722–23,” in Italian Scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, ed. C. S. Maffoli and L. C. Palm (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1989), 189–206. 41 Antonio Vallisneri, Consulti medici, ed. Benedino Gemelli, vol. XII (Firenze: Olschki, 2006), 144–9. 42 On Philippe Hecquet, see L. W. B. Brockliss, “The Medico-Religious Universe of an Early Eighteenth-Century Parisian Doctor: The Case of Philippe Hecquet,” in The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, ed. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 191–221. 43 Antonio Clericuzio, “Chemical and Mechanical Theories of Digestion in Early Modern Medicine,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 329–37. 44 Giovanni Battista Davini, “De potu vini calidi dissertatio,” in Edizione Nazionale Delle opera di Antonio Vallisneri, ed. Alessandro Dini, vol. 15 (Firenze: Olschki Ed., 2010), 195. 45 Antonio Persio, Del beuer caldo costumato de gli antichi Romani (Venetia, 1593). Persio’s advocation of hot drinking was based on Telesio’s doctrine: “According to Telesio, all being derived from modifcations resulting from the actions of the two principles of hot and cold on matter, which he did not regard as an abstract ens rationis (an entity existing in the mind) but rather as an inert corporeal mass, dark and entirely formless but capable of receiving any form,” Germana Ernest, “Tommaso Campanella,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2014 Edition, ed. Edward N. Zalta, https://plato.stanford.edu/ archives/fall2014/entries/campanella. 46 For similar discussions of that time, see Paolo Mini, Discorso delle Natura del Vino (Firenze, 1596). 47 Campanella addressed this issue in his Quaestiones Physiologicae, 549–56. 48 Letter from Muratori to Davini, dated April 26, 1720, in Edizione Nazionale Delle opera di Antonio Vallisneri, ed. Alessandro Dini (Firenze: Olschki Ed., 2010), 224. 49 On the connected histories and interchangeability of melancholy, hypochondria, and hysteria, see Sabine Arnaud,  On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 & 1820 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015). 50 Philippe Sylvestre Dufour, Traitez nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate (Lyon, 1688), 129. 51 The Dryden Album is in the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge (MS R.14.23), https://mss-cat.trin.cam.ac.uk/manuscripts/uv/view.php?n =R.14.23#?c=0&m=0&s=0&cv=132&xywh=-2099%2C-287%2C7577%2C5256 (accessed June 30, 2022). Also see William Kynan-Wilson, “Souvenirs and Stereotypes: An Introduction to Ottoman Costume Albums,” Heritage Turkey 3 (2013): 35–36. 52 Duygu Yıldırım, “Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee,” Journal of Ottoman Studies 56 (2020): 25–47. 53 Ibid., 38–39. 54 Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Bevanda Asiatica, brindata all’eminentissimo Buonvisi, Nunzio Apostolico (Vienna, 1685), 40. 55 BUB, MS 1044 Marsili 87 D f. 35r. 56 BUB, MS Marsili 87 C, c. 4. 57 BUB, MS 1044 Marsili 87 C, c. [V]. 58 BUB, MS Marsili 87 C, c. 18–19. 59 Ibid., c. 22. 60 Marsigli transcribed the pronunciation of these Turkish words: dargim (tarç ın): cinnamon; aseli (aselȋ ): honey-like, of a light yellow. 61 BUB, MS Marsili 87 C, c. 23.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscripts Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, MS Marsili 51, MS Marsili 87. University of Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS R.14.23. Printed Primary Sources Anon. A Broadside Against Coffee; or the Marriage of the Turk. London: J. L., 1672. Belon, Pierre. Les Observations de plusieures singularitez . . . trouvées en Grece, Asie . . . Paris, 1588. Davini, Giovanni Battista Davini. “De potu vini calidi dissertatio.” In Edizione Nazionale Delle opera di Antonio Vallisneri, edited by Alessandro Dini, vol. 15. Firenze: Olschki Ed., 2010. Dini, Alessandro, ed. Edizione Nazionale Delle opera di Antonio Vallisneri. Firenze: Olschki Ed., 2010. Dufour, Philippe Sylvestre. De l’usage du caphé, du thé et du chocolate. Lyon: Jean Girin & Barthelemy Riviere, 1671. Dufour, Philippe Sylvestre. Traitez nouveaux et curieux du café, du thé et du chocolate. Lyon: J. B. Deville, 1688. Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi. Edited by Orhan Şaik Gökyay, Seyit Ali Kahraman, and Yücel Dağlı. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, [1996] 2007. Gancia, G. Viaggi di Pietro della Valle, il Pellegrino. Brighton, 1843. Marsigli, Luigi Ferdinando. Bevanda Asiatica, brindata all’eminentissimo Buonvisi, Nunzio Apostolico. Vienna, 1685. Matienzo, Isidro Fernández. Discurso medico y phisico agradable a los medicos ancianos y despertador para los modernos contra el medicamento caphè. Madrid: Melchor Alvarez, 1693. Mini, Paolo. Discorso delle Natura del Vino. Firenze, 1596. Persio, Antonio. Del beuer caldo costumato de gli antichi Romani. Venetia, 1593. Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de. Materia Medica; or A Description of Simple Medicines Generally Us’d in Physick. London: Printed by W. H. for Andrew Bell at the Cross-keys and Bible in Cornhill, 1716. Vallisneri, Antonio. Consulti medici, XII. Edited by Benedino Gemelli. Firenze: Olschki, 2006. Secondary Sources Arnaud, Sabine. On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 & 1820. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015. Brockliss, L. W. B. “The Medico-Religious Universe of an Early Eighteenth-Century Parisian Doctor: The Case of Philippe Hecquet.” In The Medical Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, edited by Roger French and Andrew Wear, 191–221. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Cavazza, Marta. “The Editorial Fortune of Bolognese Scientists in Holland.” In Italian Scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, edited by C. S. Maffoli and L. C. Palm. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1989. Classen, Constance. “Foundations for An Anthropology of the Senses.” International Social Science Journal 49 (1997): 401–12.

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Clericuzio, Antonio. “Chemical and Mechanical Theories of Digestion in Early Modern Medicine.” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (2012): 329–37. Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books, 2007. Dursteler, Eric R. “Bad Bread and the ‘Outrageous Drunkenness of the Turks’: Food and Identity in the Accounts of Early Modern European Travelers to the Ottoman Empire.” Journal of World History 25 (2014): 203–28. Dursteler, Eric R. “Infdel Foods: Food and Identity in Early Modern Ottoman Travel Literature.” Journal of Ottoman Studies 39 (2012): 143–60. Earle, Rebecca. The Body of the Conquistador: Food, Race and the Colonial Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Ernest, Germana. “Tommaso Campanella.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Fall 2014 Edition, https:// plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/campanella. Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. Hathaway, Jane. “The Ottomans and the Yemeni Coffee Trade.” Oriente Moderno 25 (86), no. 1 (2006): 161–71. Hattox, Ralph S. Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval Near East. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1985. Işın, Mary. “Evliyâ Çelebi’nin Diliyle 17. Yüzyıl Yiyecek Manzaraları.” In Çağının Sıradışı Yazarı Evliyâ Çelebi, edited by Nuran Tezcan, 189– 202. Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları, 2009. Ivanova, Milena and Steven French, eds. The Aesthetics of Science: Beauty, Imagination and Understanding. New York: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2020. Kafadar, Cemal. “Evliya Çelebi in Dalmatia: An Ottoman Traveler’s Encounters with the Arts of the Franks.” In Dalmatia and the Mediterranean, edited by Alina Payne, 59–78. Leiden: Brill, 2014. Kafadar, Cemal. “How Dark Is the History of the Night, How Black the Story of Coffee, How Bitter the Tale of Love: The Changing Measure of Leisure and Pleasure in Early Modern Istanbul.” In Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean, edited by Arzu Öztürkmen and Evelyn Birge Vitz, 243–69. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2014. Kugler, Emily M. N. Sway of the Ottoman Empire on English Identity in the Long Eighteenth Century. Leiden and London: Brill, 2012. Kynan-Wilson, William. “Souvenirs and Stereotypes: An introduction to Ottoman Costume Albums.” Heritage Turkey 3 (2013): 35–36. Matar, Nabil. Islam in Britain, 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. McConnell, Anita. “A Proftable Visit: Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli’s Studies, Commerce and Friendships in Holland, 1722–23.” In Italian Scientists in the Low Countries in the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries, edited by C. S. Maffoli and L. C. Palm, 189–206. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B. V., 1989. Mikhail, Alan. “The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the Ottoman Coffee House.” In Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century, edited by Dana Sajdi, 133-70. London: I. B. Tauris & Co Ltd, 2007.

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Nasim, Omar W. The Astronomer’s Chair: A Visual and Cultural History. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021. Norton, Marcy. “Tasting Empire: Chocolate and the European Internalization of Mesoamerican Aesthetics.” The American Historical Review 111 (2006): 660–91. Riley, Gillian. The Oxford Companion to Italian Food. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Riskin, Jessica. Science in the Age of Sensibility: The Sentimental Empiricists of the French Enlightenment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002. Shapin, Steven. Changing Tastes: How Things Tasted in the Early Modern Period and How They Taste Now. Uppsala: Salvia Småskrifter, Tryck Wikströms, 2011. Shapin, Steven. “The Sciences of Subjectivity.” Social Studies of Science 42 (2012): 17–184. Stoye, John. Marsigli’s Europe 1680–1730: The Life and Times of Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli, Soldier and Virtuoso. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994. Taylor, Scott K. “Coffee and the Body: From Exoticism to Wellness in Eighteenth-Century Europe.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 54 (2021): 633–50. Terrazas Williams, Danielle. “The Inconvenience of Chocolate: Disciplining the Society of Jesus in Seventeenth-Century Mexico.” History of Religions 60 (2021): 325–57. Vercelloni, Luca. The Invention of Taste: A Cultural Account of Desire, Delight, and Disgust in Fashion, Food, and Art. Translated by Kate Singleton. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. Von Hoffmann, Viktoria. From Gluttony to Enlightenment: The World of Taste in Early Modern Europe. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2017. Wragge-Morley, Alexander. Aesthetic Science: Representing Nature in the Royal Society of London, 1650–1720. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Yıldırım, Duygu. “The Age of the Perplexed: Translating Nature and Bodies between the Ottoman Empire and Europe, 1650–1730.” PhD dissertation, Stanford University, 2021. Yıldırım, Duygu. “Bevanda asiatica: Scholarly Exchange between the Ottomans and Europeans on Coffee.” Journal of Ottoman Studies 56 (2020): 25–47.

Chapter 7

Manchineel Power, Pain, and Knowledge in the Lesser Antilles Thomas C. Anderson

“Ricord likens the manchineel to a slave weapon, highlighting how he associated his fear of slave revolt with the tree itself. The manchineel was not simply a poisonous tree—its shadow represented the growing dangers to colonial life in the Antilles.” Page 209

VISUALIZATION 7 Plant weaving through skull: Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, St. Christophers, Nieves, and Jamaica (1707). Courtesy of Hamilton College Special Collections. Skull engraving: Jan Saenredam, Vanitasstilleven met doodskop (c. 1575–1607), Rijksmuseum. Colored manchineel plate: Michel Etienne Descourtilz, Flore pittoresque et médicale des Antilles, ou, Histoire naturelle des plantes usuelles des colonies françaises, anglaises, espagnoles, et portugaises (1833). Dogs: Georges Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Oeuvres complètes de Buffon (1835). This visual experiment encapsulates the manchineel’s ominous nature as both a natural thing and an experimental tool. Using original botanical drawings from Hans Sloane and illustrations of dogs by the Comte de Buffon, it is both historically accurate and topically relevant. Furthermore, the collaged nature of the experiment is more than just visually appealing; it also refects the parsed nature of Ricord’s experiments, in which he dissected the manchineel and applied its various parts on a range of subjects.

Abstract: Deemed the world’s deadliest tree, news of the manchineel’s toxicity circulated in European reports of the Caribbean since the sixteenth century. Disguised within the mangrove thickets where it grows, from an ecological perspective the manchineel (Hippomane mancinella) is an overdefended fowering tree from the spurge (Euphorbiaceae) family. In the 1820s, French colonial physician Jean-Baptiste Ricord (1777–1837) seized on this plant’s infamous reputation to transform knowledge of its venom into a tool of political control. Through experiments with the tree’s bark, fruits, leaves, roots, and seeds, Ricord subjected his enslaved and canine subjects to dermatitis, violent diuretic and purgative effects, and even death in an attempt to ascertain the poison’s source and potential antidote. Ricord’s manuscripts preserve a rare view into the rationale for medical experimentation in the French Atlantic colonies. In them, Ricord candidly explained that he feared non-European knowledge about nature and desired to keep subservient populations at bay by removing the potential weaponry of poisons drawn from the local environment.

An ominous fxture of the Caribbean landscape, the manchineel tree (Hippomane mancinella) and its notorious toxicity captured the imaginations of colonial Europeans, enslaved Africans, and Amerindians alike. Its fruit, an inconspicuously sweet apple, earned the epithet “little apple of death” from the sixteenth century onwards due to the suffering of those unfortunate enough to consume or even touch it. When the tree’s sawdust hit the hands of those who cut it, painful blisters swelled on their skin; those who sought shelter from the rain beneath its canopy left with burns.1 Amid the growing institutionalization of medical testing in the early nineteenth century, the manchineel provided an ideal case study for the intersection of poison and medicine. Scientifc interest bled into social utility as this natural thing and its fabled pain-inducing qualities represented the scalpel with which late-colonial physicians dissected both the natural world and human difference. This chapter traces Jean-Baptiste Ricord’s (1777–1837) experimental studies of and with the manchineel tree. A Frenchman born in Martinique, Ricord graduated from the medical school at New York University in 1810. He then built his reputation in the West Indies as a practicing physician while traveling the island treating patients, before venturing into the medical research and natural historical pursuits that defned the latter half of his career.2 His earliest trials with manchineel poison took place in Guadeloupe in 1821 and exhibited a shift in interest DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-11

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Figure 7.1: Ricord’s drawing of several parts of the manchineel from his 1826 published work Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 79. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

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from therapeutic medicine to experimentation. His 1822 manuscript notes titled Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux (Memoir on the Poisonous Manchineel) detail Ricord’s over forty fastidious experiments with the tree’s seeds, roots, fruit, sap, and leaves and their varying toxic effects on both human and non-human subjects.3 The resulting study heavily relies on experiential data, focuses on the intersection of social and medical control, and scrutinizes the universality of pain. To Ricord, knowledge was power. Sensing disease, poisons, and hidden dangers all around, he, like other physicians and experimenters in the late-colonial era Antilles, aimed to tame the wild tropical environment and its unruly inhabitants. Tropical nature, itself so deadly on these biodiverse islands, was all the more frightening because it was perceived to be weaponized by the increasingly discontent population of bondspeople. Ricord sought to circumvent that secret knowledge held by enslaved Africans and Amerindians so as to dispel this threat via medical experimentation. While by no means the only such colonial scientifc enterprise to seek this end, his account is exceptional as it explicitly states this goal. In the fnal section of the Mémoire, simply titled “Treatment of this Poison,” Ricord writes: Is it not of the highest importance to understand these plants well enough, and better if possible, than the evil slaves who use them? Is there not a great advantage in knowing how to use the weapons of one’s enemy, and can we not then fght him more ably, and even disarm him before he delivers a single fatal blow?4 Understanding the exotic meant taming the island. In the above passage, Ricord likens the manchineel to a weapon of enslaved resistance, highlighting how he associated his fear of revolt with the tree itself. The manchineel was not simply a poisonous tree, its shadow represented the growing dangers to colonial life in the Antilles. By studying and understanding the worst that nature had to offer, he believed colonizers could protect themselves from the dangers of insurrection and solidify their control of the Antilles. To Ricord, knowledge of the natural world bred material power and dominance. The examination and subsequent understanding of the manchineel’s properties therefore aimed to reappropriate the tree within a European hierarchy of nature.

ECOLOGIES OF KNOWLEDGE-MAKING In the most literal sense, Guadeloupe is a land of extremes. Its topography and geography are so disproportionately dispersed that settlement of its isles necessarily mirrored the blueprint set out by the natural world. The central axis of Guadeloupe, the Rivière Salée (literally “salty river”) is a fve-kilometer-long sea channel, measuring mere hundreds of meters in width, that serves as a barrier between ecological extremes. The two main islands—Grande Terre and Basse Terre—rest on either side of this channel. Although similar in size, the likeness extends no further. To the East lies the fat, coralline limestone plateau of Grande Terre, the drier of the two, which made it preferable for colonial sugar plantations.5 This relatively orderly landscape is countered in the West by the lush, dense forests and staggering diversity of Basse Terre, dubbed the “Jewel of the Antilles.”6 In keeping with larger themes of ecologies of knowledge and alienation explored throughout this volume, this study is grounded in an examination of the ecological realities of Guadeloupe’s two paradoxical halves, which presents an argumentative structure resistant to any effort

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to alienate manchineel and its history within colonialism from the tree’s natural environment. While the Eastern island’s economy thrived at the height of slavery and its population swelled due to the dominance and success of its sugar cane plantations, the natural fortress of Basse Terre prohibited travel beyond the coastal regions.7 With an abundance of heterogeneity, Guadeloupe’s ecological diversity serves as a microcosm for that of the Caribbean at large.8 The large bay, called the Grand cul-de-sac Marin, today protected as part of the Guadeloupe National Forest, is home to the largest coral reef in the Caribbean and is dotted with vibrant mangrove clusters. This one bay alone is home to nearly 90 percent of Guadeloupe’s mangrove population.9 This ecological community is comprised of fve independent species that thrive in a range of coastal ecosystems, making them remarkably diverse and resilient. As a result of this exceptional concentration of mangrove thickets, Grand cul-de-sac Marin is a heavily protected environmental resource today.10 The manchineel, which thrives in the same types of highly saline, coastal waters, grows conterminously with the mangrove’s habitat.11 Ricord notes at least two species of mangrove (Conocarpus erecta and Avicenia nitida) that grew in the immediate vicinity of the manchineel tree.12 As with the entangled bank with which Darwin would end his Origin of Species some three decades later in 1859, Ricord saw an interwoven world of living things competing for dominance. As modern ecology remains fascinated with the interconnections between different plant species in their negotiation for survival, recent ecological studies can reveal a world similar to that where Ricord set his experiments. Therefore, while the bay is home to Guadeloupe’s most diverse ecosystems, it is also here that one is most likely to suffer the irritant dermatitis and incessant purging effects of the manchineel’s toxin on the body.13 The impact the little apple of death had on the bay and its inhabitants is not simply constrained to these ecological explanations, however, as a coastal town came to be named after it: Mansenilier. The manchineel’s toxin is only fatal when ingested. Its latex, a common feature of the Euphorbiaceae family, is quite harmful to the skin upon contact and is extremely toxic when ingested. Since the latex contained within its leaves and apples is water soluble, it can wash off the tree’s leaves in the rain and land on those standing beneath it, causing burns and irritation that are in some cases permanent.14 Fortunately, inhabitants and visitors of Grand cul-de-sac Marin are not always in danger, since the manchineel tree only fowers for approximately half of the year. One of the hallmarks of Guadeloupe’s environment are its two distinct seasons. The dry season, which runs from January to June, is characterized by temperatures between 25 and 30 degrees Celsius and strong winds, while the period from July to December is marked by near constant rain and temperatures of 30 degrees Celsius and warmer.15 As Ricord noted, his tree generally fowered at the end of the dry period, and the little apple of death only grew in the frst fve months of the rainy season.16 Thus, one is only at risk of suffering the fatal vomiting and dehydration that accompanies the toxin’s diuretic effects in the second half of the year, though the risk of irritant dermatitis from standing beneath the tree’s canopy is always present. Surprisingly for a nineteenth-century physician who studied specifc diseases and medicines rather than ecosystems, Ricord described a habitat around his poison. Along with the physical description of the height, girth, color, and different components of the tree, he illustrated an entire community of fora and fauna around the manchineel within the frst few pages of his manuscript.17 Just as Elaine Ayers notes in the next chapter of

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Figure 7.2: This map zooms in on the North East coast of Grand cul-de-sac Marin, where one fnds a town called Mansenilier. It should be noted that the Manchineel is known by many names across European languages. In French, several examples of this varied spelling are: Mancenillier, Mancenilier, and Mansenillier. Sir Archibald Campbell, A Map of the Island of Guadeloupe, Drawn from an Acurate Survey by Lieut. Archibald Campbell, Engineer, Engraved by Thomas Jefferys, Geographer to His Majesty, 1764. Digital editing my own. Courtesy of Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection.

this volume that Hugh Low judged the entirety of Borneo from his observations of one species, the pitcher plant, Ricord illustrated a picture of a multitude of entwined species in colonial Guadeloupe with the manchineel at the center. He noted that not all living things were susceptible to the manchineel, arguing that “even though the manchineel is a source of terror for men, the animals do not avoid it whatsoever.”18 Enumerating species of plants, trees, and reptiles that lived around and on the tree, he demonstrated that life is in fact possible beneath and around its canopy. He noted fourteen species of tree (many of which are themselves poisonous or understudied), eight species of plants, and two species of reptile (Anolis Lacertus and Mabouya) that live within range of the manchineel. He also noted that horses, goats, and cows eat the tree’s apples without any apparent harm.19 One particularly interesting description accompanies an obscure plant (Aristolochia trifda) that Ricord describes as

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Figure 7.3: This multi-layered visualization depicts the manchineel’s potential range and the locations where Ricord most likely conducted his experiments. At the base is the same 1764 map of Guadeloupe seen in Figure 7.2. On top of this historical map is a modern outline (purple) of Guadeloupe’s coastline. Within these boundaries is an outline drawn from satellite imagery of the mangrove habitat (green); this represents the range of the manchineel’s potential habitat. Finally, the seven largest population centers in close proximity to this habitat are pinned (teal); these are the most likely locations where Ricord ran his experiments. Sir Archibald Campbell, A Map of the Island of Guadeloupe, 1764; Florent Taureau, “Cartographie Harmonisée des Mangroves de l’Outre-Mer Français” (doctoral thesis, Université de Nantes, 2017), 31–47. Image created on Google Earth Pro.

a vine that grows on the manchineel’s trunk, though other references to the Aristolochia are confused and rare. One such mention comes from prominent naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s 1810 encyclopedia, which describes how two different species from the same genus, Aristolochia trifda and Aristolochia trilobata, are often confused with each other—though Lamarck also notes that no self-respecting botanist would misidentify them.20 This description is potentially helpful to better understand the manchineel through a lens of modern comparative ecology. Following the Janzen-Connell Hypothesis, since the Aristolochia trifda (and the other plants Ricord lists) reaches maturity in the immediate proximity of the manchineel, these plants must not be in direct competition with one another.21 Similarly, since the manchineel is

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otherwise an ecologically overdefended tree in terms of the potency of its toxin, the fact that these plants bypassed the effects of the trees’ poison and are able to survive in its vicinity may indicate the presence of some type of mutual ecological beneft. In light of the short list of plants that can grow under these same conditions, it is exceedingly unlikely that both Aristolochia trifda and Aristolochia trilobata could grow on the manchineel’s trunk, meaning that one could potentially identify the otherwise wellcamoufaged poisonous tree by the presence of its cohabitating species. While Ricord saw himself as entangled in a struggle for both survival and dominance over Guadeloupe’s enslaved population, the tree he chose to serve as his arena for that contest employed a more nuanced version of competition, in which foreign species were selectively either targeted or accepted.

ISLANDS OF FEAR AND WONDER Interest in the manchineel developed in tandem with a transformation of medical practice in the Lesser Antilles from frst contact with Europeans in 1492 to the fnal abolition of slavery in the French colonies in 1848. During this span, manchineel poison increasingly became seen as an object with deep implications for colonial control, and as such it was infused into the arena of medical experimentation. Some historians have described an Atlantic World medical complex from the eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries as a space free from European medicine’s ethical restraints.22 However, this oceanic geography remains too capacious; as other chapters in this volume have shown, mainland colonial American medicine was often highly regulated. A new focus on the specifc dynamics of an Antillean medical complex over the Atlantic at large highlights the Caribbean islands as unique spaces of colonial medical development. Due to their small geographic size, diminished Amerindian but large enslaved African populations, and focus on agricultural production, Antillean islands became a hotbed for medical experimentation free from social and ethical restraints.23 Columbus’ journal of the frst voyage described dangerous Amerindian warriors who shot fsh-tooth arrows smeared with poisonous herbs.24 The physician on the second voyage of Columbus described an unnamed plant that sailors touched their tongues to and subsequently seemed to go mad and used refrigerants to cure themselves of the pain.25 Fears of similar occurrences, combined with diseases including small-pox, yaws, and malaria, plagued the colonial Caribbean experience, making European physicians a vital part of colonial island life and survival.26 Living amidst exotic poisons and strange diseases, many colonizers were forced to reconceptualize their mortality as they sought fabled riches in this New World tropical environment. One thing became clear very quickly to colonial physicians: European survival depended on some secret knowledge of nature.27 Since the voyages of Francisco Hernández explored in chapter 2 of this volume, Europeans had been acutely aware of the power of local medical knowledge held by Amerindians, and the new infux of practices drawn from African traditions transported along with the slave trade presented even greater heterogeneity in the colonial medical marketplace. Out of these multidirectional, unequal New World encounters with the best and worst the tropics had to offer came lasting consequences for the medical complex and experimental ethics. From differential immunity to the very idea of global health, the effects of these medical interactions extended far beyond the small islands where they took place. Colonizers’ unquenchable thirst for knowledge to protect themselves from the

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newfound dangers of the natural world drove physicians to do whatever was necessary to discover new viable treatments and materia medica. As colonial institutions ossifed along with the passage of centuries of European rule in the Antilles, the physician’s work became increasingly centered on patient care across races and economic groups. However, as Londa Schiebinger has shown, the testing of new methods and medicines that characterized physicians’ craft was not always in the best interest of the bodies on whom they experimented.28 Fear of the tropical environment and its potential was not unique to the late-colonial era, but the correlation between noxious nature and enslaved insurrection notably was. As Pablo Gomez argues, in the early colonial period, especially the sixteenth century, the shock of the Caribbean experience due to the tropics’ novelty and copious endemic diseases rendered Amerindian and African medical practitioners authoritative, as their medicines and knowledge of nature seemed better-suited to the New World.29 Facing strange new maladies and death rates sometimes approaching 50 percent among bondspeople and Europeans alike, colonial authorities and physicians enacted quarantines and strictly regulated shipping and trade practices—an effort that was largely in vain.30 Amidst this bleak scenery, enslaved African and Amerindian knowledge of the natural world was an ironic asset to colonizers. Their remedies for diseases foreign to Europeans granted enslaved healers, in particular, a sort of authority, as fear of the environment superseded notions of class, race, and rank. In the early colonial Antilles, enslaved African and Amerindian medical knowledge was constitutive of European power—their medicines made life in the New World possible, and thus enabled the colonial complex in many ways, propelling empires that might otherwise have perished in the unknowns of New World nature. While some African and Amerindian remedies prolonged life in the colonies, other herbs and concoctions ended it with haste. With legends of its potency and strength hanging over the Antilles from the earliest colonial contacts, manchineel poison was one such substance. While many European travelers mention the tree, both for its dark reputation and the alluringly deep, reddish-brown hue of the furniture made from its wood, one of the frst widely-read accounts survives from Charles de Rochefort in his Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l’Amérique.31 Writing in 1665, Rochefort illustrates how the manchineel tree fell under the auspices of Amerindian secret knowledge stating, “the savage Antilleans know very well the nature of the mancenilles [. . .]”32 One year later, French Dominican missionary Raymond Breton’s Dictionnaire François-Caraïbe confrms this indigenous familiarity with the tree, translating the French “pomme de mansenille” to the Caribe “balaó-boucourou.”33 Amerindians clearly knew the plant, while Europeans recognized only the poison that could be used against them. This ignorance of the tree spurred many accounts in colonial travelogues and natural histories, such as the collection of authors Hans Sloane compiled in his 1707 A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica. Within these pages, a passage from Peter Martyr stands out: The Indians tried by the smoke of this tree to free themselves of the chiefs of the Spaniards, when they were asleep. They [the Spaniards] made the Indians confess this design and some of the authors of it were punished. The Indians have an herb whose smell saves them from the harm of this, that they may carry it about with them.34

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Not only did Amerindians know how to arm the tree against colonizers, but they also hid the antidote, rendering every facet of the manchineel the subject of secret knowledge. These passages elucidate how subjugated populations actually possessed immense power in the tropics via their unique understandings of material substances such as manchineel poison. If Amerindian and enslaved African secret knowledge primarily helped European colonizers through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, that same covert expertise became increasingly weaponized through the eighteenth and early nineteenth. Manchineel poison seems to have been the armament of choice. Indeed, as Karol Kimberlee Weaver has shown, enslaved animal caretakers—or gardiens de bêtes—understood the value of the livestock they tended within a colonial island economy, and often poisoned those same animals with manchineel and other toxic fruits to destabilize their masters’ profts.35 One such animal healer took matters even further. François Makandal (d. 1758), a gardien de bête on the plantation of Le Normand de Mézy in northern Saint Domingue, created a subversive network through which his followers, called macandalistes or pacotilleurs, poisoned fellow bondspeople and Europeans alike to inspire fear, amass a following, and ultimately eradicate all Europeans from the island. He even attempted to strike the capital at Cap-François by dropping poisonous fruits—likely manchineel apples—into the city’s water supply.36 Though his plan failed and Makandal was publicly executed in 1758, his movement is generally regarded as the start to the long Haitian Revolution, as Toussaint-Louverture invoked his image to inspire rebellion nearly 50 years after Makandal’s death.37 When harnessed the right way, New World nature had the potential to overthrow colonial regimes.38 Ricord’s study of the manchineel during the last gasp of slavery in Guadeloupe illustrates a crucial moment of transition and change in the Antilles. Faced with the nearly four-to-one ratio of bondsperson to European on the island, he feared that amidst the increasingly prominent arguments against slavery, his enslaved subjects would turn nature against him much like in Martyr’s explanation of how some Amerindians had employed it against colonial Spaniards centuries before. Whereas physicians in the early colonial era feared the tropical environment and its endemic diseases, readily turning to enslaved Africans’ and Amerindians’ knowledge of the natural world for remedies and medicines, Ricord lived in a much-changed colonial world in which he feared bondspeople themselves. He regarded them as enemies who could weaponize nature, animating the manchineel’s dark canopy as something very real—a literal tree of death. By studying the natural world, therefore, colonizers could pre emptively disarm threats of insurrection and keep the enslaved population suppressed. Just as planter Thomas Thistlewood carried a weapon at all times in Jamaica, Ricord may well have confated the manchineel’s menacing presence with that of enslaved Africans themselves.39 The actions and habits of these two men demonstrate how late-colonial masters sought to diminish bondspeople’s infuence and power wherever possible.40 The late-colonial Caribbean was an exceedingly violent environment as cruelty and terror were increasingly used to exact control. While dominating their enslaved subjects with the lash, colonial subjugators also sought to uncover the secret poisons they feared. In a letter to the provincial governor of Guadeloupe dated January 6, 1823, in which Ricord outlined his work in an attempt to secure further research funds, he states the following at the end of his introductory paragraph: I dare to hope, Monsieur le Comte, that you will share this message with his Excellency the Minister of the Colonies, for he

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who, by removing the veil that hides the poisons of the Antilles, will unmask the wicked ones, and who, by instructing the unsuspecting man, will provide him with the means to protect himself from the enemies who surround him. Because, in the Enlightened century whence we live, I do not think that anyone can afford to be ignorant.41 Here one sees how Ricord viewed his experiments as a literal defense of the colonial world order, and thus how the fatalities he induced were not just wanton killings, but a fortifcation of Guadeloupe against the perils of ignorance. He believed his toxicology to be immediately relevant to the Minister of the Colonies of the French Empire, a man of signifcant infuence. No matter how well-armed Europeans might be, however, they were so outnumbered by enslaved Africans that they could not hope to survive an island-wide organized revolt.42 With this bleak outlook on suppressing rebellion, masters took precautionary measures to prevent such an uprising from happening in the frst place. Their weapon of choice in this preemptive war of mastery and dominance was medical knowledge.43 Natural history and physicians’ work interwove in this Antillean medical complex.

CANINE TESTING AND MORTALITY Ricord exploited three main types of bodies in his search for protection: dogs of varying strength, his young, enslaved boy, Jacob, and himself. His fastidious examination of the manchineel trees’ different properties and their varying poisonous effects exhibit an almost manic approach to his work, as he leaves no stone left unturned in his examination and no room for misinterpretation in his conclusions. His study heavily relied on experiential data, but largely disregarded his subjects’ pain, as he chose to neglect their collective suffering in order to better understand the tree’s toxicity. The trail of vomit, urine, and corpses Ricord left in his wake illustrates a morbid scene with the reckless colonial physician at its center.44 Specifcally regarding his mistreatment of the animals, in the Mémoire, Ricord explicitly cites twenty-four trials where his canine subjects swallowed a sample of manchineel, resulting in ten deaths—a 42% mortality rate.45 It is no wonder then, considering these statistics, that Ricord complained of the diffculty he had in fnding dogs for his tests, since residents of Guadeloupe of all races protected their pets from his dubious care.46 He writes each minute detail of all of these deaths, recounting how the subjects struggled and suffered for hours before expiring. With each successive dog’s passing, it became impossible for Ricord to deny the manchineel’s toxicity as he witnessed the destruction it wrought on the body before his own eyes. Any medical trial whose subjects have an almost one in two chance of fatality is strikingly unethical to modern eyes. Using statistical analysis to review large trends in Ricord’s data reveals the morbid nature of his work. Furthermore, Ricord’s experimental data is skewed. Therefore, the overall mortality rate is a gross understatement of the most condemnable aspects of his work. Not all parts of the manchineel are equally poisonous, though he tested each as if they were. When broken down by the fve specifc substances he tested, two (the juice and seeds) were hardly toxic and caused no fatality. These two categories constituted seven out of the twenty-four experiments, meaning that the ten deaths came from

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Figure 7.4: Depiction of a manchineel (Mancaneel) from Hans Sloane’s 1707 A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, St. Christophers, Nieves, and Jamaica, Table 159. Courtesy of Hamilton College Special Collections.

the seventeen experiments conducted with the manchineel’s poisonous components: its apple, sap, and leaves. Without this dilution of the experimental data, the mortality rate jumps to 59%. By presenting the results of his experiments with the tree’s benign components alongside its more

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Figure 7.5: Breakdown of Ricord’s experiments by substance.

noxious poison, Ricord sought to subversively diminish the perceived potency of those toxic substances. Out of the three particularly poisonous segments of the manchineel, one stands alone above the rest. Though its leaves and apple are dangerous in their own respects and should be handled with appropriate care, the sap (or latex) is more potent than either. Uncoincidentally, this is the substance that Ricord studies in the greatest detail, conducting a third of his experiments with it alone. These trials, which vary according to the dosage of poison administered and the relative size and strength of his subject, constitute the most gruesome selections of his work. Six out of the eight dogs he subjects to these experiments perish in the trials. Judging by the low survival rate, it is no wonder that no reasonable Guadeloupean would give Ricord their dog.

HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION AND JACOB’S TESTIMONY November 17, 1821, my servant (young slave) came with me to the coast to search for some pieces of manchineel root for my experiments. He was afficted by a volatile substance that the roots emitted when he pulled them from the tree. At frst he felt a warm sensation on his face, and two hours later, he complained of a fery sensation that appeared to make him suffer: It was only the next morning, when he woke up, that he noticed his face was swollen. I made no remedy for that. Around noon, blisters flled with a dull yellow liquid (puss) formed. The 19th, the blisters were almost entirely dried up, and shedding ensued. The 20th the shedding was complete. Potentially because they were rather small, the blisters did not leave any scars. Throughout this localized infammation, his pulse remained practically normal, along with the rest of his bodily functions, indicating the benign nature of the eruptions.47

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Ricord had a close relationship with one particular bondsperson, who he simply referred to as “My young slave boy Jacob.” Enlisting Jacob as a test subject on several occasions, he caused the boy pain and coerced him to cease his complaints. In these instances, Ricord took the manchineel— the very substance he feared Jacob might use against him—and turned it on the boy. Through the experiment, Ricord sought to investigate the environment and wrest its power from his perceived enemies. Perhaps in appropriating the manchineel’s power, he could transform its menacing shadow into a useful tool of understanding. In another section of the manuscript, Ricord recounted placing three drops of a grayish, sticky substance on Jacob’s tongue—fve minutes later, the boy complained of a peppery sensation there. After twenty minutes, Jacob continued to complain, but he exhibited no visible signs of blistering or infammation. Ricord hesitated—was Jacob really in pain? Ricord thought all enslaved Africans to be inherent liars, so could he believe Jacob? To discern the truth, Ricord decided to test the manchineel tree’s poisonous sap on his own tongue. He felt only a slight tingle; Jacob must have lied. In punishment, Ricord intimidated the boy to admit his folly, forced his mouth open, and haphazardly slapped an unmeasured quantity of the poison onto his tongue. Jacob said nothing of this abuse, which only further corroborated Ricord’s suspicions.48 Jacob’s archetypal identifcation as the “lying slave” clearly informs Ricord’s experimental data, but it also helps inform the conclusions he draws about the manchineel tree itself. Stories of the poison and its effects are necessarily infuenced by the credibility of their storytellers. Because he perceives Jacob as a liar, Ricord’s respect for the manchineel’s poison is diminished, as his lack of belief in Jacob breeds a lack of belief in the manchineel’s deadly character due to the bondsperson’s invalid testimony. This agnotological approach emerges out of Ricord’s existing bias; if he did not doubt enslaved Africans’ and Amerindians’ accounts of the manchineel in the frst place, then there would be no need for him to dissect the tree and declare those same stories false or overexaggerated. Because he presumes that Jacob lied about the peppery sensation on his tongue, to Ricord, that perceived deception dilutes the tree’s noxious properties to mere fable. Where is Jacob’s voice in this (or any other) gruesome scene? His experience and terrible struggle with the manchineel is relayed in its entirety by Ricord—his master, oppressor, and torturer. In 1822, Jacob’s body was appropriated and consumed by the study, fundamentally serving as an object of experimentation rather than as an autonomous human. Recovering Jacob’s pain and experience of torture here is not intended as an act of voyeurism into historical scenes of abuse, but is instead a condemnation of the pain and terror caused by colonial medical experimentation.49 Rather than a reprisal of the exploitative role of Ricord as the physician, this analysis is instead an effort to read against the grain, thus enabling new interpretations of experimentation in the late-colonial Antilles and its lasting implications on medical practice to today.50 An important aspect of this microhistory is the consideration of the historian’s role in telling Jacob’s story. His pain was distorted to ft Ricord’s interpretation and disregarded thereafter, so one must ask what the value is in resurrecting this brutal and abusive history in lieu of allowing it to remain in obscurity as these atrocities fade from remembrance. As Marisa J. Fuentes argues, when historians recover that which was previously forgotten, we not only recount the past, but also reconceptualize these stories and in the process produce something entirely new.51 Jacob’s experience under the manchineel tree was one of injustice and compulsory silence. His skin, mouth, eyes and stomach were all afficted by the

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tree and its noxious poison, but his voice was also subdued to the whims of his ruthless subjugator. Rather ironically, as Ricord believed himself to be in grave danger beneath the tree’s wicked branches, it was in fact his enslaved subject—the very person he feared might use the poison against him—who faced the perils of the manchineel headlong. In his later published work, Ricord sought to dispel any notion that manchineel poison was a choice weapon of bondspeople. To him, combatting this perception was the most effective way to reduce the tree’s supposed threat. He devoted the concluding pages of his book to this end: The negroes have more covert methods which leave them less compromised: they rarely employ those substances whose harmful effects follow too soon after their ingestion in the stomach; they prefer those whose effects are not too aggressive and are not felt until some time after they are taken. Nevertheless, I do not believe it to be implausible that the Manchineel is not also a poison employed by the negroes, but what is sure about that race of man is that it is often nearly impossible to discern the ingredients they use to commit their poisonous crimes.52 If Ricord could not de-weaponize the manchineel through his experiments alone, he could at least change the narrative around it from that of a hidden dagger that could strike at a moment’s notice to something of a more benign nature. The descriptions he provided of his tests depicted a dramatic scene, the opposite of subtle. Thus, he felt confdent that manchineel poison could not take part in any covert activity by the enslaved. That is, within the same fve minutes it took for Jacob’s agony to commence, Ricord hoped that a European victim would be able to identify their assailant. The maltreatment and suffering Jacob underwent due to his compulsory participation in the test and subsequent forfeiture of his body indicate the racialized nature of medicine and medical ethics in the latecolonial Antilles. While Ricord read him as a bondsperson with the potential to rebel, he also viewed Jacob as less than human, or at the very least as a member of humanity’s lowest ranks. In short, Jacob’s enslaved status absolved Ricord from adhering to the rules and regulations of a growing feld of medical ethics that might have otherwise derailed his testing. While Schiebinger aptly explains that plantation bondspeoples’ economic worth afforded them a certain degree of protection from predatory and dangerous medical experimentation, Jacob’s role as an assistant to Ricord removes him from this heuristic model of enslaved Africans’ universal value.53 Just as Robert Galbraith Heath would later justify his use of electro-therapy on mental health patients in light of the terrible conditions in psychiatric wards, Ricord could justify his abuse of Jacob in the context of the boy’s especially degraded status.54 In this context, Ricord’s experiments did not need to be therapeutic for his subject—since he understood Jacob’s only real potential as a mere assistant with a proclivity to lie, deceive, and possibly even revolt, Ricord did not see his treatment of the boy as abuse, but rather the routine use of a body in scientifc research. These experiments took place in a remote corner of a small island— an intimate setting featuring Ricord and Jacob alone together. This bizarre interaction between two individuals from highly disproportionate backgrounds in many ways captures the nuances of the Antillean medical complex at large. Their location at the fringe of nineteenth-century society grants this story unique perspective, as Ricord’s tests looked notably different in Guadeloupe than they would have, were he in Paris or some other European locale. Far away from France’s imperial center, this story

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of pain and unjustifably persistent knowledge gathering took on a much darker appearance than would ever have been possible within the confnes of continental Europe or other colonial centers in the Atlantic World.

NHANDIROBA Another strange and nearly unidentifable plant fgures intimately into Ricord’s conception of the manchineel and its poison. The nhandiroba vine (Fevillea Cordifolia), Ricord’s chosen antidote to the Hippomane mancinella, produces a large nut-like fruit that is supposedly found throughout the Caribbean. In his 1826 publication, Recherches et experiences sur les poisons d’Amérique, Ricord mentions that his antidote vine held at least seven different names from Amerindian communities across the Caribbean, demonstrating that he was comfortable embracing a degree of uncertainty about the plant’s origins and source.55 Massachusetts-born astronomer and physician extraordinaire Samuel Stearn likewise made a feeting reference to the “Ghandiroba” plant hailing from Brazil originally, though he opined that it had no medical uses.56 Sloane’s 1707 reference to the “Ghandiroba vel Nhandi-roba Brasiliensibus” confrmed Brazil as the plant’s place of origin, and also provided the following description of its seed dispersal: “The fruit, or inward nuts, are carried down fresh rivers into the sea, and thence are thrown upon the banks by the waves again very frequently.”57 Did the nhandiroba truly expand the range of its habitat beyond Brazil by simply shipping its seeds via waves? Similarly, did Ricord frst encounter this obscure nut-fruit when it washed up on Guadeloupe’s shores alongside a manchineel apple? After seven experiences with the manchineel’s sap, in which six of his test subjects died, (an 86% death rate), Ricord fnally tested the nhandiroba as an antidote.58 Seeing that it was effective, and his dog was still alive, Ricord wrote: There is every reason to believe that without the administration of Nhandiroba, the animal would have died, considering the strong dose of the manchineel that he was given. I repeated this experiment on other dogs, and I had the same results. The Nhandiroba seems to always be effective, granted that the dose of the manchineel is not too strong, or that the animal is not very young or very weak. In these cases, the animals have died, even after a dose of Nhandiroba.59 Had Ricord fnally discovered a cure to this most menacing of poisons? In the nhandiroba, Ricord had a plant of equal political importance to the manchineel, one that could help secure European hegemony over the colonies rather than undermine it. Was the nhandiroba the cure-all that the bezoar had failed to become? Beyond a simple anti-poison with a single application, the nhandiroba had the potential to be a medical breakthrough of epic proportions, one that would draw fame and acclaim from continental Europe for Jean-Baptiste Ricord. He had worked in colonial hospitals, now he sought the recognition that came along with a major medical discovery that would traverse the Atlantic and infuence the Parisian metropole’s medical institutions.60 Indeed, in the preface to his section on the manchineel in the Recherches, Ricord thanks a patron for having helped his brothers, Alexandre and Philippe, enter the prestigious Faculté de médecine of Paris—this book project seems to have been his bid for a similar appointment.61 Therefore, presenting the nhandiroba as a potential cure-all for Europeans afficted with tropical diseases and poisons held enormous weight for Ricord’s

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Figure 7.6: A life-sized drawing of the Nhandiroba’s fruit by Jean-Baptiste Ricord, taken from page 151 of his Recherches et Expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique. Courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

personal life and career. This much is evident in his section on the plant in his Recherches, when he deliberately lists nine different medical applications of the Fevillea cordifolia, ranging from a countermeasure against snake venom to a treatment for menstrual pain.62 In his published work,

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Ricord argues that nhandiroba was a sort of universal medicine, something that would elevate his work from a simple toxicological report of Guadeloupe to something useful and relevant to doctors and physicians across the French Empire. Other European travelers had substantiated these medicinal qualities. Hans Sloane recognized the general health benefts of the plant, and Ricord cites the Voyages in his own published work.63 After an enslaved woman poisoned a fellow physician, Sloane administered kernels of the nhandiroba infused in wine and stated: This cured him, and he is alive at this Day. But it was some considerable Time before his Convulsive Symptoms left him. He adds, that two or three Spoonfuls of the Juice of the whole Plant given to strong young People, purges them upwards and downwards, bringing away Worms. The Milk outwardly applied takes away Warts, cures Ring-Worms and Freckles. A Cataplasm of the Green Leaves is good against cold Swellings. A Planter gave the Powder of the dried Root, which work’d upwards and downwards as Ipecacuana, which he said it was, but was as much mistaken, as these affrming the Subsequent to be the same. The Trials of Life of the Root and other Parts of this Plant seem to me to be very hazardous.64 Notably, while he also writes about the manchineel elsewhere in this volume, Sloane’s account differs from that of Ricord and does not identify the nhandiroba as an antidote. Furthermore A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, S. Christophers and Jamaica is a travelogue and not a scientifc text, making Ricord’s references to the Nhandiroba one of the frst detailed accounts of the plant in an explicitly medical document. The nhandiroba’s potency should not be overstated, however, as Ricord himself cautions against in the conclusion of the Mémoire.65 The prudent physician, not fully trusting of either antidote, should arm himself against the manchineel’s clutches in as many ways as possible. As such, Ricord provides a three-step regimen to counteract the manchineel’s poison before administering the Nhandiroba.66 A poison still steeped in mystery and superstition, Ricord clearly feared and sought to arm himself against it by whatever means necessary. While he was anxious about the tree’s dangerous potential, however, he was also fascinated by it and sought to understand it better. His thorough approach to the manchineel’s toxicity, both as a weapon of enslaved resistance but also as a source of sheer wonder and intrigue, indicates the infuence that Ricord’s experiences with the manchineel had on him. The horrors he committed in his experiments all built towards a greater understanding of the tree and its properties—a collection of knowledge he deemed vital to European survival and continued dominance in Guadeloupe. By disarming the manchineel with the nhandiroba, Ricord re-armed Caribbean colonists against insurrection, thereby transforming the manchineel from a subject of fear and mystery into an object of study and intrigue.

COLONIAL INSIGHTS FOR A EUROPEAN AUDIENCE Ricord’s experimental method and ethics present an important intervention into the history of race and racialized medicine. While Schiebinger argues that colonial physicians in the eighteenth-century Atlantic World followed a semi-standardized protocol for experimentation—testing frst on animals, then on themselves, and fnally on other humans and often showed at least superfcial concern for their subjects’ well-being—this

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nineteenth-century example complicates her model. While much of the Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux feeds directly into his later-published Recherches, several of the most conspicuous additions to the latter are accounts of his own experiences with the manchineel tree.67 This indicates that Ricord was indeed aware of the expected experimental syntax outlined by Schiebinger, and thus selectively edited the story of his experiments between his feld notes—a place where, much like with Thistlewood’s diary, he had little incentive to communicate anything but the simple truth—and his public-facing work, which he understood as a venue where his account ought to be rendered more palatable to a European audience.68 Therefore, Ricord added tales of self-experimentation to his published work of which there is scant evidence that it actually occurred. Furthermore, he responded to his bondsperson’s complaints with skepticism and neglect, refusing Jacob’s testimony and instead giving him more of the substance torturing him. In the eyes of this physician, pain was relative. In ignoring Jacob’s pain, Ricord attempted to understand the legend of the manchineel’s poison through his scientifc approach. While Ricord searched for a universal antidote, knowledge of the manchineel remained relative, fragmented, and contingent on social position. To Ricord, its leaves and branches were a source of wonder and insatiable intrigue, whereas enslaved Africans and Amerindians recognized its apple as a potent and potentially useful poison. His disregard for subjects’ collective suffering and the fervor with which Ricord approached his work indicates the perceived threat the tree posed to late-colonial island life. The manchineel resisted Ricord’s best efforts to capture and dilute it. . . . Jean-Baptiste Ricord’s Mémoire sur le Mancenillier Vénéneux contains histories of pain, superstition, agnotology, dominance, and racism within its ostensibly scientifc pages. The history of medicine fgures intimately into this story, as his subjects found themselves, unfortunately, situated beneath the shadow of the tree of death, as victims of the malicious examination of its poison. Their needless pain and total subjection to Ricord’s whims demonstrate a deeply abusive scene in the Antillean medical complex. This suffering highlights the paranoia of Europeans during this transitional moment between slavery and emancipation in Guadeloupe, as the manchineel remained a fxture of the Caribbean environment, its poison equally potent on the human body no matter the political context. In one way, the manchineel’s shadow persisted, as its treacherous branches afficted all of Guadeloupe, poisoning the bodies of enslaved Africans along with the minds of their subjugators. In another it went on, unfeeling as history unraveled around it, protecting itself among the mangroves.

NOTES 1 J. F. Pitts et al., “Manchineel Keratoconjunctivitis,” British Journal of Ophthalmology 77, no. 5 (1993): 284–6. 2 Jean-Baptiste Ricord, “Une Lettre à Son Excellence Monsieur le Comte de Landenoy, Lnt. Général, Gouverneur et Admtr pour le Roi Dans l’isle de la Guadeloupe” (Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection, January 6, 1823), 24. While contemporary biographies cite Ricord as a French native who later immigrated to the colonies, this 1823 letter proves otherwise. Likewise, Ricord states Martinique as his place of birth while describing his history of itinerant medical practice across the Antilles. Despite his colonial roots, in his title page and sign off, he refers to himself as J. B. Ricord Madianna—most likely a transformation of his name to make his work

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3

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26 27 28 29 30

more legible to European audiences. For the remainder of this chapter, I revert to the more commonly used construction of his name and omit the Madianna. Jean-Baptiste Ricord, Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux, faisant partie d’un ouvrage sur les plantes vénéneuses, les insectes et les poissons vénéneux: les vers, les méduses, les physalides et les crustacés qui se trouvent à la Guadeloupe: sur le mal d’estomac des nègres, les empoisonnements qu’ils font aux hommes et aux bestiaux et les moyens qu’ils emploient pour faire avorter les femmes (Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection, 1822). Ibid., 40. Denis Girou, United Nations Environment Program: France—National Park of Guadeloupe (New York: United Nations Environment Program, 2010), 9. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 5–6. In the National Park of Guadeloupe alone, which lies within the island of Basse Terre, there are 816 recorded species of fora, including approximately 300 species of trees, 100 species of orchids and 270 species of ferns. Florent Taureau, “Cartographie Harmonisée des Mangroves de l’Outre-Mer Français,” (Doctoral thesis, Université de Nantes, 2017), 31–47. Grand cul-desac Marin hosts 2,783.2 hectares out of a total 3,195 ha of mangrove thickets found on Guadeloupe. Taureau, “Cartographie Harmonisée,” 31–47. Figure 3 employs data drawn from page 37 to map Ricord’s likely experimentation sites. Pitts et al., “Manchineel Keratoconjunctivitis,” 1. Ricord, Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux, 3. Will H. Blackwell, Poisonous and Medicinal Plants, Prentice Hall Advanced Reference Series: Physical and Life Sciences (Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990), 183–4. Ibid., 220–1. Girou, National Park of Guadeloupe, 10. Ricord, Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux, 5. Ibid., 3–4. Ibid., 5. Ibid., 3–4. Jean-Baptiste de Monet de Lamarck, Encyclopédie méthodique. Botanique, par M. Lamarck, de l’Institut de France ; continuée par J. L. M. Poiret, professeur d’histoire naturelle, de plusieurs sociétés savantes et littéraires. Supplément (Paris: Chez H. Agasse, 1810), 456. Yan Zhu et al., “The Relative Importance of Janzen-Connell Effects in Infuencing the Spatial Patterns at the Gutianshan Subtropical Forest,” PLoS ONE 8, no. 9 (2013), http://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074560. Londa L. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017), 3. The Antilles as read here refers to the large archipelago stretching from Cuba to Grenada. These islands include both the Greater and Lesser Antilles, and are enclosed by the Caribbean Sea to the South and West, the Gulf of Mexico to the West, and the Atlantic Ocean to the East. Christopher Columbus,  American Journeys Collection: Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus, Document No. AJ-062,  Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Library and Archives (Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society, 2003), 227fn1. Diego Álvarez Chanca, “La carta del Doctor Chanca, que escribió a la Ciudad de Sevilla,” in Select Letters of Christopher Columbus: With Other Original Documents (London: Hakluyt Society, 1870), 24. Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 5. Ibid., 90–92. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 91–92. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean, 145–7. Ibid., 41–47.

226 Part II • Felt 31 Benoît Roux, “Le Pasteur Charles De Rochefort Et ‘l’Histoire Naturelle Et Morale Des Îles Antilles De l’Amérique,” in Les Indiens Des Petites Antilles: Des Premiers Peuplements Aux Débuts De La Colonisation Européenne, ed. Bernard Grunberg, vol. 5. Cahiers D’histoire De L’Amérique Coloniale (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011), 175–216, 175–6. 32 Charles de Rochefort, Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amérique. Enrichie d’un grand nombre de belles fgures en taille douce, des places & des raretez les plus considerables, qui y sont décrites. Avec un vocabulaire Caraï be (Rotterdam: Arnout Leers, 1665), 269. 33 Raymond Breton, Dictionnaire François-Caraïbe: compose par le R. P. Raymond Breton, religieux de l’ordre des Frères Prescheurs, l’un des quatre premiers François millionaires apostolique en l’îsle de la Gardeloupe et autres circonnoisines de l’Amérique (Auxere, France: Gilles Bouquet, 1666), 303. Thanks to Kate Biedermann for suggesting this citation. 34 Hans Sloane, A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers and Jamaica 2 (London: Printed by BM for the Author, 1707), 4. 35 Karol K. Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-century Saint Domingue (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 83–89. See also the work of Christopher M. Blakley on human-animal interactions between slaveholders and enslaved people. 36 Weaver, Medical Revolutionaries, 89–93. 37 Ibid., 95. Today, Makandal is recognized as a voudou god. 38 This is not to overstate the role of manchineel poison in colonial revolutions, nor to infate its rate of successful usage. The Haitian Revolution was and remains the only ever successful revolution of enslaved people against European colonizers, thus demonstrating the limits of nature’s ability to topple colonial regimes on its own. Human actors fought and died while utilizing manchineel as one armament among many. Furthermore, realities of dominance and subjugation by colonial Europeans remained the norm rather than the exception in colonial spaces around the world long after Jean-Jacques Dessalines delivered the Haitian declaration of independence in 1804. Finally, the nearly 60-year long struggle for Haitian independence is a complicated history of tyranny and sustained resistance, whose success and human cost cannot be solely attributed to manchineel—or any other poison for that matter. 39 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 117. 40 Ibid., 114–16. 41 Ricord, “Une lettre à son excellence,” 2. 42 Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 120. 43 Ibid., 123. 44 The three most common reactions to the manchineel’s poison that he cites are intense stomach expulsions, repeated urination, and death. 45 Ricord’s actual total of experiments is 27. Three remaining experiments in which the subjects did not swallow manchineel are statistically irrelevant, since the poison is not fatal unless ingested. Thanks to Stephen Wu for help with the models in this section. 46 Jean-Baptiste Ricord, Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, tirés des trois règnes de la nature, et envisagés sous les rapports de l’histoire naturelle, de la physiologie, de la pathologie et de la chimie, avec un essai sur l’empoisonnement par les miasmes des marais, le mal d’estomac des nègres (cachexia africana), et les maladies qui ressemblent aux empoisonnemens, pour servir a la toxicologie générale du continent d’Amérique et des Antilles (Bordeaux: Charles Lawalle Neveu, Libraire, Allées de Tourny, 1826), 78. 47 Ricord, Mémoire sur le mancenillier vénéneux, 9–10. 48 Ibid., 23–24. Due to the sensitive nature of this passage, the original text is included here: “Lait du Mancenillier appliqué sur la langue. Le 16 Février, 1822, étant allé au bord de la mer pour y faire des expériences, je mis sur la langue de mon jeune nègre Jacob trois gouttes de lait de Mancenillier: cinq minutes après, il prétendait éprouver une sensation comme s’il avait du piment sur la langue; le connaissant très menteur, comme sont tous les nègres, je n’ajoutai

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49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

68

point foie à ce qu’il me dit: vingt minutes après, il se plaignait de même. Cependant rien ne paraissait sur sa langue: dans la soirée, il me dit ne plus rien éprouver. N’étant point satisfait de cette expérience, le 17 dans la matinée, je mis trois gouttes de lait de Mancenillier sur le bout de ma langue, il me sembla éprouver, deux minutes après, un petit picotement: mais bien peu sensible. Dix minutes après, je mis encore trois gouttes de ce lait sur la même place, le picotement, s’étendit légèrement dans la gorge, vu que j’avais avalé un peu de salive, sans le vouloir. Je fs venir mon Jacob, et il convint, qu’il n’avait pas autant souffert, qu’il avait voulu me le faire croire. Je trompai mon doigt dans un pot de lait de Mancenillier, et l’essuyai sur sa langue, ce qui ne produisit pas un grand effet sur lui, car il ne vint plus se plaindre. Quant à moi je n’éprouvai plus rien trois heures après.” For more on politics of pain, sentimentalism, and colonial suffering, see: Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 1–17. Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 4. Ibid., 12. Ricord, Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 164–5. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 13. Cathy Gere, Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good: From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017), 60. Ricord, Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 149. Samuel Stearns and David Carlisle, The American Herbal, or Materia Medica (Walpole, NH: Printed by David Carlisle, for Thomas & Thomas, and the Author, 1801), 157. Sloane, A Voyage, 200. Ricord, Mémoire sur le mancenillier vénéneux, 24–29. Ibid., 31. Patrice Pinell, “The Genesis of the Medical Field: France, 1795–1870,” Revue Française de Sociologie 52, no. 5 (2011): 9–12. Ricord, Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 71. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 149. Sloane, A Voyage 2, ix–x. Ricord, Mémoire sur le mancenillier vénéneux, 39. Ibid. Ricord, Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, 107–14. Though not an exhaustive list, these two sections titled “Ether chargé du principe déléterre du Mancenillier” and “Lait du Mancenillier appliqué au prepuce, y produisant une irritation qui fait disparaître les accès d’une fèvre intermittente” are two examples of sections of text Ricord added into his published work and that do not appear in his private notes. This addition indicates that he was aware that European audiences would expect him to have experienced the manchineel frsthand. Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves, 10, 79–85. While Schiebinger’s historical actors took medical ethics relatively seriously, de facto and de jure medical use largely overlapped. However, Ricord’s addition of perhaps invented evidence shows his awareness of the medical conventions, his disregard for them in his practice, and his subsequent willingness to make his research ft an established model. Might other colonial physicians have likewise made such edits to their work in publications? Likewise, Ricord’s intentional disregard for these conventions does not so much exhibit a reaction to the freedom of the colonial space but rather a desire to penetrate the regulated European one.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Blackwell, Will H. Poisonous and Medicinal Plants. Prentice Hall Advanced Reference Series: Physical and Life Sciences. Englewood, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1990.

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Breton, Raymond. Dictionnaire François-Caraïbe: compose par le R. P. Raymond Breton, religieux de l’ordre des Frères Prescheurs, l’un des quatre premiers François millionaires apostolique en l’îsle de la Gardeloupe et autres circonnoisines de l’Amérique. Auxere, France: Gilles Bouquet, 1666. Burnard, Trevor. Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Chanca, Diego Álvarez. “La carta del Doctor Chanca, que escribió a la Ciudad de Sevilla.” In Select Letters of Christopher Columbus: With Other Original Documents. London: Hakluyt Society, 1870. Columbus, Christopher. American Journeys Collection: Journal of the First Voyage of Columbus. Document No. AJ-062. Wisconsin Historical Society Digital Library and Archives. Madison, WI: Wisconsin Historical Society, 2003. Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Gere, Cathy. Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good: From the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017. Girou, Denis. United Nations Environment Program: France—National Park of Guadeloupe. New York: United Nations Environment Program, 2010. Gómez, Pablo F. The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic. Chapel Hill: North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Hartman, Saidiya V. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste de Monet de. Encyclopédie méthodique. Botanique, par M. Lamarck, de l’Institut de France ; continuée par J. L. M. Poiret, professeur d’histoire naturelle, de plusieurs sociétés savantes et littéraires. Supplément. Paris: Chez H. Agasse, 1810. Pinell, Patrice. “The Genesis of the Medical Field: France, 1795–1870.” Revue Française de Sociologie 52, no. 5 (2011): 9–12. Pitts, John F., Nigel H. Barker, D. Clive Gibbons, and Jeffrey L. Jay. “Manchineel Keratoconjunctivitis.” British Journal of Ophthalmology 77, no. 5 (1993): 284–8. Ricord, Jean-Baptiste. Mémoire sur le Mancenillier vénéneux, faisant partie d’un ouvrage sur les plantes vénéneuses, les insectes et les poissons vénéneux: les vers, les méduses, les physalides et les crustacés qui se trouvent à la Guadeloupe: sur le mal d’estomac des nègres, les empoisonnements qu’ils font aux hommes et aux bestiaux et les moyens qu’ils emploient pour faire avorter les femmes. Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection, 1822. Ricord, Jean-Baptiste. Recherches et expériences sur les poisons d’Amérique, tirés des trois règnes de la nature, et envisagés sous les rapports de l’histoire naturelle, de la physiologie, de la pathologie et de la chimie, avec un essai sur l’empoisonnement par les miasmes des marais, le mal d’estomac des nègres (cachexia africana), et les maladies qui ressemblent aux empoisonnemens, pour servir a la toxicologie générale du continent d’Amérique et des Antilles. Bordeaux: Charles Lawalle Neveu, Libraire, Allées de Tourny, 1826. Ricord, Jean-Baptiste. “Une Lettre à Son Excellence Monsieur le Comte de Landenoy, Lnt. Général, Gouverneur et Admtr pour le Roi Dans l’isle de la Guadeloupe.” Hamilton College Special Collections: Beinecke Lesser Antilles Collection, January 6, 1823.

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Rochefort, Charles de. Histoire naturelle et morale des iles Antilles de l’Amérique. Enrichie d’un grand nombre de belles fgures en taille douce, des places & des raretez les plus considerables, qui y sont décrites. Avec un vocabulaire Caraï be. Rotterdam: Arnout Leers, 1665. Roux, Benoît. “Le Pasteur Charles De Rochefort Et ‘l’Histoire Naturelle Et Morale Des Îles Antilles De l’Amérique.” In Les Indiens Des Petites Antilles: Des Premiers Peuplements Aux Débuts De La Colonisation Européenne, edited by Bernard Grunberg, vol. 5, 175–216. Cahiers D’histoire De L’Amérique Coloniale. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2011. Schiebinger, Londa L. Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017. Sloane, Hans. A Voyage to the Islands of Madera, Barbados, Nieves, St. Christophers and Jamaica, vol. 2. London: Printed by BM for the Author, 1707. Stearns, Samuel and David Carlisle. The American Herbal, or Materia Medica. Walpole, NH: Printed by David Carlisle, for Thomas & Thomas, and the author, 1801. Taureau, Florent. “Cartographie Harmonisée des Mangroves de l’OutreMer Français.” Doctoral thesis, Université de Nantes, 2017. Weaver, Karol K. Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of EighteenthCentury Saint Domingue. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Zhu, Yan, Stephan Getzin, Thorsten Wiegand, Haibao Ren, and Keping Ma. “The Relative Importance of Janzen-Connell Effects in Infuencing the Spatial Patterns at the Gutianshan Subtropical Forest.” PLoS ONE 8, no. 9 (September 2013). http://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0074560.

Chapter 8

Pitcher Plant Drowning in her Sweet Nectar Elaine Ayers

“The pitcher plant’s corporeality cannot be neatly confned or ordered and cannot be rendered truly two dimensional. The multitudes of their environment cannot be reduced to a single herbarium sheet.” Page 250

VISUALIZATION 8 Main pitcher plant: M. Smith, Nepenthes rajah from Curtis’s Botanical Magazine , vol. 131 (1905). Rat (hidden in pitcher plant): George Rolleston, Forms of animal life; being outlines of zoological classifcation based upon anatomical investigation and illustrated by descriptions of specimens and of fgures (1870). Map (background): Hydrographic Offce of the Admiralty, Nautical chart of the NW coast of Borneo from Tanjong Sirik to Tanjong Tatau, at a scale of 1:291,000. Surveyed by Lieut. D. M. Gordon, HMS Royalist (1848). Snakes: James Motley, Contributions to the natural history of Labuan, and the adjacent coasts of Borneo (1855). The visualization captures both the uncanny and exotic nature of the pitcher plant and its ecology in the minds of colonial botanists. The desire to possess this natural thing was futile precisely because of its resistance to existing outside of its own environment.

Abstract: Climbing Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu in 1858, British botanist Hugh Low encountered one of the strangest acts of plant carnivory ever recorded. Within the large urn of a carnivorous pitcher plant (Nepenthes rajah), he found a dead rat being digested by digestive fuids. By examining the sensitive, monstrous, and consumptive qualities assigned to pitcher plants by nineteenth century colonial botanists, this chapter argues that debates over Nepenthes’ foral carnivory stoked and complicated political tensions centered around the uncontrollability of the island of Borneo. Characterized by local infghting, piracy, cannibalism, and the controversial reign of James Brooke, the White Rajah, Borneo was seen as simultaneously rich in natural resources and incredibly volatile within the bounds of colonial settlement. Pitcher plants’ scientifc and commercial value, this chapter proposes, were, in turn, shaped by the association of such extreme carnivory with the perceived instability of its environment and, ultimately, of the order of life itself.

During his 1858 ascent of Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu, the highest peak in the Malay Archipelago, British botanist Hugh Low encountered something that he considered one of the “most astonishing productions of nature” that he had ever seen.1 Low had climbed the nearly 13,500-foot mountain seven years earlier and was eager to return to the humid, “luxurious forests” with a team of expert indigenous guides and a curious friend, British Consul Spenser Buckingham St. John, in search of those strange, animalistic specimens that had captured his imagination on his frst expedition: carnivorous pitcher plants (Nepenthes). On longer missions through Borneo’s northwestern interior throughout the 1840s, Low had feverishly studied these “glorious specimens,” promising indigenous collectors exorbitant fees for anyone willing to “penetrate” snake-flled “jungles” for the valuable pitchers, quickly becoming the primary objects of his attention.2 Knowing that these plants favored high altitudes and cooler temperatures, the botanist was optimistic about his expedition up Kinabalu; indeed, he had already promised duplicates of the specimens to specialists back in London, all of them hungry to dissect the root causes of foral carnivory. Stopping for a rest at 5,000 feet, one of Low’s guides directed his attention towards an area teeming with the largest species of all, Nepenthes rajah. Here, the botanist saw an act of consumption so horrifc that it upset the very order of life: in one of the pitcher’s bloated, urn-like stomachs, halfdigested in acidic fuid, was a “drowned rat.”3 Unable to collect that vegetable monster for preservation, Low gathered other specimens of N. rajah, along with their handsomer cousins, N. edwardsiana, to be pressed and dried for herbarium study at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-12

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the Royal Horticultural Society. In their living form, these pitchers appear decidedly phallic: their bulging, veiny bodies spring erect from deceptively delicate fowering vines, each feshy vessel mottled with varied shades of deep reds, purples, and sickly greens. At the top of each pitcher, though, lies its trap. Fringed with hairs, ruffes, or spikes, the pitcher lures unsuspecting animal prey into a paradoxically vaginal, fuid-flled cavern with a sicklysweet smell; once inside, ants, fies, and—in N. rajah’s case, small vermin— fnd themselves trapped, unable to climb back out and sure to face a long, slow death. Broken down by digestive juices and dissolved in rainwater, meat is converted into vital nutrients that secure the plant’s ability to thrive in inhospitable environments. For the plant, this act of violence means life. Through the 1850s, though, few Europeans outside of the East Indies actually saw living pitcher plants. Exotic fora were notoriously diffcult to ship, their temperamental bodies vulnerable to even slight changes in environment—lack of sunlight, salty sea spray, and dank ship holds quickly killed even hardy plants, even those lucky enough to gain passage via glass Wardian cases.4 Instead, most botanists living in Britain or continental Europe relied on herbarium specimens for their classifcatory work, their subjects carefully dried, pressed, and fxed to paper, rendering their succulent, sprawling forms two dimensional: entire forests reduced to ordered fling cabinets. In Kew’s massive herbarium lie two such desiccated specimens of Low’s N. rajah, described as originating on the “Sabah North side of Kina Balou [sic].”5 While one specimen, K000651480, hints at the pitcher’s size, far eclipsing the ruler attached to the sheet’s left-hand side, the other simply offers cuttings of the plant’s fowers, preserved in a perpetual state of bloom. Both specimens, possibly collected from the same plant, have lost the sense of feshy, unsettling corporeality that so captured Low during his time in Borneo. Gone are its “long rusty hairs” and “turgid” body, its “bright crimson” coloring with “irregular spots of purple.”6 There is no sign of partially digested animal matter, let alone a drowned rat. Outside of its home, the pitcher plant seemed starved of the very features that made it so desirable—and reviled—in the frst place. Behind these fattened brown pitcher plants, glued to their paper as though confned, lies a vast network of collection, preservation, and display—an attempt at order that rendered Borneo’s tropical nature graspable, containable, and removable. As both consumer and consumed, carnivorous Nepenthes make literal the extractive deadly double behind botanical collection based on sensible, diligent study.7 Indeed, much of Borneo’s contested history seemed to defy British notions of how diligent study actually worked on the ground. Associated with failed attempts at seizure for both the English and Dutch East India Companies, the island’s rich natural resources, extreme local violence and in-fghting, rampant piracy, an inhospitable “malarial” climate, and even cannibalism, Borneo emerged within the colonial imagination as simultaneously more “luxurious” and “deadly” than other islands across the East Indies.8 Situating the history of the carnivorous pitcher plant within histories of colonial natural history, though, is not intended to deny or obscure the centuries-long, sustained violence performed on black and brown bodies by white colonists and settlers beginning as early as the sixteenth century.9 Rather, the objectifcation of nature as explicitly collectable and extractible—here in the case of one particularly curious genus of plants—stoked profound environmental loss and material destruction even as British and continental European natural history museums, gardens, and herbaria grew rich with specimens. The story of carnivorous pitcher plants, despite their relative adaptability in the face of environmental destruction, is one of ongoing struggles for control and, ultimately, a story of loss. Unraveling entangled narratives of sensitivity, monstrosity,

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Figure 8.1: Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew [RBGK], K00065180. and consumption centered on the carnivorous pitcher plant, I argue that nineteenth century botanical research on the genus in the tropics of Borneo further troubled social and political tensions about what it might mean to know an environment and, ultimately, about whether that environment could ever really be controlled.

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Figure 8.2: Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], RBGK, K00065181.

SENSITIVITY Despite the disturbing and destabilizing implications to the natural order presented by the act of mammalian foral carnivory, the idea that plants experienced sensation—they could feel touch, move, think, and perhaps even actively deceive—had its roots in eighteenth century notions of

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“vegetable sensitivity.”10 Communicating the discovery of the Venus fytrap (Dionaea muscipula) in the swamps of Philadelphia to Carl Linnaeus in 1769, merchant John Ellis made a joke, perhaps in poor taste: “I know that every discovery in nature is a treat to you;” he wrote, “but in this you will have a feast.”11 Referencing a hand-colored engraving of the fowering plant displaying its sharp spikes, lurid red mouths, and a struggling, headless fy, Ellis noted that “each leaf is a miniature fgure of a Rat trap

Figure 8.3: John Ellis, “A Botanical Description of the Dionæa Muscipula, or Venus’s Fly-Trap, a Newly-Discovered Sensitive Plant,” in Directions for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants, from the East-Indies and Other Distant Countries, in a State of Vegetation (London: L. Davis, 1770).

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with teeth; closing in on every fy or other insect, that creeps between its lobes, and squeezing it to Death.”12 Lured in by its delicate white blossoms, unwitting passersby (human or entomological) might mistake its beauty for passivity, only to be quickly snapped up and consumed. These foral acts of deception functioned along gendered, sexualized, and racialized lines, especially when extended to luxurious tropical environments.13 When this deception extended beyond breeding and into its dark double—consumption—already fraught relationship between collectors and their subjects grew particularly tenuous. Linnaeus had, in fact, described the Nepenthes genus years earlier in his classifcatory tome Hortus Cliffortianus, relying on specimens collected in Ceylon and Madagascar.14 Pitcher plants, or “miraculous distilling plants,” had been described by Europeans as early as the seventeenth century, named according to indigenous descriptions based on their vessellike structures.15 Working from the East Indies in the mid-1600s, Georg Eberhard Rumphius included two separate species of Nepenthes (under the genus Cantharifera [tankard-bearer]) in his Herbarium Amboinensis.16 In print if not in practice, however, Linnaeus’ full description of the genus appeared frst. As he later wrote, referencing the grief-relieving drug consumed by Helen in Homer’s Odyssey: If this is not Helen’s Nepenthes, it certainly will be for all botanists. What botanist would not be flled with admiration if, after a long journey, he should fnd this wonderful plant. In his astonishment past ills would be forgotten when beholding this admirable work of the Creator.17 More than a hundred-and-ffty years later, explorer Frederick William Burbidge would echo Linnaeus’ precise phrasing from Mount Kinabalu, fnding himself, after a diffcult climb, surrounded by “luxuriant” specimens of Nepenthes, particularly entranced by the “softest pink” and “crimson flled orifce[s]” of N. villosa.18 “All thought of fatigue and discomfort vanished,” he wrote, “as we gazed on these living wonders of the Bornean Andes!”19 Curiously, the roles of explorer and long-suffering wife collapsed in the pitcher plant’s urns. Questions of what plant sensitivity had to do with plant sensibility— and with sexuality—crystallized on the “sensitive mimosa” (Mimosa pudica) in the context of Joseph Banks’s infamous breadfruit expedition to Tahiti in the 1760s–1770s, described in Whitney Barlow Robles’s chapter of this volume. As historians like Ann Shteir and Janet Browne have convincingly argued, accounts of the sensitive mimosa—whose leaves quiver and respond to human (and other animal) touch—became inseparable from salacious gossip about the celebrity botanist’s sexual morays on this tropical paradise in the South Pacifc.20 As Banks and his crew engaged in coercive and transactional sex with the women indigenous to Tahiti, resulting in countless acts of trade, violence, and later, widespread and devastating disease, the simultaneously “yielding” and “swelling” mimosa growing on the island refected paradoxical ideas of sensitivity and sensibility, referring, in Shteir’s words, to the “senses and physical sensations in the body and also to feelings of an emotional or spiritual kind.”21 These sexual overtones, inextricable from questions of colonial domination over both bodies and the environment, extended beyond sensitive plants and into the pitchers and teeth of carnivorous plants. Conjuring an early image of the vagina dentata, Ellis described the Venus fytrap’s disturbing deception in graphic detail. The plant’s glands, he argued: discharge sweet liquor, tempt the poor animal to taste them: and the instant these parts are irritated by its feet, the two

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lobes rise up, grasp it fast, lock the rows of spines together, and squeeze it to death [. . .] Nor do the lobes ever open again, while the dead animal continues there.22 Despite what reads as an undeniably animalistic act of sexual horror, Ellis linked this carnivory to an unconscious physiological mechanism outside of the realm of sensibility, arguing that nature, having “some view towards its nourishment,” had formed the plant’s leaf joints “like a machine to catch food.”23 Botanists debated the underlying causes for plant sensitivity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, citing everything from vitalism to atmospheric reactions, but one thing was clear: if plants could move, respond, and consume like animals, they might be able to bite back. Pitcher plants occupied a decidedly less overt role in the debate over plant sensitivity in the colonial imagination, in large part because they trapped their prey passively, luring animals in with sweet-smelling nectar and then simply letting them drown, slowly digesting in those same seductive juices. Nevertheless, botanists working in the East Indies seemed to associate pitcher plants’ curious mechanisms with value because of their association with the tropics. Traveling through the Straits of Malacca on his way to Singapore in June of 1819, twenty-four-year-old botanist William Jack described the “seas of glass wind among innumerable islets, clothed in all the luxuriance of tropical vegetation, and basking in the full brilliancy of a tropical sky.”24 Jack described two new species of pitcher plant that he had found amidst this “luxuriance of tropical vegetation”: N. raffesiana and N. ampullaria.25 Intending to describe these pitchers in a manuscript (that he was unable to complete before his death), the botanist noted that “the margin of the cups is inverted in a peculiar manner so as to form a kind of trap,” observing that “the cups are in consequence always found full of insects that have been lured into the snare.”26 Quickly dismissing “superstitious ideas” about the genus held by “the ruder inhabitants of the countries in which they grow” (no more information is given, despite Jack’s fuency in Malay), Jack nevertheless proposed a trap of his own, hoping that his drawings and herbarium specimens “may appear under all the advantages of excellent execution, by way of attracting to the subject of Sumatran botany.”27 Jack’s elision of Singapore with Sumatra was not incidental: by describing the most “curious and remarkable products” in his path, even they grew on another island entirely, the botanist intended to support his patron Sir Thomas Stamford Raffes’ new and tenuous control over the territory of Bengkulu (on Sumatra’s southwest coast) by attracting East India Company funding. Raffes had seized Bengkulu in 1818 as a British stronghold in a predominantly Dutch colonial archipelago, continually advocating that colonists needed to know a region through careful linguistic study, historical research, and, most importantly, natural historical expeditions before they could claim a sustainable place there.28 Upon examining specimens of Nepenthes alongside Jack—who he had poached from the Calcutta Botanic Gardens, recognizing his skills—Raffes emphasized his desire to delineate and publish the genus quickly, describing them as “for novelty, size, and effect, certainly rank[ing] among the beauties of the East,” in an effort to establish botanical dominance in “the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, and wherever the Dutch, who are the Vandals of the East, do not establish themselves to our exclusion.”29 Raffes and Jack were right to worry: Dutch botanists based at the Batavia Botanic Gardens (in northwestern Java) were conducting their own research into pitcher plants across the East Indies, culminating, two decades later, in the frst monograph devoted exclusively to the genus, Pieter Willem Korthals’

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Figure 8.4: Tab. 4285: Nepenthes raffesiana, del. William Hood Fitch (after William Jack, whose original sketches have been lost), in Curtis’s Botanical Magazine 73.3 (1847).

1839 Over het Geslacht Nepenthes.30 Accompanied by seventy richly colored plates, Korthals compared pitcher plants to Ellis’ Venus fytrap and to American trumpet pitchers (Sarracenia), while transcribing indigenous and Malay names for some of his species.31 Traveling through the East Indies, William Jack saw the paradox inherent in making the riches of this colonial landscape visible—the region’s value lay in its (perceived) wildness, which, in turn, would disappear once advertised to eager collectors and colonial developers. Shortly

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Figure 8.5: Nepenthes ampullaria, in Pieter Willem Korthals, Over het Geslacht Nepenthes, in Verhandelingen over de Natuurlijke Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen (Leiden, S. & J. Luchtmans and C. C. van der Hoek, 1839). after announcing the discovery of N. raffesiana and N. ampullaria, the botanist described the supposed cannibalism of indigenous peoples in Sumatra, of which he had launched a full-scale investigation. After polling “some of the most intelligent chiefs” across various religions and regions of the island’s interior, Jack believed “beyond a doubt” that cannibalism, the most “revolting custom” imaginable, was practiced widely; he seemed to delight in the revulsion of describing which body parts were preferred (“the ears,” eaten “either raw with limes and pepper, or drest [sic] as he pleases), the “coolness” with which victims were chosen (“absolutely

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unparalleled”), and the “sense of honour” with which the ritual was practiced.32 Nevertheless, the botanist saw burgeoning signs of the environment’s transformation. Sumatra’s interiors were becoming “well cultivated” with crops like the native camphor (Cinnamomum camphora), the country “abound[ed] with gold” ft for mining, and highland spice plantations offered “an escape” for naturalists.33 It was from one of these plantations that Jack kept himself “busy as a bee” describing his two new species of pitchers collected “just in time,” before the forests “yield to the axe.”34 William Jack was never able to write about his travels through Borneo. Just three years after arriving in the East Indies, the botanist contracted a tropical fever and quickly died—a loss which contributed to Raffes’ uncertainty about the East India Company’s ability to settle in the region long-term.35 Further threats to colonial occupation, inextricable from debates over plant sensitivity, came in reports of the East Indian poison Upas tree (Antiaris toxicara), published alongside Jack’s account of his pitcher plants in Kew’s 1835 Companion to the Botanical Magazine. Noting that “in equatorial regions, the juices of plants” were “distilled by the effects of their never-checked vegetation,” Dutch botanist Johan Baptist Spanoghe described the much-mythologized sensitive plant whose “obnoxious effuvia” had been rumored to kill anyone who intruded on its territory.36 Described alongside Nepenthes in Rumphius’ D’Amboinsche Rariteitkamer, eighteenth century British botanists had argued that the Upas’ environment was “always attended with the greatest danger, as there is a continual perspiration issuing from the tree” that would poison its victims within a matter of minutes.37 While Spanoghe and others later dismissed these miasmatic theories of the plant’s poisonous qualities, observing how indigenous communities carefully used the plant’s sap to poison their arrows, colonial botanists continued to associate sensitive plants of the East Indies with something dangerous and territorial—something overgrown and overdeveloped within the environment itself.

MONSTROSITY Born to a Scottish nurseryman in 1824, Hugh Low had always been raised around plants. He spent his early years working at his family’s growing business, Clapton Nursery, and left for the East Indies at the age of twenty in search of valuable fora to compete with London’s other growing exotic fower businesses like Loddiges and Veitch.38 After spending time in Singapore, like Jack, Low left for an expedition to Labuan (in northwestern Borneo), ultimately spending more than thirty years there. Despite quickly falling in with colonial leadership in the region, the botanist faced devastating losses early on: during the summer of 1851, his wife died from a fever sweeping through Labuan, leaving him alone with their two children. Fearing that local rebels would raid her grave, as they had apparently done in other Christian cemeteries, Low buried Catherine in his garden in the dead of night. Just months later, the botanist left his children with family and embarked on his frst ascent of Mount Kinabalu. In the years leading up to this climb, though, Low had made a name for himself as an expert naturalist with an eye for the exotic plants that would fetch the highest prices back home—orchids, rhododendrons, and pitcher plants. Trained in the local tongue, Malay, and ready to compensate for the right plants, Low hired the most coveted and skilled indigenous collectors working in the area, often poaching them from other colonial botanists.39 Low’s apparent ease of success and seeming disregard for other colonial botanists made him a number of enemies, some of whom later accused the botanist-cum-plantation manager of enslaving Malaysian

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laborers on his rubber felds after he left Borneo for Penang.40 James Motley, a mine manager forced to relocate to Borneo in 1849 after losing his family’s Welsh coal and tin mines, considered his new competitor lazy, arguing that the botanist claimed discoveries and acquisitions belonging to others.41 Motley’s own role in claiming specimen authorship, though, was hardly better. While Low occasionally cited the names of collectors in his journals and letters—chief among them Tekei and Suniat, upon whom he could usually rely for orchids—Motley found himself consistently surprised by local botanical knowledge. Inconsistencies in collectors’ treatment extended to payment for plants: while Low paid experts £2 for each case of Nepenthes brought to him while living in Banjarmasin in 1844, Motley doled out just 16 pence for a basket of “especially valuable objects,” which included pitcher plants and orchids.42 Motley’s thoughts about indigenous botanists echoed the paradoxical views of many colonial naturalists working in the mid-nineteenth century. Grappling, no doubt, with his utter reliance on communities already well acquainted with the surrounding environment, Motley navigated between condescension and explicit racism and surprise that these men exhibited many of the traits so admired in “men of science” back in Britain. “The natives here [in Labuan] are very capital, intelligent fellows,” he wrote, noting that: they soon found out what I wanted, and I owe many of the specimens in fruit to their sharp eyes. When I found a species barren, I just showed it to them, and told them where I expected to fnd the fruit proceeding from, and they rarely failed to fnd it before long; they seemed, too, to identify themselves with the matter, and showed such emulation as to who should be the frst to fnd something new, that it was quite pleasant to be with them.—I might have fancied myself among botanists; these mountaineers, however, are botanists to an extent you would hardly expect among so-called savages.43 Motley considered many of his fellow Brits working in the region, including Low, “ungentlemanly,” “mere gardeners,” and “lazy,” by contrast, believing that few could identify the oftentimes microscopic reproductive organs (“the fruit”) necessary for classifcation, blinded, instead by botanical oddities and bright colors, all of which would entice commercial buyers back home. While Motley never mentioned pitcher plants by name in these critiques, he scoffed at Low’s ascent of Kinabalu as an act of showmanship and praised, instead, the “gentlemanly diligence” attributed to humble, daily labor and close study, especially in a region where discoveries were often communicated independent of the specimens themselves. As Low and Motley continued their collecting in northwestern Borneo, the region itself was fung into political chaos. British and Dutch forces had struggled for control over the well-situated landmass, described by Raffes as “one of the most fertile countries in the world” since the seventeenth century, their efforts continually thwarted by a combination of political instability and the challenging environment that made Borneo so desirable.44 In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the formerly powerful sultanate of Brunei (in northwest Borneo) fell to the newly independent kingdom of Sarawak (encompassing most of Borneo’s west coast), emboldened by its wealth of gold, diamond, antimony, and coal mines largely worked by enslaved indigenous Borneans kidnapped from their homes in the island’s interior. Local rebels exploited the region’s mountains, thick jungles, and poorly regulated ports for frequent raids and attacks on both colonial settlements and

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local Bruneian and Sarawak rulers, intercepting shipments both east and west while destabilizing the rich mines further inland. British and Dutch settlers living in and around Banjarmasin—including Low and Motley—reported on the prevalence of ruthless “headhunters,” often characterized as cannibals, threatening their own collecting missions and of “bloodthirsty” pirates patrolling the openings to the South China and Celebes Seas.45 Indeed, Raffes had tried but failed to wrest control over Borneo’s coastline in 1812, continuing to lament, just a year later, that “our attention is forcibly attracted by the great Island of Borneo, hitherto a blank slate on the chart of the world,” reportedly “abundantly rich in the most valuable natural productions.”46 While Raffes expressed uncertainty about Britain’s ability to control Borneo given its political volatility, James Brooke used such infghting to his advantage. Seeking to quell a Bruneian coup while tamping down local raids, Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddien II ceded rule over the large kingdom of Sarawak (in western Borneo) to the so-called White Rajah in 1842, who, in turn, operated just beyond the bounds of the East India Company.47 Low benefted tremendously from his friendship with Brooke (who involved the botanist in multiple layers of his government), using his connections to attain safe travel through Borneo and up Mount Kinabalu—as the frst European man to accomplish the climb—and to secure reliable shipping for his plant specimens out of Borneo’s ports.48 These shipments of pitcher plants and other valuable exotics to both botanists and commercial nurseries back in Britain funded his ongoing missions in the East Indies while establishing his reputation as one of the most successful collectors on the ground. Low stayed at Brooke’s sprawling, botanically rich estate on the Sarawak River in April of 1845, fancying himself “an intruder of this delightful solitude” amidst a forest far from “any of our race,” the “death like [sic] stillness of the scene” punctuated by shrieks and screams from birds and monkeys constantly reminding him of “the primeval forests on each side of us.”49 Low was far from alone, though. Just two weeks earlier, the botanist had sent multiple cases of plants westward aboard a schooner shipping antimony, and on March 16 Low had received specimens of the Upas tree from Captain Bethune.50 Before leaving Brooke’s estate, Low was careful to seek out and observe the Dyak women of the area, commenting on their coloring and physical features in much the same way he commented on his pitcher plants—with simultaneous attraction and revulsion.51 After years in the jungles of Borneo, the botanist could “scarcely tell what to think of my taste now or how to comment” on the “degrees of beauty” attributed to these women, but he found himself admitting that his “ideas from constantly seeing them have become so vitiated that what we call a pretty woman we look upon with as much pleasure or nearly so as we used at the divine forms at home.”52 Nor was Brooke immune to sexual abuses of his power. As some historians have argued, the ruler’s sexuality came under scrutiny; despite fathering at least one child, Brooke remained unmarried, allegedly engaging in same-sex relationships with young men both in Britain and Borneo.53 Within the frst decade of his rule, reports circulated—many of them coming from traveling naturalists—about the White Rajah’s extreme mistreatment of Bornean laborers, continuing his Bruneian and Sarawak predecessors’ legacy of enslaving indigenous peoples to clear forests, work in mines, and till his land under the guise of piracy and rebellion suppression while keeping most of the wealth for himself.

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Brooke’s reign secured new British control over the rich resources of western Borneo, but also lent speculation, skepticism, and suspicion to the developing mines and plantations increasingly replaced by more stable operations in Hong Kong. By the time the East India Company formally tried (and acquitted) Brooke in 1851, most collectors and naturalists drawn to the regions by its tropical forests, including Low and evolutionary naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, were forced to report on his behavior towards the people they relied on to guide them on expeditions and fnd and collect valuable plants before an imperial commission

Figure 8.6: Nepenthes rajah, in Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862).

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in Singapore.54 Low praised Brooke throughout his thirty-odd years in Borneo, dedicating his work to the ruler and naming numerous species, including the infamous rat-eating Nepenthes rajah in his honor; the botanist privately noted, though, that Brooke’s “kindness to every person about him deserves a more lasting monument than a fower can bestow.”55 Most other naturalists, including Wallace, echoed their support for the controversial fgure. Brooke’s contentious reign over the region continued, and that same year, Low embarked on his frst Nepenthes-rich ascent of Mount Kinabalu. On May 1, 1859, tragedy struck the colonial settlement of Kalangan (in southeast Borneo), where James Motley had been operating a coal mine as a way of funding his collecting missions. A group of Bornean rebels, protesting the rule of Sultan Tamjied Illah, long known for working handin-hand with Dutch forces, attacked the village and its surrounding mines, killing Motley, his wife, and their fve children with the same types of knives considered exemplary of the native arts of Borneo displayed in Kew’s Museum of Economic Botany. Over the course of fve days, the revolutionaries murdered dozens of mine laborers and their families, extending their more populated Dutch-controlled Banjarmasin.56 East India Company offcials confrmed Motley’s death to Kew and the Leeds Museum, where the naturalist had been sending specimens, noting that some of the “insurgents” had been miners themselves. “After a struggle of some duration,” one offcial wrote, Motley “was overcome by numbers, and fell an early victim.”57 Listing a series of other attacks and the “barbarous butcher[ing]” even of Dutch settlers, the company worried that “the intention of the insurgents seems to have been to exterminate the whole of the Europeans in that division of Borneo.”58 These attacks, described in salacious detail in international periodicals, seemed to confrm Raffes’ worst fear: that Borneo, rich as it was, was unstable and uncontrollable as a British colony, even though at least one botanist promised Kew that he would “fnd the large Nepenthes” on his next trip through the mountains.59 Hugh Low, safe from the attacks surrounded by his beloved plants on Borneo’s west coast, continued to write about his foral specimens. Just two weeks after the attack, the botanist reported on “some very marvellous [sic]” new pitcher plants, asking his correspondent to forward him “a copy of the work” should any be published.60

CONSUMPTION Low’s pitcher plants were indeed to be published, thoroughly described and richly illustrated in Joseph Dalton Hooker’s foundational account of the genus, read before the Linnean Society in June of 1859.61 Although more interested in their morphological structure than in their sensationalized behaviors or habitat, Hooker devoted signifcant space to Low’s N. rajah, noting that he had “only two specimens” to work with in London.62 Delineating the specimen collected on Mount Kinabalu, the botanist noted that “this wonderful plant is certainly one of the most striking vegetable productions hitherto discovered,” ranking it alongside Raffes’ animalistic Sumatran corpse fower, Raffesia arnoldii.63 Because of its exceptionalism, the pitcher plant “hence bears the title of my friend Rajah Brooke,” Hooker wrote, “of whose services in its native place it may be commemorative amongst botanists.”64 Accompanied by six black-and-white fold-out plates of fve different species of Nepenthes, Hooker’s paper attempted to capture the curious appearance of genus—N. rajah’s pitcher was “ampullaceous” and its cavern, focked by “two fmbriated wings,” was “covered with long rusty hairs,” while Low’s N. albo-marginata “turgid” body found near the

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Lokotan and Tanjong-poe Rivers was “of a beautiful, rose-color blotched with purple.”65 Describing a specimen of N. melamphora collected by Motley at Banjarmasin, Hooker deemed Korthals’ illustration, long considered a masterpiece, a “half-starved-looking form.”66 Low’s second ascent of Mount Kinabalu, just a year before Motley’s murder and the publication of Hooker’s morphological description of Nepenthes, had proved immensely successful. He returned to Brooke’s statehouse laden with cuttings of what another collector called “a monstrous species”—N. rajah—and set to work pressing dried specimens and

Figure 8.7: Nepenthes rajah, del. Walter Hood Fitch, in Joseph Dalton Hooker, “On the Origin and Development of the Pitchers of Nepenthes, with an Account of Some New Bornean Plants of that Genus,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 22 (1859): 415–24.

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packing up living plants to ship out in Wardian cases.67 Low’s compatriot, Spenser Buckingham St. John, eagerly described their expedition in two volumes, illustrated with four exaggerated and brightly colored lithographed plates depicting N. rajah, N. edwardsiana, N. lowii, and N. villosa.68 Using Low’s journals to recount botanical and zoological details of their trip, St. John embedded descriptions of western Borneo’s most remarkable “vegetable productions” within sometimes sensationalized ethnographic passages, seemingly delighting in how various communities gathered their food and ate. While neither St. John nor Low had ever personally witnessed acts of cannibalism among indigenous Borneans, they recalled stories about a group of Kayans that had “sliced off the fesh” of enemy Malays only to later roast it and eat it while others had performed the act on “some Muka men” executed at court and another community of Jangkang “universally accused of cannibalism.” While the colonists did not believe that Kayans (or other communities of indigenous Borneans) commonly “joined in this disgusting feast,” they did hypothesize that “some of the more ferocious may practise [sic] it to strike terror into their enemies.”69 One of St. John’s more typical tales of consumption immediately followed Low’s discovery of the rat-eating N. rajah. Having collected as many specimens as possible of pitchers at 5,000 feet, the team feasted on “the most sustaining and warming nourishment on the mountains,” freshly caught fowl stewed with tins of preserved soup.70 The next day, Low and St. John conversed with villagers at Kian, noting (as they often did), that “the girls became more friendly and familiar,” noting their blushes upon receiving gifts (mirrors within which to examine themselves) and listing the names of the nine most favored among them, explicitly “mention[ing] their names as specimens.”71 When the team left Kian, they noticed traps set throughout the rainforest—manmade ones this time. The area, St. John wrote, was increasingly being cleared for cultivation, and was “but rarely traversed, except by the rat snarers.” Indeed, the very same mountain rats consumed by Low’s N. rajah were “a favourite article of food among the Kiaus, though they do not eat those which frequent the houses.”72 While no mention was made of how this community interacted with the pitcher plants that, apparently, shared similar tastes, one thing was clear: the peoples of the region were to be observed, described, and ordered along with curious plant specimens, defned by their perceived sexuality signifed by the visible blush.73 While the evolutionary naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace refrained from these sexualized comments during his descriptions of his travels across Borneo in 1855, he associated pitcher plants, which had reached “their greatest development” on the island, with the luxuriance and unfettered growth of the tropics, sometimes giving way to violence.74 In one of his characteristically romantic delineations of what made some environments “essentially tropical,” Wallace described the forests of Borneo where “every mountain-top abounds with them [Nepenthes], running along the ground, or climbing over shrubs and stunted trees; their elegant pitchers hanging in every direction.”75 The naturalist continued to describe Nepenthes’ habitats as flled with parasitic fg trees whose “aerial roots, clasping and ultimately destroying the supporting tree,” demonstrated “an actual struggle for life in the vegetable kingdom, not less fatal to the vanquished than the struggles among animals.”76 While Wallace avoided commenting on foral carnivory, deferring to Hooker and Darwin on the subject in favor of his beloved insects and birds, he did place pitcher plants within this violent and death-flled struggle for life so characteristic of equatorial forests. “In the warm and moist and equable climate of the tropics,” he

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Figure 8.8: Nepenthes edwardsiana, in Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862).

wrote, “each available station is seized upon, and becomes the means of developing new forms of life especially adapted to occupy it.”77 Years before writing his foundational paper on the morphology of pitcher plants, Wallace’s friend Joseph Dalton Hooker observed frsthand the environmental destruction caused by overzealous botanical collecting, much of which was borne from making plants known to paying British and continental European customers. Working in the foothills of the

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Himalayan Mountains during the summer of 1850—having been unable to travel to his desired location, Borneo—Hooker described the fervor with which collectors laid claim to the primeval forests of the east. “I had no idea,” he wrote, “of the richness and variety of the Flora, nor can you ever have of the bulk of tropical plants, which, as I always say, puts the ordinary vasculum hors de combat in an hour.”78 Indeed, with the number of British and Dutch collecting teams at work, the roads were “becoming stripped like the Penang [Malaysian] jungles, and I assure you,” he continued, that “for miles it sometimes looks like a gale had strewed the road with rotten branches and Orchideae [orchids].”79 Gathering this many specimens was impractical, Hooker argued. “We are now packing in much larger paper layer over layer of plants to suffocation,” the botanist lamented, and collecting teams could “neither afford paper, nor room, nor carriage” for their spoils.80 Many plants were simply left on the sides of roads to rot, casualties of the fervor for evermore curious and exotic spoils. Indeed, as colonial settlements grew and railroads, mines, and plantations spread across much of Southeast Asia and the East Indies in the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of botanists expressed concern over the destruction of the forests that they depended on for specimens, even as they benefted from and contributed to this infrastructural expansion. Echoes of forests being “picked clean” sounded in accounts written by the very men doing the “picking;” St. John and Low, for instance, complained of “fne trees felled by the natives” in search of camphor to sell to colonists, noting that “this product can only be obtained by destroying the tree” while lamenting over its “wastefulness” and violence.81 Compared to other islands in the East Indies, though, Borneo remained relatively uncontrollable, at least in the eyes of the East India Company. The island’s mines languished and many company servants, including Hugh Low, took on more lucrative positions either east or west, and James Brooke continued his uneasy reign over Sarawak until his death in 1868, when the kingdom fell into the hands of a string of similarly controversial family successors, the “White Rajah Dynasty,” as stories of cannibalism, headhunting, and piracy continued to circulate. Fiction blurred with fact in tales told about the “wild island of Borneo” from naturalists’ travelogues to horticultural guides and periodicals, but the carnivorous pitcher plant and, especially, N. rajah, continued to grip the botanical imagination as symbolic of the region’s double-sided luxuriance and violence.82 Nothing so big and so wonderful could grow without something monstrous within.

CONCLUSION By the 1870s, pitcher plants could be found growing, albeit in limited numbers, at botanical gardens and commercial nurseries across Britain and continental Europe. Improved Wardian cases and shipping techniques (aided by shorter oceanic journeys aboard steamships) had ensured the successful introduction of multiple species of Nepenthes to hothouses, and horticulturalists began experimenting seriously with hybridizing new varieties. An 1872 edition of the popular Gardeners’ Chronicle reported on ten species of pitchers and four new hybrids growing in the hothouses at Veitch Nurseries, accompanied by a rare page-sized illustration of “Messrs. Veitch’s Nepenthes House” featuring overfowing rows of potted and hanging specimens.83 While Veitch boasted “several species from Borneo and elsewhere”—Borneo, it was argued, held the richest specimens— the nursery had not yet grown the two species “which surpass in beauty any now in cultivation,” N. rajah and N. edwardsiana.84 Gardens competed for these desired species fercely, sending evermore qualifed (and highly

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funded) collectors out to Borneo and the rest of the East Indies, working on the margins of the East India Company. One of those commercial collectors was Frederick William Burbidge, whose “thoughts of fatigue and discomfort vanished” as he encountered the pitchers of the “Bornean Andes.”85 Knowing that by the time he arrived in Borneo in 1877 “all attempts to introduce them alive into European gardens had failed,” Burbidge devoted himself to the cause, devoting pages to describing where “the great Nepenthes Rajah grew luxuriantly,” their “gigantic urns” flled with “the remains of ants, beetles, and other insectlife.” The collector was disappointed not to observe mammalian carnivory for himself, but capitalized on Low’s account in publicizing his own work on the species.86 Burbidge, a friend of Joseph Dalton Hooker, published widely on the cultivation of tropical plants, amassing a loyal following of horticulturalists who closely followed his detailed instructions on how to maintain moisture and acidity by packing pitcher plants in moss, how to dry and press specimens for the herbarium by flling their “cavities” with sand, and how to determine which species “luxuriate best in a constantly humid atmosphere.”87 Pitcher plants were going commercial, and nurseries stood to proft in romanticizing and sensationalizing their exoticism. Despite pitcher plants’ growth in British hothouses, botanists still puzzled over the mechanisms that allowed them to consume animals. Indeed, even Burbidge noted in 1874 that “opinion [was] pretty equally divided as to whether they are really carnivorous or not.”88 Joseph Dalton Hooker, still the expert on the genus, experimented with specimens from his quarters at Kew. Feeding scraps of meat, eggs, and other leftovers to his pitchers, the botanist noted that the genus’ “appetite for cartilage [was] simply prodigious.”89 Two days after feeding “a lump of [animal cartilage] as big as your fnger nail” to one of his specimens, Hooker observed that “not the slightest trace of putrefaction” remained, and that the chewy, undesirable meat had been reduced to a “lovely jelly.”90 Hooker and other botanists debated over whether the fuid in pitchers was analogous to the acidic digestive fuids of animals, measuring pepsin levels and concluding that the clear liquid was indeed acidic, even in “virgin pitchers” that had not yet consumed fesh.91 Arguing that pitchers’ digestive fuid was different from the “copious honey-secretion” that acted as a “decoy” to lure unsuspecting prey into its trap, Hooker noticed that his specimens starved in his “cold room” unless manually fed—the plants failed to produce this deceptive dew below a certain temperature, and prey simply passed traps by.92 The heat of the tropics, even if artifcially produced in a hothouse, was necessary for their carnivory to work. While Charles Darwin largely excluded Nepenthes from his 1875 Insectivorous Plants, deferring to his friend Hooker on the genus, he agreed that the pitchers performed an “act of true digestion,” which allowed them to survive in the “very poor soil” of the tropics; this mechanism, Darwin argued, had been “perfected through natural selection.”93 The question of how plants (and humans) simultaneously adapted to their environments and were indicative of their environments had, of course, been raised in eighteenth century debates over acclimatization, sensitivity, and sensibility, but botanists in the second half of the nineteenth century largely discussed the question in relation to breeding. Key, here, was how to reproduce tropical environments in the cold damp of Britain—in how to adjust humidity levels and degrees of sunlight, in tweaking the acidity of soils to coddle pitcher plants into producing their “honey secretion” that would draw in their prey. Cheaper and more reliable glass brought improved Wardian cases into grasp, allowing upper- and middle-class botanical devotees alike to bring tiny, enclosed, constructed versions of

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tropical environments into their homes, where they could marvel over pitchers’ provocative appearance and experiment with breeding them on their own.94 Even from within the safety of enclosed glass cases, carnivorous pitcher plants crossed the boundaries of foral normalcy in the nineteenth century imagination. That a plant should consume insects—or even rats— upended the fragile order of life, suggesting a radical rethinking not just of how to defne vegetable sensitivity but of how, and whether, the lush and dangerous environment of Borneo could be controlled. Reexamining herbarium specimens K000651480 and K000651481, those desiccated samples of Hugh Low’s rat-eating Nepenthes rajah, these challenges of order and description are made visible. The specimens’ rich colors and suggestive hairs have faded into a dark brown, and the thick, feshy pitchers that defned the genus have been fattened and made fragile. Its honey secretions have long dried up and no evidence of animal victims can be found. Look closer, though, and something else becomes visible: despite their collector’s attempt at reducing these symbols of the Bornean environment to paper, Nepenthes rajah resists. Fragments of the plant’s urn-like trap have cracked and broken off, escaping to the bottom of some shipping crate or to the foor of the Kew herbarium, only to be swept away and lost. The pitcher’s vines and leaves and fowers struggle against carefully placed glue and banding, rippling the paper underneath and creating shadows in their wake. The pitcher plant’s corporeality cannot be neatly confned or ordered and cannot be rendered truly two dimensional. The multitudes of their environment cannot be reduced to a single herbarium sheet.

NOTES 1 Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests of the Far East, vol. 1 (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1862), 317. 2 December 5, December 18, and December 23, 1844, Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844–March 1846 Mss, RBGK. 3 St. John, Life in the Forests, 327. 4 Wardian (or “closely glazed/double glazed”) cases, invented by physician Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward in the 1840s, dramatically improved plants’ chances of surviving transoceanic journeys. These cases were relatively expensive and in short supply, though, and hardly guaranteed a safe arrival. Many specimens, including pitcher plants, arrived at their fnal locations rotted, dried out, or covered in fungus, pests, and shards of broken glass. For Ward’s account of these cases, see: Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, On the Growth of Plants in Closely Glazed Cases (London: John van Voorst, 1842). 5 Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew [RBGK], K00065180; Nepenthes rajah Hook.f. [family Nepenthaceae], RBGK, K00065181. 6 St. John, Life in the Forests, 326, 328. 7 For excellent histories of what “diligent study” looked like in nineteenth century natural history and how this shaped ideas of credibility (especially among upper- and upper-middle-class white men), see: Richard Bellon, “Inspiration in the Harness of Daily Labor: Darwin, Botany, and the Triumph of Evolution, 1859–1868,” Isis 102 (2011): 392–420; ibid., A Sincere and Teachable Heart: SelfDenying Virtue in British Intellectual Life, 1736–1859 (Leiden: Brill, 2014); Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: The Power of Place (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Jim Endersby, Imperial Nature: Joseph Hooker and the Practices of Victorian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 8 For developing theories of tropicality in the early modern period and the nineteenth century, often related to questions of acclimatization, see: Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “Measurable Difference: Botany, Climate, and the Gardener’s Thermometer in Eighteenth Century France,” in Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce,

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and Politics in the Early Modern World, ed. Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 270–86; Rohan Deb Roy, Malarial Subjects: Empire, Medicine and Nonhumans in British India, 1820–1909 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Luciana Martins and Felix Driver, “The Struggle for Luxuriance: William Burchell Collects Tropical Nature,” in Tropical Visions in an Age of Empire, ed. Luciana Martins and Felix Driver (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 59–78; Michael Osborne, Nature, the Exotic, and the Science of French Colonialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); and Nancy Leys Stepan, Picturing Tropical Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Very little historical scholarship has been devoted to Borneo and even its most prominent kingdoms, Labuan and Sarawak, especially compared to other islands and territories in the Indonesian Archipelago and surrounding region. For broader histories on natural history in the eighteenth and nineteenth century East Indies, some of them comparative with other colonial regions, see: David Arnold, The Tropics and the Travelling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1836 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the ‘Improvement’ of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Andrew Goss, The Floracrats: StateSponsored Science and the Failure of the Enlightenment in Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011); Simon Schaffer, James Delbourgo, Kapil Raj, and Lissa Roberts, eds., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach: Science History Publications, 2009); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Anne Laura Stoler, Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); and Anna Winterbottom, Hybrid Knowledge in the Early East India Company World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). For earlier histories of where plants ft into (or failed to ft into) the order of life or the Great Chain or Being, see: Sachiko Kusakawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Brian Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). John Ellis to Carl Linnaeus, September 23, 1769, in John Ellis, Direction for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants, from the East-Indies and Other Distant Countries, in a State of Vegetation (London: L. Davis, 1770). Caption to “Dionaea Muscipula, Venus’s Fly-Trap,” ill. James Roberts, in John Ellis, Directions (1770). For more on foral deception, especially among “exotic” plants, see Jim Endersby, Orchid: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). Carl Linnaeus, Hortus Cliffortianus (Amsterdam, 1737), 431. See, for instance, Jakob Breyne, “Bandura zingalensium,” Prodromus Fasciculi Rariorum Plantarum, vol. 1 (Gedani, 1680), 18; John Ray, “Bandura cingalensium,” Historia Plantarum, vol. 1 (London, 1686), 721–2; and Hermann Niklas Grims, “Planta Mirabilis Destillatroia,” Miscellanea Curiosa sive Ephemeridum (Nuremberg, 1683), 363. This source’s publication, as has been noted elsewhere, was delayed for almost ffty years after a series of catastrophic losses. Georg Eberhard Rumphius, Herbarium Amboinensis, vol. 5 (Amsterdam, 1747). For more on Rumphius’ collecting and naming practices in the East Indies, see: Genie Yoo, “Wars and Wonders: The Inter-Island Network of Georg Everhard Rumphius,” British Journal for the History of Science 51, no. 4 (2018): 559–84. Carl Linnaeus, qtd. in Harry J. Veitch, “Nepenthes,” Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society 21, no. 1 (1897): 229. Frederick William Burbidge, The Gardens of the Sun: Or a Naturalist’s Journal on the Mountains and in the Forests and Swamps of Borneo and the Sulu Archipelago (London: John Murray, 1880), 100. Ibid., 100–101. Later that night, faced with a scarcity of water at his basecamp, Burbidge came back to living Nepenthes from which he “was able to augment

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[his] supply by carefully pouring off the rain water from a rather liberal under stratum of fies, ants, and other insect debris.” Ann Shteir, “Sensitive, Bashful, and Chaste? Articulating the Mimosa in Science,” in Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 169–95; Janet Browne, “Botany in the Boudoir and Garden: The Banksian Context,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 143–72; Alan Bewell, “On the Banks of the South Sea: Botany and Sexual Controversy in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Visions of Empire: Voyages, Botany, and Representations of Nature, ed. David Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 173–93; Fredrika Tuete, “The Loves of the Plants: Or, the Cross-Fertilization of Science and Desire at the End of the Eighteenth Century,” Huntington Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2000): 319–45; and Patricia Fara, Sex, Botany and Empire: The Story of Carl Linnaeus and Joseph Banks (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2003). Note that sexualized depictions of the Mimosa, like Nepenthes, encompassed both (constructed) female sensitivity (shrinking from the probing touches of men in modesty) and male sensitivity (swelling to fll the hands of awaiting women). Ann Shteir, “Sensitive, Bashful and Chaste? Articulating the Mimosa in Science,” in Science in the Market Place: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 169–95, esp.181. John Ellis to Carl Linnaeus, September 23, 1769, in Directions (1770), 37. Ellis to Linnaeus, Directions, 37. Emphasis mine. William Jack, June 20, 1819, “Memoir of the Late Mr. William Jack,” Companion to the Botanical Magazine 1 (1835): 131. For an edited version of Jack’s full description of these (and other) Nepenthes, see: “Description of Malayan Plants,” Companion to the Botanical Magazine 1 (1835): 269–72. William Jack Mss [Description of Raffesia, Dryobalanops, Euthemis and Nepenthes], 1819, Natural History Museum (South Kensington), Botany Manuscripts, MSS JAC. William Jack, “Description of Malayan Plants” (1835), 269; ibid., “Memoir of William Jack” (1835), 132. Many of Raffes’ letters were edited and republished by his wife in: Sophia Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Services of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffes, FRS &c (London: John Murray, 1830). Raffes himself published a number of natural historical manuscripts, many of them focused on ethnology and zoology. See, for instance: Thomas Stamford Raffes, The History of Java (London: East India Company, 1817); and ibid., “Descriptive Catalogue of a Zoological Collection, Made on Account of the Honourable East India Company, in the Island of Sumatra and its Vicinity,” Transactions of the Linnean Society 13 (1821): 239. Thomas Stamford Raffes to Nathaniel Wallich, June 17, 1819, in Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Service, 382; and Thomas Stamford Raffes to Colonel Addenbrooke, June 10, 1819, in Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Service, 381. Emphasis in original. Pieter Willem Korthals’ monograph was incorporated into the famous Dutch naturalist Coenraad Jacob Temminck’s work, giving it considerable reach and traction. While British botanists like William Jackson Hooker, then Director of Kew, claimed that they struggled to read the book’s “high Dutch,” it circulated widely as the authoritative work on the genus. Korthals described nine species of pitcher plants. Pieter Willem Korthals, “Over het Geslacht Nepenthes,” in Verhandelingen over de Natuurlijke Geschiedenis der Nederlandsche Overzeesche Bezittingen (Leiden: S. & J. Luchtmans and C. C. van der Hoek, 1839). Korthals noted that N. boschiana were known to Bornean islanders as Daoensompitan; N. phyllamphora were known to Malays and Hindus on Sumatra’s west coast as Gada-Gada or Gindi-Gindi (translating roughly to “water vessel”); N. gymanphora were known to Malays as Daoen-gindi and to Sundanese as Pakoe-Sorok-Radja; N. madagascariensis were known to Malagasi as Poenga and in Malay (on Madagascar) as Boenga; and N. distillatoria were known on the island of Ceylon in Sanskrit as Bandoera.

Chapter 8 • Pitcher Plant 253 32 William Jack, February 29, 1820, “Memoir of the Late Mr. William Jack,” Companion to the Botanical Magazine 1 (1835): 133–4. 33 Ibid., 135. 34 Ibid., 136; 131. 35 See, for instance, Thomas Stamford Raffes to Thomas Horsfeld, April 20, 1823. British Library, India Offce Records & Private Papers, Mss Photo Eur 070, f. 69–83. 36 “Extract of a Letter from M. Spanoghe . . . With Some Account of the Upas Tree Discovered there by that Gentleman,” Companion to the Botanical Magazine 1 (1835): 311. 37 J. M. Foersch, “Natural History of the Bohon-Upas, or Poison Tree of the Island of Java,” The London Magazine 52 (1783): 512. See also: Louis Auguste Deschamps, “Notice sur le Pohon-Upas ou Abre a Poison,” in Annales des Voyages, ed. C. Malte-Brun (Paris, 1809); William Marsden, History of Sumatra (London, 1783); William Marsden to Thomas Stamford Raffes, April 11, 1810. British Library, India Offce Library & Records, MSS Eur D742.2 and Thomas Horsfeld to Thomas Stamford Raffes, March 21, 1812. British Library, India Offce Library & Records, MSS Eur f. 148.46. For a bibliographic history of the plant, see: John Bastin, “New Light on J. N. Foersch and the Celebrated Poison Tree of Java,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 58, no. 2 (1985): 25–44. 38 For more on Low’s early years, see: Charles Cowan, “Sir Hugh Low, GCMG (1824–1905),” Journal for the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History 5, no. 1 (1968): 327–43. 39 Low’s success, in part, was largely due to his connections with other colonial offcers, who helped him form a support network on the ground while ensuring that most of his plants (usually packed in Wardian cases) made it aboard ships heading west. For details on Low’s day to day collecting routine, see: Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844—March 1846 Mss, RBGK. 40 It is unclear whether this claim is actually true. Low was responsible for establishing a number of mines in Borneo and plantations (mostly rubber) in Malaysia, where he moved in 1877, but he also actively and vocally admonished slavery and criticized his Dutch colleagues for their treatment of workers. While slavery was offcially abolished in most British colonies in 1833, plantations and mines were regulated unevenly and laborers were still forced to work and migrate, often living and dying under harsh conditions, well after the Slavery Abolition Act. 41 James Motley to William Jackson Hooker, June 10, 1855 [Martapora], in Hooker’s Journal of Botany 2 (1855): 293; Hugh Low to Lewis Llewelyn Dillwyn, June 12, 1851, John Randall Private Catalogue, f10. For a brief biography of Motley, see: John Bastin, “James Motley and His ‘Contributions to the Natural History of Labuan’,” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 60, no. 2 (1987): 43–54. Motley detailed his career in the region in his book written with cryptogamist Lewis Llewellyn Dillwyn, Contributions to the Natural History of Labuan, and the Adjacent Coasts of Borneo (London: John van Voorst, 1855). 42 James Motley to William Mitten, “Extracts of Letters from the Malayan Islands,” October 9, 1854, in Hooker’s Journal of Botany 6 (1854): 79–80. Note that both Motley and Low were considered successful and reliable to their colleagues back in Britain and both of their specimens were incorporated into collections at Kew, the Royal Horticultural Society, and commercial nurseries. 43 Motley to Mitten, “Extracts of Letters,” (1854): 79–80. 44 Thomas Stamford Raffes to Lord Minto, 1812, in Sophia Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Service (1830), 54. Raffes outlines his role in (unsuccessfully) negotiating territory from the Dutch and from Borneo’s shifting sultanates in a series of letters to Lord Minto, reprinted in Chapter 3 of Memoir of the Life and Public Service (1830), 54–109. 45 A number of recent texts have capitalized on this nineteenth century characterization of Borneo as simultaneously violent and rich in natural resources, painting a romanticized portrait of the region as particularly “wild” compared to the rest of Southeast Asia. See, for instance: Eric Hansen, Stranger in the Forest: On Foot Across Borneo (New York: Vintage, 1988); John Wassner, Espresso

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with the Headhunters: A Journey through the Jungles of Borneo (Chichester: Summersdale, 2001); and Stephen Holley, A White Headhunter in Borneo (Kota Kinabalu: Natural History Publications, 2004). Thomas Stamford Raffes to William Ramsay [Secretary to the Court of Directors of the East India Company], January 1813, in Sophia Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Service (1830), 142. Among many reasons given for Raffes’ failure to secure the posts was the view that the region required excessive fnancial investment with unpredictable and unstable yields. While western Borneo was known to be incredibly rich in natural resources (and especially in minerals), Raffes expressed uncertainty about their lack of on-the-ground knowledge about Borneo’s interior and about the already fraught relations between local Muslim rulers, “rebellious Dayaks” and the “slavish and humiliating manner” of trade between Borneo, China, and Thailand. Raffes, Memoir of the Life and Public Service (1830), 61. A great deal has been written about James Brooke and the “White Rajah” dynasty that ruled Sarawak and its surrounding region (the kingdom’s borders were blurry and changed over the course of the nineteenth century), including fctionalized accounts dramatizing their rule and, again, romanticizing the “wilds” of Borneo. Brooke apparently inspired characters in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim (London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900); Rudyard Kipling’s, “The Man Who Would be King,” in The Phantom Rickshaw and Other Eerie Tales (Allahabad: A. H. Wheeler & Co., 1888); and Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1855). For historiographical accounts of Brooke and his descendants, see: Emily Hahn, James Brooke of Sarawak: A Biography (London: A. Barker, 1953); Bob Reese, The White Rajahs of Sarawak: A Borneo Dynasty (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 2004); B. Stuchtey, “James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak: By the Character and Construction of Victorian Colonial Heroes,” Historische Zeitschrift 298, no. 3 (2014): 625–52. Brooke also published a number of his own accounts of his reign. See: Spenser St. John, The Life of Sir James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, from His Personal Papers and Correspondence (London: W. Blackwood, 1879); James Brooke, Narrative of Events in Borneo and Celebes, Down to the Occupation of Labuan (London: John Murray, 1848); and James Brooke, A Letter from Borneo: With Notices of the Country and its Inhabitants (London: L. & G. Seeley, 1842). Low’s traveling companion, Spenser St. John, recounts dozens of incidents of Brooke intervening on their behalf. In one particularly disturbing passage indicating Brooke’s reach throughout Borneo’s forested interior, St. John writes that, in the rural village of “Grung,” Low and St. John noticed something exhibiting “remarkable proof of the effects that have attended the change of system from native lawlessness to English superintendence.” There were few girls in the village between the ages of ten and ffteen, owing to the fact that “before Sir James Brooke held the reins of Government the little female children were seized for slaves and concubines by the Rajahs and Malay chiefs.” Now that Brooke was in power, “the houses are crowded with interesting girls of nine and younger.” St. John, Life in the Forests, 150. April 2, 1845, Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844–March 1846 Mss, RBGK. March 15, 1845 and March 16, 1845, Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844–March 1846 Mss, RBGK. Note that while most eighteenth and nineteenth century explorers referred to indigenous non-Muslim Borneans as “Dyaks” or “Dayaks” (and many still do), the term is now considered outdated and reductive. Muslims living in Borneo (many of them from elsewhere in the East Indies) were typically referred to generically as “Malays.” Because many of the people men like Low interacted with would have traveled (voluntarily or involuntarily) to live and work in or near colonial settlements, it is diffcult to trace these people’s original communities and ethnic identities. Low rarely recorded the names of the people he interacted with or relied on in collecting. Early May 1845, Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844–March 1846 Mss, RBGK.

Chapter 8 • Pitcher Plant 255 53 See, for instance, Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990) and J. H. Walker, “This Peculiar Acuteness of Feeling: James Brooke and the Enactment of Desire,” Borneo Research Bulletin 29 (1998): 148–89. For more on the connections between sexuality, violence, and colonial power, see the classic works: Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); Felicity Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995). 54 For details of the trial, see: The Evidence Produced Before the Commissioners Charged with the Enquiry into the Facts Relating to Sir James Brooke (Singapore: Alfred Simonides, 1854). Low’s name was mentioned frequently throughout the trial as a witness to many of Brooke’s movements and actions. 55 20 November 1845, Hugh Low’s Borneo Journal, November 1844–March 1846 Mss, RBGK. Joseph Dalton Hooker announced the naming of Nepenthes rajah in “On the Origin and Development of the Pitchers of Nepenthes, with an Account of Some New Bornean Plants of that Genus,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 22 (1859): 415–24. 56 While this uprising has largely been left out of more signifcant revolts in Bornean history, a short account can be found in: Isaac H. Burkill, “The Circumstances Attending the Murder in 1859, of the Botanist James Motley,” Journal of the Straits Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 79 (1918): 37–38; and in contemporary news reports in The Singapore Free Press, June 2, 1859 and June 30, 1859. 57 Alexander Fraser to Thomas Motley, May 23, 1859, in “Biographical Note, with Extracts from the Correspondence, of the Late Mr. James Motley Who Was Massacred at Kalangan, May 1, 1859,” Annals and Magazine of Natural History 4 (1859): 316. 58 Ibid., 316–17. For further confrmation of Motley’s death, including instructions on how to distribute his remaining specimens, see: Samuel Simpson to William Jackson Hooker, August 6, 1859. RBGK, Directors’ Correspondence 56, f. 295–6. 59 Willem Hendrik de Vriese to William Jackson Hooker, July 28, 1860. RBGK, Directors’ Correspondence 57, f. 241. De Vriese included more information about Motley’s death, disclosing that the botanist had been “beaten to death” but had warned his family of the attack; nevertheless, they were “hacked to death; nothing was saved.” He reported that “the Dayak are hanged if the Dutch capture them” and that many had fed to the mountains (where he hoped to fnd N. rajah), and that the Dutch had deposed the current sultan, annexed Banjarmasin, and were sending ships and troops out to “ensure order.” 60 Hugh Low to Joseph Dalton Hooker, May 15, 1859. RBGK, Directors’ Correspondence 218, f. 180. 61 Joseph Dalton Hooker, “On the Origin and Development,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 22 (1859): 415–24. 62 Ibid., 421. 63 Ibid. The giant Sumatran corpse fower, Raffesia arnoldii, had been identifed by the botanist Joseph Arnold under Raffes’ patronage in 1818. After Arnold’s premature death from a tropical fever, Raffes had hired William Jack to work more closely with the genus. Raffes considered the work on Raffesia and Nepenthes the fnest produced by “his” botanists during their time in the East Indies. For more on the corpse fower, see: Robert Brown, “An Account of a New Genus of Plants, Named Raffesia,” Transactions of the Linnean Society of London 13 (1821): 201–34. For a historical account of Arnold and the corpse fower, see: Elaine Ayers, “Noble Rot: On Joseph Arnold and the Discovery of the Corpse Flower,” Cabinet Magazine 64 (2018): 71–78. 64 Hooker, “On the Origin and Development,” 421. 65 Ibid., 423. 66 Ibid.

256 Part II • Felt 67 Thomas Oxley to William Jackson Hooker, September 4, 1849. RBGK, Directors’ Correspondence 54, f. 373. 68 Spenser Buckingham St. John, Life in the Forests, vol. 1 (1862), opp. 317; 327; 336; 337. 69 Ibid., 123–4. 70 Ibid., 331. 71 Ibid., 331–2. 72 Ibid., 333. 73 For more on the blush as a colonial signifer of constructed femininity, race, and sexuality, see: Angela Rosenthal, “Visceral Culture: Blushing and the Legibility of Whiteness in Eighteenth-Century Portraiture,” Art History 27, no. 4 (2004): 563–92 and Mechthild Fend, Fleshing Out Surfaces: Skin in French Art and Medicine, 1650–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2017). 74 Alfred Russel Wallace, The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Organ-utan and the Bird of Paradise (London: Macmillan, 1869), 169. 75 Ibid., 129. 76 Ibid., 131. 77 Ibid. 78 Joseph Dalton Hooker to William Jackson Hooker, June 21, 1850, in Leonard Huxley and Hyacinth Symonds Hooker, eds., Life and Letters of Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1918), 335–6. A vasculum was a metal collecting box used to temporarily store and transport plants in the feld. 79 Joseph Dalton Hooker to William Jackson Hooker, June 21, 1850, in Life and Letters, vol. 1 (1918), 337. 80 Joseph Dalton Hooker to William Jackson Hooker, June 21, 1850, in Life and Letters, vol. 1 (1918), 338. 81 Spenser St. John, Life in the Forests, vol. 2 (1863), 271–2. 82 See, for instance, The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, June 23, 1862, 599–600; and Mordecai Cubitt, Freaks and Marvels of Plant Life; or, Curiosities of Vegetation (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1882), 99–121. The pitcher plant was further popularized by the explorer and artist Marianne North, who “discovered” a new species of pitcher plant on an expedition to Borneo, N. northiana. North’s painting of the specimen is now on display in the Marianne North Gallery at Kew. For her account of her discovery, see: Marianne North, Recollections of a Happy Life: Being the Autobiography of Marianne North, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1893), 250–2. 83 “On the Culture of Nepenthes at Glasnevin,” The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, March 16, 1872: 359–60 and “The Cultivated Species of Nepenthes,” The Gardeners’ Chronicle and Agricultural Gazette, April 20, 1872: 540–2. 84 “The Cultivated Species,” Gardeners’ Chronicle, April 20, 1872: 540. 85 Frederick William Burbidge, Gardens of the Sun (London: J. Murray, 1880), 100. 86 Ibid., 100, 279. 87 Frederick William Burbidge, Domestic Floriculture: Window Gardening and Floral Decorations (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874), 189, 282, 287. See also: Cool Orchids and How to Grow Them (London: R. Hardwicke, 1874) and Cultivated Plants, Their Propagation and Improvement (Edinburgh: William Blackwood & Sons, 1877). 88 Burbidge, Domestic Floriculture, 287. 89 Joseph Dalton Hooker to Charles Darwin, August 17, 1874, Life and Letters, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1918), 157. 90 Ibid. 91 Ibid. 92 Ibid. 93 Charles Darwin, Insectivorous Plants (London: John Murray, 1875), 363. Darwin only mentions Nepenthes three times in this book but corresponded at length about the genus with Joseph Dalton Hooker over the course of decades. Hooker, for his part, asked Darwin about the extent to which he would cover the genus before the book’s publication, noting that “if you have the smallest objection to either Nepenthes or Drosera [which Darwin did write about at length] being described pray say so, as I would rather send you all Nepenthes matter for you to append or incorporate, than appear to flch.” Joseph Dalton

Chapter 8 • Pitcher Plant 257 Hooker to Charles Darwin, July 18, 1873, in Life and Letters, vol. 1 (1918), 156. Darwin, for his part, played a hand in rejecting another theory on pitcher plant digestion proposed to the Linnean Society by gynecologist Lawson Tait in 1875. For transcriptions of these letters and descriptions of why the paper was rejected, including descriptions of Tait’s work as “trash,” “rubbish,” and “accursed,” see: Joseph Dalton Hooker to Charles Darwin, January 28, 1876, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 10371; Charles Darwin to George Gabriel Stokes, April 21, 1876, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 10462; Charles Darwin to Lawson Tait, April 24, 1876, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 10470; Lawson Tait to Charles Darwin, April 25, 1876, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 10473; Charles Darwin to William Thiselton-Dyer, April 26, 1876, Darwin Correspondence Project, Letter no. 10477; and Charles Darwin to Lawson Tait, May 5, 1876, Letter no. 10497. 94 For more on the proliferation of glass cultures in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, see: David Elliston Allen, “Tastes and Crazes,” in Cultures of Natural History, ed. Nicholas Jardine, James Secord, and Emma Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 394–407; and Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

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PART III

Preserved

Chapter 9

Leaf The Twofold Materiality of Early Modern Herbals Julia Heideklang

“The following section explores the tensions between the types of books that aimed to create a paper garden or a memory garden at home and those intended to be portable, to be taken by readers into the physical garden outside.” Page 269

VISUALIZATION 9 Base of the book: Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (1542): Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica, BL4A14 (Fondo Webb), p. 206–207, used by permission of the University of Florence. People and garden: Wilton Garden, plate 1, Hortus Penbrochianus (MET, 27.66.2(1)). Metropolitan Museum of Art. People and garden 2: Balthasar Florisz van Berckenrode. This visualization blends the herbal and the garden into a hybrid natural thing. It reminds us of the intertwined spaces of book and garden, which are not only linked by metaphors, but also by the plants collected and inserted by readers. In front of the seemingly permanent illustrations of the garden, we see the leaf, which represents the ephemerality of such traces and the imminent danger of loss in the archive and nature itself.

Abstract: Thinking about plants erases the temporal boundaries of human histories, eliding generations and connecting scholars millennia apart through their shared reckoning with the material world. This chapter explores the material aspects of early modern herbals and combines these observations with the focus on early modern paratexts or the visual and verbal elements, including the dedication that open a book and contextualize its contribution. The frst part revisits the long-established connection between book and garden through three widely read European authors: Leonhart Fuchs (1501–1566), Andrea Mattioli (1501–1577), and Andrea Cesalpino (1524/25–1603). Using a comparative network analysis, it shows the strategic choices and collaborative effects of condensed disciplinary historiographies embedded in authorial paratexts. This approach offers new insights into how these paratextual strategies helped construct and shape the scientifc community and botanical reading practices. Finally, we turn back from the textual analysis to the reading traces found in a small sample of remaining copies. These ambiguous material remains suggest how early modern readers used their botanical texts in practice. The twofold materiality of early modern herbals becomes multifold as the printed paper gardens are transformed into hybrid natural things.

During the early modern period, the number of plants described increased dramatically. When botanists such as Leonhart Fuchs, William Turner (1508–1568), Pietro Andrea Mattioli, and Andrea Cesalpino wrote herbals containing hundreds of plant descriptions, they embarked on a project of dual materiality. As they detailed the properties of fowers, herbs, and trees, they recorded their observations in a botanical output. The paper on which they wrote, the glue that brought coherence to the folios, and even the book’s cover board were themselves made of leaves, wood, and plant sap, a fact well-known to the authors and their contemporary readers. From the start, a material connection linked botanical prose and the plants it described. This materiality also linked the concepts of book and garden, of paper slips and dried plant specimens.1 While books organized excerpts and quotes from ancient and contemporary authorities, gardens collected natural things from various places, arranged them in a new plot of land, and cultivated them therein. Early modern gardens provided a space for thinking and experience. Many historians have linked burgeoning botanical knowledge to gardens starting in Italy in the 1540s with the establishment DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-14

266 Part III • Preserved

Figure 9.1: Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (1542): Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica, BL4A14 (Fondo Webb), p. 206/207, used by permission of the University of Florence.

of Europe’s frst botanical gardens the Orto botanico di Pisa, the Orto botanico di Padua, and the Orto Botanico di Firenze. These gardens contained tangible nature while simultaneously serving as a metaphorical three-dimensional space of knowledge creation.2 As botany and natural history gained importance and popularity throughout the sixteenth century, different garden forms served as reference points for botanical authors. These gardens were increasingly flled with plant specimens collected by a broad network of agents, be they the most infuential scholars of the time or interested lay people.3

PRINTING THE GARDEN Botany also took shape beyond the garden. Its emergence and development of botany as a scientifc feld in the early modern period was facilitated by the invention of the printing press. Knowledge of plants and botanical practices had been cultivated in nature studies since prehistory. Throughout European antiquity and the medieval period, there had been a long and diverse tradition of botanical writings. It is important to note that, as Helen Burgos-Ellis’ essay on the Nahuatl botanical knowledge and practices shows so vividly, a great deal of botanical knowledges and contributors to botany—especially those from non-European indigenous cultures—were disregarded or ignored by European scholars.4 Within early modern Europe, however, the printing press enabled key changes in form, distribution, and accessibility of botanical knowledge.5 Botany, like many other felds, experienced a surge in standardization, methodology, and textual presentation from the earliest uses of Gutenberg’s invention, as we can see in the Herbarius Latinus (1484) and Gart der Gesundheit (1485), two of the earliest successful printing projects.6 From the late

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ffteenth through the sixteenth century, botanists increasingly debated how best to standardize their feld and its practices. These debates negotiated how one should write about plants with eloquence and abundance while also achieving the brevity required by material and fnancial limitations; they often considered whether or not to include illustrations of plant subjects along with their descriptions, and how an herbal ought to be read. This period constituted an important moment of formation and differentiation in the feld of botany and its scientifc community.7 This was also a moment of construction and selection, as botanical authors were aware: Through different paratextual strategies, authors sought to shape how readers would contextualize their contribution within the scholarly conversation. This chapter sheds light on two aspects of botanical prose writing, one focuses on authorial strategies in constructing a history of botany, the other on reading traces and usage. Both aspects are enabled through paratextual strategies. But what is a paratext, and what is specifc regarding botanical paratexts? A paratext, as defned by Gérard Genette, can be a verbal and non-verbal production accompanying the main text; for early modern print works that includes woodcuts and other visual representations.8 While Genette’s approach has already been discussed and criticized in its scope as being too limited to a narrow concept of “the book,” the term was then more broadly applied to other media.9 In recent years, the term has been applied to early modern paratexts as well.10 Subsequent scholars have argued that paratexts must be studied for their material as well as textual aspects and need to be defned carefully to understand their specifc historical and material context. Early modern printed paratexts still await a more indepth analysis regarding the processes of bookmaking and reading.11 With respect to botanical works, we have authorial paratexts such as titles, dedicatory epistles, and poems. Although not exclusively used in botanical prints, garden metaphors appear often in these materials; they often reference different scholarly practices of collection, reading, and writing. In this chapter, I focus on paratexts as platforms for telling different histories of botany with an emphasis on deliberate strategies of accumulation, selection, and even erasure of knowledge. Furthermore, I argue that we can discover another form of paratext when turning to remaining copies of early modern books: the plant specimens that readers inserted between the pages, which were collected, dried, and stored in printed copies of books. Out of the wide range of paratexts, this chapter focuses particularly on the title pages, prefaces (including dedicatory epistles, prefaces to the reader, and other kinds of prefaces) as well as dedicatory poems. I frst consider three of the most infuential early modern botanists—Andrea Cesalpino, Leonhart Fuchs, and Pietro Andrea Mattioli—and the different methods each used to present their botanical theories. Next, I take a closer look at Cesalpino and Mattioli to offer a comparative study of how each author employed different paratextual strategies to demonstrate their theories in an attempt to infuence the feld at large. To contextualize these results, I compare them to my wider dataset of sixteenth-century herbals with a focus on the ancient and contemporary authorities the authors cited and the attributes and achievements connected to them.12 By visualizing these datasheets with the digital tool Palladio, I display how sixteenth-century authors told individual stories of the history of botany. Palladio allows us to visualize the overall network of scholars referenced by sixteenth-century herbals. While there is core group of canonical

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thinkers, which has already been identifed in research, each network historiography constructed by individual authors differs signifcantly: they seem to be responding to one another (9.2a) and employ different approaches to the number of authorities invoked (9.2b), especially in the cases of Cesalpino and Mattioli. Finally, the essay concludes by presenting the case for why early modern botanical books are, in fact, living tomes. I follow the ambiguous material traces early modern readers left, which are still visible in the present. Such a hybrid natural thing—a leaf, if you will—blurs the lines of paper and plant.

Figure 9.2a: Historiographies of Botanical Knowledge (1484–1583) Grouped by Author. This chart depicts mentions of authorities in the feld of medico-botanical knowledge. The size of the nodes corresponds to the number of connections to referenced authorities. The nodes of the examined authors are colored silver. The core group of the cited authorities are red, and the two main ancient authorities are orange.

Figure 9.2b: Historiographies of Botanical Knowledge Grouped by Work. All mentioned authorities in the feld of medico-botanical knowledge sorted by works and year of publication, showing the absolute number of authorities named within the examined works.

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BETWEEN PARATEXT AND THE GARDEN Much like the plants they described, early botanical books were living documents that evolved and changed across readings and multiple editions. Each reader had the opportunity to infuence the physical book beyond the parameters of the author’s original text. Early modern paratexts were infuential tools that imbued a main text with meaning. They demonstrated an author’s expertise and shaped how the reader might interpret a plant’s materiality and usefulness. The following section explores the tensions between the types of books that aimed to create a paper garden or a memory garden at home and those intended to be portable, to be taken by readers into the physical garden outside. Andrea Cesalpino preferred written word over illustration in his botanical descriptions. The director of the botanical garden at the University of Pisa believed in classifying plants based on their physical properties rather than their alphabetic order or medicinal properties; he greatly infuenced later botanists including Linnaeus. For Cesalpino, learning botanical principles entailed reading books like one “read” fruits, herbs, and fowers in a garden.13 Therefore, Cesalpino decided to present his published botanical studies without illustrations. He emphasized brevity of description, clarity, and a Theophrastean-styled and systematized order that encouraged his reader to build their own memory garden based on his textual descriptions. Describing his teacher’s newly printed botanical treatise De Plantis Libri XVI (1583) in verse, Cesalpino’s student, Cristoforo Paganelli (1551–1591), concluded with the following four lines: If ever once you walked here [in the garden] a little while Whether picking up a fruit of the greening garden, or herbs, or pleasantly smelling little fowers, There is nothing you will want less than to leave.14 Explicitly, De Plantis Libri XVI is presented as a book that teaches about a garden, but the metaphor between Cesalpino’s botanical prose and the garden of which it speaks extends further. Skillfully intertwining the two spheres of book and garden, Paganelli’s poem investigates the twofold materiality of early modern botany. At frst glance, the imaginary garden in the poem seems to be a botanical garden; upon a closer look, however, it is clearly a memory garden. This was a garden without boundaries or rules that aimed to train early modern botanists by presenting descriptions and examples of the plants growing in the natural world. These guided experiences with Renaissance and early modern gardens functioned in much the same way as memory training did in Cicero’s De oratore and Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria.15 A practitioner relied on the visual acumen of human memory to embed knowledge in an imagined structure; by walking through the structure in one’s mind, one could encounter information stored within it. Cesalpino, then, wrote his botanical prose to be descriptive and useful. It was designed to penetrate the mind of the reader in a way that he would recall Cesalpino’s classifcatory schema and botanical principles long after he put the book down and stepped into the physical garden.16 Not all early botanists shared Cesalpino’s commitment to brevity and botanical prose. As Paula Findlen argues, a common practice emerged by the 1550s of advertising a given herbal’s “rich portraits drawn from nature” as an indication of a volume’s quality and usefulness.17 Fitting with this tradition, thirty to forty years before Cesalpino published his black and white pages, two other naturalists—Leonhart Fuchs and Pietro Andrea Mattioli—each published books replete with rich illustrations.18

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In 1542, Fuchs published his De historia plantarum commentarii insignes, followed in 1554 by the Latin translation of Mattioli’s Discorsi and Commentarii.19 These illustrations were more than splashes of decoration that enhanced the aesthetic value of their pages. Both Fuchs and Mattioli not only promoted the number of illustrations as an important part of their works but also used them to further their arguments. These two works, and others of similar kind, were truly revolutionary to botanists of their time. As Alessandro Tosi explains, they presented “a garden of words, therefore, but also and above all a garden of images that was no longer the verbal garden presented by Euricius Corsdus in his Botanologicon (1534), or by Hieronymus Bock in his Kreütter Buch (1539).”20 Nevertheless, Cesalpino decided to forego illustrations and present his botanical prose as a purely textual garden. Despite the divergence of printing strategies, members of this community of early botanists were aware of the problem of botanical identifcation and medical knowledge. When writing in the context of the university, Leonhart Fuchs complained that “hardly one doctor in a hundred had knowledge of so much as a handful of plants.”21 This lack of botanical experience among medical professionals would soon change with the advent of pleasure gardens in European society. Over the frst half of the sixteenth century, Europe’s elite became increasingly enchanted by the wonders that nature possessed, compelling them to collect various plants and arrange them in manicured outdoor spaces. This foral fxation came to a head in 1544 when Cosimo I de’ Medici established the Orto botanico di Pisa—the world’s frst botanical garden or a large garden designed to display a great diversity of plant species along with their botanical names. As garden historian John Dixon Hunt observes, “long before any complete treatise was devoted to the art of making pleasure gardens, their increasingly conspicuous place in sixteenth-century life attracted the attention of commentators.”22 Just two years prior to the establishment of the Orto botanico di Pisa, in 1542, Fuchs drew an explicit connection between private pleasure gardens and botanical knowledge. He provided a garden metaphor on the title page of his Commentarii: Most people travel to foreign regions, the ones here, the others there, with incredible effort, tireless labor, and always at risk for their life, to enable the recognition of medicinal herbs. Here you can acquire knowledge of this whole subject with greatest possible savings in time and expense, far from all risks, as if in a living and most pleasant garden.23 This garden metaphor conveyed four topoi: completeness of content, brevity, safety provided to the reader compared to the naturalist who endured the risks and labors, and the aesthetic pleasure that arises from knowledge.24 Interestingly, the word encapsulating brevity, compendium, does not only refer to “gain, proft, acquisition,” but also signifes a “shorter route, a short cut,” and in a fgurative sense, “an easy method, a ‘short cut,’ a ‘royal road.’”25 Accordingly, Fuchs’ usage of compendium playfully intertwines the word’s spatial and temporal implications, thus connecting the time the readers have to invest to the limited spaces of book and garden, promising the most pleasant, safest, and shortest way through those spaces of knowledge. Subsequently, we might connect Fuchs’ metaphor to Tosi’s suggestion that “the garden, like the collection, is an encyclopedia and space of knowledge, both metaphorical and real.”26 We should view Fuchs’ choice here as strategic. Through his dedication of his “plant

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collections” to his protégée Joachim II, Margrave of Brandenburg, he dually advertises two types of collections in reference to the private gardens of the nobility, skillfully connecting the two spheres of book and garden through their epistemological and spatial qualities. This theoretical link between garden and book cannot be overstated, however, since only four years earlier, in 1538, Fuchs had publicly demanded an improvement to botanical education at the University of Tübingen. Education, he argued, required feld trips, and students needed to enter the physical garden rather than just read of the metaphorical space.27 Clearly for Fuchs, both written descriptions and frsthand experience played a central role in gaining botanical knowledge.28 Despite his emphasis on brevity, both the Latin and German editions of Fuchs Commentarii turned out to be weighty folio-sized tomes. This seems to have deeply concerned Fuchs. We fnd his metaphor elaborated in regard to reading practices on the title page of his 1549 Primi de stirpium historia commentarium tomi vivae imagines: pictures drawn from nature, contracted in a small and narrower form, and as skillful as possible drawn, for whoever has the desire to gain knowledge about the botanicals from the bottom up (radicitus), be it while walking around or while traveling to quite aptly have it at heart, and are able to compare them with the local fora.29 Those octavo-sized picture editions, frst printed in 1545 in Latin as well as in German, had smaller woodcuts supplemented with the plant names. The heavy, folio-sized books were meant for studying at home, in one’s own private chamber. However, portability would offer new opportunities not possible with heavy tomes. Therefore, Fuchs produced a book for walking in the gardens or traveling around in nature. Whereas Cesalpino designed his quarto with the concept of a memory garden in mind so that the tome could stay inside while the reader ventured into the physical garden, Fuchs presented a portable copy designed for comparing the visual-textual representations of plants in the book with actual specimens. In short, these new volumes brought the book into the garden. Other members of this naturalistic network, however, sought different methods by which to connect text and plant. Beyond Fuchs’ companion edition intended for traveling and research in the feld, Mattioli’s Discorsi or Commentarii combined those two ideas even more explicitly. If both Fuchs’ and Cesalpino’s works sought to link the physical and metaphorical garden as equally important spaces, Mattioli’s Discorsi or Commentarii doubled down on the concept of a paper garden.30 Mattioli’s works were massively popular, quickly becoming some of the most widely read botanical works of the period.31 In the decades following its publication, his work became infuential and many editions and translations, including German, French, Spanish, and Czech were printed. Beyond this, Mattioli became the primary mediator of the work of ancient herbalist Dioscorides and Renaissance readers. Through his translations, Dioscorides’ De materia medica remained a central touch point for early modern natural history.32 While many arguments surrounded the Discorsi, Mattioli’s writing quickly came to portray the status quo of medico-botanical knowledge. The budding botanical scientifc community grew impatient for when the next Mattioli would arrive.33 Despite the many changes the text underwent through its widespread distribution, the dedicatory epistles were reprinted with each edition. Once again, the garden both plays a central role regarding the epistemological functions of botanical books and is embedded as garden

272 Part III • Preserved

metaphor in the highly visible paratext. Mattioli advertises his herbal as written for those who cannot travel through the world towards the knowledge of the simples, and do not have experts who could show them, to have from me a garden, where they can see and learn to know them at whatever time of the year they want without any cultivation (needed).34 With this metaphor Mattioli describes his work as a paper garden, not only by building on the analogy between it and a real garden space, but by also indicating the differences of both spaces—garden and book. An experience in a garden is by nature transitory and temporary—a visitor’s observations are restricted to the time they actually spend among the fowers and plants. Furthermore, a garden is subject to constant change due to seasonal variations and weather patterns.35 In contrast to these challenges posed by a physical garden, once printed, the paper garden presented knowledge that was fxed and secured in a permanent form, accessible forever. Taking into consideration the subsequent Latin edition of the same paragraph cited above, another aspect of the metaphor gains importance beyond the typical correlation between physical and paper gardens. The Italian rendition of this passage laments the lack of learned people teaching their botanical knowledge through demonstrations within the garden. Interestingly, the Latin version specifes the role of a teacher (praeceptores) who apparently demonstrates one’s teachings to their students through some form of apprenticeship.36 The challenge of presenting botanical knowledge for a growing readership can be observed through the various botanical works addressing problems of structure, brevity, and content. It is clear that Mattioli sought to assign a clear distribution of roles between himself and his readership, in which he, the teacher, presented his improved paper garden to his students and thus eliminated the need for them to venture into physical gardens. In Cesalpino, Fuchs, and Mattioli, we fnd three different concepts of books and gardens that challenge each other in terms of how the physical garden related to the metaphorical space. While each author observed a correlation between the two, they differed in respect to how their books were meant to be used by students of botany, a wider readership, and in relation to actual gardens and practical experience in nature. While Cesalpino looked to provide an abbreviated form for his students to read before venturing into the physical garden, Fuchs created a volume for his students to carry with them while they walked among the fowers. Mattioli departed from both of these models and tried to create an ideal paper garden, thus eliminating the need for new observations in the physical space. In each example, natural things shaped the stories in different ways, and the way the authors spoke of various leaves impacted how those plants were read about in the pages of their books.

COMPARING CESALPINO AND MATTIOLI To demonstrate the validity of their work, early modern authors like Cesalpino, Fuchs, and Mattioli commonly assembled catalogs and lists of the authorities they cited; they also displayed such lists in the paratexts of their books. This was important for establishing authority in the feld and the author’s self-fashioning. As botany rose in importance over the course of the long sixteenth century, patterns emerged as to which authors were cited and which were excluded. Mapping a corpus of herbals written between 1482 and 1583 using the social networking software

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Palladio, I argue that these paratextual citations were far from haphazard references to a series of old books. Rather, they constituted the framework of an implicit argument meant to shape the still developing feld of botany by emphasizing certain texts and foregoing others. Palladio allows us to move beyond textual interpretation alone by basing quantifable observations on a coherent and standardized data set.37 Although this might at frst glance seem like a mere reaffrmation of what research has shown, it emphasizes the role of self-fashioning in name lists or catalogs within the paratextual apparatus. By mapping these lists, we can see how early modern authors constructed a shared sense of the botanical scientifc community and deployed different strategies of accumulation, selection, and manipulation (for the combined network, see Figure 9.2a). The authorities cited in these paratexts were both contemporary scholars and well-known authorities from previous centuries. This historic community of botanists was not, however, an exclusive and well-defned society. Furthermore, any notion of a gradual evolution in botanical practices and accepted authorities in the feld over the course of the sixteenth century would be far too teleological, as this intellectual community underwent fuctuating periods of stasis and evolution. Among sixteenth-century authors, discord emerged over which historic authors to cite. Above all, a core group of four scholars—Dioscorides (c. 40-c. 90), Ermolao Barbaro (1454–1493), Jean Ruel (1474–1537), and Antonius Musa Brasavola (1500– 1555)—emerged as the most universally-accepted authorities in these texts.38 These scholars were frequently cited together and correlated both in terms of content and in terms of their spatial representation on the page and their location within each paratext.39 Ultimately, they form the main cluster of scholars whose works and infuence helped revive botanical knowledge and practice (Figure 9.4). Context matters, of course. While Dioscorides is referenced in every text as an infuential authority, his example contrasts that of Ermolao Barbaro in that he is not always referenced in a positive light. In fact, his writings provide a clear point of departure between Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s and Andrea Cesaplino’s work (Figure 9.3). Cesalpino’s De Plantis XVI rejects Dioscorides’ work as derivative, denouncing the ancient scholar and his style of writing about plants (ratio tractandi), classifying plants based on their medical utility only, and thus creating a system of taxonomy that pertained solely to a physician’s agenda (tamquam Medicus solum).40 During this period, this form of herbal literature had an association with Dioscorides’ chief commentator, Mattioli. By criticizing the form and validity of De materia medica, Cesalpino implicitly rejected all the works based on this model, which would also imply Mattioli and his writings. With such polarized views of Dioscorides came different paratextual strategies employed by Cesalpino and Mattioli as they sought to construct new disciplinary histories. Both Mattioli and Cesalpino cite the four core authorities, as well as Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), Luca Ghini (c. 1490–1556), and Luigi Anguillara (c. 1512–1570) in their respective works. This shared common ground, however, is overshadowed by the apparent stark differences. Whereas Mattioli references a veritable plethora of other botanical authorities and contributors, Cesalpino elects to name just a few: Amatus Lusitanus (1512– 1570), García da Orta (1495–1568), Nicolás de Monardes (1493–1588), and an intriguing yet concealing et aliique exteri (and other foreign authors).41 This approach of only citing a select group of authorities distinguishes the few fortunate enough to be selected by Cesalpino; at the same time, it excludes many others from the disciplinary historiography. It must also be noted that the group that Cesalpino deems worthy of being cited are

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Figure 9.3: Authorities Named by Andrea Cesalpino and Pietro Andrea Mattioli in Comparison. Red (shared authorities of the core group as in Figure 9.2a); orange (additional authorities shared by both authors); green (Southern European authorities whose works were printed in the 1560s); turquoise (Southern European authorities not invoked by Mattioli, but by Cesalpino). Dioscorides is also invoked by Cesalpino, but in a negative context of reprehensio. scholars from Southern Europe and the Iberian Empires.42 We might think back to the term aliique exteri in light of the fact that Cesalpino’s refections on the brevity and style of botanical prose applied equally to both German and Italian writers, save for the German tendency to emphasize a plant’s medical usages.43 In this light, Cesalpino’s implicit criticism of Mattioli, followed by his explicit resistance of the medico-botanical form of writing, can be understood as a two-pronged strategy to simultaneously champion Italian achievements and undermine Mattioli’s already strong infuence over the scientifc community. In sum, Cesalpino’s sought to accentuate the work of those authors of whom he approved while diminishing the impact of rivals like Mattioli. Mattioli’s strategy, by contrast, actually places emphasis on the authorities that he decides not to mention at all. He references all the same authorities as Cesalpino, except for Lusitanus, Monardes, and da Orta. Whereas Cesalpino celebrates Monardes and Da Orta for making knowledge from the New World and India available for European naturalists, Mattioli’s work was a translation of Dioscorides’ work and a critical commentary based on that; that might explain why, especially in the frst editions, it does not focus on “those (plants) unknown to the ancients.”44 With respect to Lusitanus, a comparison of Mattioli’s earlier and later editions, as well as vernacular version and Latin edition, suggests his intention to deny Lusitanus acknowledgement in his Latin publications.45 In contrast to Cesalpino’s silence on Northern European authorities, Mattioli explicitly includes them in his catalogue, namely Brunfels and Fuchs, Valerius Cordus (1515–1544) and Euricius Cordius (1486–1538) as well as Conrad Gessner (1506–1565).46 Furthermore, Mattioli does not rank the authorities he references in any particular order, but rather groups all contemporary authorities under the equalizing label of “alcuni preclarissimi ingegni de I tempi referri diligentissimi inuestigatori” (some of the preeminent thinkers of our time). Mattioli then concludes his study by stating, “together with others, who I will not mention for the sake of brevity.”47 On one hand, this strategy furthers the impression of a large group of

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authorities in the feld of natural history; on the other hand, it places even more signifcance on the individual authorities he does not mention, as noted above. The text builds authority through the broad array of scholars, humanists, and even interested lay people included in the catalogue of contributors. Meanwhile, certain authorities, well-acknowledged in other print works, were denied mention, especially in Latin prints meant for the broader and scientifc readership. As we can see, Cesalpino’s and Mattioli’s different paratextual strategies deployed in the dedicatory epistles and other forewords were deeply connected to each author’s epistemology and form of writing and designed to position the authors in the century-long tradition. Cesalpino aimed to depart from the botanical prose writing of most of his predecessors and contemporary colleagues. His reduction to a short list of representatives of the feld promoted Italian and Southern European scholars, while simultaneously undermining the traditional model of Dioscorides and his long-established rival Mattioli. In contrast, Mattioli chose to accumulate a broad array of scholars and contributors in order to set himself on the top of the mountain of previous work. With Mattioli, it becomes clear that paratexts cannot be understood out of their contemporary social context. Finally, both Cesalpino and Mattioli relate stories about the rescue and rediscovery of botanical knowledge, attributing achievements to certain groups and individuals while omitting others. In this way, they constructed a powerful disciplinary history that is still present today despite its slow decentering by modern research.48

STORIES OF THE BOOKFOLD49 We now turn from authorial citation to the twofold materiality of botanical tomes. These offer evidence for readers’ engagement, especially through what they left pressed between the books’ pages. These natural things—leaves, fowers, and anthers of the same plant that a given page described—are a physical contribution made by the reader to the paratextual strategies that situated the book in a particular botanical collection. Although they were not incorporated into the book by the original publisher, they were pressed or inserted after exsiccation into the book by a later reader. As with marginal annotations and drawings, these natural things provide information and insight into a book’s past readership. In the following table, I seek to analyze the traces of reading practices and usage of remaining herbals in comparison to the authorial paratexts, revealing tendencies in how the herbals were used and read, and what role plant specimens played. My sample consists of nine remaining texts housed in the botanical library of the University of Florence and the Biblioteca Marucelliana. The data presented here cannot lead to any fnal conclusions, as a more comprehensive collection of these botanical tomes and their inserted naturalia is necessary. Nonetheless, it explores the following questions: Were these inserted natural things preserved intentionally or accidentally? Does the printed text correspond with a possible identifcation of the inserted natural thing? How does the quantity of inserted natural things correspond to the authorial concepts conveyed through their paratexts and a given volume’s popularity or infuence within the feld? A return to our three early botanists—Cesalpino, Fuchs, and Mattioli—lends itself well to a preliminary investigation of these questions.

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Table 9.1 Remaining copies of Fuchs, Mattioli, and Cesalpino from the Biblioteca Botanica and Biblioteca Marucelliana in Florence. This table highlights the pages with natural matter and exemplary pages, the specifc kind of plant traces, and their correspondence to the contents and plants discussed in the book. Note, that Mus (spec.) and Scincus are animal species; accordingly, the plant material does not correspond to those pages. Author

Work

Publishing Printing Current Location Format Institution

Signature

Annotations Drawings

Leonhart De historia Lyon Fuchs stirpium (1551) commentarii

Octavo

Biblioteca di BL4B11 Yes Scienze, Botanica (Fondo Webb) (Firenze)

No

De historia stirpium commentarii De historia stirpium commentarii

Lyon (1549)

Octavo

BL4B10 Yes (Fondo Webb)

No

Lyon (1549)

Octavo

Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica (Firenze) Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica (Firenze)

71M23 (Società Botanica Italiana)

Yes

No

De historia stirpium commentarii De historia stirpium commentarii

Paris (1546)

Octavo

30F3 (Fondo Webb)

No

No

Basel (1542)

Folio

Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica (Firenze) Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica (Firenze)

BL4A14 No (Fondo Webb)

No

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Natural Things

Number of Pages (Main Text)

Indicated, 852 but uncertain

Number Exemplary Position of Pages Pages of with any Natural kind of Things traces

Category of Natural Things

3

Near book fold p. 196/197 Book fold

Traces of Traces of a Absinthium a plant plant (color)

Unknown

Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (root)

Pulegium

Unknown

p. 65

Book fold

Sambucus (spec.)

Not corresponding

p. 73

Book fold Book fold

Arctium (spec.)

Unknown

Raphanus sylvestris

Unknown

Raphanus sylvestris

Unknown

Rosmarinus (offcinalis) Elaeoselinum

Possibly corresponding Unknown

No

852

0

Yes

852

48

p. 5

Precise Category of Natural Things

p. 137

Book fold

p. 467

Book fold Book fold

Part of a Upper plant part of the specimen without roots Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (stem) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf)

p. 137

Plant (Species) described on pages

Uncertain 408 (204) 2

p. 96

Yes

p. 10/11

Book fold

Remains Remains of Asarum of a plant a plant (leaf)

p. 10/11

Book fold Book fold Book fold Book fold Book fold Book fold

Traces of a plant Remains of a plant Remains of a plant Soil

Traces of a plant (color) Remains of a plant (ear) Remains of a plant (root) Soil

Remains of a plant Remains of a plant

Remains of a plant (leaf) Remains Anethum of a plant (blossom)

896

42

p. 20/21 p. 22/23 p. 22/23 p. 30/31 p. 30/31

Corresponding with page

Corresponding

Asarum

Corresponding

Alsine maior

Not corresponding Unknown

Alsine media/ minor Alsine media/ minor Anethum

Corresponding Corresponding

(Continued)

278 Part III • Preserved

Table 9.1 (Continued) Author

Work

Publishing Printing Current Location Format Institution

Signature

Annotations Drawings

Pietro Andrea Mattioli

Discorsi

Venice (1550)

Quarto

Biblioteca di 41B1 (Fondo Scienze, Botanica antico) (Firenze)

Yes

No

Commentarii Lyon (1563)

Quarto

Biblioteca di 41B2 (Fondo Scienze, Botanica Webb) (Firenze)

Yes

No

Chapter 9 • Leaf 279

Natural Things

Number of Pages (Main Text)

Number Exemplary Position of Pages Pages of with any Natural kind of Things traces p. 43/44

Book fold

p. 45/46

Book fold Book fold Book fold

p. 55/56 p. 136/37

Book fold p. 198/199 Book fold p. 198/99

p. 206/07 p. 252/53

p. 300/01

Book fold

p. 542/43

Book fold Book fold

p. 612/13

Indicated, 802 but uncertain

4

Yes

18

837

Book fold Book fold

p. 44/45 p. 130/31 p. 118/19

p. 248/49 p. 592/93

Book fold Book fold Book fold Book fold Book fold

Category of Natural Things

Precise Category of Natural Things

Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (fowerhead: calyx, petals, stamen) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (sepals) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (stem) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom) Remains Remains of of a plant a plant (leaf) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom)

Plant (Species) described on pages

Corresponding with page

Artemisia latifolia

Possibly corresponding

Artemisia monoclonos Spina alba

Possibly corresponding Possibly corresponding Possibly corresponding

Gramen

Pulegium

Corresponding

Pulegium

Corresponding

Corresponding Geranium (spec.) Panicum (spec.) Corresponding

Lactuca (spec.)

Corresponding

Oxyacantha

Not corresponding Unknown

Quinquefolium malus candidum

Iuncus odoratus Possibly corresponding Cypressus Unknown (spec.) Populus (spec.) Corresponding

Mus (spec.) Epipactis

Not corresponding Corresponding

(Continued)

280 Part III • Preserved

Table 9.1 (Continued) Author

Work

Publishing Printing Current Location Format Institution

Commentarii Venice (1565)

Andrea De Plantis Cesalpino

Florence (1583)

Signature

Annotations Drawings

Folio

Biblioteca Marucelliana di Firenze

SALA.I.L.II.48 Yes

No

Quarto

Biblioteca R.i.19 No Marucelliana di Firenze Biblioteca di BL8B12 No Scienze, Botanica (Fondo Webb) (Firenze)

No

No

Chapter 9 • Leaf 281

Natural Things

Number of Pages (Main Text)

Indicated, 1329 but uncertain

Indicated 621 but uncertain No 621

Number Exemplary Position of Pages Pages of with any Natural kind of Things traces 8

2

0

p. 363

Book fold

p. 364/65

Book fold

p. 560/61

Book fold

p. 560/61

Book fold

p. 604/05

Book fold

p. 296/97

Book fold

Category of Natural Things

Precise Category of Natural Things

Part of a Part of plant a plant (fronds) Part of a Part of plant a plant (fronds) Traces of Traces of a plant a plant (impression) Traces of Traces of a a plant plant (color) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (stem) Remains Remains of a plant of a plant (blossom)

Plant (Species) described on pages

Corresponding with page

Scincus

Not corresponding

Scincus

Not corresponding

Corresponding Allium ursinum (or scorodoprasum) Corresponding Allium ursinum (or scorodoprasum) Possibly Scilla (spec.) corresponding Baticula

corresponding

282 Part III • Preserved

Keeping in mind that Cesalpino created a new systematic approach with an emphasis on brevitas, with paratexts suggesting that one build one’s own memory garden while gaining actual botanical knowledge through the sensorial experience of natural things, we may be surprised to fnd that of the two copies included in the sample only one shows a hint of being used in some context involving plant specimens. The copy R.i.19 belonged to the Convento di Santo Stefano a Empoli and was read by a sixteenth or early seventeenth-century reader. In between the pages 296 and 297, there was preserved a tiny piece of a plant, a calyx, that could very well be perceived by the reader as corresponding to the baticula described in the plant chapter by Cesalpino (today known as Sea fennel or Chrithmum maritimum L.). It is quite probable that this plant could have been in one of the two enclosed gardens of the convent. At the same time, the plant matter may have fallen onto the pages during the comparison of specimen and text rather unintentionally. Both copies show no further traces of annotations (except for orthographical corrections in R.i.19), drawings or inserted plants. The second copy seems to be nearly without any signs of usage at all, while the other at least has been read, probably in close proximity to real plant specimens. Overall, from the six copies I examined in Florence this is the only evidence for usage of natural things in the process of reading Cesalpino’s De plantis (Table 9.2). Either Cesalpino was effective in his paratextual communication effort and his readers frst studied the text then separately ventured out into the garden with their own memory garden in mind, or his concept did not incite the intended usage or reaction by his readership at all and remained on the shelf. Copies of Fuchs’ De historia stirpium commentarii and Mattioli’s Commentarii indicate different trends in past readership and usage as different copies of each work contain a broad array of traces of inserted natural things. From the eight copies only one octavo-sized copy of Fuchs’ Commentarii (Lyon 1549: BL4B10) shows no signs or evidence for any usage.50 In all the other copies there is indication for some practical usage or even systematic collection and insertion of plants. The beautifully colored copy of Fuchs’ Commentarii (Basel 1542: BL4A14) holds several preserved plant traces. Although only some pieces remain today, the number of fndings and the relatively high proportion of correlation with the described plants indicate a systematic collection and insertion by its reader. In the copy of Mattioli’s Commentarii (Lyon 1563: 41B2), there are fewer embedded natural things, but still notable correspondences. Considering other traces like stains and impressions of some kind of container, together with small bits of plant matter, we might conclude that the reader engaged in a more practical quotidian usage of the book as for instance an apothecary would have. Other copies show plant materials and numerous and detailed annotations in the margins.51 This broader usage of added dried plant specimens indicates a more intimate relationship between book, garden, and the dual nature of plants and information about them. In the examples of Fuchs and Mattioli, then, we see the beginnings of a trend towards the usage of inserted natural things as physical exempla, as quotes from nature complementary to annotated references and paper slips, within early botanical prints.52 The book fold itself plays an important role in this history, since the actual act of pressing parts of plants between pages provided the conditions for these natural things to be preserved in the frst place. Their presence transformed these botanical prints into intricate archives of preserved natural things and allowed the reader to take possession of the printed botanical knowledge. Sometimes readers created a plant album

Chapter 9 • Leaf 283

Table 9.2 Texts analyzed in Florence, their number, presence of annotations, drawing, and traces of fora. Works

Overall Number

With Annotations

With Drawings

With Natural Things or Traces thereof

Herbarum vivae eicones Herbarium Oth. Brunfelsii tomis New Kreütter Buch De historia stirpium commentarii Discorsi De stirpium libri tres Commentarii De Plantis The Herball SUMMA

2 3 2 7 5 1 5 6 1 32

2 3 2 4 5 1 5 6 1 29

0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 0 2

0 2 1 5(6) 3 1 3 1 0 16(17)

or even a new herbarium on the base of the printed herbal. The book fold also presents a problem in recovering the specimens they contain. Since the bindings of these books should not be opened fully, that sometimes makes it diffcult to extract or even detect the presence of small traces of leaves and other botanical matter. Additionally, these traces are very fragile, so the very act of detaching them from the book fold can damage or even destroy them; in any event, opening the page might already change the context of the fndings. A more systematic study of this corpus would require a consistent methodology for extracting and subsequently preserving the natural things encountered through the research.

PARATEXTS, READERS, AND LEAVES LEFT BEHIND In the early modern world, books were constantly evolving and participatory sources of knowledge. Their content and form could change and be transformed with each reader who took it upon themselves to insert a new leaf in the book’s pages. Therefore, we might consider the fabricated things—the book pages and paper slips—and the inserted natural things pressed in the bindings of rare books as both signifcant sources of evidence, connecting authors and readers. Inserted specimens were not just preserved within the book, but part of that book’s construction and continued existence as a living document. Beyond shaping the early botanical community, defning the feld, and providing a forum to debate best practices, the paratexts of early herbals enabled authors to privilege certain contributors and to marginalize or exclude others. The paratexts of authors such as Cesalpino, Fuchs, and Mattioli contextualized their work and enabled a dialogue between authorial texts and reader spanning centuries. The infuence of such paratextual strategies is still visible today; they shaped what fgures historians believe created the feld of botany and which ones have been forgotten altogether. A broader vision of nature studies—one that moves beyond this canon of European natural history— is required to restore the role of those others whose analytical contributions are mentioned vaguely or ignored entirely. Despite the strategies of persuasion, it was still the reader’s choice to accept, modify, or reject the printed text. The heterogenous paratexts simultaneously provide insight into how these books have been used over time and allow the pages of uniformly printed copies to be transformed to individual tomes.

284 Part III • Preserved

NOTES 1 Florike Egmond, “Into the Wild: Botanical Fieldwork in the Sixteenth Century,” in Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording, and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill Academic Publishers, 2018), 167; see also Leah Knight, On Books and Botany in Early Modern England, Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2009), xi; such material connection of course were not only restricted to the production of codices nor limited geographically to Europe. 2 Benjamin Bühler, “Botanik,” in Literatur und Wissen, Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2013), 65. 3 Paula Findlen, “The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Late Renaissance Italy,” in Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, ed. Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec (New York: Springer International Publishing, 2017), 135; on garden types see: Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, “Types of Gardens,” in The Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance, ed. Elisabeth Hyde (London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2016), 43–72. 4 See Helen Burgos-Ellis, “Pollen: The Sexual Life of Plants in Mesoamerica;” on the limitations on Europe as a reference model, see also “Introduction,” 3–4. 5 Sachiko Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012); especially on the interplay of manuscript and print culture in this context see: Dominic Olariu, “‘Kräuterautopsie’ im Jahr 1487,” Geschichte der Pharmazie 70, no. 3 (2018): 29–51. 6 Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 1–10; however, see also for a critical contextualization of Eisenstein’s argument Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book, Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 10–21. 7 Paula Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientifc Community: Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Italy,” in Natural Particulars: Nature and Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, ed. Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999), 372. 8 Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 9 See Klaus Kreimeier and Georg Stanitzek, eds., Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen (Berlin et al.: De Gruyter, 2004). 10 See particularly Helen Smith and Louise Wilson, eds., Renaissance Paratexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 11 The main part of research focuses on modern literature and media. However, there are now approaches to paratexts and their epistemic functions in context of scientifc collection and practices, see for instance: Kristin Knebel, Claudia Ortlieb, and Grudun Püschel, eds., Steine rahmen, Tiere taxieren, Dinge inszenieren. Sammlung und Beiwerk (Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2018). Additionally, there is research focusing on particular forms of paratexts in the feld of history of the book (albeit not discussed under the term paratext and its implications), see: Ursula Rautenberg, “Die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Buchtitelblatts in der Inkunabelnzeit in Deutschland, den Niederlanden und Venedig. Quantitative und qualitative Studien,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 62 (2008): 1–105 to name just one important example. Finally, see the recent publications of Ann Blair, “The Dedication Strategies of Conrad Gessner,” in Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, ed. Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec (New York: Springer, 2017), 169–209, and publications discussing readers’ paratexts, such as Andrea Van Leerdam, “Popularising and Personalising and Illustrated Herbal in Dutch,” Nuncius 36 (2021): 356–93 as well as Anthony Grafton, “The Margin as Canvas: A Forgotten Function of the Early Printed Page,” in Impagination, Layout and Materialtiy of Writing and Reading Publication, ed. Kyming Chang, Anthony Grafton, and Glenn W. Most (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021), 185–207. 12 A corpus of the following herbals (both vernacular and Latin) is behind this analysis: Herbarius Latinus (1484) by an anonymous author, Gart der Gesundheit

Chapter 9 • Leaf 285

13

14

15 16 17 18

19 20

21 22 23

24

25 26 27

(1485) by Johann Wonnecke von Kaub, Herbarum vivae eicones (1530) and Contrafayt Kreütterbuch (1532) by Otto Brunfels, Kreutter Buch (153) by Hieronymus Bock and its Latin edition De stirpibus commentariorum Libri tres (1552) translated by David Kyber, De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (1542) and the German edition New Kreüterbuch (1543) by Leonhart Fuchs, the New Herball (1551) by William Turner, the Discorsi (edition of 1550) and Commentarii (1554) by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, and De plantis Libri XVI (1583) by Andrea Cesalpino. I selected these works because they show a strong use of paratextual strategies in their dedicatory epistles and poems. Michael A. Buratovich, “Binomial Classifcation,” in Science and Scientists, vol. 1 (Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press Inc, 2006), 80. Guido Moggi, “L’erbario di Andrea Cesalpino,” in Gli erbari aretini da Andrea Cesalpino ai giorni nostri (Florence: a cura di Chiara Nepi, 2008), 1–20. Andreae Cesalpini Aretini, De plantis libri XVI, apud Georgium Marescottium, Florentiae 1583, [b2v]. All following transcripts, translations and fgures are based on the copy: Andreae Cesalpini De plantis libri XVI, apud Georgium Marescottum, Florentiae 1583 (digitized by BSB: Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4 Nat 54; urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11220346-2). John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 68 f. Egmond, “Into the Wild,” 167. Paula Findlen, “Natural History,” in The Cambridge History of Science 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 3rd revised ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 457. Klaus Dobat, Leonhart Fuchs: Das Kräuterbuch von 1543. New Kreüterbuch (Cologne, Germany: Taschen Deutschland GmbH+, 2001); Frank J. Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Kusukawa, Picturing the Book of Nature. This Latin translation made Mattioli’s original Italian work accessible to the entire scientifc community, ultimately leading to a much broader readership. Alessandro Tosi, “Botanical Illustration and the Idea of the Garden in the Sixteenth Century Between Imitation and Imagination,” in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. By Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2016), 191. Anderson, An Illustrated History of the Herbals, 137. Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove, 32. As Helen Burgos-Ellis shows, such a development towards centralized collection efforts resulting in botanical collections and gardens were by no means limited to Europe. Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium commentarii (1542), title page. All further transcripts, fgures and translations are based on the copy Leonhart Fuchs, de historia stirpium commentarii insignes, maximis impensis et vigiliis elaborati, adiectis earundem vivis plusquam quingentis imaginibus, nunquam antea ad naturae imitationem artifciosus effectis & expressis, Basileae in offciana Isigriniana (1542) (digitized by archive.org). In the dedicatory epistle of the same work that follows directly after the title page (at least in all the scans and remaining copies I have examined so far it was also actually bound this way by the readers), Fuchs promotes the botanical knowledge (stirpium cognitio/inuestigandarum stirpium) even stronger through the same topos of gaining pleasure: delectatio, iucunditas, voluptas (see: Fuchs, De historia stirpium,[α2v]). Peter G. W. Glare, Oxford Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ad loc. Tosi, “Botanical Illustration,” 192. Fuchs had experienced the benefts of botanical feld trips in the years 1526– 28 and 1533–1535 teaching in Ingolstadt; he wanted to see feld trips implemented in Tubingen as well, as he wrote in the Facultäts-Statuten of 1538: Aetatis denique tempore cum medicinae studiosis rura montesque saepius petat ac plantarum uultum diligenter obseruet illisque uiuas eorundem imagines demonstret. See Rudolf Von Roth, ed., Eberhart-Karls-Universität Tubingen: Urkunden der

286 Part III • Preserved

28

29

30

31 32 33

34

35

36 37

38

Geschichte der Universität Tübingen aus den Jahren 1476 bis 1550 (Tübingen: Verlag der Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1877), 312; digitized by the Universität Tübingen: LXV116; http://doi.org/10.20345/digitue.12013). Paula Findlen, “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 272–89, 445. Fuchs, Primi . . . tomi vivae imagines (1549), title page. All further transcripts, fgures and translations are based on the copy Leonhart Fuchs, Primi de stirpium historia commentariorum tomi vivae imagines in exiguam angustioremque formam contractae ac quam feri potest artifciosissime expressae . . . Basileae in offciana Isiginiana 1549 (digitized by BSB: Phyt. 182 a; urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00034002-0). Mattioli’s works were popular. The frst edition of his Discorsi was printed in 1544. Later on, the Venetian printer Vincenzo Valgrisi oversaw an illustrated print edition and ultimately, in 1554, the frst Latin edition was printed. Only a year after that Mattioli was called to Prague and appointed as private physician of Archduke Maximilian I, which not only increased his reputation but also gave him abundant resources and a robust network and patronage. In the following decades his work became infuential, and many editions and translations were printed. Tosi, “Botanical Illustration,” 193. Findlen, “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections,” 460; Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientifc Community,” 373. Findlen, “The Death of a Naturalist”; Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008); Findlen, “The Formation of a Scientifc Community”; Richard Palmer, “Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance,” in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 149–57; Karen Reeds, “Renaissance Humanism and Botany,” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 519–42. Mattioli, Discorsi (1550), premessa, α4v. All transcripts and translations are based on the following copies, unless noted otherwise: the Italian edition Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Il Dioscoride dell’ eccellente dottore medico M. P. Andrea Matthioli da Siena (Venetia, 1550) and the Latin edition Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii, in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anarzabei, de medica materia (Venetijs, in offciana Erasmiana, apud Vincentium Valgrisium, 1554). These changes are impressively documented not in the gardens themselves, but through various garden catalogues, see H. Walter Lack, Jardin de la Malmaison. Ein Garten für Kaiserin Josephine (Munich: Prestel, 2004), 7; Gregory Grämiger, “Reconstructing Order: The Spatial Arrangement of Plants in the Hortus Botanicus of Leiden University in Its First Years,” in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, ed. Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn (Basel, Switzerland: Birkhäuser, 2016), 248; Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove, 29. See Mattioli, Commentarii (1554), epistola nuncupatoria, α4v. On the corpus, see above n. ##. I extracted various items (e.g., authority/ group/profession named, attribute, achievement, positive/negative context) into different tables and combined them with a table that included all the different paratexts and their parameters). Accordingly, the comparison between Mattioli and Cesalpino displays only a minor fraction of the data. It shows how we can visualize the different strategies deployed not only by different authors, regional differences (i.e., all German authors reference the contribution of printer-publishers and artists), and differences occurring between vernacular and Latin editions, as Palladio allows us to cluster connections and select one setting or another by combining different tables. Apart from Dioscorides, all these authors were cited in every text of the corpus except the Herbarius Latinus (1484) and Gart der Gesundheit (1485). This, however, might not be surprising considering both works were printed before the new criticism and critical approach on ancient source texts, incited by Niccolò Leoniceno (1428–1524). Furthermore, Antonius Musa Brasavola  was not born until after each of these sources were published, making it impossible for him to be cited there.

Chapter 9 • Leaf 287 39 This is not visualized by Palladio, since Palladio allows us to visualize networks via connections with the size of the nodes correlating to the quantity of connections or edges. 40 Cesalpino, De plantis XVI (1583), a4r. 41 Monardes, da Orta, and Lusitanus wrote about new regions of the world and thus presented knowledge to which the ancients did not have access. Anguillara presented a condensed form of prose that simultaneously did not compromise in quality in the view of Cesalpino. 42 Of these authors, Jean Ruel hailed from France; Ermolao Barbaro, Antonius Musa Brasavola, Luca Ghini, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, and Luigi Anguillara all hailed from Italy, Amatus Lusitanus and García da Orta were from Portugal; Nicolas Monardes was from Spain; and the two antique scholars Theophrastus and Dioscorides were from Rome. 43 Cesalpino’s refections about knowledge and form of botanical prose refer to a discourse vividly present in the botanical works of the three German authors: Brunfels, Bock and Fuchs. 44 Cesalpino, De plantis XVI (1583), a3r-v; but see also: C. R. Boxer, Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia d’Orta and Nicolás Monardes (London: Hispanic and Luso- Brazilian Councils, 1963); Iris Montero Sobrevilla, “Indigenous Naturalists,” in Worlds of Natural History, ed. Helen Anne Curry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 112–30. 45 This, of course, is only the starting point of an escalating feud, that will enter the Latin print work in form of another paratexts that was frst printed as separate writing, the aggressive Apologia in Amatum Lusitanum (1558); see also Palmer, Medical Botany. This worthwhile comparison cannot be explored in detail in this context, but there are further differences supporting the notion that Mattioli frmly used his Italian and Latin edition as two distinctive platforms, and so did other authors too, for instance Brunfels and Fuchs. 46 See Mattioli, Commentarii (1554), α3v and Mattioli, Discorsi (1550), A4v, B2r. The Latin and Italian passages differ in crucial ways, although they employ similar wording. While Mattioli includes only Brunfels and Fuchs in his Latin epistula nuncupatoria and acknowledges Fuchs especially (apud Germanos clarae eruditionis medicus), he includes a broader number of authorities in his Italian edition while omitting any specifc attributes. 47 Mattioli, Discorsi (1550), A4v. 48 The role of apothecaries in medico-botanical knowledge is concealed by the self-stylization of the physician-botanist. For further discussion see for instance the insightful chapter of Valentina Pugliano, “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop,” in Worlds of Natural History, ed. H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 44–60. 49 Many of the copies in this sample belonged to the collection of Philipp Barker Webb (1793–1854). The English botanist and explorer not only developed one of the fnest herbaria collections in the nineteenth century, but also a vast botanical library containing botanical works from the early prints onto contemporary and extremely rare works amounting to nearly 5000 books. Today it is housed together with the Webb-herbarium in the Herbarium Centrale Italicum, as wished for by Webb, and overseen by his colleague and friend Filippo Parlatore, see: Filippo Parlatore, Elogio di Filippo Barker Webb (Firenze, 1865), digitized by Bayrische Staatsbibliothek: 4 Biogr.260o, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb10050205-1). The collection includes sixteenth-century botanical print works by Brunfels, Bock, Fuchs, Mattioli, Cesalpino, and Gerard. 50 The back of the title page is adorned with a woodcut of a portrait of Fuchs and a bookmark ribbon lying between p. 448/449 while pages 187–9 seem to have never been separated for reading. 51 Such cases are the copies of Mattioli’s Discorsi (Venice 1550: 41B1) and Commentarii (Venice 1565: SALA.1.L.II.48) as well as a copy of Fuchs’ Commentarii (Paris 1546: 30F3) that seems to have been used in the feld, showing unintentionally collected bits of plant matter. 52 They also provide insight into how these books were transformed in the process of reading from uniformly printed copies to individual hybrid tomes, an observation that builds on Grafton, The Margin as Canvas.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Primary Sources REMAINING COPIES EXAMINED

Andrea Cesalpino. De Plantis (1583), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: BL8B12 (Fondo Webb). Andrea Cesalpino. De Plantis (1583), Biblioteca Marucelliana: R.i.19. Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Basel, 1542), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: BL4A14 (Fondo Webb). Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Paris, 1546), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: 30F3 (Fondo Webb). Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Lyon, 1549), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: 71M23 (Società Botanica). Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Lyon, 1549), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: BL4B10 (Fondo antico). Leonhart Fuchs. De historia stirpium commentarii insignes (Lyon, 1551), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: BL4B10 (Fondo Webb). Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Commentarii (1563), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: 41B2 “Variante B” (Fondo Webb). Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Commentarii (1565), Biblioteca Marucelliana: SALA.I.L.II.48. Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Discorsi (1550), Biblioteca di Scienze, Botanica: 41B1 (Fondo antico). DIGITALIZED AND OTHER PRIMARY SOURCES

Andreae Cesalpini Aretini. Andreae Cesalpini De plantis libri XVI, apud Georgium Marescottum, Florentiae, 1583 (digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München: Augsburg, Staats- und Stadtbibliothek 4 Nat 54; urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb11220346-2). Filippo Parlatore, Elogio di Filippo Barker Webb, Firenze 1865 (digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München: 4 Biogr.260o, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10050205-1). Leonhart Fuchs. de historia stirpium commentarii insignes, maximis impensis et vigiliis elaborati, adiectis earundem vivis plusquam quingentis imaginibus, nunquam antea ad naturae imitationem artifciosus effectis & expressis, Basileae in offciana Isigriniana 1542 (digitized by archive. org). Leonhart Fuchs. Primi de stirpium historia commentariorum tomi vivae imagines in exiguam angustioremque formam contractae ac quam feri potest artifciosissime expressae .  .  . Basileae in offciana Isiginiana 1549 (digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München: Phyt. 182 a; urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb00034002-0). Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Il Dioscoride dell’ eccellente dottore medico M. P. Andrea Matthioli da Siena, (Venetia 1550) and the Latin edition Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii, in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anarzabei, de medica materia, Venetijs, in offciana Erasmiana, apud Vincentium Valgrisium, 1554 (digitized by archive.org). Pietro Andrea Mattioli. Petri Andreae Matthioli medici Senensis commentarii, in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei, de materia medica. Adiectis quam plurimis plantarum & animalium imaginibus, eodem authore, Venetia 1554 (digitized by Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München: Res/2A. gr.b.527; urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10139456-1). Rudolf Von Roth, ed., Eberhart-Karls-Universität Tubingen: Urkunden der Geschichte der Universität Tübingen aus den Jahren 1476 bis 1550.

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Tübingen: Verlag der Laupp’schen Buchhandlung, 1877 (digitized by Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen: LXV116; http://doi. org/10.20345/digitue.12013). Secondary Sources Anderson, Frank J. An Illustrated History of the Herbals. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Blair, Ann. “The Dedication Strategies of Conrad Gessner.” In Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine: Essays in Honor of Nancy Siraisi, edited by Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec, 169–209. New York: Springer, 2017. Boxer, C. R. Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia d’Orta and Nicolás Monardes. London: Hispanic and Luso- Brazilian Councils, 1963. Bühler, Benjamin. “Botanik.” In Literatur und Wissen, Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch, 65–66. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2013. Buratovich, Michael A. “Binomial Classifcation.” In Science and Scientists, vol. 1, 80. Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press Inc, 2006. Dobat, Klaus. Leonhart Fuchs: Das Kräuterbuch von 1543. New Kreüterbuch. Cologne: Taschen Deutschland GmbH+, 2001. Egmond, Florike. “Into the Wild: Botanical Fieldwork in the Sixteenth Century.” In Naturalists in the Field, Collecting, Recording and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Arthur MacGregor, 166–211. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018. Eisenstein, Elizabeth. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Findlen, Paula. “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections.” In The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 272– 89, Third Revised Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Findlen, Paula. “The Death of a Naturalist: Knowledge and Community in Renaissance Italy.” In Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine, edited by Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec (Essays in the Honour of Nancy Siraisi), 127–67. Berlin: Springer Verlag, 2017. Findlen, Paula. “The Formation of a Scientifc Community: Natural History in Sixteenth-Century Italy.” In Natural Particulars, Nature and the Disciplines in Renaissance Europe, edited by Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi, 369–400. Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 1999. Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin, foreword by Richard Macksey. Cambridge et al.: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Giannetto, Raffaella Fabiani. “Types of Gardens.” In The Cultural History of Gardens in the Renaissance, edited by Elisabeth Hyde, 43–72. London et al.: Bloomsbury, 2016. Glare, Peter G. W. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Oxford et al: Oxford University Press, 1997. Grafton, Anthony. “The Margin as Canvas: A Forgotten Function of the Early Printed Page.” In Impagination, Layout and Materiality of Writing and Reading Publication, edited by Ky-ming Chang, Anthony Grafton, and Glenn W. Most, 185–207. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021. Grämiger, Gregory. “Reconstructing Order: The Spatial Arrangement of Plants in the Hortus Botanicus of Leiden University in Its First Years.” in Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern

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Period, edited by Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, 235–51. Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2016. Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination, 1600–1750, Second Edition, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Johns, Adrian. The Nature of the Book, Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Knebel, Kristin, Claudia Ortlieb, and Grudun Püschel, eds. Steine rahmen, Tiere taxieren, Dinge inszenieren. Sammlung und Beiwerk. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag, 2018. Knight, Leah. On Books and Botany in Early Modern England, SixteenthCentury Plants and Print Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Kreimeier, Klaus and Georg Stanitzek, eds. Paratexte in Literatur, Film, Fernsehen. Berlin et al.: De Gruyter, 2004. Kusukawa, Sachiko. Picturing the Book of Nature. Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany. London and Chigaco: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Lack, H. Walter. Jardin de la Malmaison. Ein Garten für Kaiserin Josephine. Munich: Prestel, 2004. Moggi, Guido. “L’erbario di Andrea Cesalpino.” In Gli Erbari Aretini da Andrea Cesalpino ai giorni nostri, edited by Chiara Nepi and Enrico Gusmeroli, 1–20. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2008. Montero Sobrevilla, Iris. “Indigenous Naturalists.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 112–30. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing. Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Olariu, Dominic. “Kräuterautopsie’ im Jahr 1487.” Geschichte der Pharmazie 70, no. 3 (2018): 29–51. Palmer, Richard. “Medical Botany in Northern Italy in the Renaissance.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 78 (1985): 149–57. Pugliano, Valentina. “Natural History in the Apothecary’s Shop.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by H. A. Curry, N. Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, 44–60. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Rautenberg, Ursula. “Die Entstehung und Entwicklung des Buchtitelblatts in der Inkunabelnzeit in Deutschland, den Niederlanden und Venedig. Quantitative und qualitative Studien.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 62 (2008): 1–105. Reeds, Karen. “Renaissance Humanism and Botany.” Annals of Science 33 (1976): 519–42. Tosi, Alessandro. “Botanical Illustration and the Idea of the Garden in the Sixteenth Century Between Imitation and Imagination.” In Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period, edited by Hubertus Fischer, Volker R. Remmert, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn, 183–210. Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2016. Van Leerdam, Andrea. “Popularising and Personalising and Illustrated Herbal in Dutch.” Nuncius 36 (2021): 356–93.

Chapter 10

Armadillo An Animal in Search of a Place Florencia Pierri

“Powers used ambiguity to create for the armadillo an emblematic signifcance that would not have been out of place in the tradition of the medieval bestiary, all the while engaging with questions of classifcation that were of immense interest to scholars of his era.” Page 295

VISUALIZATION 10 All animals: Joannes Jonstonus, Historiae naturalis de quadrupedibus libri: cum aeneis fguris (Amstelodami, Apud Ioannem Iacobi Fil. Schipper, 1657). Border graphic: Adriaen Collaert, Neptunus Zeegoden (c. 1570–1618), Rijksmuseum. In early modern Europe, armadillos had a patchwork nature. Likewise, this armadillo’s existence is transitory and its identity contingent. Just as it was described by the Europeans who tried to understand it, it exists in shifting relationship to the horse, pig, frog, turtle, and fsh that frame it. Moreover, its bisected body reveals the fragility of its classifcation, where one missing part could unsettle its place in the order of nature.

Abstract: European naturalists were entranced by armadillos, and in the early modern period, they came to symbolize both the American continent and the complicated and confounding character of its animals. As they moved through global trade networks, armadillos simultaneously lost indigenous meanings and classifcations and acquired new and sometimes conficting ones from Europeans who sought to make sense of them. In the era when armadillos arrived in Europe, animals were classifed into three broad categories: land animals, fsh, and birds—the armadillo’s affnity for land, mixed with its physical particularities which made it suitable to aquatic environments as well, necessarily challenged these classical taxonomic categories. This chapter examines these shifting understandings and conversations about living natural things through published natural histories and cabinet classifcation schemes to show how, even as these animals could be folded into an emblematic or bestiary tradition, they enormously complicated encyclopedic enterprises of classifying in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In the late seventeenth century, an amateur poet by the name of Powers applied both his pen and his dubious literary skills to natural history and wrote a series of descriptions of American fora and fauna. He described some objects in relatively straightforward prose—he stated, for example that the “pacos or Indian sheepe or rather camell goat” were “certainly the most benefcial Animals in the world,” since they provided meat, fne wool, and could carry heavy loads, needing neither saddle nor shoes.1 However, perhaps moved to strike a higher key, other naturalia invoked in him a more poetic turn. “Do not yr Palates much provoke,” he warned of the pineapple, “with this sweet Indian Artichoke/ [. . .]/ By wch Lethiferous fatall juice/They will the Bloody Flux produce.”2 From the poetic heights of bloody diarrhea, Powers turned to the animal we would now call an armadillo, to which he dedicated two poems and a drawing (the only picture in the more than two dozen textual descriptions). In the illustrated ode to “a Creature called Armadillo or Tatu,” he described an “Animall arm’d with Scale/as if it weare a cote of Maile,” and sketched next to it the unmistakable hinged carapace of that Central American animal.3 Even though by modern zoological standards, his textual description left something to be desired, Powers knew enough of what the animal looked like to draw a fgure of this seemingly chain-mail clad creature, but by the late seventeenth century, this would not have been too surprising. For Powers and his contemporaries, this animal with a porcine snout and amazing ability to curl up DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-15

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into an impenetrable ball was immediately recognizable as one of the many creatures that had come to Europe from the New World. Powers’ language itself was an echo of a description from nearly two hundred years prior, when the Spanish lawyer turned conquistador Martín Fernández de Enciso (c. 1470–1528) used a remarkably similar simile to describe this American animal in his Suma de Geographia (1519), the frst widely published Spanish language description of the New World.4 The book dealt not only with issues of navigation, but it also provided a descriptive geography of the world, complete with a catalog of its most memorable fora and fauna.5 Included in that catalog were not only camels, elephants, reindeer, and other exotic animals, but also the theretofore unknown (for Europeans, at least) animals of the Americas, especially those of Darién, where Enciso spent most of his time during his two trips to the Caribbean. He was particularly taken with the armadillo, an animal which was “beautiful to see,” but bizarre: the size of a month-old pig, with the hooves, head, and ears of a horse. It even grazed like a horse, and it was curiously covered from its ears to its tail by a shell that gave it the appearance of wearing the equine plate armor that would have been a common sight in the age of the Spanish Reconquista.6 By the late seventeenth century, it was almost impossible for Powers not to have seen an armadillo, either in a painting or engraving, as a dried carapace, or even as a living pet. In London alone there were scores of these specimens, both in private hands and in the semi-public collections that were the forerunners of modern-day museums. To give but one example, the “Chelsea knackatory” founded in 1690 by the self-styled Don Saltero had several of them by the seventeenth century.7 That collection was curated by James Salter (d. c.1728), former valet to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), from the cast-offs from the latter’s collection, and the preponderance of armadillos in Salter’s own collection refects the positive glut of them in Sloan’s.8 By the time Powers wrote his poems, this animal was far from a scarce sight in seventeenth century Europe, even as it remained a symbol of the mysterious west.9 If we return to Powers’ poem, after he gave a description of the creature, he noted that the animal was complicated and confounding: In shape of snout hee is a Swine & like to him doth grunt and whine But if you view his scaly skin Hees Fish without and Swine within Creature of Amphibious nature.10 Here, the poet picked up on a central ambiguity about the animal’s true nature: whether it was a quadruped, a fsh, or a reptile. It was the uncertainty as to its very nature that confounded. If one went by its snout and the noise it made, then the animal was unproblematically a quadruped. However, if one went by its scales and aquatic habitat, then it was piscine. It seemed, then, that this creature should be an amphibian, which, in the frst usage of the word was not strictly a zoological category, but descriptor of anything of an ambiguous nature.11 However, as a classifcatory term, amphibian had increasingly narrowed its reach over the course of the seventeenth century, and it also did not make sense to classify armadillos with frogs and toads. For Powers, then, these animals existed in a liminal position between several categories because of the tension between their internal and external natures. Powers would later play with this ambiguity in the second of his armadillo poems. In it, he describes this “sealed tortoise” as sinister precisely because of the duplicity inherent in its liminal status. “What Indian

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monster’s this that dwells,/under a roof all thatched with shells?” he asked, concluding that “Both Flesh and Fish he is.” As environments changed, he continued, these animals could opportunistically take advantage of any situation, since its “Amphibious nature” kept it “secure from Injuryes.” This not only had taxonomical implications, but their duplicitousness could also shed some light on the human experience. Referring to that “Indian monster,” Powers argued that “Thus doe the Parasites at Courte/turn fsh or fesh of any sort/& as thinges there doe change their state/do they themselves Transspeciate.”12 Powers used ambiguity to create for the armadillo an emblematic signifcance that would not have been out of place in the tradition of the medieval bestiary, all the while engaging with questions of classifcation that were of immense interest to scholars of his era. That an animal took up a symbolic presence was not uncommon—many scholars have commented on the emblematic uses of animals in the medieval and early modern eras.13 William Ashworth has argued that the incorporation of New World animals into late sixteenth and seventeenth century works of natural history sounded the death knell for the emblematic worldview, since American animals owed no legacy to the classical tradition.14 However, if, as Emma Spary counsels in her work on Enlightenment natural history, we look at the “individuals who traded in notions of nature” rather than take as representative the work of a few published books of natural history which look scientifc to our modern eyes, we see a different story.15 While it is true that some natural histories did not incorporate emblematics into New World animal descriptions in the way that they did for their Old World counterparts, it was not because of a rejection of the genre. Rather, like the rest of the material about American animals, the pace of accumulation of knowledge was slow, and while learning about an animal’s physical appearance was easy, untangling its emblematic associations was not. However, as Powers’ own writings attest, authors would still turn to the traditions of emblems and moral stories to write learnedly about animals, and his poems about New World naturalia provide us with insight into some of the pressing issues and general trends in natural history writings about the American continent as it was done in countries outside of Spain and by people who did not have a direct connection with the project of imperial expansion. In Totemism, Claude Levi Strauss wrote that animals were “good to think with,” and in the case of early modern studies of animals, armadillos provide a particularly fruitful cognitive tool.16 Powers’ armadillo poems provide a perfect capsule of what it was like to study and think about American animals in a broader category of nature studies. He shared these concerns with others who wished to make a more scholarly study of animals in the early modern period. Using the example of the armadillo in Europe, this chapter examines the course that nature studies took as New World animals made their way into Europe. It traces armadillos as they traveled through the waters and lands of European imagination, until they eventually burrowed their way into a new home within European conceptions of nature.

SENDING ANIMALS In 1523, Francisco de Garay (1475–1523), then governor of Jamaica, sent out an expedition to scout for a possible colony along the Panuco River in present day Mexico. When he reached a promising location, he sent out a smaller group to reconnoiter the region and draw up some maps. Cristóbal Pérez Hernán (d.1523) was part of that smaller expedition. He was not just

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a soldier in Garay’s employ; he was also a correspondent of Peter Martire’s (1457–1526), and the latter included his story in the Decades Orbe Novo.17 Martire related that the soldier “took many new observations” about the region, all of which Martire deemed unworthy of recording, save for one. Pérez Hernán, Martire wrote, caught sight of an odd quadruped grazing in a feld where their contingent had stopped to take some measurements. It looked like a knight’s horse in miniature, ftted out for battle, and protected by silvery scales like those of a dragon. However, unlike a fearless warhorse, he found that this creature was slow and timid, and at the frst sight of danger, it curled up into a perfect impenetrable ball. Interest piqued, he set off to capture it—not a terribly diffcult feat, since the animal’s main mode of defense was its hard shell, and besides that, it was not overly threatening. Once captured, he brought it aboard his ship, where it lived with the rest of the soldiers’ domestic animals. Unfortunately for both captive and captor, however, the expedition was caught up in an Amerindian ambush, and suffered many privations. With supplies dwindling, he could no longer justify keeping his curious new pet and, just as the members of James Cook’s Endeavour crew had elected to eat their Taningia danae specimen when their own supplies ran short, he learned that armadillo meat was quite a delicacy.18 Related only by Martire’s pen, the story of Pérez Hernán’s armadillo was, by mere chance, saved from the obscurity of the intervening years. Martire did not include this anecdote because of its rarity, rather, he included it despite the ordinariness of capturing animals with the intention of bringing them back to Europe. The practice of collecting animals, either living or dead, is diffcult to trace in the historical record because it was such a commonplace occurrence, and one that did not usually generate a paper trail. Unlike the trade in silver, plants, or other merchandise, with few exceptions, there was no large-scale and systematic attempt to transport American animals to Europe in the early modern period.19 Instead of coming through the channels of exploitable goods, these animals came in ones or twos, the charges of the individual sailors, pilots, or travelers who caught them, and not listed in any ship’s manifest. Also, this practice was habitual—after all, the image of a sailor even in our modern imagination would not be complete without a talking parrot or a cheeky monkey. As Louise Robbins has pointed out in the context of the eighteenth century, “acquiring birds here and there may have been too routine to warrant notice, even when numbers ran into the hundreds.”20 What was true for birds was true for other animals as well; travelers brought back everything from hummingbirds to jaguars on ships bound for Europe from the American continent, along with the usual menagerie of livestock and working animals that were essential to every nautical voyage. Despite this, animals did leave traces in the archive, and one can reconstruct this traffc by fnding their treads in memoires, letters, artwork, collections catalogs, and other sources to see that by the late sixteenth century, American animals, especially armadillos, had become rather commonplace in Europe. Starting in the late ffteenth century, travelers to the Indies caught animals with the intention of exhibiting them once they returned home. Sometimes, they were even successful. Upon his frst landfall on what he believed to be the Indies, Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) immediately noticed the songs of little birds [were] so beautiful that a man would never want to leave this place. And there are swarms of parrots that obscure the sun, and birds of all sizes and so different from ours that it is a marvel.21

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It was not a surprise, then, that he returned to Spain with colorful parrots in tow. He was not the only one to do so—the sheer numbers of American birds in Europe made them almost emblematic of the continent.22 One of the earliest maps depicting the New World, the 1502 Cantino Planisphere, literally put Brazil on the map with the gaudy colors of scarlet macaws— birds which appeared in European art starting in the early 1500s.23 In 1494, King Ferdinand of Spain issued an order to send a trapper to the Indies specifcally to capture falcons, and an early condition of obtaining a royal license to go exploring in the New World was that those in charge would bring back parrots for the monarchs.24 This fascination with New World naturalia extended beyond birds, of course. In 1499, Vicente Yañez Pinzón (c. 1462–c. 1514), who accompanied Columbus on his frst voyage, set out on his own expedition to explore the South American coast and encountered a “monstrous animal” so singular that he captured it and its young to bring to the king of Spain. According to Angelo Trevisan, secretary to Venice’s ambassador to Spain, Pinzón trapped the mother with three of her young still in her curious belly pouch. The offspring died on the voyage (though not before they were seen by several credible witnesses), but he still brought the mother from Seville to Granada specifcally to present her to the Spanish court.25 A few years later, Hernan Cortés (1485–1547) attempted to bring to Charles V (1500–1558) two so-called tigers he had captured on his travels, but much to the consternation of everyone involved, not least the tigers themselves, the animals escaped from their cages and ate two sailors before someone managed to shoot them.26 Sixty years later in 1580, the governor of Cartagena sent another tiger to Spain, this time successfully, and like the 1499 opossum, it was dispatched to the court at Madrid as soon as it arrived in Seville.27 Successes like these were a rarity. In 1632, Philip IV (1605–1665) ordered that “the most ferocious animals that nature breeds, like lions, tigers, bears, and the like” be brought from the Indies to a new palace he was constructing for himself in Madrid.28 By all accounts, the closest he got was three “tigers” from Guayaquil that, after a year-long voyage, died 15 miles away from Madrid. The English explorer Roger Barlow (c. 1480–1553), who was part of Sebastian Cabot’s (c. 1474–1557) 1528 voyage along the southern coast of Brazil, found some “sort of smal byrdes [with] the goodliest colored fethers that ever a man might se, the colours would chaunge in moving of them as it were chaungable silke,” and thought them so beautiful that he “toke one of them alive and kept it in a cage,” knowing that it would cause a sensation if he could bring it back to Europe. Unfortunately, the bird “lived not long for lacke of knowledge to diet or other keeping,” and for want of a better alternative, they “toke of the skynne, the heade, fete and featers [. . .] and stuffed it with drie mosse and put it in a coffer.”29 Although that animal did not make it back alive, a note in a Spanish deposition after Barlow’s expedition returned in the late 1520s indicates that he did manage to bring back three supposed Indian sheep to the king of Spain.30 There was great prestige attached to gifting a monarch with an American animal, even though it was diffcult to keep anything alive long enough to make it back to Europe.31 Likewise, there was a great demand to see in person what travelers told tales about, and conquistadors certainly obliged. Though in a piecemeal manner, indigenous American animals did come to Europe—sometimes dead, sometimes alive—and once there, they were no longer abstractions, but real animals entangled in an interconnected mesh of nature studies, classifcatory problems, learned erudition, and the early modern European impulse to collect. Removed from

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their indigenous habitat, they hesitatingly entered a new ecology of European knowledge that was not quite ready for them. As these cases suggest, the New World marvels that did make it to Europe tended to remain in a courtly setting, but the huge outpouring of interest in curiosities meant that Europe was full of American animals, especially by the end of the sixteenth century.32 This increase coincided with the rise of new sites for natural history knowledge-making, including gardens and museums, as well as a new urge to transport naturalia not only from the New World to Spain, but also within Europe itself. This entire movement was undergirded by the effort to deliver new animals and plants into the hands of not just royalty, but also the generally curious, including naturalists who were writing encyclopedias of natural history and who did not have the same kind of access to the Americas as Spaniards did. Instead, they relied on specimens and information sent to them from all over the world from other European correspondents. Still, sending naturalia even within the bounds of Europe was fraught with diffculties. For example, in 1595, the Dutch naturalist Carolus Clusius (1526–1609) sent a letter to the Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598). The two shared an interest in philology and natural history and Arias Montano was instrumental in sending Clusius books about the Indies. Arias Montano was also part of a larger network of correspondents, and he brokered trades of other material among his own network of friends in Spain.33 On one occasion, Clusius had sent, via Arias Montano, a packet of seeds to Simón de Tovar (c. 1528–1596), a prominent Spanish collector based in Seville whose garden Clusius had toured in 1564.34 As Arias Montano wrote, “as soon as I recognized the author’s hand, I was gladdened, but after having read it, I was much surprised that it had been delivered to me so late, after the passage of several months.”35 Not only was the letter late, but it had also been opened at some point, and its contents disturbed. Someone had ransacked the packet of seeds, and all the labels had disappeared, something which, as Tovar told Arias Montano, was uncharacteristic of

Figure 10.1: Varieties of Armadillo Drawn from Previous Natural Histories. Joannes Jonstronis, Historiae Naturalis de quadrupetibus libri IV (Frankfurt: Matthaeus Merian, 1650–1653), “Armadillo sive aiatochtli” and “Armadillo Genus Alterum Clusii,” Table LXXIIII.

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the meticulous Dutch naturalist. To mitigate against future misadventures, Arias Montano gave Clusius a handy Spanish phrase that he could write on the letter’s wrapper— “In the service of His Majesty”—in the hopes (vain, as it turned out) that this would deter further theft.36 Theft was a common problem, and no amount of untruthful association with monarchy could stem that. When Tovar died in 1596, another Spaniard, Rodrigo Zamorano (1542–1620), the royal cosmographer and head of the Casa de Contratación, became Clusius’ main source of American naturalia. His frst delivery included a nopal from New Spain, a plant whose transport out of the New World was a criminal offence because it was the host species for the famed cochineal beetle.37 As the head of the organization that enforced these rules, however, Zamorano was unlikely to prosecute himself, and he likely viewed his exchange with Clusius as part of the Republic of Letters, and outside of the world of commerce that the Casa was tasked to regulate.38 “I performed this small favor for you,” he wrote, “with great pleasure, as I wanted you to [include me] in your list of friends and admirers,” and he hoped that this would translate into a reciprocal relationship of natural gifts.39 However, as Zamorano later learned, the plants never reached Clusius, and suspiciously, some of these specimens were later seen in the garden of the Count of Aremberg.40 Something similar had happened to Tovar, who wrote to Clusius in 1596, frustrated that the botanical box [pyxis] he sent had not been delivered. “I vehemently lament,” he wrote, and “I feel very unlucky that what I hoped would be pleasing to you, and what I prepared with great care and love unfortunately resulted to be in vain, since it was intercepted and stolen.” However, pilfering was not the only worry on his mind. In this same response, he explained to Clusius that he would re-send the contents of the box, except for one species, of which he had only one remaining sample, “since it is infertile in our regions.”41 He was afraid that if he were to send it immediately in the shipment meant to replace the purloined objects, it would die because of inclement weather, leaving them both plant-less. All of these problems—the time it took for things to travel, the unwillingness to part with one’s only exemplar, and the very real possibility that specimens would die in transit—were only exacerbated when the objects in question were not plants but animals, which took less kindly to being stuffed in boxes or ignored for months on end. After Arias Montano’s death in 1596, Clusius’ main correspondent in the Iberian peninsula (with whom he mainly discussed animals) was the physician Juan de Castañeda.42 “I promise you,” Castañeda wrote, “that we have here [in Seville] the greatest curiosities that anyone can desire, of animals and fsh that have shells and natural defenses like those of turtles or tortoises. These are armadillos [. . .] We also have other very strange animals.” He explained that he could only send their names, “because, for not having more than one, they cannot be sent.”43 In another letter, he described two fsh that a pilot had brought him from Honduras, and although he did send a written description of both, again, he lamented that “if only there were someone who had them, I would send them to you.” Also in this letter, he noted that Zamorano (with whom Clusius had exchanged letters in the late 1500s) was the man responsible for having these fsh sent to Spain. “As examiner of the pilots in the passage to the Indies,” he explained, Zamorano ordered that “every pilot who goes [to the Indies] is required to send him something new or extraordinary, and that is why the walls of his house are all covered in shells, fsh, and remarkable animals.” Castañeda ended his letter with the vow that Clusius needed to only say the word, and he would marshal Zamorano’s network to search for whatever he might want or need for his own work.44

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There were two issues at work here: Castañeda both knew that naturalists in the rest of Europe wanted to write global, encyclopedic natural histories, and he did not think that the circle of naturalists in Seville were equipped to do this work. When he wrote to Clusius about the armadillo, he regretted that they did not have anyone who could draw and engrave it.45 He even went so far as to suggest the artists in the Netherlands were “more hardworking than the people here, and know more,” and if Clusius were to send him an artist, he could in turn send Clusius more skillfully executed drawings.46 Castañeda understood that scholars were interested in accommodating novelties from the New World into existing frameworks of natural philosophy, but that this would happen best as a collaborative effort. Some naturalists disagreed. Writing about the New World in the 1580s, Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) complained that “many historians of these places have described many plants and animals that are born there, nonetheless, they have not written of them ex professo; rather, of the profusion of natural things they found there, they have been forced to write and refer to their variety as it were incidentally and in passing.”47 He argued that only an educated man could write as an expert, and an skilled rendering of the natural could only be done by a trained naturalist, not a collection of ad hoc travelers. To that end, he tried to convince the grand duke of Tuscany to send him to the New World so he could observe its nature for himself. Although the duke was convinced of the necessity of this, unfortunately for Aldrovandi, he chose someone else to undertake the journey.48 However, by the end of the century, networks of circulation that allowed for the travel of both goods and information were already frmly in place. Alienated from their original contexts, specimens in motion (and information about them) uncoupled travel from the act of writing. As Barrera-Osorio argued, these networks connected such far-fung places as Peru and Leiden, and everywhere in between, and their members “placed their own experience, reports, and collections at the center of new epistemological approaches to nature. From these activities and networks emerged the empiricism that characterized the new scientifc practices of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”49 These networks (and the volume they handled) also made sure that, no matter the diffculties inherent in sending them, animals and plants eventually made it to cabinets, collections, and museums throughout Europe. While Castañeda lamented that he could not send Clusius an armadillo in the post, in some sense, he needn’t have bothered.50 Although, as we have seen, plants and animals often did not survive overseas, or even an inter-European trip, the late ffteenth century saw an increase not only in interest in curiosities, but also in systematic efforts to collect and send them. There were countless natural things that made this journey, and plenty of specimens, especially the hardier ones, made it through.

AN ARMADILLO IN EVERY CABINET If you were to walk into a learned man’s cabinet of curiosities anywhere in Europe by the mid sixteenth century, you would have almost certainly found an armadillo carapace. In a study of French cabinets of curiosities in the seventeenth century, Antoine Schnapper found that while contents their might have varied, all of them contained the “inevitable” armadillo.51 Similarly, in her survey of ten cabinets of the same century, Wilma George found that every one of them also contained at least one armadillo.52 The catalog of the rarities in the school of anatomy in Oxford in 1657 also noted that there was one in the south part of the school, next to a sea urchin and

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Figure 10.2: Museum Wormianum as depicted in Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, seu, Historia rerum rariorum (Leiden: Elsevier, 1655). the subject of chapter 4 of this volume, a rhinoceros horn.53 A 1681 catalog of the Royal Society’s Gresham College had three different types of armadillos, classifed by analogy. There was a “weesle-headed armadillo,” a “pigheaded armadillo,” and a “great shell’d hedgehog.”54 There were also plenty of armadillos for Clusius to visit in the Low Countries. The sale catalog of the collection of the French-born pharmacist Christiaen Porret (1554–1627), shows that his collection (which Clusius consulted several times when writing his encyclopedia of natural history) had one, as did the merchant and traveler Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611), who gifted one to his neighbor, physician, and fellow collector Bernardus Paludanus (1550–1633).55 Examinations of the illustrated frontispieces of published catalogs can turn into games of Where’s Waldo, with an unmistakable curved carapace replacing a red and white striped shirt. They were also points of pride for collectors—Ferrante Imperato (c. 1525–c. 1615), Ole Worm (1588–1657), and Fernardino Cospi (1606– 1686) all had collections encompassing far more than could ft in one image; nevertheless they put them on graphic display in the frontispieces of their published catalogs.56 Armadillos even crossed the bounds of Europe. When the French naturalist Pierre Belon (1517–1564) traveled with the French ambassador to the Ottoman Empire in the 1550s, he went to a market in Constantinople where he “found many singularities brought from far-away lands,” including theriac and its exotic ingredients, fsh from the Nile river, and “the animal that is called a Tatou.”57 Belon made it clear that this “type of hedgehog, unknown to the ancients” was from the New World and had traveled from there to Constantinople.58 He had also seen one of these animals in Paris, this time, a live specimen which thrived on grains and fruit, and for his readers who might not have had this same pleasure, “I thought it would be good to give its portrait.”59 He possibly did not pay enough attention to the live specimen, since the animal in the fgure has a barred snout, a quirk of post mortem

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preparation for an animal whose lips recede into a snarl when they dry out.60 Either as live animals eating fruit in a Parisian home, offered for sale in a bazaar in Constantinople, or on the pages of popular books, these animals were ideal natural things. Known far beyond the range of their native habitats, they were equally fascinating as living creatures for their unique habits and defense strategies as they were as dead specimens, when their carapaces proved to be valuable sources from which to make taxonomic critiques. The increase in popularity and visibility of exotic animals in Europe corresponded with the rise deciphering their natural history. As María Portuondo argued, new things from the Americas needed to be “accommodated into prevailing natural philosophical frameworks,” and they had to be “‘consumed’ by a European intelligentsia who interpreted the world mostly through the hermeneutical lenses afforded by Aristotelian and in some cases Neoplatonic natural philosophies.”61 This was precisely what many naturalists did when confronted with animals like armadillos. As we have seen, naturalists had relatively easy access to these creatures. As Belon explained, what made armadillos so common in so many cabinets of curiosities, and what made it possible for them to be brought so far from their native homes, was “because nature has armed them with hard skin [. . .] so that one can easily remove their skin without them losing their true form.”62 On a practical level, therefore, these animals were attractive to collectors due to their durability. However, they were also appealing to those who delighted in their liminal status. Like many other American animals, they were odd, but what distinguished them from other fauna from that region was their resistance to easy classifcation, throwing into relief the problems naturalists had in incorporating newfound fauna to an older tradition of natural history. Now it was up to these scholars to take these animals, the sometimes conficting information about them from a variety of sources that ranged from questionable to downright disingenuous, and the existing trends of scholarly studies of naturalia to rewrite the book of nature to take into account her newly expanded borders.

ANIMALS OUT OF PLACE In ones and twos, then, dead and alive, American animals came to Europe. Their inclusion in cabinets of curiosities and other European collections was not merely decorative, however. These spaces were the sites of serious academic research, and as we saw in the previous section, the interEuropean trade in of these animals was central to scholarly study.63 Once they landed in the cabinets of the learned and the curious, where precisely did they go? In the era when armadillos made it to Europe, non-human (and non-insect) animals were classifed into three broad groups: land animals, fsh, and birds.64 Quadrupeds lived on land, gave birth to live young, and had four limbs. Things that few in the air, including bats, were classifed as birds. Fishes roamed the sea, and included everything from sharks to whales, and, later on, manatees.65 Over the course of his life, Conrad Gessner (1516–1565), the Swiss physician, bibliographer, and general polymath amassed a huge store of knowledge about a variety of topics. A lifelong collector of naturalia and natural information, his books represented as close an encapsulation of the entirety of European zoological knowledge as existed in the early modern period.66 He classifed living creatures—and his books—by this defnition. The frst volume of his Historiae Animalium described quadrupeds that gave birth to live young, followed by a 1554 book about egglaying quadrupeds. Book three (1555) dealt with birds, and the following book (1558) was about fsh.67

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Figure 10.3: Gessner’s Armadillo. Historiae Animalium. Conrad Gessner, “Appendix Historiae Quadrupedum Viviparorum,” in Historia Animalium Liber II: De Quadrupedibus Oviparis (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1554), 20. The second book, on oviparous quadrupeds, contained an appendix of an additional 30 entries that were meant to be in book I on viviparous quadrupeds.68 In the appendix’s letter to the reader, Gessner noted that some of these additions were the result of new information and fgures that

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had been sent to him after the publication of the original 1551 book—facts which by and large supplemented information that Gessner had already published.69 Other times, however, the additions truly were press-stopping novelties about viviparous quadrupeds that simply had not existed in the earlier work or about oviparous quadrupeds that came to Gessner’s attention after the sections to which they belonged were already damp off the press. This refects both Gessner’s working process, and the nature of early modern natural history as discipline in fux, with new information, and even new animals, constantly making their way into scholarly works at inopportune times.70 Most of the animals in the appendix that were additions to the text came from the New World, including the armadillo, which in this version, he called a tatu. In his description, Gessner cited extensively, and almost verbatim, from Belon’s Singularitez. He did, however, take issue with Belon’s image. Gessner argued that in his book, the former had “put forth a picture of this quadruped as a cloven-footed animal, as if it were a swine, and legs that are higher than in our picture,” and he also noted that his image had a corrected aping mouth.71 The image in the Historiae was made based on one sent to him by an apothecary who also sent him the animal’s skin, tail, and legs. From this, Gessner created the image for the Historiae Animalium.72 Since he had a corpse at his disposal, he was able to determine that “the feet in this animal are not cloven, but digitated: with fve digits in the back feet, and four digits in the front feet: indeed, the two farthest are each the shortest, and they are almost hidden.”73 This is diffcult to see, since, especially on their back feet, an armadillo’s toes grow very close together, and as he found, the frst and ffth toe, while separate, are very small. A cursory glance at a dried armadillo in a cabinet, coupled with the idea of these animals as being pig-like, led many to the conclusion that, like their porcine look-alikes, they had cloven hooves. Because he had a specimen he could examine at length, he was able to correct Belon’s image, and in doing so, Gessner also established its place in a taxonomical system where being cloven-footed was a major classifcatory divide. At the same time, however, he likely received a specimen that had been dried out long before, and the exaggerated open mouth that he believed was a correction to Belon’s fgure was instead an artifact—a result of time and dehydration peeling the animal’s thin lips away from the bone of its snout and into the snarl so characteristic (and characteristically mistaken) of representations of this animal in the early modern period. Belon, who had seen a live animal, would have known that the animal’s mouth closed fully, but his image was drawn from memory, not life, and was thus epistemologically suspect. When faced with a conficting fact, even one from a person who claimed to have seen the real thing rooting around in a Parisian courtyard, Gessner still had to rely on the evidence provided by the object in front of him. And since animals traveled better dead than alive, Gessner’s specimen, like so many others in Europe from which naturalists illustrated, had this same artifact. The ability to examine the carapace closely led Gessner to make a few assumptions about its nature—some of which (like the structure of its feet) track with contemporary zoological understanding, and others (like the open mouth), which do not. Ulisse Aldrovandi also grouped his works into categories broadly similar to Gessner’s with books on quadrupeds, fsh, birds, serpents, and insects. In the introduction to his 1637 De Quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis, he noted that this classifcatory scheme appeared in everything from sacred literature to the works of the ancient Greeks, but that some of the

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Figure 10.4: Aldrovandi’s Armadillo. “Tatum, sive Echinus Brasilianus,” Ulisse Aldrovandi, De quadrupedibus digitatis viviparis libri tres (Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini (printer) and Marco Antonio Bernia, 1645), 480. fner breakdowns in these earlier classifcation systems had problems.74 In his revised scheme, he classifed quadrupeds into three categories: those with cloven hoofs, solid hoofs, or those with digits. Only after he had settled what he thought was a more fundamental distinction did he divide animals up as either viviparous or oviparous. Gessner, who only separated quadrupeds by their mode of reproduction, saw the issue of armadillo’s feet as a curious puzzle, but for Aldrovandi, this uncertainty represented a classifcatory problem. Like Gessner, Aldrovandi relied on his own personal collection of naturalia for his books, though his collection was more voluminous. Nevertheless, Aldrovandi, like other scholars, had to wade his way through

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the mass of sometimes contradictory descriptions from authors of varying levels of credibility or observational skills. This directly impacted Aldrovandi’s simplest choice about what he called a “tatu, or Brazilian hedgehog”: where should it go? He had done his research. He noted some authors said it looked like a horse, while others called it a “checkered piglet.”75 Both of these descriptions compared it to a horse and a pig, and neither of those hooved animals belonged in a book about digitate animals. What Aldrovandi read in Belon added more evidence for the inclusion of armadillos in his Quadrupedum Bisulcorum, which dealt with clovenhooved animals. From Belon’s description, Aldrovandi argued, “this animal would be put in the group of cloven-footed animals, and not in the group of digitate animals.”76 Gessner, on the other hand, made a point of correcting Belon’s image and explicitly noted that armadillos were digitate. Aldrovandi was thus faced with conficting reports on a central issue of his classifcatory scheme. Making matters worse, the armadillo exuviae he had access to in Bologna were missing their feet.77 In the end, while he cited numerous authors in his entry on the armadillo, he privileged those authors (like Gessner) who provided images of digitate creatures.78 Moreover, because these images also looked the most like dried (though legless) specimens he had, and relying on morphological similarity to hedgehogs, he decided they must be digitate, and sorted them accordingly. While he had to grapple with the choice of classifying the armadillo as an odd-toed ungulate or a digitate animal, other authors sometimes disagreed on a more fundamental division. If we return to the poem that opened this chapter, we see that Powers contended that if one went by the shape of their snouts and the noises they made, armadillos were unproblematically quadrupeds. But, if one went by their scales and the ease with which they swam underwater, then they were piscine. And, indeed, plenty of authors took the latter route. Sometime between 1540 and 1585, the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), wrote about “earthly things” in the Historia general de las cosas de la Nueva España. His animal descriptions consisted of information gathered from his Amerindian interlocutors, and the work’s many drawings were created by indigenous artists.79 He divided the animals into the three sections: animals, birds, and fsh. It was in that third chapter, on the “animals of the sea” that Sahagún placed “the animal that they call the armored one,” right after other freshwater fsh.80 It is possible that in putting the armadillo in the category of water animal, Sahagún followed an indigenous classifcation system. This attention to Amerindian classifcation methods ft with his goal of preserving indigenous knowledge.81 But other authors, ones who likely did not have access to indigenous knowledge, often classifed animals in much the same way. In 1577, Adriaen Coenens (1514–1587), a Dutch fsherman and fsh auctioneer began work on his Vis Booc, a compendium of the creatures that teemed in and around the sea. It described wondrous events, such as whales washing ashore, wonderful creatures like mermaids, but also our now familiar armadillo. The placement of the armadillo suggests that Coenens considered it an amphibious link that tied together land and water lizards, as it was fanked on the preceding page by a winged chameleon and two types of lizards, and on the other page, by a pair of water lizards.82 Coenens was not the only one to think of this animal as a bridge between land and sea and embrace its amphibious nature. The French merchant Léonard Bernon (b.1560) had quite a few armadillos in his collection, as would beft any wealthy merchant, but it was their placement that was somewhat surprising. In the section of his catalog dedicated to amphibians, he noted that he had the usual suspects: American caimans, turtles,

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Figure 10.5 Nahua “turtle-rabbit” or “Ayotochin.” Bernardino de Sahagún, Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España, Book 11, Chapter 3, Part 4, Biblioteca Laurenziana, 65r.

Egyptian crocodiles, but also “a whole armadillo, which are very rare,” and “three beautiful tatous.”83 A Brazilian lizard and two chameleons (one alive, one dead), on the other hand, were classifed with the terrestrial animals.84 Sometimes, this animal skipped around, even within one particular cabinet. In 1587, when an armadillo was brought to the Escorial, it was accompanied by this explanatory note: “this is the hide of the animal that they call the armadillo. It is covered all over with shells, and because of this, it is said to be an animal of the sea as well as of land,” though it was elsewhere described as only a land animal.85

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CONCLUSION: UNCANNY ANIMALS Europeans simply could not make up their minds. Was an armadillo a fsh? An amphibian? A quadruped?86 Like the tricky beast that Powers described, it had a fuid nature, and could move from category to category with ease. The armadillo’s resistance to classifcation drove Europeans’ fascination with the animal in the early modern period. Sailors brought them home in droves because of their unusual anatomy, collectors included them in their cabinets of curiosities, and those who wished to classify them were faced with a dizzying array of categorical possibilities. The driving force behind all of this interest was that the armadillo did not ft into European classifcatory schemes, which had ossifed around the animals that were known (or imagined) on the continent for centuries. Armadillos represented a fundamental problem for Europeans who wanted to make sense of the natural world. When Europeans frst encountered animals like armadillos, they were complete unknowns, but over time, scholars tried to incorporate them into encyclopedic works of nature. And while these animals were not unknown by the late seventeenth century, their identifcation was still not set. Europeans knew what they were, but they did not know what to do with them. They were by no means novelties, but they nevertheless remained liminal in the older classifcation schemes, and they crossed through fundamental categories in a way that revealed the inherent weaknesses of those systems. They were not yet ready to settle into their place in the European book of nature.

NOTES 1 2 3 4 5

6 7 8

9

10 11

British Library (BL), MS Sloane, 4020, 212r. BL, MS Sloane, 4020, 215v. Ibid. Martín Fernández de Enciso, Suma de Geographia: q[ue] trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo, en especial de las indias . . . (Seville: Jacobo Cro[m]berger, 1519). Enciso’s work is part of a larger Spanish cartographical tradition of prose cartography. For more, see Ricardo Padrón, The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 2004). Enciso, Suma de Geographia, h6r. For more on the analogical approach to knowledge, see G. E. R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966). Barbara Benedict, “Spectating Science in the Early Modern Collection,” in Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750, ed. Judy A. Hayden (London: Routledge, 2016), 211–12. The earliest published catalog from 1729 notes some “armadilla,” A Catalog of the Rarities to be seen at don Saltero’s Coffee-House in Chelsea (London: Tho[mas] Edlin, 1792), 15. By the thirty-sixth edition of that catalog, there were four, including an armadillo fetus preserved in spirits, and both a land and sea “armadilla,” A Catalog of the Rarities to be Seen at don Saltero’s Coffee-House in Chelsea (London, 1790?), 3, 14, 16. As Persephone Braham argues, monsters became “enduring symbols of national and regional character” in Latin America for Europeans from 1492 to well into the modern period. Persephone Braham, “The Monstrous Caribbean,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). BL, MS Sloane, 4020, 215v. The earliest defnition for amphibian in the OED is “having two modes of existence, fg. of a doubtful nature,” with a quotation dating to 1637, www. oed.com/view/Entry/6620 (accessed June 20, 2022).

Chapter 10 • Armadillo 309 12 BL, MS Sloane, 4020, 213r. 13 Willene B. Clark and Meredith T. McMunn, eds., Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989); Debra Higgs Strickland, The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature (New York: Garland, 1999). 14 William B. Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View,” in Reappraisals of the Scientifc Revolution, ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 15 E. C. Spary, “The ‘Nature’ of Enlightenment,” in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 296–8. 16 Claude Lévi-Strauss, Totemism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972). See, for example, Natalie Lawrence, “Exotic Origins: The Emblematic Biogeographies of Early Modern Scaly Mammals,” Itinerario 39, no. 1 (2015): 17–42; Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, “Armadillos in Unlikely Places. Some Unpublished Sixteenth-Century Sources for New World ‘Rezeptionsgeschichte’ in Northern Europe,” Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 20, no. 1/2 (1994): 3–52. 17 Pietro Martire d’ Anghiera, De Orbe Novo (Alcalá de Henares: Michaele[m] d[e] Eguia, 1530), 106r-v. 18 For the squid feast aboard the Endeavour, see Whitney Barlow Robles’s chapter in this volume. 19 Even in the eighteenth century, when global travel was quicker, animals were still by and large brought individually, as Louise Robbins has pointed out in the case of eighteenth-century France. Louise E. Robbins, Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 20 Robbins, Elephant Slaves, 10. 21 Viajes de Cristóbal Colón, AGI, Patronato, 16r. 22 Marcy Norton, “Going to the Birds: Birds as Things and Beings in Early Modernity,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen (London: Routledge, 2013), 69–76. 23 Carta del Cantino, 1502, Biblioteca Estense Universitaria, c.g.a.2. Unlike their African counterparts (which were already quite popular in Europe), American parrots tended to be both brighter and larger. For more on American birds in art, see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 35–37. 24 Cédula del Rey a Don Juan de Fonseca, August 16, 1494, AGI, Patronato, 9, 63v; Asiento de Rodrifo de Bastidas, March 8, 1503, in Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, vol. 2 (Madrid: M. B. de Quirós, 1864), 362–6. 25 “De Navigatione Pinzoni socii admirantis, et de rebus per eum repertis,” in Novus Orbis Regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum, ed. Simon Grynäus (Basel: Johannes Hervagius, 1532), 119–21, quotation from 121. 26 Martire, De Orbe Novo, 81v. 27 Carta del Consejo al Licenciado Diego Gasca, June 6, 1580, Archivo General de Indias (AGI), Indiferente, 1956, 96r. 28 Real Orden, 20–06–1632, AGI, Indiferente, 429, L. 38, 23r. 29 Roger Barlow, A Brief Summe of Geographie, ed. E. G. R. Taylor (London: Hakluyt Society, 1931), 161. 30 E. G. R. Taylor, “Introduction,” in Barlow, A Brief Summe of Geographie, xl. See also José Torbio Medina, El Veneciano Sebastián Caboto al Servicio de España, vol. 1 (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1908), 181–2. 31 European monarchs used menageries as a way to project authority, see Eric Baratay and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier, Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West (London: Reaktion, 2002); Nigel Rothfels, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Caroline Grigson, Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England, 1100–1837 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 32 Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientifc Revolution (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006), 121. 33 For a general overview of Clusius’ network, see Florike Egmond, “Clusius and Friends: Cultures of Exchange in the Circles of European Naturalists,” in

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34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

53 54 55

Carolus Clusius: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, ed. Florike Egmond, Paul Hoftijzer, and Robert Visser (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007), 9–48; For the Spanish case, see Josep L. Barona, “Clusius’ Exchange of Botanical Information with Spanish Scholars,” in Carolus Clusius, 99–116. Carolus Clusius, Rariorum plantarum historia . . . (Antwerp: Plantin, 1601), 173. Letter from Arias Montano to Clusius, 1596–02–19, Universiteitsbibliotheek Leiden (UBL), VUL 101, Montano 4. The letter was written entirely in Latin with just one exception, “por servicio de Su Magestad” was written in Spanish, suggesting where Arias Montano the blame might rest. Letter from Arias Montano to Clusius, 1596–02–19, UBL, VUL 101, Montano 4. Jeremy Baskes, Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 9–15. The Spanish empire had a monopoly on the cochineal trade thanks to these safeguards, but their 250year monopoly did end in the eighteenth century, Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 39–44. On the place of money and commercialization in early modern natural history, see Brian W. Ogilvie, The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), especially 78–80. Letter from Zamorano to Clusius, 1603–06–03, UBL, VUL 101, Çamoranus. Ibid. Letter from Simón de Tovar to Clusius, 1596–02–13, UBL, VUL 101, Tovar 1. Barona, “Clusius’ Exchange,” 110–111. For more on the Seville group of naturalists who exchanged specimens, see Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 122–7. Letter from Castañeda to Clusius, 1600–10–20, UBL, VUL 101, Castañeda, 3. Ibid., Castañeda, 4. Ibid., Castañeda, 3. Letter from Castañeda to Clusius, 1601–08–21, UBL VUL 101, Castañeda, 2. In a letter from 5 January 1602, he also complained that there were no engravers in Seville. Quoted in Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 158. Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, 127. Letter from Castañeda to Clusius, 1600–10–20, UBL, VUL 101, Castañeda, 3. Antoine Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne Et La Tulipe: Les Cabinets De Curiosités En France Au XVIIe Siécle (Paris: Flammarion, 2012), 69–70. Wilma George, “Alive or Dead: Zoological Collections in the Seventeenth Century,” in The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, ed. Arthur MacGregor and Oliver Impey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), 180–1. Catalogus Rariorum in Schola Anatomica Oxoniensi, Bodleian, MS. Rawl. D.912, 204r. Nehemiah Grew, Musaeum Regalis Societatis, or a Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artifcial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham Colledge (London: W. Rawlins, 1681), 17–20. Catalogus of Register Vande Sonderling-Heden of Rariteyten Ende Wtgelesen Sinnelickheden . . . (Leiden: Jan Claesz van Dorp, 1628). For more on Porret and his collection, see Claudia Swan, “Making Sense of Medical Collections in Early Modern Holland: The Uses of Wonder,” in Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, ed. Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmid (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), especially 200–201. On Paludanus, see F. Hunger, “Bernardus Paludanus (Berent Ten Broecke), 1550– 1633: Zijn Verzamelingen En Zijn Werk,” in Itinerario, Voyage, Ofte Schipvaert Van Jan Huygen Van Linschoten Naer Oost Ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592, ed. C. Burger and F. Hunger (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1934), 249–68; Peter Mason,

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56

57 58 59 60 61

62 63

64 65

66

67

68 69

70 71 72

Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 79–81. Ferrante Imperato, Dell’historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato napolitano (Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1599); Ole Worm, Museum Wormianum, seu, Historia rerum rariorum (Leiden: Elsevier, 1655); Lorenzo Legati, Museo Cospiano (Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1677). Pierre Belon, Les Observations De Plusieurs Singularitez Et Choses Memorables, Trouvées in Grece, Asie, Iudée, Egypte, Arabie, & Autres Pays Estranges . . . (Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1553), 209v. Ibid., 5r, 209v. Ibid., 209v–210r. My thanks to the staff at Prey Taxidermy in Los Angeles, CA for explaining this to me. María Portuondo, “America and the Hermeneutics of Nature in Renaissance Europe,” in Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: Circulation, Resistance and Diversity, ed. Bethany Aram and Bartolomé Yun Casilla (Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 78–99, quotation from 78. Belon, Singularitez, 210r. Paula Findlen, “Natural History,” in The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3: Early Modern Science, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 435–68; Findlen, “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections,” 272–89. This broadly followed Pliny’s classifcation, Caius Plinius Secundus, Natural History: Books 8–11, vol. 3 (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1983). E. W. Gudger, “The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology,” Isis 22, no. 1 (1934). For the use of the term ‘encyclopedism’ in the early modern period, see Ann Blair, “Revisiting Renaissance Encyclopaedism,” in Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, ed. Jason König and Greg Woolfe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). The large-scale compilers of natural knowledge of the sixteenth century like Conrad Gessner and Ulisse Aldrovandi also by and large kept to a similar model. For a biographical work about Gessner and his many publications, see Hans H. Wellisch, Conrad Gessner: A Bio-Bibliography (Zug: IDC, 1984). For the most recent complete biography about Gessner, see Urs B. Leu, Conrad Gessner (1516–1565): Universalgelehrter Und Naturforscher Der Renaissance (Zurich: NZZ, 2016). For more on the current state of historical research on Conrad Gessner, see the articles in the 2016 issue of Gesnerus, especially Philippe Glardon, “Gessner Studies: State of the Research and New Perspectives on 16thCentury Studies in Natural History,” Gesnerus 73, no. 1 (2016). Conrad Gessner, Historia Animalium Liber I, De Quadrupedibus Viviparis (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1551); Conrad Gessner, Historia Animalium Liber II, De Quadrupedibus Oviparis (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1554); Conrad Gessner, Historiae Animalium Liber III, Qui Est De Avium Natura (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1555); The book on fshes was mainly a reprint and Latin translation of two works on fshes by Guillaume Rondelet and Pierre Belon. Conrad Gessner, Historiae Animalium Liber IIII, Qui Est De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantium Natura (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1558). Conrad Gessner, “Appendix Historiae Quadrupedum Viviparorum,” in Historia Animalium Liber II, 1–27. For his list of thanks, see the “ad lectorem” in ibid., 1; For more on Gessner’s relationship between one particular contributor, John Caius, see Anthony Grafton, “Philological and Artisanal Knowledge Making in Renaissance Natural History: A Study in Cultures of Knowledge,” History of Humanities 3, no. 1 (2018). For more on Gessner’s writing process, see Ann Blair, “Conrad Gessner’s Paratexts,” Gesnerus 73, no. 1 (2016). Gessner, “Appendix,” 19–20. Ibid., 20. This was reprinted in the second edition of the De Quadrupedibus Viviparis.

312 Part III • Preserved 73 Gessner, “Appendix,” 20. 74 “Ordinis Ratio,” in Ulisse Aldrovandi, De Quadrupedibus Digitatis Viviparis Libri Tres, Et De Quadrupedibus Digitatis Oviparis Libri Duo (Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini, 1637), 1–2. 75 Ibid., 478. 76 Ibid., 479. 77 Ibid. On Aldrovandi’s use of textual sources, see Fabien Kramer, “Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon and the Use of Paper Technology in Renaissance Natural History,” Early Science and Medicine 19, no. 5 (2014): 398–423. 78 Daniella Bleichmar showed that the watercolor image of the armadillo that Aldrovandi used while preparing his manuscript was based on (although not an exact copy of) the Gessner armadillo, Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), 17–20. 79 For Sahagún and his work, see the articles by Arthur Anderson and Charles Dibble in the beginning of Bernardino de Sahagún, Florentine Codex, Book 1: Introduction and Indices (Santa Fe: The School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1982). The most well-known manuscript of this work is the Florentine Codex, held in the Laurentian Library of Florence. A digital facsimile can be accessed at www.wdl.org/es/item/10622/. 80 Florentine Codex, 65r. 81 For another context where Amerindian knowledge went largely ignored by Europeans, see Hellen Ellis’ discussion of selective breeding in this volume. 82 Adrian Coenen, Vis Booc, Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB), 245v. A digital facsimile can be accessed at https://galerij.kb.nl/kb.html#/visboek. On the Americana in this work, see Egmond and Mason, “Armadillos in Unlikely Places,” 3–52. 83 Recueil des Pieces Curieuses apportées des Indes, d’Egypte et d’Ethiopie, qui se trouvent dans le Cabinet de Leonard Bernon (Paris, 1670), 3. On the possible distinctions between armadillos and tatous in the seventeenth century, see Schnapper, Le Géant, La Licorne Et La Tulipe, 70. 84 Recueil des Pieces Curieuses, 4–5. 85 Quoted in José Miguel Morán and Fernando Checa Cremades, El coleccionismo en España: de la cámara de maravillas a la galería de pinturas (Madrid: Cátedra, 1985), 107. 86 On another natural thing that defed European categorization, see Duygu Yıldırım’s chapter on coffee in this volume.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Ashworth, William B. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” In Reappraisals of the Scientifc Revolution, edited by David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman, 303–32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Baratay, Eric and Elisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. Zoo: A History of Zoological Gardens in the West. London: Reaktion, 2002. Barlow, Roger. A Brief Summe of Geographie. Edited by E. G. R. Taylor. London: Hakluyt Society, 1931. Barona, Josep L. “Clusius’ Exchange of Botancal Information with Spanish Scholars.” In Carolus Clusius: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, edited by Florike Egmond, Paul Hoftijzer, and Robert Visser. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007. Barrera-Osorio, Antonio. Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientifc Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. Baskes, Jeremy. Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750–1821. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000. Belon, Pierre. Les Observations De Plusieurs Singularitez Et Choses Mémorables, Trouvées in Grèce, Asie, Iudée, Égypte, Arabie, & Autres Pays Estranges. Paris: Gilles Corrozet, 1553.

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Benedict, Barbara. “Spectating Science in the Early Modern Collection.” In Travel Narratives, the New Science, and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750, edited by Judy A. Hayden, 197–214. London: Routledge, 2016. Blair, Ann. “Conrad Gessner’s Paratexts.” Gesnerus 73, no. 1 (2016): 73–122. Blair, Ann. “Revisiting Renaissance Encyclopaedism.” In Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, edited by Jason König and Greg Woolfe, 377–97. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017. Braham, Persephone. “The Monstrous Caribbean.” In The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle, 17–47. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. A Catalog of the Rarities to be Seen at Don Saltero’s Coffee-House in Chelsea. London, 1790. A Catalog of the Rarities to be Seen at don Saltero’s Coffee-House in Chelsea. London: Tho[mas] Edlin, 1792. Catalogus of Register Vande Sonderling-Heden Oft Rariteyten Ende Wtgelesen Sinnelickheden. Leiden: Jan Claesz van Dorp, 1628. Clark, Willene B. and Meredith T. McMunn, eds. Beasts and Birds of the Middle Ages: The Bestiary and Its Legacy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Clusius, Carolus. Rariorum plantarum historia. Antwerp: Plantin, 1601. Colección de documentos inéditos relativos al descubrimiento, conquista y colonización de las posesiones españolas en América y Oceanía, vol. 2. Madrid: M. B. de Quirós, 1864. Conrad Gessner. Historia Animalium Liber II, De Quadrupedibus Oviparis. Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1554. Conrad Gessner. Historiae Animalium Liber III, Qui Est De Avium Natura. Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1555. Conrad Gessner. Historiae Animalium Liber IIII, Qui Est De Piscium & Aquatilium Animantium Natura. Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1558. Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750. New York: Zone Books, 2001. Egmond, Florike. “Clusius and Friends: Cultures of Exchange in the Circles of European Naturalists.” In Carolus Clusius: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist, edited by Florike Egmond, Paul Hoftijzer, and Robert Visser, 9–48. Amsterdam: Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007. Egmond, Florike and Peter Mason. “Armadillos in Unlikely Places. Some Unpublished Sixteenth-Century Sources for New World ‘Rezeptionsgeschichte’ in Northern Europe.” Ibero-amerikanisches Archiv 20, no. 1/2 (1994): 3–52. Enciso, Martín Fernández de. Suma de Geographia: q[ue] trata de todas las partidas y provincias del mundo, en especial de las indias. Seville: Jacobo Cro[m]berger, 1519. Fabien, Kramer. “Ulisse Aldrovandi’s Pandechion Epistemonicon and the Use of Paper Technology in Renaissance Natural History.” Early Science and Medicine 19, no. 5 (2014): 398–423. Findlen, Paula. “Anatomy Theaters, Botanical Gardens, and Natural History Collections.” In The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 272– 89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Findlen, Paula. “Natural History.” In The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 3: Early Modern Science, edited by Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston, 435–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Findlen, Paula. Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientifc Culture in Early Modern Italy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010.

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George, Wilma. “Alive or Dead: Zoological Collections in the Seventeenth Century.” In The Origins of Museums: The Cabinet of Curiosities in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe, edited by Arthur MacGregor and Oliver Impey, 179–87. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987. Gessner, Conrad. Historia Animalium Liber I, De Quadrupedibus Viviparis. Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1551. Glardon, Philippe. “Gessner Studies: State of the Research and New Perspectives on 16th–Century Studies in Natural History.” Gesnerus 73, no. 1 (2016): 7–28. Grafton, Anthony. “Philological and Artisanal Knowledge Making in Renaissance Natural History: A Study in Cultures of Knowledge.” History of Humanities 3, no. 1 (2018). Grew, Nehemiah. Musaeum Regalis Societatis, or a Catalogue and Description of the Natural and Artifcial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society and Preserved at Gresham Colledge. London: W. Rawlins, 1681. Grigson, Caroline. Menagerie: The History of Exotic Animals in England, 1100–1837. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Grynäus, Simon. Novus Orbis Regionum ac insularum veteribus incognitarum. Basel: Johannes Hervagius, 1532. Gudger, E. W. “The Five Great Naturalists of the Sixteenth Century: Belon, Rondelet, Salviani, Gesner and Aldrovandi: A Chapter in the History of Ichthyology.” Isis 22, no. 1 (1934): 21–40. Honour, Hugh. The New Golden Land: European Images of America from the Discoveries to the Present Time. New York: Pantheon Books, 1976. Hunger, Friedrich W. T. “Bernardus Paludanus (Berent ten Broecke), 1550–1633: Zijn verzamelingen en zijn werk.” In Itinerario, voyage, ofte Schipvaert van Jan Huygen van Linschoten naer Oost ofte Portugaels Indien, 1579–1592, edited by C. Burger and F. Hunger, 249–68. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1934. Imperato, Ferrante. Dell’historia naturale di Ferrante Imperato napolitano. Naples: Costantino Vitale, 1599. Lawrence, Natalie. “Exotic Origins: The Emblematic Biogeographies of Early Modern Scaly Mammals.” Itinerario 39, no. 1 (2015): 17–43. Legari, Lorenzo. Museo Cospiano. Bologna: Giacomo Monti, 1677. Leu, Urs B. Conrad Gessner (1516–1565): Universalgelehrter Und Naturforscher Der Renaissance. Zurich: NZZ, 2016. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1972. Lloyd, G. E. R. Polarity and Analogy: Two Types of Argumentation in Early Greek Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966. Martire d’ Anghiera, Pietro. De Orbe Novo. Alcalá de Henares: Michaele[m] d[e] Eguia, 1530. Mason, Peter. Infelicities: Representations of the Exotic. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Morán, José Miguel and Fernando Checa Cremades. El coleccionismo en España: de la cámara de maravillas a la galería de pinturas. Madrid: Cátedra, 1985. Norton, Marcy. “Going to the Birds: Birds as Things and Beings in Early Modernity.” In Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500– 1800, edited by Paula Findlen, 53–83. London: Routledge, 2013. Ogilvie, Brian W. The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Padrón, Ricardo. The Spacious Word: Cartography, Literature, and Empire in Early Modern Spain. Chicago: The University Chicago Press, 2004. Portuondo, María. “America and the Hermeneutics of Nature in Renaissance Europe.” In Global Goods and the Spanish Empire, 1492–1824: Circulation, Resistance and Diversity, edited by Bethany Aram and

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Bartolomé Yun Casilla, 78–99. Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Robbins, Louise E. Elephant Slaves and Pampered Parrots: Exotic Animals in Eighteenth-Century Paris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. Rothfels, Nigel. Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Sahagún, Bernardino de. Florentine Codex, Book 1: Introduction and Indices. Santa Fe: The School of American Research and the University of Utah, 1982. Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Schnapper, Antoine. Le Géant, La Licorne Et La Tulipe: Les Cabinets De Curiosités En France Au XVIIe Siécle. Paris: Flammarion, 2012. Spary, E. C. “The ‘Nature’ of Enlightenment.” In The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, 272–304. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Strickland, Debra Higgs. The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life, and Literature. New York: Garland, 1999. Swan, Claudia. “Making Sense of Medical Collections in Early Modern Holland: The Uses of Wonder.” In Making Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, and Texts, 1400–1800, edited by Pamela Smith and Benjamin Schmid, 199–213. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Torbio Medina, José. El Veneciano Sebastián Caboto al Servicio de España, vol. 1. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Universitaria, 1908. Ulisse Aldrovandi. De Quadrupedibus Digitatis Viviparis Libri Tres, Et De Quadrupedibus Digitatis Oviparis Libri Duo. Bologna: Nicolai Tebaldini, 1637. Wellisch, Hans H. Conrad Gessner: A Bio-Bibliography. Zug: IDC, 1984. Worm, Ole. Museum Wormianum, seu, Historia rerum rariorum. Leiden: Elsevir, 1655.

Chapter 11

Bird Living Names of Félix de Azara’s Lost Collection Anna Toledano

“Many of those practicing natural history in the Americas questioned the utility of the Linnaean system in the American context . . . [t]hey wanted scientifc names to refect the appearance and habit of the species that they described rather than the names of far-off, long dead naturalists.” Page 323

VISUALIZATION 11 Azara’s handwritten list of birds: ACN0022/402, ACN0022/404, Archivo MNCN-CSIC. Gallita ou petit Coq d’Az: Félix de Azara et al., Voyages Dans l’Amérique Méridionale: Collection de Planches (1809). Although no images of Azara’s birds remain, his inventory brings them back into focus centuries later. His careful handwritten list of specimens sent to Madrid forms the body of his cockerel. While a hired illustrator drew this commissioned illustration from a taxidermy specimen in a museum, Azara’s words make the breast of the bird concrete.

Abstract: In 1781, Spanish army engineer turned naturalist Félix de Azara (1742–1821) embarked on a state-sponsored mission to survey the new territory of Paraguay. During twenty long years there, Azara amassed a vast natural history collection. In 1788, he sent 84 specimens of 61 species of birds to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid, along with forty pages of inventories listing the birds’ descriptive, hybrid Guaraní and Spanish names. These handwritten catalogs are the only material that remains of Azara’s birds today. Often, this not entirely scientifc nomenclature was the only known name for a species, and so naturalists adopted it into offcial scientifc taxonomy, where it has remained authoritative ever since. This chapter compares Azara’s unique nomenclature against databases of modern species names to measure the infuence of this amateur naturalist and his local informants on modern Linnaean taxonomy and natural history.

Decades before Darwin set out on his voyage on the HMS Beagle, Félix de Azara (1742–1821) observed many of the same species of animals and plants that the Englishman would see during his journey.1 Charged with the task of drawing maps of the Spanish and Portuguese territories in what were then the border regions of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata (modern day Paraguay and Brazil), Azara arrived in South America on March 12, 1781, and remained in the region for twenty years. The expedition proved long and monotonous, providing the curious, assiduous Azara with much time to observe the wildlife and peoples near the Río de la Plata. In the spirit of the Spanish royal decrees mandating that colonists remit all objects of natural wonder to the Crown, Azara collected specimens and produced copious notes on the animals that he saw, eventually developing his own treatises on nature studies to be published in Europe in the early nineteenth century. During his time in South America, Azara amassed a signifcant collection of natural history objects. In 1788, he sent the frst of fve extensive set of birds for study to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History—what is now the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid—by way of José Moñino y Redondo, the Conde de Floridablanca (1728–1808), who was chief minister in charge of Spain’s foreign policy.2 Azara had preserved the birds using aguardiente, a strong grain alcohol. Forty pages of descriptions and notes accompanied the animals, which totaled 84 specimens of 61 different species. He gave the birds’ descriptive, hybrid Guaraní and Spanish names such as the Tugüay-machete and the Yby̆yaù ̆ sociable. In a detailed four-columned list, he also included the sex of the individual specimens, DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-16

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along with assessments of their condition.3 In a letter dated September 13 of the same year to Eugenio Izquierdo de Rivera y Lazaún, the director of the Royal Cabinet, Azara indicated that he hoped to prepare another shipment of 108 new birds shortly, and that he also wished to enlist the help of a local priest, Don Pedro Blas Nozeda, to “gather all of the species of birds, describe them and send them” to Spain. The end goal was to develop a complete ornithology and remit all “300 or 400 species of birds, or more, that are in this country.”4 This second box later arrived at the Cabinet with 107 more specimens inside.5 The personnel in Madrid did not view the specimens with as much enthusiasm as Azara did. The arduous journey—as well as the alcoholic

Figure 11.1: The frst page of Azara’s initial handwritten list of birds. Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural de las aves contenidas en la botijuela 1ª, que dirige al Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] D. Félix de Azara, 1788; ACN0022/402, p. 1; Archivo MNCN-CSIC.

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aguardiente—had been unkind to the avecillas, or “little birds,” thus rendering them unft for museum display. Vice director of the Cabinet, José Clavijo Fajardo, sent his thanks to Azara via the Conde de Floridablanca, but only for drafts of Azara’s Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata and not for the ill-preserved birds.6 Since the specimens did not appear exactly as they had in life, the naturalists at the museum saw them as worthless for taxidermy and study. Tragically, the newly-adopted, somewhat shortsighted taxonomic standards of collecting at the Cabinet could not accommodate the unidentifed, locally-named birds in Azara’s collection.7 Since neither the Comte de Buffon nor Carolus Linnaeus—the defnitive naturalists of the day—had referenced any of the species that Azara identifed, Clavijo considered them uninteresting and disposed of them.8 While this anecdote serves as an example of the capriciousness of what survives the sands of time and what does not in terms of objects of nature, it also illustrates the attitude at the Spanish institution—and among educated Spaniards themselves—toward Azara during the period in which the Cabinet transformed into the Royal Museum of Natural Sciences, a metamorphosis fnally completed in 1815. The Cabinet rejected these Paraguayan bird specimens because Azara, separated by an ocean, had developed a differing set of methods and valuations from standard European science. Put simply, Azara operated within a different knowledge paradigm than did the Cabinet. His lack of professional training as a naturalist may have also played a role: although he was well-versed in mathematics and the physical sciences, his practical biological knowledge was self-taught. Azara maintained that his frsthand observations of animals as they lived in the wild prevented him from drawing the same mistaken conclusions as European naturalists who studied in the zoo, where animals were in shackles, or in the museum, where they were dead. In Azara’s worldview, not all dead specimens were equal, and he lamented the use of faded taxidermy animals decaying in vitrines for anatomical study.9 Likely in his mind, his little drunken birds were not useless at all, but perfect examples for measurement and analysis, although perhaps not for taxidermy. Although Azara’s professional contemporaries at the Royal Cabinet preferred their more traditional methodologies over his ad hoc colonial techniques, they did not refuse his work in its entirety. Izquierdo himself respected Azara’s erudition, recommending to the king himself to consult Azara’s works regarding questions of the natural world.10 Years later, after his return to Europe, Azara even enjoyed some success from his publications in his home country as well as in other European nations. Yet the words in his books were not as effective at describing the birds as were the birds themselves. If the disdain of the naturalists at the Cabinet for Azara’s methods of collecting did not play a role in relegating him to historical obscurity, their disregard for the specimens he sent surely did. No publicfacing museum vitrine would display the tangible fruits of Azara’s labor, and he would receive no advertisement for his extensive work beyond his texts. Different forms of knowledge held value over others. Despite these Spanish efforts to suppress Azara’s scientifc infuence, his taxonomic work still gained traction in Europe. Other European naturalists, such as Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot, Alexander von Humboldt, and even Charles Darwin, valued Azara’s astute observations over many seasons in South America. These naturalists—Vieillot chief among them— preserved Azara’s birds in spirit after the Royal Cabinet destroyed them in body: they maintained Azara’s Guaraní species names in their taxonomy. In spite of—or perhaps due to—his ignorance of proper practice in

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Linnaean nomenclature, Azara’s hybrid indigenous-European names live on in modern biology today.

AN INADVERTENT NATURALIST Félix de Azara was born on May 18, 1742, in the little municipality of Barbuñales in Huesca, Aragon, Spain.11 His aristocratic family was wellconnected: his father was lord of their small hometown as well as a baron. The younger Azara studied briefy at the local university before enlisting with the Spanish military and fnishing his degree at the military academy in Barcelona. Although he eventually joined the engineering track, he had originally intended to pursue an education in the humanities and maybe a different career, perhaps a portent of what was to come.12 Azara’s initial experience in the military was not as uneventful as his twenty years in South America; in fact, it was quite the opposite. In 1776, during a battle in Algiers, Azara was shot in the chest.13 It was rather miraculous that he survived, and he convalesced for years afterward.14 Only in 1781 was he prepared to take on his next assignment: to embark on the state-sponsored mission to survey the new Spanish territories of Paraguay (Azara’s particular assignment), Uruguay, and Argentina, as well as the Portuguese colony of Brazil. Azara moved into a world that was exploding with “soldiers, scientists, settlers, and civic authorities,” both those whom the Spanish sent and those who were enticed by the promise of a new life.15 The goal of Azara’s journey was to establish a fxed international boundary of more than one thousand miles extending down from Bolivia all the way toward the coast near the Río de la Plata.16 Unlucky Azara soon realized that the army had sent him on a fool’s errand. The Portuguese had no intention of holding up their end of the treaty, since they were not eager to solidify any boundaries that would preclude them from obtaining additional territory. Azara made some efforts to complete his task on his own, but even the act of surveying proved extremely diffcult not just for him but also for the Spanish representatives sent to other South American regions. Historian of Latin America Tamar Herzog describes the hurdles that they encountered, such as treaties [that] often mentioned rivers, settlements, and mountains that never existed or were not located where the parties had imagined. Others had a different name in Spanish and Portuguese. Because the territory was not only huge but also unknown, experts sent to the Americas in the 1750s, 1770s, and 1780s to demarcate the divisions described in the 1750 and 1777 treaties disagreed, their work degenerating into endless debates regarding where rivers fowed and where mountains were located. Just as with the sixteenth-century treaty of Tordesillas, Herzog writes, “these experts thus failed to reach concord on how a theoretical, imaginary line described in a European document would become a concrete, material reality in the Americas.”17 When it became obvious that the Portuguese would never arrive, Azara decided to start to study the animals and peoples in Paraguay in order to pass the time.18 He knew that the fauna and the indigenous people in the Americas were largely unknown to Europeans and thought that to apply his efforts to such research would be worthwhile.19 Félix de Azara wrote numerous multi-volume tomes on the fora, fauna, and ecology of the South American region where he lived. His best-known works include Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata

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Figure 11.2: A map of the Rio de la Plata Region—including presentday Paraguay to the north, Argentina to the west, and Uruguay to the southeast—in which Azara worked, from the French edition of his Voyages. Félix de Azara, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, and Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale: Collection de Planches (1809), plate VII. David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

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(Apuntamientos Para La Historia Natural de Los Páxaros Del Paragüay y Rio de La Plata, 1801) and Remarks on the Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata (Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, 1802), for which he tried his hand at illustration as well, despite his admitted lack of skill.20 These were not natural histories in the traditional sense, but more in the genre of administrative works from a government offcial.21 As a diligent civil servant, Azara kept meticulous records not only of the habits of these living things, but also of his own daily travels. The unedited records of seven different trips found in the public library in Buenos Aires prove his attention to detail and his effort to uphold his original obligations to some extent.22 Other publications include studies of the terrain near Río de la Plata—a bit more closely related to his original task in Paraguay—as well as the memoirs of his travels. Two diaries of surveying expeditions are among his many posthumously published travelogs. The frst is a log of the activities of a mission to the Tebicuary River in Paraguay in 1785.23 The second is a diary of the accomplishments of his team on a 1796 mission to survey the border at Buenos Aires, demonstrating that Azara attempted to serve the army throughout his tenure in South America. He commanded 167 men in the effort, having risen in the ranks to captain.24 One might consider Azara an obedient civil servant, constantly collecting, sharing, and remitting useful information to his home country at a scientifc moment during which the remote parts of nature were becoming more and more intriguing to European observers. Nevertheless, once the local colonial government eventually caught wind of his extracurricular naturalist undertakings, the governor was not pleased. In one instance, offcials arrested Azara, confscating three crates of his manuscripts and dispatching them to the viceroy in Buenos Aires.25 Unlucky Azara, as the rather colorful anthropologist Victor Wolfgang von Hagen writes, “was set upon by Indians, gnawed at by animals, stung by insects—and yet kept on, until fnally the offcials in Spain remembered him, and dissolved the Commission.”26 He went home to Europe two decades after he had arrived in Paraguay. Azara had submitted his frst draft of Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay to the Conde de Floridablanca, whose offce forwarded the work to the Royal Cabinet of Natural Sciences on March 17, 1790.27 In addition to that manuscript and his ill-fated birds (which included hundreds more than Azara declared in the aforementioned correspondence), he also sent the Cabinet a weasel known as a lanoso—preserved in aguardiente—as well as nine armadillos.28 Whether they met the standards of the Cabinet, the records do not show. If they did not, then they perhaps were unft to be specimens in any eighteenth-century European natural history cabinet. Azara’s thought process, methods, and worldview were unique not only to Spanish science, but to European science as well.

DISTINCTLY AMERICAN NAMES—AND IDEAS Azara returned to Europe in 1801. He did not head to his home country; instead, he joined his well-connected brother, José Nicolás (1731–1804), in Paris where the latter served as the Spanish ambassador to France. Although the two brothers hardly knew one another—they had lived separately for almost their entire lives—and Nicolás was more interested in collecting artwork than objects of natural history, he still introduced Félix to his acquaintances at the National Museum of Natural History

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there, who took interest in the younger Azara’s scientifc work.29 Even there, Félix ruffed some feathers with his American-infuenced scientifc methodologies. The frst matter in question was nomenclature. As shown in his detailed list of the names of the birds he remitted to the Cabinet, Azara used hybrid Spanish-indigenous titles for species, combining local knowledge with his European background.30 He was not the only Spanish American to support this technique: many of those practicing natural history in the Americas questioned the utility of the Linnaean system in the American context, driving a wedge between science in the colonies and in the nation itself. They wanted scientifc names to refect the appearance and habit of the species that they described rather than the names of far-off, long-dead naturalists.31 Because Azara had not been trained in the Linnaean tradition, it was easy for him to do away with it when in practice he found the American naming framework more suitable. He cited the example of the cagüaré, a type of anteater that has a putrid smell, which its name indicates in Guaraní.32 His Tugüay-machete signifed, in Guaraní and Spanish, “machete tail,” while the similarly hybrid Yby̆yaù ̆ sociable received its Guaraní name as an onomatopoeia of its call.33 An even more contentious element of Azara’s American methodological manifesto was his invalidation of conclusions that scholars had made about animals without having observed them in their natural habitats. In his introduction to his treatise on quadrupeds, Azara stressed that he [put] all my care to tell the truth without exaggerating anything, and to know and express the characters of the animals whose descriptions I made in their presence. Because of this I have been less at risk to fall into the errors that those who have not been able to observe them alive have not been able to avoid; those who have beheld them emaciated, hairless and dirty in cages and chains; and those who have sought them in cabinets: where, in spite of care, the injury of time must have altered the colors heavily, changing the black into brown, etc.: and no skin, nor the best-prepared skeleton, gives the exact idea of the shapes and sizes.34 He lambasted armchair scientists—the worst of whom, in his eyes, was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788)—who made their discoveries not in the feld but using stuffed skins and bones in the museum. “Between the traveling and sedentary naturalist,” writes historian Irina Podgorny, the second enjoyed the confdence given by the collections and the necessary books for repetition and observation and comparison. . . . The land, with its heterogeneity, could destroy the [traveling] naturalist’s capacity to observe. The museum, in consequence, rose as a reliable space that was representative of the world.35 Azara wondered why their knowledge was privileged when he had learned so much from closely recording the unique doglike habits of a particular Paraguayan rodent and colorfully recounting what it felt like to have vampire bats nipping at his feet: “I have been bitten four times on the tips of my toes while sleeping under the open sky, or while in country houses.”36 He even corrected many falsely held notions in Europe, such as that every anteater was female and that their proboscides substituted for something more phallic in the act.37

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Figure 11.3: The black anteater, one of the two varieties that Azara studied, as illustrated in the French edition of his Voyages. Azara commissioned these illustrations from specimens that he identifed in the museum in Paris as correctly corresponding to those in his notes from South America.38 Félix de Azara, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, and Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, Voyages dans l’Amérique méridionale: Collection de Planches (1809), plate VII; David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries.

Cognizant of his lack of training in the feld, towards the end of his tenure in South America in 1796, Azara requested a copy of the Comte de Buffon’s seminal Natural History, unaware that its author had been dead for eight years. Although by then he had already completed his monograph on the birds of Paraguay, Azara incorporated responses to some of Buffon’s assertions in his treatise on the quadrupeds of the region. In the introduction, Azara lambasted Buffon while acknowledging his intellectual infuence: I found that much of the historical part of the work was composed of vulgar, false or incorrect information:. . . and in short, that it was necessary for me to indicate in my work the errors that it suffered. I held back nevertheless for some time from this new, arduous and diffcult task, judging [Buffon] superior to my knowledge; and it seemed to me that to do it well, that I needed to have read the authors that he used: and I did not have them, nor more knowledge of their works than what could be read in Buffon’s citations. But at last considering on the other hand the utility that always results from destroying errors: that it would be almost impossible for me to have all of the books of the mentioned authors: and that it seems that Spain does not have anyone who wants to speak on this subject; I determined to critique the mentioned work, and the authors that are cited within it.39

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Azara saw himself as the lone Spaniard to take up this combative mantle. In the body of the work, Azara structured the entries for each animal in his natural history in three parts: the frst, detailing his qualitative observations from the feld; the second, his quantitative data from dead specimens, such as length and weight; and the third, rebuttals and complications of Buffon’s writings on the same or similar species. Buffon was the only naturalist to whom Azara responded in the fnal publication, which the Spaniard acknowledged was due to his only having read Buffon among the canonical naturalists of the period.40 Azara identifed species of which Buffon had no knowledge, as well as improved descriptions of species for which Buffon had observed poor-quality specimens.41 Azara’s blunt tone shocked other French scholars, who had never heard of this Spaniard before. Did he even have the right to refute someone as decorated as Buffon, and so rudely? Azara was perhaps harder on Buffon than a polite, trained scholar would have been, and his lack of any other books in his library likely led Azara to overestimate Buffon’s infuence.42 Consider Azara’s entry on the aforementioned Paraguayan rodent. In it, Azara exposed many errors in Buffon’s description of the same animal, particularly that the Frenchman had the species wrong. Azara took ownership of this creature, the nutria—of which he owned eight as pets— by calling them “my Nutria” as opposed to Buffon’s misidentifed one.43 Azara declared that the animal that Buffon identifed as something wholly different, the “Saricoviana,” was his nutria, since all of the characteristics in the description matched. Yet, Buffon’s lifeless specimen did not communicate all of the true habits of this animal that Azara had observed in the wild. Azara denied Buffon’s claim that the jaguar and puma kill many of them; because they do not even hunt them nor could they catch them. . . . The jaguar, and not the puma, hunt and kill, not my Nutria, but the capybaras on the banks, swimming but not diving; for it is something it does not know how to do.44 Azara also trusted vital indigenous knowledge from the “Payaguas barbarians, who navigate the River Paraguay and know this animal better than anyone.”45 He provided observations in domestication as well from a neighbor of his (although it is strange that he could not have discovered such behavior from his own romp of nutria at home). These nutrias would eat “fsh, meat, bread, manioc, and other things, which it ate without repugnance.” One was intelligent enough to go into the street and return: it knew the people living in the house, and accompanied them like a dog, although it tired due to the shortness of its legs: it understood and approached when called by name: it played with dogs and cats, and also with its owners, although rarely, because it bit more than was worth suffering: it never attacked the chickens, nor any other animal except a suckling pig . . .: it ran through all of the rooms, and slept always underneath the bed, and took care of its needs in a designated spot.46 All of these colorful details were invisible to Buffon across the Atlantic Ocean. Yet, Azara’s revision of Buffon’s work went beyond simple editing, refutation, and augmentation on the basis of the habits of individual animals. In the same treatise on quadrupeds, Azara not only amended much of Buffon’s work on animals of South America, but also vehemently denied the Frenchman’s general intellectual ideology of biological determinism

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and the fxity of species. He took issue with Buffon for the same reason that the French naturalist had his infamous trans-Atlantic debate with United States President Thomas Jefferson: Azara passionately believed that American fora and fauna were not degenerate compared to that of Europe.47 Although he had not been born there, Azara was a fervent supporter of the Americas and their biological value. Buffon’s charges often consisted of accusations that American fauna was not as menacing as the tiger or lion, which Azara countered with the strong teeth of the capybara, for which there is no European analog or superior.48 Even the birds, of which Azara was an expert, “have in America the same shapes, sizes, colors and distribution as in the rest of the world.”49 Helen Cowie describes what was at stake: Azara and his fellow European-American naturalists, realizing that their land was being maligned, “regarded it as their job to disabuse their Old World counterparts of their misconceptions, viewing the correction of errors and provision of reliable data about American fauna and fora as one of their key contributions to European science.”50 Art historian Daniela Bleichmar shows that Azara was not alone in this belief, as naturalists like him “became more and more deeply ensconced in local projects, their priorities and allegiances shifted subtly and gradually from the distant metropole to much more immediate and present concerns.”51 Local naturalists were even known to compete with one another on the basis of the robustness of their fauna in South America itself, since “given the Crown’s interest in natural commodities, presenting a region as a privileged repository of natural riches offered it advantageous status vis-àvis other territories.”52 Azara held a special distaste for the Jesuits in the region, which made sense after their expulsion from Paraguay in 1767. The problem with refuting these fellow Americans’ testimony, though, was that they had also observed the animals “with their own eyes.” Historian Miguel de Asúa writes that Azara’s refutations of the Jesuits “as little less than professional liars” held little weight, especially during this “observational turn” that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century.53 Azara’s natural history was also ecologically mindful: he saw the American ecosystem, in historian of science Andrés Galera Gómez’s words, as “a paradise threatened by a civilization that advances inexorably and the colonization of new territories.”54 Galera Gómez argues that Azara’s work has Rousseauian ideology embedded within its critique of the environmental impact of colonization on wildlife (but perhaps not on indigenous peoples).55 Whether Azara had such a framework in mind is unknown; what is known, though, is that he tried to bring his worldview back to Europe, and in doing so met with some perhaps unexpected success.

AMERICAN EMPIRICISM IN FRANCE Azara had the opportunity while he was at the Museum of Natural History in 1801 to consult the very specimens that Buffon had used to make his claims. Much had changed in the intervening years: after Buffon’s death in 1788, the leadership in French natural history had transferred to his intellectual opponents, such as Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. Change among French professional natural historians was afoot, and theories such as extinction, which Buffon, as well as contemporary Catholic Spaniards, denied gained traction while biological determinism faded away. Azara’s little birds would soon fnd themselves swept up in these winds of change, too.

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In actuality in the museum, Azara was pleased to see so many different types of animals brought together in one space; to amass his hundreds of birds in South America had not been a simple task. The arrangement aggrandized the experience of viewing the animals: they seemed larger and more impressive than when in the countryside.56 Although Azara denigrated naturalists who relied solely on these nonliving specimens, he was unopposed to using specifc types of evidence in the natural history cabinet to supplement observations from the feld. If a naturalist had seen a particular parrot alive, then he would be able to identify whether the taxidermist—or the fading powers of time—had falsifed the specimen by inserting a plume here or dyeing a feather there. Azara remarked how an error that Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton committed when identifying a species from its specimen in the museum was unsurprising, because even in life it is diffcult to distinguish between the families, and “this is almost impossible when the examples are preserved in cabinets.”57 Only the fossilized bones, which an artist cannot primp or misshape, persist reliably into the present. During Félix’s tenure in Paris, Nicolás shared his younger brother’s in-progress manuscript on the natural history of quadrupeds with Cuvier, the distinguished comparative anatomist at the National Museum. Cuvier admired Félix’s work—perhaps, in part, due to its challenge of Buffon—and arranged for its translation and publication in French.58 Cuvier charged fellow naturalist Charles Athanase Walckenaer with the task. Although Azara did not have his notes that the Viceroy in Buenos Aires had confscated, he and Walckenaer embarked on the task of preparing his manuscript for print. Over the course of the translation, the two men formed a rapport, exchanging maps, books, and other knowledge. This relationship was short-lived, however, as Azara returned to Spain in 1802, and the mounting tensions of impending war in Europe defnitively ended their correspondence in 1806. Despite “radio silence,” Walckenaer went ahead and published the French translation of Azara’s Voyages the following year, which was dedicated to his brother, Nicolás.59 Although he and his brother’s relationship suffered due to years of separation, it was his brother who helped Félix de Azara gain reputation towards the end of his career. Nicolás’ professional status facilitated the publication of Félix’s works in French frst, providing him an immediate international audience as well as a warmer intellectual home than in his native Spain. His Voyages met praise, and European naturalists quoted it, albeit without citation, but with abandon.60 Azara boasted of his warm reception in other scientifc nations, stating that the French naturalists, their National Institute, the original Italian poem Gli Animali parlanti, and many public papers, have praised my work in certain terms, but they do not refer to me well, yet they have not seen it in the state in which it is published today. All do me the justice of believing me, that I have not sought anything but the truth in the description of a multitude of American animals, of whom they have no news of; or if they have, it was very scarce, confusing and wrong.61 A German version of Voyages appeared in 1811, followed by Italian in 1817 and English in 1835.62 Finally in 1845, almost twenty-fve years after Azara’s death, the Spanish edition of Voyages reached the presses, but in Montevideo rather than in Madrid. A few years later, Azara’s nephew, the Marqués de Nibbiano D. Agustín de Azara, enlisted the Madrid-based author Basilio Sebastián Castellanos de Losada to arrange and publish his

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uncle’s Description and History of Paraguay and the Rio de la Plata. In July 1847, Castellanos sent a copy of that posthumous work to the director of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid.63 His new edition of Félix de Azara’s Memoirs arrived in November. While the director acknowledged the receipt of the Description, the Memoirs went unanswered. The fnal document in Azara’s fle in the archive at the National Museum is an inquiry from Castellanos asking if the Memoirs reached their destination, without reply.64 Azara presaged this unremarkable ending when in a letter to Walckanaer he lamented the state of science, especially natural history, in Spain.65 His compatriots would not be the ones to carry on his intellectual legacy; rather, other European and South American naturalists would uphold Azara’s contributions to the discipline and give more life to his little birds. Chief among these European naturalists would be Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot (1748–1830), another Frenchman who also took his inspiration for bird collecting from Buffon. Vieillot is honored with the citation for many of the frst Linnaean names of bird species, including many of those that Azara carefully described in his shipments to the Royal Cabinet. In his traditional encyclopedic natural history—as compared to Azara’s non-traditional nature studies—Vieillot took it upon himself to assign Linnaean names to Azara’s birds from Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata. In Vieillot’s nomenclature, Azara’s guirahuro—which Vieillot indicated is “a Guaraní word” meaning a “black and irritating bird”—became Agelaius guirahuro, which is now Pseudoleistes guirahuro.66 This is but one of many examples of Azara’s Guaraní bird names that Vieillot singlehandedly preserved into the present (Table 11.1). His efforts amounted to a resounding endorsement of Azara’s taxonomic philosophy, that Guaraní behavioral descriptions of these species painted a fuller picture of the lifeways of these animals.

FIRSTHAND OBSERVATION INTO THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Vieillot was the frst of many European naturalists to acknowledge the importance of Azara’s taxonomic and empirical work. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), the Prussian naturalist who traveled extensively in the Americas, was yet another who relied upon Azara’s astute observations. Humboldt arrived in South America in 1799, just as Azara’s tour there was ending. Although he only spent fve years in the Western Hemisphere, Humboldt’s work is much better known than that of Azara, even among his contemporary scientifc circles. The goal of Humboldt’s expedition—fnanced by the Bourbon crown—was to continue the intellectual mission to refute the passé ideas of naturalists such as Buffon. With this aim, Humboldt discussed both the discord between Azara and Buffon as well as the diffculty of nomenclature: “We must not confound the ouistiti of Buffon, which is the titi of Mr. D’Azara; the titi of Carthagena and the isthmus of Darien, which is the pinche of Buffon; and the titi of the Oroonoko, which is the saimiri of the French naturalists.”67 Like Darwin, Humboldt trusted Azara’s word, using his testimony of having “seen a jaguar, the skin of which was wholly white, except the shade only, as it might be termed, of a few circular spots” to support his claim of the existence of a diversity of animals with white fur in the Americas.68

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Humboldt also noted Azara’s descriptions of animal behavior, which the later naturalist’s experience corroborated. For example, consider the remarkable circumstance, stated so long ago as by Don Felix de Azara, that [a certain] species of vultures, if taken young and reared, will so accustom themselves to the person who feeds them, that they will follow him on a journey for many miles, fying after the wagon in which he travels over the Pampas.69 One can perhaps imagine Azara traveling along in the campo with birds in tow behind him. Humboldt’s prose contains glimmers of appreciation for Azara that appear fully realized in Darwin’s work. Charles Darwin regarded Azara as the premier source on the fora and fauna of South America; on the verso side of one of his notes on the animals he saw on the voyage of the Beagle in June 1832, Darwin described him as “[t]he distinguished naturalist Don Felix Azara.”70 Azara’s encouragement of frsthand observation likely served to ingratiate his work with the British naturalist. It is perhaps of no surprise, then, that the young Darwin brought Walckanaer’s French translation of Azara’s four-volume treatise, Voyages through South America, aboard the ship.71 Darwin marked particular passages in his fully annotated set. In the frst volume, he signaled a page in which Azara discussed how farmers in Paraguay burn wild plants in the terrain in order to make it easier for their cattle to graze; only the seeds of the hardiest plants survive the culling. Darwin placed a loose slip of paper here with the note “struggle for Existence.”72 Another note within the third volume highlighted the relationship among three bird species: “Caracara makes Vulture disgorge prey; Lestris take advantage of natural instinct to disgorge.”73 Darwin had Azara’s writings with him in the feld—in hand and in mind—while he formed the initial version of his evolutionary theory. Darwin went on to cite the Spanish natural philosopher in all three of his major works: The Voyage of the Beagle; On the Origin of Species; and The Descent of Man.74 In On the Origin of Species, Darwin described Azara’s observations as unfaggingly “accurate.”75 In correspondence, Darwin recommended Azara’s work to other naturalists to answer questions about South American fauna, further indicating the English naturalist’s respect of the Spaniard’s judgment. In 1860 in a letter to Charles Lyell, the eminent British geologist, Darwin put the validity of Azara’s testimony above his own: A writer . . . denies my statement that the woodpecker of La Plata never frequents trees: I observed its habits during two years, but what is more to the purpose, Azara, whose accuracy all admit, is more emphatic than I am in regards to its never frequenting trees.76 Another Briton, William Percival Hunter, a member of the Geological Society of London and the translator of the English edition of Azara’s treatise on quadrupeds, dedicated the work to his fellow American bird admirer, John James Audubon (1785–1851).77 Hunter tried to fll out details that Azara missed, as well as to include his own notes from the multiple editions of the work and evidence from Cuvier’s writings. Hunter translated Azara’s work from the original Spanish, rather than the “French translation, by Barthelemy de St. Mery, from an imperfect manuscript,” which had been out of print for decades.78 Azara noted in the Spanish

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edition that it included his additions and improvements,79 a version which Hunter stated was less frequently referred to than Barthelemy’s translation. . . . [I]t is at present very diffcult, even at Paris, which may be called the headquarters of natural history, to fnd a copy. From naturalists of all nations, therefore, who with one accord have every where proclaimed Azara to be an author of the highest authority and value, the work is gradually being withdrawn; and in a few years, unless reprinted in French or Spanish, it will become a lost or sealed book. An English translation, then, though of very humble pretensions, will, it is hoped, prove acceptable to the naturalist, while by the world at large it may be considered an entirely new work. Of a production, of which most naturalists have heard so much and known so little, some account is required from the translator.80 Hunter saw it as his mission to keep Azara’s prose alive. While the task of maintaining Azara’s intellectual legacy may have transferred from the French to the English, it would not be until the 1900s when scholars from his own nation began to expound upon his accomplishments, and they would be largely historians rather than scientists themselves. Although he captured the attention of these prominent nineteenth-century naturalists, Azara still had little luck with armchair scientists confned to a continental European mode of thought.

FROM DIVERGENT ORNITHOLOGY TO STANDARD TAXONOMY While Azara’s work faced criticism from contemporary naturalists, modern evolutionary biologists continue to study Azara’s taxonomic and naming practices, some even arguing that “[a]mong those explorers whose faunal descriptions are still the primary authority for determining the application of mammalian technical names, . . . none is more important than Félix de Azara.”81 One set of researchers, hailing from institutions, such as the American Museum of Natural History as well as the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, updated Azara’s taxonomic description of varieties of opossums in order to conform with presentday research. They state that Azara’s “descriptions are detailed enough to permit unambiguous identifcations of many species,” acknowledging the same quality of prose that Darwin appreciated.82 Yet, some of his identifcations are unrecognizable, and only recent morphological studies of a statistically signifcant population of individuals have been able to resolve the confusion. Twentieth- and twenty-frst-century ornithologists have long been preoccupied with the task of matching Azara’s bird descriptions—and Vieillot’s binomials thereof—to known species. Paul Smith, a researcher based in Paraguay, has argued for the streamlining of the Linnaean synonyms for some of the bird species that Azara was the frst to describe.83 One way modern researchers might pay homage to Azara’s taxonomic philosophy is to settle on Guaraní names, rather than Latin ones, as the accepted nomenclature. That Vieillot embraced the Linnaean system while integrating Azara’s Guaraní terms shows that the Latinate hegemony can be subverted in creative ways. Barring a full overhaul, which would be infeasible of this entrenched system of nature, naturalists can subvert the

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dominance of Latin and integrate indigenous knowledge by codifying Azara’s Guaraní names. Despite Azara’s rejection of Linnaean classifcation, that is precisely where his scientifc legacy is secured within natural history. Ironically, a number of those species are honored with his name as the specifc epithet, such as the opossum Didelphis azarae, in direct opposition to Azara’s philosophy of biological nomenclature.84 Yet, many more maintain the Guaraní terms that he used to name these creatures over two hundred years ago, proving that Guaraní has staying power as a scientifc tool. Table 11.1 contains a selection of birds listed in the inventory of Azara’s frst shipment to the Royal Cabinet whose scientifc names still contain their Guaraní names today. These scientifc names come from Avibase, the defnitive database of species names for professional ornithologists. This comparison of Azara’s unique nomenclature against databases of modern species names demonstrates the clear infuence of this amateur naturalist and his local informants on modern Linnaean taxonomy. Perhaps Azara’s aguardiente was more effective of a fxative than it initially appeared to be. He only used such a technique for preservation because of the same twist of fate that afforded him the opportunity to create something wholly new: his ignorance of natural history and self-taught knowledge of nature studies. Yet, while Azara practiced American natural studies in a way that was distinctly not European, he still owed much to that knowledge paradigm and did not introduce much to break theoretically with it. He used the mistakes he found in Buffon’s work as a guide to determine which of his observations were worth noting. Nevertheless, he still embarked on a self-designed project inspired by his environment and an innate desire and curiosity to do things which he was not trained to do. His careful studies of South American nature have stood the test of time and, arguably, of some of the greatest historical minds. While Azara’s little birds may not have persisted into the present, their linguistic legacy surely demonstrates their tenacious survivability, comparable to that of their indefatigable collector.

Table 11.1 A selection of bird species from Azara’s inventory that retain their Guaraní names in their modern scientifc names. Name in Azara’s Inventory85

Name in Azara’s Apuntamientos 86

Number in Azara’s Apuntamientos

Guaraní Common Name87

English Common Name88

Scientifc Classifcation89

Cachurỳ

Tachuri

Vol. 2, p. 70

Papapiri

Suyrirì

Suiriri

Vol. 2, p. 148

Suiriri

Tachuris rubrigastra Suiriri suiriri

Pepoaza

Pepoazá

Vol. 2, p. 166

Pepoasa

Many-colored Rush-Tyrant Chaco Suiriri Flycatcher Gray Monjita

Yruperò Añumbỳ

Iruperó Añumbí

Vol. 2, p. 171 Vol. 2, p. 226

Chiripepè

Chiripepé

Vol. 2, p. 429

Yrupero Guyra añumby Chiripepe

White Monjita Firewoodgatherer Maroon-bellied Parakeet

Xolmis cinereus pepoaza Xolmis irupero Anumbius annumbi Pyrrhura frontalis chiripepe

332 Part III • Preserved

Figure 11.4: Francisco Goya’s 1805 portrait of Félix de Azara. Azara wears his military regalia, replete with sword, cane, and well-pressed uniform. Yet, his intellectual pursuits also fgure into the symbolism of the scene. He holds in his right hand a paper, indicating he is a learned man. Most wonderfully, behind him is a veritable cabinet of curiosities. Taxidermy felines grace the lowest shelf while his beloved birds overfow on the others, tucked away for study when necessary. Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, Portrait of Félix de Azara (1805), oil on canvas. Museo Goya. Colección Ibercaja-Museo Camón Aznar.

Chapter 11 • Bird 333

NOTES 1 An earlier version of an excerpt of this chapter appeared in the JHI Blog under the title “Félix de Azara: Drawn From Life,” https://jhiblog.org/2016/06/29/ felix-de-azara-drawn-from-life. Thank you to Mackenzie Cooley and Duygu Yıldırım for your encouragement, advice, and enthusiasm throughout this process. I was fortunate to receive feedback at a number of scholarly workshops over the course of the evolution of this essay: I am grateful to the participants at the Göttingen Collecting Summer School (2016); the Natural Things Workshop (2019), especially Manuel Barrantes, Whitney Barlow Robles, and Alexander Statman; and the ISHMap Workshop (2022), especially Clara Elisa von Sanden. Thank you to Paula Findlen and my classmates in her Spring 2016 research seminar, where I began the project that grew into this article, for their feedback. 2 Marcelo Fabián Figueroa, “Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay: Making Inventories and Taxonomies at the Boundaries of the Spanish Empire, 1784– 1802,” in Global Scientifc Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, ed. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 154. 3 Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural de las aves contenidas en la botijuela 1ª, que dirige al Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] D. Félix de Azara, 1788; ACN0022/402, pp. 1r–1v; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 4 Carta de D. Félix de Azara a D. Eugenio Izquierdo; le informa, después de un año de silencio y del envío posterior de una «botija de 84 aves de 61 especies sumergidas en aguardiente»», que tiene 108 [aves] acopiadas y trabaja en llenar una tercera [botija], 1788, septiembre 13, Asunción (Paraguay); ACN0022/403, pp. 1r–1v; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 5 «Índice de las aves remitidas a España» [por D. Félix de Azara], 1788; ACN0022/404, pp. 1r–1v; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 6 Borrador de la contestación dirigida al Conde de Floridablanca con el informe acerca de los dos tomos de “Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural” de D. Félix de Azara, 1790, abril 13, Madrid; ACN0022/408, pp.  1v–1r; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 7 Marcelo Fabián Figueroa, “En los márgenes del Imperio Español y de la Historia natural: Félix de Azara colector (1787–1789),” Prohistoria 15, no. ene./jun. (2011): 10–11. 8 Thomas F. Glick and David M. Quinlan, “Félix de Azara: The Myth of the Isolated Genius in Spanish Science,” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 76. Azara’s birds were not the only ones to reach the wastebasket. Countless shipments of natural wonders arrived from various eighteenth-century expeditions only to sit unopened in the nooks and crannies of the Cabinet building. In 1789 the museum stowed away a container of dried birds from botanist Martín Sessé y Lacasta which, when fnally opened fve years later, was ruined. The cause was not only the time spent shuttered away, but also the poorly prepared specimens. See María de los Ángeles Calatayud Arinero, Eugenio Izquierdo de Rivera y Lazaún (1745–1813): científco y político en la sombra (Madrid: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 2009), 90–91. 9 Helen Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850 (Manchester; New York: Manchester University Press; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 5. 10 Carta de [D. Eugenio Izquierdo] expresa en ella, la complacencia de S. M., por «su erudita curiosidad en orden a los objetos de Historia Natural», ocupándose en ello el tiempo que le permitan sus obligaciones, 1789; ACN0022/406; pp. 1r–1v; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 11 While some sources indicate that Azara was born in 1746, scholars established from the Azara family’s records that he was in fact baptized in 1742. See Enrique Alvarez Lopez, Comentarios y anotaciones acerca de la obra de don Felix de Azara, Trabajo publicado en Miscelanea Americanista (Madrid: Instituto Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, 1952), 7–8. 12 Luis de León Canaveri, Don Félix de Azara: Breve estudio bio-bibliográfco (Buenos Aires: Tipo Lito Fermi, 1931), 4.

334 Part III • Preserved 13 Victor Wolfgang Von Hagen, The Green World of the Naturalists: A Treasury of Five Centuries of Natural History in South America (New York: Greenberg, 1948), 131. 14 León Canaveri, Don Félix de Azara: Breve estudio bio-bibliográfco, 4. 15 Tamar Herzog, Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 93. 16 Von Hagen, The Green World of the Naturalists, 131. 17 Herzog, Frontiers of Possession, 32. 18 Von Hagen, The Green World of the Naturalists, 131–2. 19 Canaveri, Don Félix de Azara: Breve estudio bio-bibliográfco, 5. 20 Félix de Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1 (Imprenta de la Viuda de Ibarra, 1802), iv. For the French edition, Azara hired an illustrator, but he drew his illustrations from the specimens in the Paris Museum rather than from life. Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire, 1750–1850, 135. 21 Figueroa, “Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay,” 149. 22 Félix de Azara, Juan María Gutiérrez, and Bartolomé Mitre, Viajes inéditos de D. Félix de Azara desde Sante-Fè á la Asunción, al interior del Paraguay, y á los pueblos de Misiones (Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Mayo, 1873), 11–13, 1. 23 See Félix de Azara, Diario de la navegación y reconocimiento del Rio Tebicuari (Imprenta del Estado, 1836). 24 Félix de Azara, Diario de un reconocimiento de las guardias y fortines, que guarnecen la linea de frontera de Buenos-Aires, 1st ed. (Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1837), 6. 25 Glick and Quinlan, “Félix de Azara,” 76. 26 Von Hagen, The Green World of the Naturalists, 132. 27 Ofcio del Conde de Floridablanca al Vicedirector del Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] remitiéndole dos tomos de “Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural” de las aves de la Provincia del Paraguay, del Capitán de navío D. Félix de Azara, 1790; ACN0022/407, p. 1r; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 28 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 221. 29 Karen Stolley, Domesticating Empire: Enlightenment in Spanish America (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013), 87. They frst met in 1765 in Barcelona, since their parents had sent Nicolás off to school in Salamanca. Barbara G. Beddall, “‘Un Naturalista Original’: Don Félix de Azara, 1746–1821,” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 17. 30 Irina Podgorny and Maria Margaret Lopes, El desierto en una vitrina: museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890 (Argentina: Limusa, 2014), 45. For discussion of indigenous-Spanish translation of terms and classifcatory practices more broadly, see Allison Margaret Bigelow, Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Iris Montero, “The Slow Science of Swift Nature: Hummingbirds and Humans in New Spain,” in Global Scientifc Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, ed. Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), 127–46. 31 See chap. 5, “Linguistic Imperialism,” in Londa L. Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 194–225. 32 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 74. 33 In modern Guaraní, tuguái means tail, while Ybiyaú is the name of a region in Paraguay. Antonio Guasch, Diccionario guaraní, precedido de una síntesis gramatical y de la fauna y fora guaraníticas (Asunción: Ediciones Loyola, 1981), 732; Félix de Azara, Apuntamientos Para La Historia Natural de Los Páxaros Del Paragüay y Rio de La Plata, vol. 2, 3 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de Doña Manuela Ibarra, 1805), 538. 34 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, i–ii. 35 Podgorny and Lopes, El desierto en una vitrina: museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890, 45–46.

Chapter 11 • Bird 335 36 Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850, 52; Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 306 and vol. 2, 294. 37 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 65. 38 Félix de Azara et al., Viajes por la America del Sur de Don Felix de Azara, desde 1789 hasta 1801 (1850), 4. 39 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, v–vi. 40 Ibid., vol. 1, vii. Nicolás Azara was more interested in art collecting than natural history. Yet, the list of books for sale from his library after Nicolás’ death in 1804 paints a picture—though incomplete—of his collection to which Félix may have had access when he fnally reached Europe, among which were some works of science. Nicolás specially ordered the books of Hipólito Ruiz and José Pavón, the Spanish botanical explorers sent to Peru from 1777 through 1788. Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa, La biblioteca de José Nicolás de Azara (Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1997), 34. 41 Fundación de Historia Natural Félix de Azara, “Félix de Azara (1742–1821).” 42 Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850, 108–10. 43 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 306, 18. To further complicate the debate, nutria in Spanish means otter, which Azara’s nutria is not; in Linnaean taxonomy, the subfamily Lutrinae—from the Latin lutra and thus the Spanish nutria—represents the otters. Azara’s nutria (Myocastor coypus) is now known as the coypu in most Spanish speaking countries. 44 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 318. 45 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 305. For a European naturalist, Azara devoted an unusual amount of space in his writings to identifying the indigenous people who collected specimens for him. They were part of the colonial structure he created to make science happen. See Figueroa, “Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay,” 156–8. 46 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, 306. 47 Like Jefferson, Azara invoked the example of the extinct giant sloth, or Megatherium, as evidence for the great beasts that once roamed the Americas: “Tambien es cierto, que no hay en América animal que oponer al Elefante y al Hipopotámo; pero igualmente lo es, que se han encontrado repetidas veces en los campos interiores hácia el Rio de la Plata osamentas de quadrúpedos que pueden competir con dichos Colosos asiáticos. Una de ellas se llevó al Real Gabinete de Madrid.” Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, x; José María López Piñero and Thomas F. Glick, El megaterio de Bru y el Presidente Jefferson: relación insospechada en los albores de la paleontología, Cuadernos valencianos de historia de la medicina y de la ciencia (Valencia: Universidad Valencia/CSIC, 1993), 44. 48 Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850, 116; Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, ix–x. 49 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, viii–ix. 50 Cowie, Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850, 120. 51 Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 145. 52 Ibid. 53 Miguel de Asúa, Science in the vanished Arcadia: knowledge of nature in the Jesuit missions of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata, Scientifc and learned cultures and their institutions (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014), 312. 54 Félix de Azara and Andrés Galera Gómez, Descripción general del Paraguay, El Libro de bolsillo (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990), 14–15.

336 Part III • Preserved 55 Ibid., 15. 56 Podgorny and Lopes, El desierto en una vitrina: museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890, 44–45. 57 Ibid., 46. 58 Fundación de Historia Natural Félix de Azara, “Félix de Azara (1742–1821).” 59 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, 1. 60 Von Hagen, The Green World of the Naturalists, 132. 61 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, vii–viii. 62 Félix de Azara, Reise nach Südamerika in den Jahren 1781 bis 1801 (Vienna: B. Philipp Bauer, 1811); Félix de Azara, C. A. Walckenaer, and Georges Cuvier, Viaggi nell’America Meridionale, 2 vols., Raccolta di viaggi dopo quelli di cook (Milano: Sonzogno, 1817). The English version is cited in other sources, such as Azara and Galera Gómez, Descripción general del Paraguay, 34, but this historian’s search has proven fruitless to fnd the original copy. 63 Carta impresa rubricada por D. Basilio Sebastián Castellanos de Losada, dirigida al «Director del Museo de Ciencias Naturales y del Gabinete de Historia Natural», se le avisa el envío de un ejemplar de “Descripción e Historia del Paraguay y del Río de la Plata,” obra póstuma de D. Félix de Azara, publicada por su sobrino el actual Marqués de Nibbiano D. Agustín de Azara, 1847; ACN0022/409, p. 1r; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 64 D. Basilio Sebastián Castellanos pregunta al Director del Museo de Ciencias Naturales si ha recibido el ejemplar de las memorias inéditas del «Brigadier de Marina D. Félix de Azara», que con fecha 18 de noviembre último le había remitido para ese centro, 1847; ACN0022/412, p.  1r; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 65 Azara and Galera Gómez, Descripción general del Paraguay, 34. 66 Pierre Joseph Bonnaterre, Robert Bénard, and L. P. Vieillot, Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique Des Trois Règnes de La Nature (Paris: Chez Mme. veuve Agasse, 1823), 717; Avibase, “Yellow-rumped Marshbird,” https://avibase. ca/45D8B6C5 (accessed August 11, 2022). 67 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen Maria Williams, 7 vols., vol. 4 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1819), 526. 68 Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804, trans. Helen Maria Williams, 7 vols., vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1818), 282. 69 Alexander von Humboldt, Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Different Climates, trans. Mrs. Sabine, 2 vols., vol. 2 (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849), 45. 70 Charles Darwin, “Beagle animal notes, 1832–1833,” Darwin Online, trans. Richard Darwin Keynes, ed. John van Wyhe, last modifed 2011, http:// darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=CUL-DAR29 .1.A1-A49&viewtype=text. 71 Darwin also brought, in the original Spanish, Azara’s Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata. See Charles Darwin, “Catalogue of the Beagle Library,” Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe, last modifed 2002, http://darwin-online.org.uk/BeagleLibrary/Beagle_Library_Catalogue.htm. 72 Félix de Azara et al., Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale, 4 vols., vol. 1 (Paris: Dentu, 1809), 100. Marginalia as recorded in Charles Darwin’s Library, http:// biodiversitylibrary.org/page/24011728. 73 Félix de Azara et al., Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale, 4 vols., vol. 3 (Paris: Dentu, 1809), 55. Marginalia as recorded in Charles Darwin’s Library, http:// biodiversitylibrary.org/page/24012645. 74 “El militar español que inspiró a Darwin: un ofcial oscense, Felix de Azara, habló de la selección natural decenios antes que el inglés,” Boletín de la Comisión de Historia de la Geología de España, no. 33 (2009): 6–7. 75 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, 6th ed. (London: John Murray, 1876), 142.

Chapter 11 • Bird 337 76 Charles Darwin, “Letter no. 2989,” Darwin Correspondence Project, www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-2989 (accessed August 15, 2022). 77 Félix de Azara and William Perceval Hunter, The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River la Plata (Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1838), v. 78 Azara and Hunter, The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River la Plata, ix–x. 79 Azara, Apuntamientos para la Historia Natural de los quadrúpedos del Paragüay y Rio de la Plata, vol. 1, vi–vii. 80 Azara and Hunter, The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River la Plata, xiii–xiv. 81 Robert S. Voss et al., “Chapter 11. The Six Opossums of Félix de Azara: Identifcation, Taxonomic History, Neotype Designations, and Nomenclatural Recommendations,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 331 (December 15, 2009): 407. The biologist Philip Herskovitz created an excellent inventory of Azara’s infuence on mammalian scientifc names: see Bruce D. Patterson, Robert M. Timm, and Philip Hershkovitz, Studies in Neotropical Mammalogy: Essays in Honor of Philip Hershkovitz (Chicago, IL: Field Museum of Natural History, 1987), 57–64. 82 Voss et al., “The Six Opossums of Felix de Azara,” 407. 83 Paul Smith et al., “Senior Synonyms for Three Neotropical Birds Described by Louis Vieillot Based on Félix de Azara (Passeriformes: Thraupidae, Tyrannidae, Tityridae),” Zootaxa 4433, no. 1 (June 11, 2018): 141. See also Paul Smith, “The Identity of Sylvia Rufcollis Vieillot, 1817 and Azara’s No. 240 ‘Cola Aguda Cola de Canela Obscura’ (Aves: Furnariidae),” Ardea 106, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 79. 84 Voss et al., “The Six Opossums of Felix de Azara,” 409. 85 ACN0022/402, pp. 1r–1v; Archivo MNCN-CSIC. 86 Félix de Azara, Apuntamientos Para La Historia Natural de Los Páxaros Del Paragüay y Rio de La Plata, vol. 2. 87 Avibase; Benjamín Aceval, “Especies de Aves de Los Humedales” (Field Museum of Natural History, 2018), https://feldguides.feldmuseum.org/ sites/default/files/rapid-color-guides-pdfs/971_paraguay_aves_de_los_ humedales.pdf. 88 Ibid. 89 Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Manuscript Sources Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural de las aves contenidas en la botijuela 1ª, que dirige al Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] D. Félix de Azara, 1788; ACN0022/402. Archivo del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, Madrid, Spain Borrador de la contestación dirigida al Conde de Floridablanca con el informe acerca de los dos tomos de “Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural” de D. Félix de Azara, 1790, abril 13, Madrid; ACN0022/408. Carta de [D. Eugenio Izquierdo] expresa en ella, la complacencia de S. M., por “su erudita curiosidad en orden a los objetos de Historia Natural,” ocupándose en ello el tiempo que le permitan sus obligaciones, 1789; ACN0022/406. Carta de D. Félix de Azara a D. Eugenio Izquierdo; le informa, después de un año de silencio y del envío posterior de una “botija de 84 aves de 61 especies sumergidas en aguardiente,” que tiene 108 [aves] acopiadas y trabaja en llenar una tercera [botija], 1788, septiembre 13, Asunción (Paraguay); ACN0022/403. Carta impresa rubricada por D. Basilio Sebastián Castellanos de Losada, dirigida al “Director del Museo de Ciencias Naturales y del Gabinete

338 Part III • Preserved

de Historia Natural,” se le avisa el envío de un ejemplar de “Descripción e Historia del Paraguay y del Río de la Plata,” obra póstuma de D. Félix de Azara, publicada por su sobrino el actual Marqués de Nibbiano D. Agustín de Azara, 1847; ACN0022/409. D. Basilio Sebastián Castellanos pregunta al Director del Museo de Ciencias Naturales si ha recibido el ejemplar de las memorias inéditas del “Brigadier de Marina D. Félix de Azara,” que con fecha 18 de noviembre último le había remitido para ese centro, 1847; ACN0022/412. “Índice de las aves remitidas a España” [por D. Félix de Azara], 1788; ACN0022/404. Ofcio del Conde de Floridablanca al Vicedirector del Real Gabinete [de Historia Natural] remitiéndole dos tomos de “Apuntaciones para la Historia Natural” de las aves de la Provincia del Paraguay, del Capitán de navío D. Félix de Azara, 1790; ACN0022/407. Viaje de Félix de Azara (1781–1801); Expediciones Científcas América, Asia y Oceanía; Fondo Museo: Print Sources Alvarez Lopez, Enrique. Comentarios y anotaciones acerca de la obra de don Felix de Azara. Trabajo publicado en Miscelanea Americanista. Madrid: Instituto Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo, 1952. Asúa, Miguel de. Science in the Vanished Arcadia: Knowledge of Nature in the Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and Rio de la Plata. Scientifc and learned cultures and their institutions. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2014. Azara, Félix de. Apuntamientos Para La Historia Natural de Los Páxaros Del Paragüay y Rio de La Plata, 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta de Doña Manuela Ibarra, 1802–05. Azara, Félix de. Apuntamientos Para La Historia Natural de Los Quadrúpedos Del Paragüay y Rio de La Plata, 2 vols. Imprenta de la Viuda de Ibarra, 1802. Azara, Félix de. Diario de la navegación y reconocimiento del Rio Tebicuari. Imprenta del Estado, 1836. Azara, Félix de. Diario de un reconocimiento de las guardias y fortines, que guarnecen la linea de frontera de Buenos-Aires, First Edition. Buenos Aires: Imprenta del Estado, 1837. Azara, Félix de. Essais sur l’histoire naturelle des quadrupèdes de la province du Paraguay. Paris: C. Pougens, an IX, 1801. Azara, Félix de. Reise nach Südamerika in den Jahren 1781 bis 1801. Vienna: B. Philipp Bauer, 1811. Azara, Félix de and Andrés Galera Gómez. Descripción general del Paraguay. El Libro de bolsillo. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1990. Azara, Félix de, Juan María Gutiérrez, and Bartolomé Mitre. Viajes inéditos de D. Félix de Azara desde Sante-Fè á la Asunción, al interior del Paraguay, y á los pueblos de Misiones. Buenos Aires: Imprenta de Mayo, 1873. Azara, Félix de and William Perceval Hunter. The Natural History of the Quadrupeds of Paraguay and the River la Plata. Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1838. Azara, Félix de, Charles Nicolas Sigisbert Sonnini de Manoncourt, Georges Cuvier, and Charles Athanase Walckenaer. Voyages dans l’Amérique Méridionale. 4 vols. Paris: Dentu, 1809. Azara, Félix de, C. A. Walckenaer, and Georges Cuvier. Viaggi nell’America Meridionale. Raccolta di viaggi dopo quelli di cook. 2 vols. Milano: Sonzogno, 1817. Azara, Félix de, Charles Athanase Walckenaer, Georges Cuvier, Florencio Varela, and Bernardino Rivadavia. Viajes por la America del Sur de Don Felix de Azara, desde 1789 hasta 1801, 1850.

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Beddall, Barbara G. “‘Un Naturalista Original’: Don Félix de Azara, 1746– 1821.” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 15–66. Bigelow, Allison Margaret. Mining Language: Racial Thinking, Indigenous Knowledge, and Colonial Metallurgy in the Early Modern Iberian World. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Bleichmar, Daniela. Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions & Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Bonnaterre, Pierre Joseph, Robert Bénard, and L. P. Vieillot. Tableau Encyclopédique et Méthodique Des Trois Règnes de La Nature. Paris: Chez Mme. veuve Agasse, 1823. Calatayud Arinero, María de los Ángeles. Eugenio Izquierdo de Rivera y Lazaún (1745–1813): científco y político en la sombra. Monografías del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. Madrid: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científcas, 2009. Cowie, Helen. Conquering Nature in Spain and Its Empire, 1750–1850. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press; Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Darwin, Charles. The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, Sixth Edition. London: John Murray, 1876. “El militar español que inspiró a Darwin: un ofcial oscense, Felix de Azara, habló de la selección natural decenios antes que el inglés.” Boletín de la Comisión de Historia de la Geología de España, no. 33 (2009): 6–7. Figueroa, Marcelo Fabián. “En los márgenes del Imperio Español y de la Historia natural: Félix de Azara colector (1787–1789).” Prohistoria 15, no. ene./jun. (2011). Figueroa, Marcelo Fabián. “Félix de Azara and the Birds of Paraguay: Making Inventories and Taxonomies at the Boundaries of the Spanish Empire, 1784–1802.” Chap. 8 In Global Scientifc Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, edited by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, 147–62. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016. Glick, Thomas F., and David M. Quinlan. “Félix de Azara: The Myth of the Isolated Genius in Spanish Science.” Journal of the History of Biology 8, no. 1 (1975): 67–83. Guasch, Antonio. Diccionario guaraní, precedido de una síntesis gramatical y de la fauna y fora guaraníticas. Asunción: Ediciones Loyola, 1981. Herzog, Tamar. Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Humboldt, Alexander von. Aspects of Nature in Different Lands and Different Climates. Translated by Mrs. Sabine. 2 vols. Vol. 2. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1849. Humboldt, Alexander von. Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804. Translated by Helen Maria Williams. 7 vols. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1818–19. León Canaveri, Luis de. Don Félix de Azara: Breve estudio bio-bibliográfco. Buenos Aires: Tipo Lito Fermi, 1931. López Piñero, José María and Thomas F. Glick. El megaterio de Bru y el Presidente Jefferson: relación insospechada en los albores de la paleontología. Cuadernos valencianos de historia de la medicina y de la ciencia. Valencia: Universidad Valencia/CSIC, 1993. Montero, Iris. “The Slow Science of Swift Nature: Hummingbirds and Humans in New Spain.” Chap. 7 In Global Scientifc Practice in an Age of Revolutions, 1750–1850, edited by Patrick Manning and Daniel Rood, 127–46. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016.

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Patterson, Bruce D., Robert M. Timm, and Philip Hershkovitz. Studies in Neotropical Mammalogy: Essays in Honor of Philip Hershkovitz. Chicago, IL: Field Museum of Natural History, 1987. Podgorny, Irina and Maria Margaret Lopes. El desierto en una vitrina: museos e historia natural en la Argentina, 1810–1890. Argentina: Limusa, 2008. Sánchez Espinosa, Gabriel. La biblioteca de José Nicolás de Azara. Madrid: Calcografía Nacional, Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, 1997. Schiebinger, Londa L. Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Smith, Paul J. “The Identity of Sylvia Rufcollis Vieillot, 1817 and Azara’s No. 240 ‘Cola Aguda Cola de Canela Obscura’ (Aves: Furnariidae).” Ardea 106, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 79–83. Smith, Paul J., Fernando Pacheco, Glayson Ariel Bencke, and Alexandre Aleixo. “Senior Synonyms for Three Neotropical Birds Described by Louis Vieillot Based on Félix de Azara (Passeriformes: Thraupidae, Tyrannidae, Tityridae).” Zootaxa 4433, no. 1 (June 11, 2018): 141–50. Stolley, Karen. Domesticating Empire: Enlightenment in Spanish America. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang. The Green World of the Naturalists: A Treasury of Five Centuries of Natural History in South America. New York: Greenberg, 1948. Voss, R. S., P. Myers, F. Catzefis, A. P. Carmignotto, and J. Barreiro. “The Six Opossums of Felix de Azara: Identifcation, Taxonomic History, Neotype Designations, and Nomenclatural Recommendations.” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History, no. 331 (2009): 406–33. Digital Sources Aceval, Benjamín. “Especies de Aves de Los Humedales.” Field Museum of Natural History, 2018. https://feldguides.feldmuseum.org/sites/ default/fles/rapid-color-guides-pdfs/971_paraguay_aves_de_los_ humedales.pdf. Avibase. https://avibase.bsc-eoc.org/ (accessed August 11, 2022). Darwin, Charles. “BeagleAnimal Notes, 1832–1833.” Transc. Richard Darwin Keynes. Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe. Last modifed 2011. http:// darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=1&itemID=CULDAR29.1.A1-A49&viewtype=text. Darwin, Charles. “Catalogue of the Beagle Library.” Darwin Online, ed. John van Wyhe. Last modifed 2002. http://darwin-online.org.uk/ BeagleLibrary/Beagle_Library_Catalogue.htm. Darwin, Charles. “Darwin Correspondence Project.” Letter no. 2989. www.darwinproject.ac.uk/DCP-LETT-2989 (accessed August 15, 2022).

Chapter 12

Brain Objecthood, Subjecthood, and the Genius of Gauss Nicolaas Rupke

“Gauss’s brain never was just an object of simple scientifc interest; on the contrary, it has perpetually been part of highly contested socio-political and religious debates.” Page 358

VISUALIZATION 12 Carl Friedrich Gauss: Gottlieb Biermann (1877). The brain of Saartjie Baartman: Carl Vogt, Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung und in der Geschichte der Erde (1863). Is genius a matter of the anatomical properties of our cerebral organ? Whose brain better to examine than that of the “king of mathematicians,” Carl Friedrich Gauss? The iconic Gauss painting shows a glint of “mad genius” in his eyes, while his brain has been lifted to show size and convolutions in contrast to “lesser” brains in the margins.

Abstract: Which assumptions underpinned the collecting, preservation and representation of human brains, or more particularly, of brains that were not merely anonymous specimens, but objects invested with the identity of the original, living person? This question is addressed by looking at one brain in particular, namely of the great mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Recounted here are the circumstances under which Gauss’s brain was acquired by his academic colleague Rudolph Wagner and made part of a collection of human brains. This early start to elite brain research took place in the context of two classic, mid-nineteenth century clashes in the natural sciences. One debate, carried out by Wagner and Carl Vogt, concerned the so-called Materialismusstreit, a “confict over materialism” centered on the brain-mind/soul paradigm. The other, known as the hippocampus controversy, saw adversaries Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley contest the kinship between apes, humans, and human races as based on brains and skulls. A recent convolution to the story of Gauss’s brain illustrates the persistence of the object’s agency. After having been saved from disposal by the author of this chapter, the brain was publicly exhibited in 1996 and 1997, along with three other elite brains and subsequently examined by means of MRI. In its wake, the startling discovery was made that a swap of Gauss’s brain with another elite brain had taken place, namely that of the pathologist Conrad Heinrich Fuchs. The Fuchs fask contained the cerebral remains of Gauss and vice versa. Who perpetrated the misdeed? No irrefutable answer has as yet been put forward; a solution to the conundrum may prove evanescent as in the case of the infamous, still unsolved riddle of the Piltdown hoax.1

On February 23, 1855, shortly after midnight, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Carl Friedrich Gauss, died at the age of 77 in the Astronomical Observatory at the University of Göttingen where he had lived and worked. Over the course of the following morning, February 24, a team of fve medical doctors (Gauss’s personal doctor, the anatomist and pathologist Jakob Henle, the pathologist August Förster, the pathologist and physiologist Conrad Heinrich Fuchs, and the anatomist and physiologist Rudolph Wagner), along with several others, convened in the room where Gauss’s lifeless body still lay in repose. An autopsy soon uncovered a kidney stone of calcium oxalate, which was quite possibly the result of a wine-drinking habit. Following this meeting, Rudolph Wagner (who DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-17

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had received permission from Gauss during his dying days) removed Gauss’s brain and added the prize specimen to the growing collection of elite brains he used for scientifc study. Not long after, in that same year, he announced the weight of the brain (1492 grams with cerebral membranes; 1410 grams without) and wrote it on the label of the fask in which the item was preserved. More detailed and extensive observations were published by Wagner in his Vorstudien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Morphologie und Physiologie des menschlichen Gehirns als Seelenorgan (1860; 1862) (Preliminary studies to a scientifc morphology and physiology of the human brain as organ of the mind/soul).2 For well over a century, following the heady days of Wagner’s collecting of, and research into, elite brains, Gauss’s brain was scarcely re-enlisted in active brain and mind research, not even after the brain of Hermann von Helmholtz (1821–1894) and, more internationally, of Albert Einstein (1879–1955) rekindled the fascination with reading

Figure 12.1: Gauss in repose, February 23, 1855 (daguerreotype from Krämer, 2000, Figure 6; original: SUB Göttingen).

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scientifc genius from cerebral anatomy.3 While these great men’s brains were subjected to research into the secret of their genius, Gauss’s brain remained in limbo while in the custodial possession of successive professors at Göttingen University’s Medical Faculty, slowly passing from hand to hand until it reached the neuropathologist Hans Orthner (1914– 2000). This state of abeyance came to an end in 1994, when I had moved to Göttingen and was appointed director of the Institute for the History of Medicine, which was part of the Medical Faculty.4 Not long after, my secretary received a phone call from Orthner (who had retired some years before), in which he repeated a request made earlier to the previous director, Ulrich Tröhler, to offoad historical collection items. The message, as transferred to me, said if the Institute for the History of Medicine were not able or willing to take possession, the objects might have to be disposed of (‘entsorgt’). I dispatched Michael Hagner, the Institute’s assistant, to collect these unspecifed items, and upon his return he struggled up the main staircase while carrying a heavy object in the kind of cotton bag in which one habitually picks up early-morning bread rolls. The object was plonked down onto my desk, the loosely ftting bag slipped off, and suddenly I beheld a human brain in a glass container marked in clear handwriting C. F. G—ss (Carl Friedrich Gauss). There I stood, transfxed, eye-to-eye with what many mathematicians revered as the fnest mental hardware in the history of humankind.5 Astonished by our fnd, we conducted additional trips, and soon the brains of the pathologist Conrad Heinrich Fuchs (1803–1855), the classical scholar Carl Friedrich Hermann (1804– 1855), and the mathematician Peter Gustav Lejeune-Dirichlet (1805– 1859)—all one-time Göttingen professors—were added to the Institute’s new collection. With these precious items in my curatorial possession, they were placed in glass-panelled display cases in one of the Institute’s downstairs exhibition rooms. Word spread, and before long a number of mathematicians asked for access to the shrine. International correspondence followed. A Japanese expert on Einstein’s brain, inquired: “Did you discover the secret of the genius from Carl Friedrich Gauss’s brain?” Later he persisted: “What do you think about Albert Einstein’s genius? What is Albert Einstein’s brain? Is Einstein’s brain evolution or mutation or intellectual DNA?” My response, perhaps feeble, was: “Our current belief is that mental excellence cannot be read from cerebral ‘hardware.’”6 Next came two public showings of the brain specimens. As part of consecutive conferences at the Institute, one on Medical Geography in Historical Perspective (June 13–15, 1996), the other on New Perspectives on Alexander von Humboldt (May 29–31, 1997), the downstairs exhibition room with the collection of elite brains was used for a display of Humboldtiana. The showcases with brains were intermixed with samples of Humboldtian cartography; among the maps were those showing the global distribution of geomagnetism, the product of collaboration between Gauss and Humboldt, illustrating the frst instance of a big science project for which Gauss’s living brain had conceived the integrating and unifying mathematics.7 Beyond proving to be an interesting display, the exhibit excited public response to our new collection of elite brains and demonstrated one important thing: the interest that the scientifc community took into the secrets of these few vaunted cerebra transformed them into natural things in and of themselves with agency, not unlike religious icons. The collection, however modest, stirred a renewed interest in

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Figure 12.2: The fask marked C. F. G—ss; visible here is the right cerebral hemisphere of which the convolutions proved to be characteristic of the brain of Fuchs. Shown in the lower-right corner, outside the fask is part of the cast of the inner surface of Gauss’s skull (author’s photo, May 29, 1997).

Figure 12.3: A view of the exhibition room with cartographic Humboldtiana and four of Wagner’s elite brains. The fask marked C. F. G— ss, in the display case on the left, proved to contain the brain of Fuchs and vice versa. The fask marked C. H. F—s with Gauss’s brain is in the rear showcase, on the left (author’s photo, May 29, 1997).

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Gauss’s brain; yet more mundanely, as my career took off in different directions and I had to end the curatorial relationship with the collection of elite brains, it left me with a concern about the depleted state of preservative fuid (Weingeist/ethyl alcohol/formalin) in two of the collection’s four jars in which the fuid had dropped so low as to expose the top parts of the brains. One of the two was the fask marked Gauss (Figure 12.2). By chance, I encountered professor and director of the University’s forensic medicine department Klaus-Steffen Saternus, who agreed to take care of the fuid depletion problem. With a heavy conscience abated, my mind wandered from these specimens of great genius, until a year later another colleague became involved, namely Jens Frahm, director of the Biomedical NMR Research Group at the Max Planck Institute for Biomedical Chemistry and one of the world’s leaders in the development of magnetic resonance imaging. To national and international commendation, Frahm documented Gauss’s brain by means of state-of-the-art MRI analysis, thus avoiding the multiple cutting and thin slicing that had destroyed Einstein’s brain more than half a century earlier.8 Frahm clarifed that his purpose was a descriptive and visual documentation of the brain, not a search for anatomical indicators of genius, mathematical or otherwise. “We are not looking for the genius in the gyri of the brain. Our aim is to fully document the historical specimens to preserve them for future research.”9 And indeed, no extraordinary features were found. This was, of course, contrary to the beliefs of Wagner and his comrades-in-arms who had preserved Gauss’s brain in large part to study the physical attributes responsible for his genius. For these nineteenthcentury scholars, upon Gauss’s death, his cerebral organ of mind/ soul became invested with the totality of his extraordinary talents and accomplishments. Its 1492-gram mass of cerebral tissue proved an

Figure 12.4: The brains of Carl Friedrich Hermann and Peter Gustav Lejeune-Dirichlet being examined by a conference delegate. The Fuchs fask with the brain of Gauss is on the right, just outside the picture (author’s photo, May 29, 1997).

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ideal object for scientifc study that might provide physical evidence of genius and thus of mind, and perhaps even bolster the belief in an afterlife.

THE CULT OF GREAT MEN AND ELITE BRAINS The 1855 transfguration of Gauss’s brain by Wagner into a collection object for the study of mind is commonly taken as the beginning of elite brain research. Already through the preceding half century, however, a scientifc interest in the trinity of skull, brain and mind/soul had been growing amongst the scientifc community. Just the year before Gauss’s death, this interest had peaked with the publication of the eponymous Schädel, Hirn und Seele des Menschen und der Thiere nach Alter, Geschlecht und Raçe (1854) (Skull, brain and mind/soul of humans and animals according to age, sex and race), written by the Jena anatomist and embryologist Emil Huschke (1797–1858). Therefore, as contemporaries investigated Gauss’s brain for physical markers of his cognitive ability, this undergirded a widespread belief that the shape and size of heads and their cerebral content were morphological expressions of mind and, perhaps, of genius,10 on the one hand separating humankind from apes and on the other identifying great men, ft to be leaders.11 A preoccupation with great men and minds was particularly pronounced among several Germanizing philo-German British thinkers. Prominent among them was Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), who, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) before him, believed that Germany was the contemporary heartland of spiritual renewal.12 Carlyle rejected the bourgeois liberalism of his day, which sought to remedy the country’s ills by means of external, political measures. A society’s progress, in his view, came from the moral strength of individual men. In his lectures “On Heroes, Hero Worship, and the Heroic in History” (1840), he argued that the welfare of mankind and its advances in civilization depended on the virtue of a few great individuals, superior in moral character and intellectual ability. These were divinely chosen people, sent at preordained times to enlighten and lead with their courage and truthfulness. Such socio-political thought had obvious attractions for the emerging generation of metropolitan scientists, who were trying to lay claim to part of the cultural authority hitherto monopolized by members of the traditional estates. The great comparative anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1804–1892), to whom we will return, was attracted by it, and while he developed his Germanic transcendental morphology, also of human skulls and brains, he simultaneously nurtured a friendship with Carlyle, with whom he shared a variety of specifc interests. Carlyle, for his part, thought quite highly of Owen; and in a real sense, Owen, with his autocratic, larger-than-life personality and his discoveries of the transcendental meaning of vertebrate morphology, ftted Carlyle’s model of the hero. As a Victorian scientist, Owen combined the features of both poets and prophets of yore, who Carlyle maintained were the same in this fundamental respect that they have penetrated the sacred mystery of the universe, the Divine Idea of the World.13 Like Owen, Gauss was another perfect example of the anointed few who saw the mysterious truth behind nature’s external clothing. In 1884, Otto Knille included him in the iconic painting Weimar 1803, which depicted Germany’s intellectual leadership arrayed to the left and the right of the central fgure of Goethe. Gauss was a man of simple beginnings, a child prodigy who through his mathematic ability easily grasped

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the inner logic of the world. Among the various anecdotes about him as a child prodigy, the story about his day of reckoning has gained widespread circulation. When Gauss was a young boy of seven years, one day at school, the schoolmaster kept the boys occupied by making them add the integers from 1 to 100. When fnished, each had to place his slate on the front table, on top of the previous ones. Almost instantly, young Carl Friedrich rose and placed his tablet down with on it a single number: 5050. After the other boys at long last had handed in their results, the teacher checked their additions, using his cane to chastise those whose sums were wrong. When in the end he came to the tablet that had been put down frst, he demanded of young Gauss to explain how he had arrived at the correct answer. Unhesitatingly, the boy explained that the addition’s task can be reduced to counting 1+100, 2+99, 3+98 and so on till 50+51; in other words (or numbers rather), to the easy multiplication of 50×101.14

Figure 12.5: Carl Friedrich Gauss (1877 oil painting by Gottlieb Biermann after the 1840 original by Christian Albrecht Jensen).

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Throughout his illustrious career, Gauss was not only a great mathematician, but also an astronomer, geodesist, and physicist of rare genius, who was one of the vaunted early scientists to become celebrated as a national hero. From his humble beginnings, Gauss’s genius shone when still a youngster, and at age 14 the talented pupil was presented to the Duke of Brunswick, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand (1735–1806), who provided him with fnancial support from 1792 till 1806. With this patronage, Gauss was enabled to enter the Collegium Carolinum (1792–1795)—a preparatory college to university study—and independently to develop a variety of brilliant mathematical ideas.15 He then attended the University of Göttingen (October 15, 1795 until September 28, 1798), where he had the opportunity to read the mathematical classics, fnding remarkably that in many instances he had managed to arrive on his own at some of the feld’s most cutting-edge solutions. He obtained his doctorate in absentia, on July 16, 1799, nominally under Johann Friedrich Pfaff (1765–1825), at the dukedom’s University of Helmstedt, by submitting some earlier work on the frst of his four famed proofs of the fundamental theorem of algebra. Gauss’s frst great work, Disquisitiones arithmeticae (1801), made him, according to Joseph Louis Lagrange (1736–1813), at a stroke the leading mathematician in the world.16 Around this time, Gauss turned his attention to astronomy following the discovery of the minor planet Ceres, which on January 1, 1801 had been observed by the Palermo astronomer Giuseppe Piazzi (1746–1826), who recorded its motion but soon after lost track. From the scarce observational data, Gauss accurately predicted Ceres’ position, using an improved orbit theory as well as the method of least squares which he had previously developed. This work led to his second remarkable book, the Theoria motus corporum coelestium (1809), which showed him to be one of Europe’s fnest astronomers, as well. Then, with the death of his patron, Gauss had to look for a new source of income, and in 1807 he accepted a position at Göttingen University as Professor of Astronomy and Director of the Observatory, where he would proceed to spend a great deal of his time attending to the practicalities of equipping and running the institution.17 Gauss applied his unequalled facility with numbers to various scientifc projects, most notably in the case of his geodetic survey of the Kingdom of Hanover, to which Göttingen belonged.18 Among the resulting theoretical advances were his ideas on how to overcome the diffculties of mapping the terrestrial ellipsoid on a sphere (conformal mapping), treated in the Disquisitiones generales circa superfcies curvas (1828). In 1828, on the entreaty of Alexander von Humboldt, Gauss took part in the one and only scientifc convention of his life, in Berlin. This work inspired him to develop his long-standing interest in earth’s magnetism, and together with the physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber (1804–1891), who was Professor at Göttingen from 1831 until 1837, he established a magnetic observatory and in 1834 organized the Magnetic Association, the frst major scientifc project based on international cooperation for Europe-wide geomagnetic observations. This project was subsequently expanded into a worldwide network by Humboldt. Results of the Magnetic Association’s work were summarized in a joint publication with Weber, Allgemeine Theorie des Erdmagnetismus (1839), followed by an Atlas (1840). At this time, Gauss also applied himself to the improvement and invention of scientifc instruments, developing the heliotrope, the biflar magnetometer, and in 1833, he invented and built, together with Weber, the frst electrical telegraph.19 Although not a churchman, with age Gauss increasingly became preoccupied with the metaphysical issue of immortality and was a staunch believer in life after death, which brings us back to his brain as a collector’s

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item and an object of scientifc study. Wagner, the renowned collector of elite gray matter to whom we will return shortly, was considerably more religious in a conventional sense than Gauss had been and, in the famous man’s dying days, conducted fromme Gespräche (pious deathbed conversations) with him.20 While the great mathematician’s metaphysical condition remains a matter of ecclesiastical debate, Wagner’s suspension of Gauss’s brain in preservative solution has indeed ensured a different type of immortality for the princeps mathematicorum (frst among mathematicans).

PART OF MATERIALISM DEBATE Within this general preoccupation with great men and minds, and the posthumous transposition of their brilliance to skulls and brains, a more specifc religious concern existed with the notion of a human soul. In the course of the nineteenth century, doubt about the concept of a transcendental soul burgeoned and the materialist view became increasingly prevalent that mind and soul are not only confned to the nervous system but, in fact, are no more than its products, originating and dying with the brain. Besides, the notion of mind was increasingly separated from that of soul, and the latter became relegated to the sphere of theological speculation. This soul-body problem or, in more modern parlance, this mind-body problem became the battleground on which vitalist dualism clashed with materialist monism—a battleground that was located at the confuence of a number of different currents of scientifc research. Could the material brain, in the form of special features, give credence to the notion of an immaterial soul, either by indicating godly genius or at least human uniqueness? Among the men who tried to stem the rising tide of materialism was Wagner.21 He gained national and international renown when in 1854 he delivered the keynote address on “Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz” (Creation of humans and substance/reality of the soul) to the “Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte” (Assembly of German scientists and doctors), held in Göttingen. The orthodox Lutheran and politically conservative Wagner used the occasion to attack the crude materialism of the radical-revolutionary Carl Vogt (1817–95). Vogt had expressed the materialistic view that the human soul is nothing more than a function of the brain and that thought is a product of the brain in the same way that bile is secreted by the liver or urine is produced by the kidneys.22 The so-called Materialismusstreit spread to Britain as Owen and the pugnacious, talented advocate for Darwinism Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) carried on a controversy about the extent of the anatomical differences between the brains of apes and humans. Each of the two combatants used Wagner’s work and their personal correspondence with him to strengthen their respective stances, based on the Göttingen professor’s authority that came with his collection of skulls and brains. Already in his early publications, such as the Lehrbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie (1834–35) (Textbook of comparative anatomy), Wagner had stated that humans share with animals the possession of body and soul (in the sense of animation) but differ from them because human souls have mental abilities, a rational mind, “ein unmittelbares Geschenk Gottes” (a direct gift from God). Wagner further had enumerated a variety of cerebral and skeletal characteristics that characterize humans. Among the former he had listed the large development of the human brain, especially of the two hemispheres which more completely than in apes cover the cerebellum; he had also cited the presence of a posterior cornu or horn (the part of the lateral ventricle of each cerebral hemisphere that curves inward),

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a hippocampus minor (an internal protrusion inside the posterior hornlike cavity in each brain hemisphere) and various other cerebral features, such as the many and pronounced cortical convolutions. Wagner had qualifed this list of human peculiarities by adding that in part these are present in the anthropoid apes as well. In the early 1850s, he turned his attention specifcally to the question of the human mind/soul. In his “Menschenschöpfung und Seelensubstanz,” Wagner asserted that there are no physiological grounds for denying the existence of an independent immaterial soul and that the moral order of society requires us to assume the soul’s existence.23 He stated that, although in scientifc matters he sided with the skeptics, in matters of faith he preferred the simple Köhlerglauben (the faith of a person whose job it is to make charcoal, i.e., a simple faith). This expression provided Vogt, known for his scientifc materialism, with the title of a scathing counter-booklet, Köhlerglaube und Wissenschaft (1856) (Blind faith and science), in which he denounced Wagner’s piety. The mutual abuse in the Wagner-Vogt clash was unequaled. Both men continued to promulgate their conficting ideas. Vogt elaborated on his materialistic views in Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung und in der Geschichte der Erde (Lectures about mankind, its place in creation and in the history of the earth) published in the same year as Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (1863) (see below). Three years after the Göttingen meeting, in 1857, Wagner published his clearest exposition of the question in Der Kampf um die Seele (The confict over the soul/mind). Although humans share both body and soul with animals, humankind is unique in that we are capable of abstract thought and have a notion of morality and divinity, the symbol of which is speech. No serious objections can be brought against the assumption of a soul—he reiterated—nor against that of its immortality. In his Vorstudien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Morphologie und Physiologie des menschlichen Gehirns als Seelenorgan (1860) Wagner continued the work by the French anatomist and zoologist Louis Pierre Gratiolet (1815–1865), concluding that the cerebral convolutions in humans and simians are constructed according to basic types that, although similar, cannot be reduced one to another. Both men believed that distinctively human brain features do exist, but these were to be found in characteristics of the brain as a whole, not in restricted anatomical parts. Gratiolet, who along with Owen was one of the frst to describe the brain of a gorilla, had established an international reputation with his classic Mémoire sur les plis cérébraux de l’homme et des primatès (1854) (Treatise on the cerebral convolutions), which was a meticulous study of brain morphology in humans and in a wide range of simians. In the more comprehensive Anatomie comparée du système nerveux (1839–57) (Comparative anatomy of the nervous system of humans and primates), of which the second volume was written by Gratiolet, he, along with several others among his French colleagues, maintained that Homo sapiens is suffciently different from the animal kingdom to constitute a separate human kingdom. This was a ‘règne de verbe’ (kingdom of the word), founded on humanity’s possession of a rational soul as manifested by the ability to speak. Wagner made capital out of the fact that he had in his collection of human brains that of Gauss, whose cerebral organ, although not markedly large, was characterized by pronounced cortical convolutions. The same was not true, however, of the brain of another highly gifted colleague, the mineralogist Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann (1782–1859), whose death had provided Wagner with another prize specimen in his collection of brains, and Wagner left undecided the question of whether Gaussian brain features indicated intellectual excellence/genius. In general, he

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Figure 12.6: Gauss’s brain, left hemisphere (from Wagner 1860, plate 4). doubted that mental attributes can be correlated with specifc cerebral features. Brain architecture, the geometry of convolutions, does matter, but brain parts do not correspond to functions in the way that this is true with other organs, for example, vertebrate limbs (a leg is for walking, a wing for fying, a fn for swimming, etc.).24

MEN, MONKEYS, AND MIND Parallel to and in partial synergy with the French and German developments, a similar historic confict broke out in Britain where Owen had been diligently amassing skulls and brains—especially of apes—for purposes of comparison and contrast with those of humans. In 1857, the same year that Wagner published his Der Kampf um die Seele, Owen presented his views on the fundamental difference between humans and apes to the Linnean Society. Expanding upon Wagner’s textbook of comparative anatomy of the mid-1830s (see above), Owen stated that the human brain differs markedly from that of all other mammals: (1) it shows a sudden increase in the relative and absolute size of the cerebral hemispheres, corresponding, of course, to an increase in cranial capacity; (2) both front and back of the cerebrum are well developed; the posterior part of each hemisphere in particular extends backward beyond the cerebellum to form a posterior lobe; (3) the backward extension of the lateral ventricle in each hemisphere is curved so as to form a posterior horn; (4) in each of these a hippocampus minor is present; and (5) the surface area of the cerebrum is increased by many and deep convolutions. Owen argued that the degree to which the human cerebral hemispheres show the development of a posterior lobe, posterior horn, and hippocampus minor justifes using these features for taxonomic purposes. Owen’s exact words and their meaning soon became a matter of controversy, and just as Vogt had attacked Wagner, Huxley now took on Owen at a number of consecutive meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in Oxford (1860), Manchester (1861) and Cambridge (1862)—the so-called hippocampus controversy.25 The results appeared in papers and in Huxley’s Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature.26 Vogt followed suit with the above cited lectures about man, his place in creation and in the history of the earth.27

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The question whether or not human uniqueness can be captured by physical attributes, such as the anatomical features of the brain selected by Owen, was a profound one. Several critics believed that Owen, by defning Homo sapiens merely in terms of particulars of size and shape of the cerebrum, trivialized what it is to be human. The British Medical Journal rebuked Owen and Huxley, adding an appreciative summary of the views of Jean-Louis-Armand de Quatrefages (1810–1892), who taught anthropology at the Museum d’Histoire naturelle in Paris. In his just then published L’Espèce humaine (1861) (The Human Species), he argued that humans are distinguished from animals by having a notion of right and wrong and by a belief in the existence of a God, that is, by the possession of moral and religious awareness. Neither anatomical nor physiological nor even such mental features as articulate speech separate humanity from the animal world, he believed; these merely present differences of degree, not of kind. The truly distinctive characteristics of humans are their moral awareness and religious nature by virtue of which they occupy a special position in the natural world. In fact, these features set humans apart from animals just as much as the latter differ from plants; and Quatrefages joined his fellow naturalist and countryman Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1805–1861) in placing Homo sapiens not merely in a sub-class of its own, as Owen had proposed, but far beyond, in a separate kingdom. Ever since the latter half of the 1830s, Owen and Wagner had occasionally been in friendly correspondence, and in 1860 Wagner sent a copy of the frst volume of his Vorstudien to Owen, adding in two consecutive letters that he was “contra Darwin and Huxley” and sided with Owen in his views expressed by his sympathizers (who himself was not present) at the Oxford meeting of the BAAS, which views Wagner interpreted as an anti-Darwinian insistence on a fundamental human-ape difference. In print, however, Wagner moderated his stance to a certain extent. He disagreed with Owen in that he regarded the overall organization or architecture of the brain as a more reliable taxonomic criterion than any individual morphological feature. No sooner had Wagner published his evenhanded assessment of the Owen-Huxley clash in a footnote to a paper in the Nachrichten von der Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Notices from the Göttingen Scientifc Society)28 than Huxley began a series of letters to Wagner in an effort to win him over to his side. Perceptively, Huxley grasped that Wagner’s sympathy for Owen was part of a shared dislike of Darwinian ideas, shared by Owen and Wagner, and that if he were to prevail upon the Göttingen physiologist, he needed to disown Darwin as much as possible. This is what he did, repeatedly assuring Wagner that he—Huxley—was not a Darwinian and that his work on apes had no direct bearing on Darwin’s theory. He began by complimenting Wagner, by now into his ffty-seventh year, expressing his “admiration of the manner in which a veteran in science like yourself, keeps his place in the frst rank among the press of younger investigators.” But with respect to Wagner’s published position vis-à-vis the OwenHuxley clash, how could Wagner say that Owen expressed certain truths “when every assertion which is peculiarly his own, is demonstrably false?” “I do not think you quite apprehend my position as regards Mr. Owen. The question between us is not one of Darwinism or anti-Darwinism—not one of the importance or unimportance of certain characters—: but it is a question of anatomical fact and of personal veracity.” This initial letter was followed by a much longer one giving a full exposé of the controversy as Huxley saw it and in which, once more, he dissociated himself as much as possible from Darwin. “In heaven’s name let us be neither Darwinians nor anti-Darwinians but truthful men of science, as your poet says ‘Im Ganzen, Guten,Wahren, resolut zu leben.’”

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Huxley’s letter was not intended merely to put his case to Wagner but to get the latter’s vote in the campaign to defeat Owen. In a further letter, accompanying an offprint of his paper “On the Brain of Ateles paniscus,” Huxley made this clear: “I should be very glad if you would give your opinion on the question of anatomical fact, à propos of my paper, in which you will fnd nothing Darwinian.” In the sense in which Wagner was likely to understand Huxley, namely that Huxley entertained grave doubts about the theory of evolution and especially of human evolution, the latter’s disavowal of Darwinism was apt to deceive. The result of Huxley’s correspondence was more than he could have hoped for. First, Wagner went public in support of Huxley in the latter’s disagreement with Owen, and Huxley responded by acknowledging that “your public support in this matter will be very useful,” adding: “it is a great comfort to me to observe that one does not necessarily become prejudiced and obstructive as one grows old.” Second, at the end of 1862, on Wagner’s recommendation, the thirty-seven-year-old Huxley was elected to the Königliche Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, an honor that had come Owen’s way only three years earlier. Poor Wagner received nothing in return. He held out great hopes that Huxley would discuss his Vorstudien in the Natural History Review, but this never happened in spite of a reminder Wagner sent to Huxley of “our scientifc harmony . . . against Owen on account of the Cerebrum of the Apes.”29

GAUSS’S BRAIN AND HUXLEY’S RULE Like Huxley, Vogt also exploited his old foe Wagner and ignoring Wagner’s curatorial and intellectual ownership of Gauss’s brain, turned it against Owen by using its features to shore up the evolutionary racism of Huxley’s Rule. Scientifc racism received its mature, late-modern expression in the form of what became known as Huxley’s Law or Rule, part and parcel of the outcome of the hippocampus controversy. Along with Owen’s belief that a wide gap separates humans from the great apes was another belief, namely that the various human races are anatomically closely related, forming a single, unitary species. This was a view associated with such names as Blumenbach and also, in Britain, the physical anthropologist and ethnologist James Cowles Prichard (1786–1848). Owen based his theory of the unity of the human species on the observation that the osteological differences between the various human races “are much less in degree and very inferior in importance” compared to most of the distinctions between “the lowest varieties of Man” and “the highest of the Ape tribe”; also, the osteological and dental features which distinguish humans from the apes are the same for all races of humankind. “I have come to the conclusion that Man forms one species,” Owen proclaimed. Moreover: “Man is the sole species of his Genus, the sole representative of his Order.” He demonstrated the “men-animals” gap in the form of cross-sections of the skulls of humans and apes, also using for the same purpose other anatomical features such as the muscles and tendons in the human foot compared to those of the gorilla. As with the skulls, Owen argued for a monogenist similarity among human varieties and a contrasting gap with apes, stressing various features, in particular the hippocampus minor.30 When in 1859 Darwin published On the Origin of Species, Huxley, who through the late 1840s and the 50s had been a staunch anti-evolutionist, threw in his lot with the Darwinians. The same was true for Vogt. Both men changed their party allegiance and took on one of the two challenges that Darwin did not meet in his magnum opus, namely human evolution (the other was the origin of life). In the Darwinian-Lyellian model of evolution

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by small and gradual changes, cumulatively preserved in the struggle for life, the evolution of Homo sapiens had occurred in a series of small steps from animal to human. Proof of this would exist in the form of intermediary stages, and for the purpose of providing this proof, Blumenbach’s non-Caucasian varieties were used, either to represent successive stages of humanization or different levels of parallel lines of evolution from one or more ape ancestors. In this way, racism became baked into the scientifc cake: in Darwinian evolution theory racist ranking constituted a pillar of proof of human descent from animal ancestors. The differences between Blumenbach’s human varieties were changed from geographical ones, monogenously clustered around a Eurocentric Caucasian archetype, to hierarchical stages in the Darwinian evolution of ape-like ancestors to humans and ultimately to Europeans. The horizontal line was irrevocably changed to the vertical, showing indigenous races as closest to anthropoids. While attacking Owen’s classic picture of the contrast between the skulls of humans and of anthropoid apes, Huxley developed a law or rule that canonically encapsulated modern scientifc racism. It states that, anatomically speaking, the difference between the putatively highest human race and the supposedly lowest is larger than the difference between the lowest human race and the highest ape. The reverse perspective, starting with the apes, expressed the exact same racist ruling: the difference between the lowest and highest anthropoids is larger than the difference between the highest anthropoid and the lowest human (which is a false comparison, implying that human races are equivalent to species; a proper comparison would have been of humans with races of gorilla or, instead, races of chimp).31 Huxley concluded: Thus, even in the important matter of cranial capacity, Men differ more widely from one another than they do from the Apes; while the lowest Apes differ as much, in proportion, from the highest, as the latter does from Man.32 Human races had to be defned by their place in the hierarchy of morphological sequences. Darwinian opinion concurred that among human races a gradual animalization downwards and humanization upwards existed. Two human brains in particular were widely used dramatically to prove Huxley’s Rule. One had been removed from the corpse of Saartjie Baartman (1789–1815), the so-called Hottentot Venus (Figure 12.7), by none other than the great comparative anatomist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832). The other brain was Gauss’s. A member of the South African Khoi people, Baartman was exhibited in freak shows in London and Paris for her steatopygia (large buttocks), dying early at the age of 26. In recent decades, she has become a cause célèbre in feminist and anti-colonialist literature.33 During, and in the wake of, the Materialismusstreit and hippocampus controversy, her brain became widely used along with Gauss’s brain, sensationally to illustrate the two extremes of human, racial difference. Baartman supposedly was a closer relative of anthropoid apes than of Gauss. Vogt compared and contrasted the cerebral convolutions in Baartman (Figure 12.7) with on the one hand those of an orangutan and on the other with the famous Wagner illustration of Gauss’s brain.34 Vogt’s example took like wildfre, and similar depictions were soon splashed across the pages of popular and semi-popular literature, an example being the international bestseller Le monde avant la création de l’homme (1886) (The world before the creation of mankind) by the French astronomer and science writer Camille Flammarion (1842–1925), who pictured Baartman’s proximity to apes by simplifying her cerebral convolutions and thus exaggerating her distance from the princeps mathematicorum (Figure 12.8).35 Thus, while

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Figure 12.7: The brain of Saartjie Baartman (from Vogt 1863, part 1, 232).

Figure 12.8: Huxley’s Rule illustrated, intending to demonstrate, among other things, that the difference in intelligence as shown by cerebral convolutions between Baartman and Gauss is greater than between Baartman and a chimpanzee (from Flammarion 1886, 752).

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the Blumenbachians and, in particular, Owen, had maintained the fundamental similarity and unity of humankind, the Darwinians—Huxley, Vogt, and many others—used Baartman’s brain to animalize her, simultaneously turning Gauss’s brain into the icon of Apollonian superiority and Caucasian supremacy.

CONCLUSION: BRAIN AS A UNIQUE MIND? The mummifcation of humans, from Tutankhamen in his tomb to Jeremy Bentham in his display case in the cupola of University College, London, as well as to Lenin in his Moscow Mausoleum perpetuated their agency among the living. Religious icons such as the Turin Shroud have acted in ways that are not fundamentally different. Similarly, the brain of Gauss conveyed and continues to do so today, vitality of one kind or another to those who are linked by means of possession, scientifc analysis and other means of appropriation. Returning to our opening discussion of Gauss’s brain in modern times, some years had elapsed when to widespread consternation, news of scandal came out in the open. Renate Schweizer, a member of the Frahm group that years earlier had published their renowned MRI study of the brain, discovered that the specimen in the fask marked C. F. G—ss did not, in fact, contain the brain of the princeps mathematicorum. A mix-up of elite brains had taken place: the fask with the Gauss label held the brain of Fuchs, while Gauss’s was found to be in the fask marked C. H. F—s. Schweizer based her determinations on a rare anomaly of the brain, a so-called divided sulcus, which occurs when the central sulcus is not continuous but blocked and divided into two parts. In Wagner’s original illustration of Gauss’s brain this feature is not present, but it does occur in the left hemisphere of the Fuchs specimen. The brain in the fask marked C. F. G—ss and, consequently, the one used by Frahm for MRI documentation, had the distinctive divided sulcus. Further comparisons confrmed that a mix-up of the two brains had indeed taken place.36 A renewed MRI was carried out, this time using the authentic Gauss brain, yet also on this occasion no potential genius features stood out.37 How had the mix-up of the two elite brains come about? Whodunit? Had it been an innocent mistake, the result of careless laboratory practice? Or were we dealing with a hoax, intentionally perpetrated for a particular personal or political purpose? The Frahm group, in this matter led by Schweizer, suggested that the switch had taken place after 1862 and before 1955, and most likely shortly after 1862. The wrongdoing had been sloppy lab practices and the responsibility for these were put on the shoulders of Hermann Wagner (1840–1929), Rudolph’s son, who as part of his doctoral dissertation on Maassbestimmungen der Oberfäche des grossen Gehirns (1864) (Determinations of the dimensions of the surface of the cerebrum) had worked on samples from his father’s collection, including Gauss’s brain. Supporting evidence for this hypothesis was provided; the evidence, however, is not conclusive, nor is the year 1955 incontrovertible as the terminus a quo for the mix-up.38 As documented above, Gauss’s brain never was just an object of simple scientifc interest; on the contrary; on the contrary, it has perpetually been part of highly contested socio-political and religious debates.39 Under such circumstances, the possibility of a deliberate mixup, of a hoax, may have to be considered. It is imaginable—even likely, I suggest—that the Gauss-Fuchs swap is a prank. To a historian of science,

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the mistaken identity evokes memories of the infamous Piltdown hoax, which took place in the context of the search for the missing link in the evolution from apes to humans. As speculated and extensively argued in the historical literature, the perpetrator could have been someone who merely played a trick on colleagues, perhaps intended to take them down a peg or two; equally forcefully argued has been the possibility that an overly zealous Darwinian was behind the fake skull, wanting to buttress Huxley’s Rule; or, quite the reverse, that a religious adversary wanted to pull the rug from under the Darwinians by having them fall for the trick and then be exposed for their lack of scientifc soundness. Until today, the extensive body of Piltdown literature has not reached a common verdict, and different historical detectives come to clashing conclusions.40 Let me end with a serious anecdote that adds one further, significant feature to the contested nature of Gauss’s brain and therefore to the possibility that the mix-up was intentional. At the end of the first day of the 1997 New perspectives on Alexander von Humboldt meeting, we festively opened the small exhibition of Humboldtian cartography and the interspersed elite brains. Walking down the stairs from the meeting room to the exhibition space, I asked one of the participants, Rudolf Vierhaus (1922–2011), the revered director of the Max Planck Institute for History, if he wished me to be his guide to the exhibition and the collection of the famous brains. Instantly, Vierhaus stopped. He shuddered. Courteously but firmly he replied that he had seen all too many Nazi collections of human organs for him to take pleasure in walking around a room with any such trove of body parts, Nazi or not; a decent burial of the brain specimens would be the appropriate line of action to take and, excusing himself, Vierhaus walked straight out of the front door.41 Given these and other—the religious, the racist—visceral associations with Gauss’s brain, the possibility of an intentional mix-up cannot be discounted. Such a swap could and would have opened up to ridicule all those who might have tried to draw benefit from finding in Gauss’s brain indications of exceptionalism. In order to bring clarity to whodunit, we need not only an account of the broad, socio-political and cultural context and meaning of Gauss’s brain as a collection item as attempted in this chapter, but additionally a fine-grained study of curatorial and laboratory practices for the times that the flasks were moved and used and of who the people with hands-on involvement were.42 More generally, the brain is, perhaps, the ultimate natural thing, also in the context of this volume, in the cybernetic sense that our chapters are its products, namely the creations of our own cerebral organs. This observation has validity in the ecology of knowledges of Western modernism. One could of course step outside the Western objectifcation of brain and consider it in a non-European ecology of knowledge production by treating this natural thing as a food item, done for example in rituals of funerary endocannibalism. In such instances, its agency is transferred to the consumed person’s kin group, not unlike in Western scientifc society the preserved brain’s post-mortem agency extends to those who collect and possess it and interpret its features. As I have shown above for late-modern scientifc society, agency of the collected brain was enhanced by it being considered the seat of personal identity and mind, even of genius with all its identifying accomplishments. As such, brain gained superior status to even skull, the latter’s function being primarily safely to encapsulate its prized content. All this has made Gauss’s brain

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so compelling in generating competing appropriations, as would have happened to Newton’s (had it been preserved) and as has occurred in the case of Einstein’s brain.

NOTES 1 Acknowledgements: This essay began as an “After Hours Conversations” talk at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study (Oct. 17, 2016). I warmly thank the organizing committee and in particular Helmut Hofer for encouragement and feedback. Special thanks go to Mackenzie Cooley for felicitous changes to, and corrections of, the originally submitted typescript. I am also much indebted to Wolfgang Böker who provided substantive assistance with parts of the research and critically scrutinized the typescript. The author’s interest in Gauss and in the historical context of his signifcance goes back over some twenty years (Rupke 2000; 2002; 2003; 2005; [2005]; 2009; 2019; 2020; Rupke and Böker 2020). Parts taken from these publications have been used as building blocks for this new story of Gauss’s brain. 2 Accounts of Gauss’s death occur in a range of biographical articles and books. See for example G. Waldo Dunnington, Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. A Study of His Life and Work (New York: Exposition Press, 1955), 322–4. Among other biographies see Wolfgang Sartorius von Waltershausen, Gauss zum Gedächtniss (Leipzig: Wolfgang, 1856); Horst Michling, Carl Friedrich Gauss: Aus dem Leben des Princeps Mathematicorum (Göttingen: Göttinger Tageblatt, 1976); Karin Reich, Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1777–1977 (Munich: Moos, 1977). 3 For reports on research into Helmholtz’s brain, see: David Hansemann, “Ueber das Gehirn von Hermann v. Helmholtz,” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane, vol. 20 (1899), 1–12. For Einstein, see: Carolyn Abraham, Possessing Genius. The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004). 4 Axel Wittmann, “Über das Gehirnpräparat ‘Gauß’,” Mitteilungen der GaussGesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 5–9, footnote 8, inaccurately represents my association with the Institute for the History of Medicine; for one of several corrigenda see Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur to Nicolaas Rupke, “Bestellung zum Vorsteher der Abteilung Geschichte der Medizin,” October 10, 1994. 5 Nicolaas Rupke, “Software der besonderen Art,” in Mein Gauß. Was Menschen von heute mit dem Gelehrten Carl Friedrich Gauß verbindet (Göttingen: Göttinger Tageblatt/Gauss-Gesellschaft, 2005), 33. 6 Kenji Sugimoto to N.A. Rupke, July 19, 1996; May 10, 2000; Rupke to Sugimoto, August 8, 1996; Wolfgang Böker to Sugimoto, May 24, 2000 (author’s private papers). For those who can read Japanese see also Kenji Sugimoto, Albert Einstein: A Photographic Biography (Tokio: Kodansha, 2001), 196–203. 7 Nicolaas Rupke, “The Geomagnetic Project: Internationalism in Science between the French Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War,” in The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, ed. Hugh R. Slotten, Ronald L. Numbers, and David N. Livingstone (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 32–42. 8 Axel Wittmann, Jens Frahm, and Wolfgang Hänicke, “MagnetresonanzTomographie des Gehirns von Carl Friedrich Gauβ,” Mitteilungen der GaussGesellschaft, no. 36 (1999): 9–19; Jens Frahm, “Mit Kilogauβ ins menschliche Gehirn. Anatomie, Stoffwechsel und Funktion,” Mitteilungen der GaussGesellschaft, no. 37 (2000): 3–16; for Einstein, see: Abraham, Possessing Genius, 99–106, 270–3. 9 Anon., “Unraveling the True Identity of the Brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss,” Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Press Release, October 28, 2013, 3pp. 10 This was true especially during the heyday of Franz Joseph Gall’s (1758–1828) phrenology, when for example the ‘beautiful skull,’ attributed to Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) (today a contested attribution), was turned into an icon

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that revealed his mental traits and talents; see Robert J. Richards, “The Beautiful Skulls of Schiller and the Georgian Girl: Quantitative and Aesthetic Scaling of the Races, 1770–1850,” in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Race and Natural History, 1750–1850, ed. Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 142–76. Michael Hagner, Geniale Gehirne. Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004), passim. In 1799 Coleridge studied in Göttingen. For Carlyle, Germany’s spiritual leader was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), and it was George Henry Lewes (1817–1878), one of Carlyle’s admirers, who wrote a classic biography of Goethe. On Carlyle and Owen see Nicolaas Rupke, Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 94–96. Brian Hayes, “Gauss’ Day of Reckoning. A Famous Story about the Boy Wonder of Mathematics Has Taken on a Life of Its Own,” American Scientist 94, no. 3 (2006): 200–205. Such as when on March 30, 1796, he solved the more than 2000-year-old problem of how to construct the regular 17-gon with a compass and ruler. Nicolaas Rupke, “Gauss, Carl Friedrich,” in The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed. John L. Heilbron (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 325–6. See also Ivo Schneider’s, “The Development of Gauss’ Image,” in Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), 99–107. By this time, he had already produced his main mathematical work and had toyed with non-Euclidean geometry, denying the parallel postulate, but he kept these revolutionary views by and large to himself. While Gauss did not enjoy teaching, he had several outstanding mathematicians among his pupils, such as: Moritz Benedict Cantor (1829–1920), Richard Dedekind (1831–1916), and Bernhard Riemann (1826–1866). See Karin Reich, “Gauß’ Schüler. Sie studierten bei Gauß—Karrieren von Gauß’ Schülern—Gauß’ als Lehrer,” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 37 (2000): 33–62. From 1818 until 1825, he personally led the triangulation feldwork and subsequently, until 1847, supervised the project, making more than a million calculations. Rupke, The Geomagnetic Project, 34–35. Gauss’s motto was pauca sed matura (few but mature), yet his many “mature” publications (323) were “few” only in relation to the multiplicity of his ideas. Rudolf Wagner, Gespräche mit Carl Friedrich Gauß in den letzten Monaten seines Lebens, ed. with an introduction by Heinrich Rubner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975). Wagner, having taught comparative anatomy and zoology at the University of Erlangen, in 1840 moved to Göttingen where he succeeded Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752–1840) and became Professor of Comparative Physiology and Zoology. Simultaneously, he assumed the Directorship of the University’s Academic Museum as well as the Curatorship of the Blumenbachian Collection of Skulls. On Wagner see Nicolaas Rupke and Wolfgang Böker, “Wagner, Rudolph Friedrich Johannes Heinrich,” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, vol. 27 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2020), 207–8. Nicolaas Rupke, “Translation Studies in the History of Science: The Example of Vestiges,” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 217–20. The address’ 3,000 copies sold within weeks, and Wagner published a new edition with further thoughts on human souls, a copy of which he gifted the by then ailing Gauss. Rupke, Richard Owen, 224–9. Ibid., 182–243. Thomas Henry Huxley, Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature (London: Williams and Norgate Publishers, 1863). Carl Vogt, Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung und in der Geschichte der Erde (Giessen: Ricker, 1863). Till 1942, “(Königliche) Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen” was the offcial name of today’s “Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen.”

362 Part III • Preserved 29 Rupke, Richard Owen, 205–8. 30 Ibid., 182–208. 31 Ibid., 209–13; Nicolaas Rupke, “The Origins of Scientifc Racism and Huxley’s Rule,” in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, ed. Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer, 241–4. 32 Huxley, Evidence, 95. 33 Clifton Crais and Pamela Scully, Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), passim. 34 Vogt, Vorlesungen, vol. 1, 232–3. 35 Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and Expanded ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 122. 36 Renate Schweizer, “Die vertauschten Gehirne von C. F. Gauß und C. H. Fuchs: Geschichte einer Entdeckung,” Mitteilungen der Gas-Gesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 11–27; Renate Schweizer, Axel Wittmann, and Jens Frahm, “A Rare Anatomical Variation Newly Identifes the Brains of C. F. Gauss and C. H. Fuchs in a Collection at the University of Göttingen,” Brain 137 (2014): e269. http://doi. org/10.1093/brain/awt296. A picture taken of the fask marked ‘Gauss’ during the Humboldt Conference, May 29, 1997 (Figure 2), shows the distinctive convolutions of the right hemisphere of what later proved to be the brain of Fuchs (Frahm, “Mit Kilosgauß ins menschliche Gehirn,” 10, top part of his Figure 4). In other words, the mix-up occurred before that date. 37 Anon., “Unraveling the True Identity of the Brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss,” ubi supra. 38 Walter J. Schulz-Schaeffer, “Untersuchungen über den Zeitpunkt zu dem die Gehirnasservate von Carl Friedrich Gauß und Conrad Heinrich Fuchs verwechselt worden sind,” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 29–32. The photographic evidence needs corroboration. 39 The actuality of the subject matter was apparent from, among other things, a series of lectures on brain and mind/Geist, organized by the Göttingen Academy of Sciences; see Norbert Elsner and Gerd Lüer, eds., Das Gehirn und sein Geist (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2000). 40 See for example: John Evangelist Walsh, Unraveling Piltdown: The Science Fraud of the Century and Its Solution (New York and Toronto: Random House, 1996). 41 This unease about organ collections is apparent, too, from the absence of Wagner’s collection of elite brains in recent, detailed catalogues of University holdings; see for example Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Dinge des Wissens. Die Sammlungen, Museen und Gärten der Universität Göttingen (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), passim. The Nazi connotation was reinforced when one of my doctoral students at the Institute for the History of Medicine drew international attention with the publication of his thesis on the euthanasia of disabled children at Vienna’s Spiegelgrund clinic. There, a notorious Nazi psychiatrist (Heinrich Gross) had ‘harvested’ the brains and other body parts of the many murdered children, on a collection of which he continued to build his postWar career; see Matthias Dahl, Endstation Spiegelgrund. Die Tötung behinderter Kinder während des Nationalsozialismus am Beispiel einer Kinderfachabteilung in Wien 1940 bis 1945 (Vienna: Verlag Erasmus, 1998). At long last, the body parts of the children were given a ceremonial burial. 42 Schweizer’s 2014 account of the history of her discovery of the mix-up is an inspiring beginning to such a project. The contributions to the nature and sequence of events as told by Wittmann (“Über das Gehirnpräparat ‘Gauß’,” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 5–9) contain factual corrigenda.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Abraham, Carolyn. Possessing Genius: The Bizarre Odyssey of Einstein’s Brain. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004. Anon. “Unraveling the True Identity of the Brain of Carl Friedrich Gauss.” Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry, Press Release, October 28, 2013, 3pp.

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Crais, Clifton and Pamela Scully. Sarah Baartman and the Hottentot Venus: A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Dunnington, G. Waldo. Carl Friedrich Gauss: Titan of Science. A Study of His Life and Work. New York: Exposition Press, 1955. Elsner, Norbert and Gerd Lüer. Das Gehirn und sein Geist. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000. Flammarion, Camille. Le Monde avant la Création de l’Homme. Paris: Marpon and Flammarion, 1886. Frahm, Jens. “Mit Kilogauβ ins menschliche Gehirn. Anatomie, Stoffwechsel und Funktion.” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 37 (2000): 3–16. Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man, Revised and Expanded ed. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996. Hagner, Michael. Geniale Gehirne. Zur Geschichte der Elitegehirnforschung. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2004. Hansemann, David. “Ueber das Gehirn von Hermann v. Helmholtz.” Zeitschrift für Psychologie und Physiologie der Sinnesorgane 20 (1899): 1–12. Hayes, Brian. “Gauss’ Day of Reckoning. A Famous Story about the Boy Wonder of Mathematics Has Taken on a Life of Its Own.” American Scientist 94, no. 3 (2006). www.americanscientist.org/template/ AssetDetail/assetid/50686 to view the article with illustrations Helms, Gunther. “MRT-Untersuchungen des Erhaltungszustandes der historischen Göttinger Gehirnpräparate.” Mitteilungen der GaussGesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 33–38. Huxley, Thomas Henry. Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. London: Williams and Norgate Publishers, 1863. Michling, Horst. Carl Friedrich Gauss: Aus dem Leben des Princeps Mathematicorum. Göttinger Tageblatt, 1997. Reich, Karin. Carl Friedrich Gauss, 1777–1977. Munich: Moos, 1977. Rupke, Nicolaas. “Carl Friedrich Gauss und der Erdmagnetismus.” In ‘Wie der Blitz einschlägt, hat sich das Rätsel gelöst’. Carl Friedrich Gauss in Göttingen, edited by Elmar Mittler, 188–204. Göttingen: SUB, 2005. Rupke, Nicolaas. “Gauss, Carl Friedrich.” In The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, edited by John L. Heilbron, 325–6. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Rupke, Nicolaas. “The Geomagnetic Project: Internationalism in Science between the French Revolution and the Franco-Prussian War.” In The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. 8: Modern Science in National, Transnational, and Global Context, edited by Hugh R. Slotten, Ronald L. Numbers, and David N. Livingstone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, June 2020. Rupke, Nicolaas. “The Göttingen Location.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nicolaas Rupke, 19–32. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2002. Rupke, Nicolaas. “The Origins of Scientifc Racism and Huxley’s Rule.” In Johann Friedrich Blumenbach: Race and Natural History Around 1800, edited by Nicolaas Rupke and Gerhard Lauer, 263 pp. London and New York: Routledge, 2018 (dated 2019). Rupke, Nicolaas. Richard Owen: Biology without Darwin, 356 pp. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009. Rupke, Nicolaas. “Software der besonderen Art.” In Mein Gauβ. Was Menschen von heute mit dem Gelehrten Carl Friedrich Gauβ, 33. Göttingen: Göttinger Tageblatt/Gauss-Gesellschaft, 2005.

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Rupke, Nicolaas. “Translation Studies in the History of Science: The Example of Vestiges.” British Journal for the History of Science 33 (2000): 209–22. Rupke, Nicolaas and Wolfgang Böker. “Wagner, Rudolph.” In Neue Deutsche Biographie, in press. Sartorius von Waltershausen, Wolfgang. Gauss zum Gedächtniss. Leipzig: Wolfgang, 1856. Schneider, Ivo. “The Development of Gauss’ Image.” In Göttingen and the Development of the Natural Sciences, edited by Nicolaas Rupke, 99–107. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002. Schulz-Schaeffer, Walter J. “Untersuchungen über den Zeitpunkt su dem die Gehirnasservate von Carl Friedrich Gauβ und Conrad Heinrich Fuchs verwechselt worden sind.” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 29–32. Schweitzer, Renate. “Die vertauschten Gehirne von C. F. Gauβ und C. H. Fuchs: Geschichte einer Entdeckung.” Mitteilungen der GauβGesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 11–27. Schweitzer, Renate, Axel Wittmann, and Jens Frahm. “A Rare Anatomical Variation Newly Identifes the Brains of C. F. Gauss and C. H. Fuchs in a Collection at the University of Göttingen.” Brain 137 (2014): e269. http://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awt296. Sugimoto, Kenji. Albert Einstein: A Photographic Biography. Tokio: Kodansha, 2001 (written in Japanese). Vogt, Carl. Vorlesungen über den Menschen, seine Stellung in der Schöpfung, und in der Geschichte der Erde. Giessen: Ricker, 1863. Wagner, Rudolf. Gespräche mit Carl Friedrich Gauβ in den letzten Monaten seines Lebens. Edited with an introduction by Heinrich Rubner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975. Wagner, Rudolph. Vorstudien zu einer wissenschaftlichen Morphologie und Physiologie des menschlichen Gehirns als Seelenorgan. Göttingen: Dieterich, part 1, 1860; part 2, 1862. Walsh, John Evangelist. Unraveling Piltdown. The Science Fraud of the Century and its Solution. New York and Toronto: Random House, 1996. Wittmann, Axel. “Über das Gehirnpräparat “Gauβ.” Mitteilungen der Gauss-Gesellschaft, no. 51 (2014): 5–9. Wittmann, Axel, Jens Frahm, and Wolfgang Hänicke. “MagnetresonanzTomographie des Gehirns von Carl Friedrich Gauβ.” Mitteilungen der Gauβ-Gesellschaft, no. 36 (1999): 9–19. Wittmann, Axel and Frank Woesthoff. “Das Gehirn des Genies in der Resonanz von 20 Kilo-Gauss.” Spektrum. Informationen aus Forschung und Lehre 4 (1999): 12–15.

Epilogue Nature’s Narratives Paula Findlen Abstract: This epilogue refects on nature’s materiality by examining aspects of the natural world that challenge our ability to grasp them, literally and fguratively. Whales and other large marine mammals, icebergs, storms, and more generally weather all fall into this category. What kinds of histories can we write of them? Who writes nature’s narratives and where?

Natural things have their own stories. The opening salvo of Mackenzie Cooley, Anna Toledano, and Duygu Yıldırım’s Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds gives voice to the idea of nature studies no longer centered around the idea of natural history—a geographically and culturally specifc way of understanding the natural world frst articulated by the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder in his Natural History in the frst century CE1—but focused on developing a deep and multi-faceted understanding of the multiple ways to know nature. How do we engage the natural world? What happens when one form of understanding becomes entangled with other ways of knowing? Ultimately, nature’s materiality is central to any interrogation of how we come to terms with nature.2 The creative quality of this volume invites readers to perform their own thought experiments to deepen our understanding of how people in the past engaged the natural world. It has led me to think about the different ways in which early modern observers tried to capture elements of nature whose materiality challenged and even alienated them. Below I offer a few examples that have interested me, inspired by reading Alan Mikhail’s meditation on COVID-19 as a natural thing and the twelve essays at the core of Natural Things. Let us see what happens when we try this experiment.

A WHALE OF AN ICEBERG July 2, 1578. On the bank of the river Schehle near Antwerp, the Dutch fshmonger Adriaen Coenan (1514–87) inspected a beached sperm whale, one of many large sea creatures that washed ashore and captured the imagination of Dutch artists and the public as the Leviathans of their time.3 Seven years later, he recalled this moment in The Whale Book (1585), his illustrated account of whales and other large sea creatures, by offering an indelible description of a single part of the whale’s anatomy. “The tongue lay in the throat like a liver and was the size of a barrel of beer.”4 This remarkable sentence written almost four hundred and ffty years ago captures the overwhelming reality of a monstrously large, deep red pulsating organ. While not quite as shocking or titillating as the whale’s penis, it is perhaps more instructive in how nature continually challenges the human scale of things. DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-18

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Figure 13.1: Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557). Metropolitan Museum of Art 17.3.859, engraving, 9 × 11 5/8 in. (22.9 × 29.6 cm). Elsewhere, as Florike Egmond and Peter Mason describe in their modern edition and translation of this remarkable book, Coenan reached deep into the recesses of his memory to recall a 1534 storm that wrecked forty ships near Den Briel in South Holland. It prevented him from claiming his share of a big fsh whose carcass, dislodged by the unsettled waters, drifted along the tidal river of the Brielse Mass towards Rockanje on the North Sea. Imagine Coenan’s surprise fve or six years later when he discovered “a large piece of this big fsh still lying on the shore” during a trip to this Dutch coastal village. “It was so big I could stand on it, like the side of a fshing boat.”5 Almost half a century had passed yet the Dutch fshmonger (and inspector of all things that washed ashore in his part of the world) did not forget the experience of standing atop the decaying carcass of what was probably a bottlenose dolphin. He marveled at its ability to survive nature’s ferocity, human depredation, and the vicissitudes of time. This was indeed an early modern ecology of knowledge—along an estuary where today centuries of siltation followed by mid-twentieth century dams ensure that no large sea mammal could travel this far inland. Overfshing along the European coasts made it less likely that one would see certain large marine mammals. Pieter Bruegel’s political allegory of nature, Big Fish Eat Little Fish (1557, Figure 13.1), now seemed ironic, perhaps even poignant. By the seventeenth century fshermen increasingly traveled to the western Arctic for whaling, making the kinds of encounters that inspired Breugel’s image and Coenan’s book less likely to happen on European shores.6 Whales were also considered barometers of shifting weather patterns. The anonymous author of A Wonderful History of All the Storms, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, &c. (London, 1704) recorded only three occasions—in 1299, during the reign of Edward VI, and in 1658—when whales entered the Thames.7 Coenan’s network included important Dutch naturalists and collectors of curiosities but was comprised of many people from different walks of life who shared his interests. He knew fshermen who prominently displayed spectacular dried specimens; in November 1576, Coenan purchased the head of a swordfsh nailed to a Scheveningen fsherman’s house in The Hague “for the price of drinking his fll of beer for one day” and subsequently passed it on to a Delft goldsmith “in exchange for other

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Figure 13.2: Abraham Storck, Dutch Whalers Near Spitsbergen (1690). Stichting Rijksmuseum het Zuiderzeemuseum. 022296, oil on canvas, Wikimedia Commons. things.”8 He read the vernacular ichthyology of Pierre Belon and Guillaume Rondelet, avowed fsh experts in print, but his way of thinking about and describing nature was largely experiential. He was an expert not a scholar. Seeing was never enough. People did not buy unknown fsh without tasting them. The raw became the cooked. The widemouthed anglerfsh—known as the sea devil because of its frighteningly sharp teeth and spine protruding from its skull—was generally deemed inedible. Many fshermen threw them away but enterprising artisans of nature “dry the skin to stuff it for decoration.”9 Coenan’s whale book is a remarkable record of different ways to interact with nature. In his lifetime Coenan experienced the diversity of fsh from the North Sea and North Atlantic brought to market. His illustrated books were the culmination of lived experience.10 Coenan’s opportunities to see large and unusual fsh were entirely contingent on circumstance. It was not simply how far Dutch fshermen traveled but what nature brought to their shores. Today we would say that the author of The Whale Book probably understood more about the marine ecology of his environment than most people, save for the Dutch whalers in the next generations who traveled to the Greenland Fishery during the warmer months to compete for blubber and oil with fshermen from other countries (Figure 13.2).11 Coenan made it his business to examine everything that came from the sea, his sea, and the world that fowed through it. The rest of nature did not command his attention. These were his natural things, and he wanted to tell their story. During that same summer of 1578, an English sailor named Thomas Ellis embarked from Plymouth bound for Meta Incognita, as a crew member on Martin Frobisher’s third voyage in search of the Northwest Passage. The previous two expeditions painfully revealed the English inability to handle the harsh climate of Greenland, Labrador, and beyond. While Frobisher and his companions lacked the complex Inuit vocabulary for describing the wind, water, snow and extreme cold they encountered, their efforts to convey this unforgiving environment inspired Royal Society member Robert Boyle to devote several pages to what he learned from sixteenth-century English Artic journals in his New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or An

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Experimental History of Cold (1665).12 No laboratory experiment could replicate the experience gained in the Far North and Boyle did not belong to a generation of researchers who got on the ship to hone their science. To my knowledge, he did not even see the growing Alpine glaciers such as the Lower Grindelwald that swallowed ancient villages in their frigid embrace.13 Mostly, Boyle was an armchair observer of the natural world. While his insights were acute, even profound, he saw very little and experienced far less. Not long into this ill-fated third venture to Baffn Island in 1578, the ffteen English ships carrying almost four hundred men encountered a colossal storm. Between the heavy fog and snow, it was virtually impossible to see anything. Engulfed in a bleak and disorienting landscape, Ellis witnessed the almost miraculous appearance of “a marvellous hugh mountaine of ice” as his ship passed alongside it.14 In the vast, seemingly infnite emptiness of the chilly ocean, with no land in sight, it was one of the few distinguishable features of this environment to capture his attention. As art historian Christopher Heuer recounts in his study of the Renaissance Artic, Ellis felt compelled to draw the large iceberg from four different vantage points: “These Foure being but one Island of Yce, and as we came neere unto it, and departed from it, in so many shapes it appeared.”15 The Far North seemed like a cruel mirage, dynamically sculpted by the elements, constantly changing. The Artic challenged the limits of human perception and endurance, yet Ellis was determined to convey his impressions of an iceberg. Volcanoes captured the early modern imagination as the very image of nature’s volatile, unpredictable heat.16 The iceberg was the material embodiment of extreme cold.17 In its own fashion, it was a beached whale. I offer these examples of early modern responses to nature as the starting point for my own refections inspired by the excellent and varied essays that comprise Natural Things. Reading them brings to mind Amitav Ghosh’s meditation on history, climate, and natural commodities, where he writes: Yet, what can be said about the role of the nutmeg tree in this story? It is certainly true that the history of the archipelago cannot be narrated without reference to the tree—but it cannot for that reason be said that the tree authored or decided the fate of the Bandanese.18 Ghosh’s refection on “the limits of a certain way of telling stories about the past” is a challenge to historians to think differently about historical contingencies and their consequences.19 The chapters in this creatively assembled volume immerse their readers in well-defned case studies that grapple with nature’s materiality. They challenge us to come to terms with nature’s ambiguity and instability, with its pliability and intractability in the face of human efforts to make sense of nature and do things with it. They insist on the importance of understanding nature at its origins in relation to the remaking of nature that occurs when we alienate nature from its environment. Last but hardly least, they chart new geographies of knowledge by expanding the sources and locations from which we write the history of science. In recent years the history of science, environmental history, and material culture have increasingly converged. This volume is a product of these new sensibilities that have inspired a fresh take on how to study nature as a historical object and subject that also has its own agency and therefore is a protagonist in nature studies as they are understood today. “The earth is a vast archive recording its own history,” declares Philipp Blom in his recent study of the Little Ice Age.20 Accounting for nature’s own history is essential to writing the history of the natural world. The history of how humans have harnessed, modifed, and commodifed nature is equally crucial to this subject. These developments have made the study of the natural world even more important as a barometer of human understanding and limits. More than a decade ago, historian Dipesh

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Chakrabarty announced the “collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history,” writing about climate and historical consciousness since the mid-eighteenth century.21 This agenda has been further developed in the work of environmental historians, the project of deep history, and efforts to rethink the relationship between history, biology, and bioarcheology, raising interesting questions about what changes when these historical records are studied together.22 As a historian of the late medieval and early modern era, I would simply observe that this erosion of boundaries is not an invention of a post-industrial world but a rediscovery of an essential feature of many premodern societies that did not sharply delineate human experience from the natural world.23 Where might we go next in trying to describe the challenges of interpreting early modern nature?

BEING OUT OF ONE’S ELEMENT In one of his last surviving letters, written in the dark chill of a Stockholm winter on January 15, 1650, the philosopher René Descartes meditated upon the effects of the climate in which he found himself, literally and metaphorically: “Here men’s thoughts freeze during winter like water.” He concluded this pensive, melancholic letter with the following thought: “But here I am out of my element. . . .”24 Expressing his profound discomfort in the fnal winter of his discontent, Descartes articulated the shock of fnding himself in an alien and forbidding environment that ultimately killed him. In all likelihood, he was recalling the great French Renaissance writer François Rabelais’ idea of “frozen words” (paroles gélées) arrested in midair inspired by French accounts of northern climates, but he was also commenting on the effect of environment on the original Cartesian mind.25 Ellis survived the Artic North, but Descartes’ many years in the Netherlands did not prepare him for the Swedish cold of 1649–50. We are inclined to take Descartes’ description of his condition metaphorically. To be out of one’s element is indeed a form of alienation. Descartes, however, meant this literally. His body was no longer where it should be. He was not in his element—and he meant this in a way that premodern observers of the intertwined relationship between body and environment immediately understood. Descartes not only sent pleading letters back to his friends in France and the Netherlands, but also scientifc observations of the Baltic cold— temperature readings he shared with Blaise Pascal whose air pressure experiments on the Puy de Dôme measured the thinning atmosphere at high altitude.26 Descartes was a man of science, after all, who wrote a Meteorology to accompany his Discourse on Method (1637). More generally, he participated in a society increasingly trying to fnd new ways to understand changes in weather. As historians of science such as Jan Golinski and Craig Martin have observed, early modern weather was a shared subject for experts and lay people.27 One did not have to be a “meteoroscoper”—to use Elizabethan mathematician Leonard Digges’ felicitous term from 155528—to make observations of climate fuctuating with the elements. Jamestown archeologists discovered a thermoscope, an early temperature measuring device, among the detritus of the abandoned colony. This was the era when words like “hurricano” entered the English vocabulary, inspiring Shakespeare’s imagery of violent storms staged in the relative safety of a London playhouse.29 Long-distance travel fueled curiosity about different climates and weather systems which quickly became a necessary kind of knowledge. What kind of natural things did the weather produce? Observing and recording local changes in climate, extreme weather events, and unusual weather phenomena generated a considerable literature, suggesting that there was a growing public appetite for weather news. Francis Bacon’s

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History of the Winds (Historia ventorum, 1622) (Figure 13.3) indicates how all this scattered information might potentially be mustered in the service of science. Bacon famously described winds as the “wings of mankind” and “servants to mankind”—forces to be harnessed to accelerate and extend human dominion over nature.30 It was not until the late seventeenth century that such projects became more common, increasingly organized by learned societies that encouraged individuals to submit reports and keep records that might become useful data.31

Figure 13.3: The Wind as Baconian Servant to Mankind. Francis Bacon, Historia naturalis & experimentalis de ventis (Leiden, 1648 ed.). Courtesy of the Internet Archive, Early European Books/Koninklijke Bibliotheek, Nationale bibliotheek van Nederland.

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Thus, by the seventeenth century people’s interest in the weather had noticeably increased. Cotton Mather’s Winter Meditations (1693), published in the depth of a New England winter, began with his curiosity about how cold China was for four months of the year, based on reading the Jesuit Martino Martini’s Novus atlas sinensis (1655). “I almost Thought that I read the Description of our Winters in this part of our Western World,” wrote Mather, who became a corresponding member of the Royal Society, puzzling over how this could be the case despite the different latitudes of Boston and Beijing, though surely he already had an answer based on decades of discussion about why New England was colder than England.32 Descartes was not alone in taking the temperature of his times.

MATERIALIZING WEATHER How might we approach the history of climate guided by the spirit and method of the essays in Natural Things? Weather is indeed material—it has tangible effects on humans and the environment. Despite countless efforts to subject it to science, weather is often unpredictable. A storm is an untamable thing, a combinatorial product of the elements, with the force to reshape nature and alter human experience. A powerful storm demonstrates the real limits of human control over nature and pushes the boundaries of understanding. How did early modern societies understand this kind of natural thing? The instability of climate captured the literary imagination of the seventeenth century. Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611) famously conjured a powerful tropical storm that sent survivors of a shipwreck to an unknown island. As literary critic Sophie Chiari observes, fercely violent weather is the protagonist, but it is also the agent of everything that befalls the humans caught in the tempest. When Caliban darkly forecasts “another storm brewing” (Tempest 2.2.19), he draws our attention to the volatile unpredictability of nature that constantly alters human plans, for better and for worse.33 But what exactly was a tempest? In mariner’s terminology, as recorded by Daniel Defoe almost a century later in The Storm (1703), a tempest was the highest of twelve categories on a “Table of Degrees,” an escalating scale of winds that began with “stark calm.”34 It was a vocabulary honed at sea but also used on land to calibrate nature’s force. There was always another storm brewing, so how best to categorize these recurrent facts of nature? In seventeenth-century England, Shakespeare’s words struck many as prophetic. 1607 was a year of heavy fooding, especially in the western part of the isle. The Great Frost of 1607–08 arrived at the end of that year. Powerful Atlantic storms produced the 1609 hurricane which blew the English ship Sea-Venture, bound for the nascent Jamestown colony, so far off course that it beached in Bermuda, inspiring The Tempest.35 The years immediately following the play’s appearance produced such low temperatures, bitter winds, ice, and snow that pamphlets documented the “freezing and cold winters in more then usuall extremity” (Figure 13.4)36 An anonymous pamphlet titled The Cold Yeare. 1614. A deep Snow: In which Men and Cattell have perished (1615), possibly written by playwright Thomas Dekker, presented an England that now seemed more like the Artic North that Thomas Ellis found so alien a few decades before: “you would almost sweare, that those partes of England lay under the Frozen Zone, and scarce remember there were a Sunne in Heaven, so seldome doe his fyres cast any heate upon them.”37 Bears, wolves, and other beasts primarily known to those who traveled to Russia with the Muscovy Company were rumored to be wandering through the northern English cities. A changing climate altered perceptions of one’s native land, just as imperial dreams intensifed interest in other climates.

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Figure 13.4: Anonymous, The wonders of this windie winter (London, 1613). Folger Shakespeare Library, LUNA Folger 16730 (STC 25949).

Time might dull the memory of specifc storms, great foods, and unseasonably cold winters, yet the idea of studying the weather took root. Bacon’s vision of a new kind of natural history inspired a more expansive defnition of natural things that included new ways of recording weather that went beyond the seasonal forecasts of popular almanacs. In 1662, Christopher Wren exhorted his fellow Royal Society members to construct “A History of Things, depending upon the Alteration of the Air and Seasons.” In September 1663, John Wilkins presented a paper on the importance of documenting “a history of the weather.” Robert Hooke’s ambitious schema for making “a more accurate history of the change of the weather,” presented to the Royal Society on October 7, 1663, emerged from these discussions.38 What could a new science of weather offer? Royal Society members lamented the erratic, ad hoc nature of weather data, but they nonetheless began to record the weather, as did many

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English diarists as well as the offcers and captains of the Royal Navy, who began to keep more regular ship logbooks in the 1680s.39 Publishing about weather and weather instruments became a regular feature of the Philosophical Transactions. Boyle’s experimental program exemplifed how the “power of cold”40—something felt and experienced but hard to describe— could become an object of study. Less well-known observers embraced the idea that it was possible to expand the early modern catalogue of natural things. The clergyman Ralph Bohun, who spent fve years as a tutor in John Evelyn’s household before returning to Oxford, published A Discourse Concerning the Origines and Properties of Wind (1671). Bohun cited the strategic location of Evelyn’s house at Sayes Court in Deptford—home to the offces of the Royal Navy, the English East India Company, and many other ventures in commerce, navigation, and empire on the southern bank of the Thames in southeast London—as his inspiration. There he could consult ships’ captains and experience the brisk weather of the North Atlantic, while studying what the ancients and modern experimental philosophers said about wind.41 Extreme weather inspired the physician John Peter to compose A Philosophical Account of This Hard Frost (1684)—still considered the coldest English winter by meteorologists: “And the daring Atoms of Cold insinuate themselves into the Ink in my Pen whilst I am Writing,” he exclaimed. Writing weather narratives became a novel and alluring way to making the unseen forces of nature visible and comprehensible.42 What did it take to move beyond individual experience to create a composite portrait of the elements? In 1686, astronomer Edmond Halley published a global map of winds in the Philosophical Transactions that synthesized widely dispersed information to construct a complex and seemingly comprehensive portrait of nature (Figure 13.5). “It is not the work of one, nor of few, but a multitude of Observers, to bring together the experience requisite to compose a perfect and compleat History of these Winds,” declared Halley with Baconian exuberance.43 In August 1698, the limits of Halley’s map became apparent during after dinner conversation at Samuel Pepys’ London house. The learned English pirate William Dampier, recently returned from his frst voyage around the world, showed Secretary of the Admiralty Pepys and fellow Royal Society member John Evelyn his own map of the southern trade winds, declaring that “the maps hitherto extant were all false as to the Pacifc Sea.”44 Halley spent over a year in 1677–78 on the remote volcanic island of St. Helena in the south Atlantic, establishing an observatory to map the heavens, but he did not venture further, and displayed the limits of his knowledge on his map.

Figure 13.5: Edmond Halley’s Map of Trade Winds and Monsoons. Edmond Halley, “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and Near the Tropicks,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 16, n. 183 (1686), Wikimedia Commons.

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Weather inspired the production of a growing stream of meteorological data recorded in space and time, especially among seafaring nations such as England with an expanding empire. From his rectory near Upminster, Reverend William Derham made daily weather observations between 1697 and 1706, using an outdoor thermometer when so many others (John Locke included) recorded indoor temperatures; he regularly submitted his information to the Royal Society, which made him a Fellow in 1703 and put him in charge of collecting meteorological observations.45 Many years after writing his Winter Meditations, on February 28, 1717, Mather recorded the details of the fercest New England snowstorm he had ever known. The long winter of 1717 inspired him to keep writing about the weather. On May 24, 1717, he resolved to “make some useful Collections of the rare Occurrences, which were in the Storms and Snows, that we had in the Conclusion of our Winter. I may make a good Use of them. And communicate them [to] the Royal Society.” Mather previously compiled an account of lightning, thunder, earthquakes, and hurricanes in North America.46 Thus, by the early eighteenth century, a new kind of nature archive emerged. It was full of variously acquired information about winds, rains, snow, ice, humidity, temperature, and storms—a byproduct of a desire to transform human experience of the elements into an unruly mass of data. This was the kind of citizen science that eventually inspired new forms of understanding weather.47

THE NATURE OF A STORM No amount of weather data or scientifc analysis prepared anyone for the Great Storm of 1703 (Figure 13.6).48 This unusual weather event probably began as a tropical cyclone that swept across the Atlantic—the kind of Caribbean hurricane increasingly familiar to the British at a distance. It combined with a series of escalating local storms that marked this cold rainy fall at the

Figure 13.6: The Great Storm of 1703. The Great Storm Nov[em]ber 26 1703 Wherein Rear Admiral Beaumont was lost on the Goodwin Sands . . . Beaumont’s Squadron of Observation off Dunkerque, engraving, 328 mm × 449 mm, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London, PY7410.

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height of the Little Ice Age to produce catastrophic results.49 Ultimately, it became the kind of natural thing that demanded “a great many Stories.”50 Weather watchers noticed very strong winds during the two weeks preceding the storm. Evelyn, who had just turned eighty-three, did not attend church on November 21, 1703, due to the “wet and uncomfortable weather.”51 Friday, November 26 began as a relatively calm day, according to one contemporary report; around sunset the winds began to increase, with all the usual Signs of a Storm at hand: Murmurs arising in the Air and among the Trees, and some Meteors shooting; but it did not begin to rage with the Force that caused such fatal Effects till between one and two on Saturday Morning.52 The Great Storm reached southern England during the night of November 26–27, causing immense destruction to many coastal towns, the returning feet of the English navy, the East India Company’s merchant ships, nearby farming communities, the university town of Cambridge, and greater London. From Wotton in Surrey, John Evelyn watched in despair as the “hurricane and tempest of wind, rain, and lightning through all the nation, especially London,” tore through his family estate, destroying the garden, farms, and many buildings, and uprooting scores of beloved ancient oaks. Evelyn found himself uncharacteristically at a loss for words. “I am not able to describe it; but submit to the pleasure of Almighty God,” he wrote in his diary on November 26–27.53 By December 7, he was in London at his Dover Street house, which survived the storm in much better shape than Sayes Court, which was also in shambles. In the fourth edition of his bestselling Sylva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions (1662), published in 1706, Evelyn incorporated his observations of the effect of the Great Storm on his personal property and “all the considerable Woods of the Nation.”54 His gratitude “for what are yet left standing,” like the famously large ancient oak at Epping Forest in Essex, which reportedly righted itself after being blown down, only compounded the magnitude of his loss. Two years after the Great Storm, Evelyn now found his voice, narrating the sounds and sights he recalled with horror: But however it were, methinks I still hear, and am sure feel the dismal Groans (happening on the the 26. Novemb. 1703.) of our Forests, so many thousand of goodly Oaks subverted by the late dreadful Hurricane; prostrating the Trees, and crushing all that grew under them, lying in ghastly Postures, like whole Regiments fallen in Battle, by the Sword of the Conquerer.55 No one more vividly captured the death of Nature by nature than Evelyn. In November 1703, England temporarily became a battlefeld of competing elements. Majestic trees embodying nature’s antiquity, beauty, and productivity were viciously felled by an apocalyptic burst of English (and possibly global) weather. Nature stopped the eternal clock, for one brutal moment. Evelyn marveled that he should outlive so many oaks in his senescence. In so many ways, he created the template for the narrative framing Richard Powers’ The Overstory, an epic work of fction about trees, people, resilience, and resistance. Not everyone thought frst and foremost about trees during a storm. The howling winds roused William Derham from his bed at the Upminster rectory in Essex around midnight. He monitored the storm’s growing force until it blew down his weathervane around 3:00 am. Derham subsequently collected impressions of the wind’s direction “by information

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from Millers, and others that were forc’d to venture abroad, and by my own guess.”56 From England, the storm swept across the North Sea into the Baltic but the damage in these areas was marginal by comparison. Nature suddenly altered the English coastline and landscape, exposing all sorts of vulnerabilities. This became the storm of the century—a “never to be forgotten Disaster” that is still used to measure other extreme weather events in Great Britain and is studied as a case history for modeling risk assessment.57 Witnesses proclaimed the total cost to the English Nation to be far greater than the Great Fire of London in 1666. A few days after the Great Storm, performances of The Tempest and Hamlet could be seen in the ruined city to the horror of the most pious clergy who felt this was a moment for prayer and introspection rather than the public levity of “a Mock-Tempest on the Stage.”58 The most famous eyewitness was Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), who had only recently been released from Newgate debtor’s prison. At home with his family, around 10:00 pm Defoe anticipated a “very tempestuous Night” after confrming that the precipitous drop in the mercury in his home barometer had not been caused by his children’s mischief.59 Barometers were not necessarily known for their reliability. In the mid-1660s, Boyle despaired of fnding “any general rule about the rising and falling of the Quick-Silver.” They nonetheless became one of the most ubiquitous weather instruments in many homes, including that of the journalist, artisan, and failed entrepreneur Defoe. In 1686, Halley offered some answers about why the level of mercury rose and fell, including the prescient comment: “That upon very great Winds . . . the Mercury sinks lowest of all.”60 If Defoe read this article, he did not recall it as the storm began, though he surely took note of the fact that some months after the Great Storm, Francis Hauksbee was asked to replicate the effect of extreme weather on a barometer during an April 12, 1704 meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College. “In the late Violent Storm or Hurricane of Wind, it was observable that the Mercury in the Barometer did not only considerably subside, but upon Extraordinary Gusts a Visible Vibration of Quicksilver appear’d.”61 By midnight, however, Defoe was no longer checking his instrument. Science assisted his understanding but ultimately did not provide all the answers. Faith, too, was crucial to assaying the truth of the matter, but in the wrong hands it became a moral bludgeon weaponized to provoke fear. The storm raged furiously, threatening to bury him and his family in a house on the outskirts of London that probably belonged to his mother-inlaw. They survived. The next day Defoe emerged, joining those assessing the damage. He traveled about the ruined city and countryside, heading south towards England’s ports to see the full effect of nature’s fury. Defoe wanted to understand the nature of the Great Storm and, even more fundamentally, what it revealed about his society. He revisited Bohun’s 1671 book on the science of winds but found it nearly worthless, “as Abstruse and Cloudy to our Understanding as ever.”62 He eagerly consumed the earliest printed reports that appeared—newspaper articles, pamphlets, sermons, and scientifc observations—as well as the offcial tally of damage and losses on land and sea and the number of deaths in the weekly Bills of Mortality. Advertising in the London newspapers, Defoe encouraged people to send in accounts of the storm. His crowdsourcing experiment was a great success. Defoe assembled over sixty reports, ensuring that The Storm did not speak in a single voice. While offering a strongly English perspective, Defoe projected a global geography of weather by describing the storm’s course “possibly from . . . Florida and Virginia” to England, then all the way to “Muscovy,

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and part of Tartary” as it swept across the Baltic Sea. Where did it go next? Defoe speculated that it ended in the vast Northern Ocean, where man never came, and Ship never sail’d; and its Violence cou’d have no effect, but upon the vast Mountains of Ice and the hugh drifts of Snow, in which Abyss of Moisture and Cold it is very probable the Force of it was check’d, and the World restor’d to Calmness and Quiet: and in this Circle of Fury it might fnd its End not far off from its Beginning, the Fierceness of the Motion perhaps not arriving to a Period, till having pass’d the Pole, it reached again the Northern Parts of America.63 The Frigid Zone was the only place capable of taming the weather beast, and yet it did not die out entirely but was remade in the New World. The Great Storm of 1703 engendered many experiments in how to narrate nature. The anonymous compiler of A Wonderful History of All the Storms, Earthquakes, Hurricanes, &c. informed readers that the Great Storm inspired him to compile 500 years of natural disasters “and the great damages they have done.”64 One weather diary, possibly written by twenty-three year old Oxford lawyer Thomas Appletree, envisioned the convulsions of air as a result of supernatural wind “haunted by Furies, or Exasperated by Aeriall demons,” describing the scarred landscape as “a decayed, antient Ruinous face,” in the manner of Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s painting of winter.65 Evelyn felt that the storm was one of the reasons to update his Sylva to report with some urgency on the altered state of England’s timber. Derham submitted an article to the Philosophical Transactions in which he declared that he would not recount “a long history of the Devastation” but take a philosophical approach to the data to measure its effects.66 By contrast, Defoe’s The Storm, published in July 1704, recorded a cacophony of voices. He allowed a wide range of literate people, including several women, to share their experiences of this recent disaster in print, interwoven with his own views of its causes and effects. Fundamentally, Defoe was much more interested in the unsettled present that the storm revealed. Observing that most natural disasters, including plague and fre, affected the few rather than the many, Defoe calibrated the magnitude of the Great Storm by focusing on its nearly universal impact on England in less than a day. Nature’s power, velocity, and volatility were on full display—and so too were the limits of science and technology. The anonymous author of An Exact Account of the Late Dreadful Tempest (1704) aptly described English ships as the “Walls of the Kingdom.” What happened when these “foating Castles” came unmoored, marooned on land, burst open at the seams to divulge the nation’s treasure, with far too many lost at sea?67 Defoe was not the only observer to see the storm’s destruction of Henry Winstanley’s Eddystone lighthouse off Plymouth Sound, killing Winstanley and his assistants, as further proof that the English lost the battle with nature on November 27. Completed in 1698 and only recently fortifed to withstand the high waves that assail this treacherous reef, the lighthouse could not withstand the storm. A ship returning from Virginia a few days after the storm sank because the vanquished lighthouse did not guide it safely to shore.68 The simultaneous evisceration of the wooden model of Winstanley’s lighthouse at his home struck many people, including Defoe, as emblematic of nature’s response to English hubris on land and sea. As Sean Silver writes, “a weather event is not a thing unto itself.”69 It only becomes tangible through its manifest effects, the imprint it leaves

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behind and how it is perceived. Defoe understood this very well. He presented The Storm as the product of the paradox of misunderstanding how to arrive at the truth: Two Men met in the Middle of a great Wood; One was searching for a Plant which grew in the Wood, the Other had lost himself in the Wood, and wanted to get out: The Latter rejoyc’d when thro’ the Trees he saw the open Country; but the Other Man’s Business was not to get out, but to fnd what he look’d for; yet this Man no more undervalued the Pleasantness of the Champion Country than the Other.70 Defoe was evidently a careful and appreciative reader of Evelyn’s Sylva. He was also an attentive observer of the struggles between science and faith, and skeptical of the ability of science to become faith by other means. The Great Storm, in Defoe’s parable, was a reckoning for all the competing forces in his society. As he declared in a mock sermon delivered in an imaginary coffeehouse where politics was the barometer of all conversation, he awaited the time when the “Feuds and Storms of parties” no longer tore England apart and the “fallen Oaks” could speak.71 Twenty years later, Defoe revisited “the late great Storm” in his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–27).72 Winstanley’s lighthouse had been rebuilt, something Defoe considered unlikely “in the time of that terrible Tempest, which we call by way of distinction, The great Storm.” He observed how many “Farmers and Country People” repurposed “Old Planks, Beams, Wales and Timbers” as recycled building materials.73 Returning to the places that suffered the greatest devastation, he recalled their losses. Between Bridgewater and Bristol, along a road known as the Lower Way, which was prone to fooding even in normal times, Defoe discovered the memory of the Great Storm inscribed in the landscape: the Country People have set up Marks upon their Houses and Trees, with this Note upon them, Thus high the Waters came in the great Storm: Thus far the great Tide fowed up in the last violent Tempest; and the like.74 He had discovered new ways to narrate nature. Weather is an especially peculiar and elusive natural thing. And yet, we have been fnding new ways to write about it as a polyvalent history of understanding nature. The natural things assembled here, through careful and creative use of a wide array of sources, methodologies, and visualizations, will surely inspire us to take the next steps in thinking about how to recover nature’s histories. They remind us very well of something Surekha Davies recently observed, when she writes: “Natural objects exist in the world independently of our knowledge of them and . . . independent of any particular community’s knowledge of them.”75 Perhaps, eventually, the fallen oaks will speak.

NOTES 1 On this tradition, see Roger French, Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature (London: Routledge, 1994); and Trevor Murphy, Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Aude Doody, Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 2 Paula Findlen and Anna Toledano, “The Materials of Natural History,” in Worlds of Natural History, ed. Helen Anne Curry, Nick Jardine, James A.

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3

4

5 6 7 8 9

10 11 12

13 14 15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Secord, and Emma C. Spary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 151–69. Larry Silver, “De Profundis: Linear Leviathans in the Lowlands,” in Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika, ed. Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 260–82; and Surekha Davies, “Here Be Black Holes,” Aeon, July 13, 2020. Florike Egmond and Peter Mason, eds., with Kees Lankester, The Whale Book: Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenan in 1585 (London: Reaktion, 2003), 10; Florike Egmond, “On Northern Shores: SixteenthCentury Observations of Fish and Seabirds (North Sea and Atlantic),” in Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording, and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Arthur MacGregor (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 129–48. Coenan is also discussed in Silver, “De Profundis,” 268–9; and Davies, “Her Be Black Holes.” Egmond and Mason, The Whale Book, 4. W. Jeffery Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 19–47, esp. pp. 29–31. Anon., A Wonderful History of All the Storms, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, &c. (London, 1704), 7, 10, 14. Egmond and Mason, The Whale Book, 54. Ibid., 200; see Findlen, “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Science, and Art in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities,” in Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2002), 297–323. Egmond, “On Northern Shores”; Pamela Smith, “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe,” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (2010): 25–50. Dagomar Degroot, “War of the Whales: Climate Change, Weather, and Artic Confict in the Early Seventeenth Century,” Environmental History 26 (2020): 549–77. Peter C. Mancall, “The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in SixteenthCentury Nunavut,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 70 (2013): 3–40; Robert Boyle, New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or An Experimental History of Cold (London, 1665), 523–7. Wolfgang Behringer, A Cultural History of Climate, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 89–90. Thomas Ellis, A True Report of the Third and Last Voyage into Meta Incognita (London, 1578), sig. A8v. Ibid., sig. A8v. As discussed in Christopher P. Heuer, Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image (New York: Zone, 2019), xxxx. On the relationship between these explorations and early modern climatology, see Sam White, “Unpuzzling American Climate: New World Experience and the Foundations of a New Science,” Isis 106, no. 3 (2015): 553–62. Sean Cocco, Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). On the Dutch experience of sea ice, see Dagomar Degroot, “Testing the Limits of Climate History: The Quest for a Northeast Passage during the Little Ice Age, 1594–97,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 4 (2015): 459–84. Amitav Ghosh, The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021), 31. Ibid., 32. Philipp Blom, Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present, English trans. (New York: Liveright, 2019), 13. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222, esp. 201. Timothy LeCain, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); for a review of this work, see Findlen, “Objects of History: The Past Materialized,” History & Theory 59 (2020): 270– 82. For an insightful integration of bioarcheology into historical research, see

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23

24

25 26 27 28

29 30

31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

39

Monica Green, “The Four Black Deaths,” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (2020): 1601–1631. For a classic study of the relationship between human and natural history, see Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico, trans. Lydia G. Cohcrane (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); more recently, Lydia Barnett, After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in the Early Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019). René Descartes to Nicolas de Flécelles, Stockholm, January 15, 1650, Oeuvres, vol. 5, 467, available online via Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic Epistolarium; Russell Shorto’s Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Confict between Faith and Reason (New York: Vintage, 2008), 39 brought this marvelous letter to my attention. François Rabelais, Gargantua et Pantegruel, book 4, as discussed in Heuer, Into the White, 164–6. Shorto, Descartes’ Bones, 39. Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Craig Martin, Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). Leonard Digges, A Prognostication of Right Good Effect Fructfully Augmented, Contayninge Playne, Briefe, Pleasant, Chosen Rules, to Iudge the Wether for Ever . . . (London, 1555), sig.B3r. See Sophie Chiari, Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern “Fated Sky” (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 11–15. Chiari, Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, 223. The Jamestown discovery is on p. 226. This fundamental aspect of Baconian science is famously discussed in Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1980). For a recent refection on the enduring infuence of Merchant’s work, see Paula Findlen, “Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later,” Public Books, January 21, 2021, www.publicbooks.org/science-turned-upside-down-carolyn-merchantsvision-of-nature-40-year-later/ On Bacon’s natural history of wind, see Risha Amadea Druckman, The Nature of Wind: Myth, Fact, and Faith in the Development of Wind Knowledge in Early Modern England (PhD diss., Duke University, 2015), 24–86. Golinski, British Weather; and Lorraine Daston, “Super-Vision: Weather Watching and Table Reading in the Early Modern Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences,” Huntington Library Quarterly 78 (2015): 187–215. Cotton Mather, Winter Meditations (Bolston, 1693), sig. B1r; see Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (1982): 1262–1289; and White, “Unpuzzling American Climate.” Chiari, Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, 217–55, quote from p. 218. Daniel Defoe, The Storm, ed. Richard Hamblyn (London: Penguin, 2005), 24. Ibid., 224. Anon., The Wonders of this Windie Winter (London, 1613), sig.A3v. I have drawn the material in this section from Christopher Ryan Gilson’s dissertation, Strange and Terrible Wonders: Climate Change in the Early Modern World (PhD diss., Texas A&M, 2015), quote from p. 150. Anon., The Cold Yeare. 1614. A Deep Snow: In Which Men and Cattell Have Perished (London, 1615), sig.A4v-B2r. See Gilson, Strange and Terrible Wonders, 158. Gilson, Strange and Terrible Wonders, 196; Daston, “Super-Vision,” 187; Gordon Manley, “A Preliminary Note on Early Meteorological Observation in the London Region, 1680–1717, with Estimates of the Monthly Mean Temperatures,” The Meteorological Magazine 90, no. 1072 (November 1961): 303. Joyce Macadam, “English Weather: The Seventeenth-Century Diary of Ralph Josselin,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 221–46; Dennis Wheeler, “British Naval Logbooks from the Late Seventeenth Century: New Climatic Information from Old Sources,” History of Meteorology 2 (2005): 133–45.

Epilogue 381 40 Boyle, New Experiments and Observations. See Heuer, Into the White, 159. 41 Anita McConnell, “Ralph Bohum,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). 42 John Peters, A Philosophical Account of This Frost (London, 1684), 10. Gilson, Strange and Terrible Wonders, 211 brought Peter’s treatise to my attention; see also Gordon Manning, “1684: The Coldest Winter in the English Instrumental Record,” Weather 30 (December 1975): 382–8. On “weather narratives,” see Druckman, The Nature of Wind, 266–359. 43 Edmond Halley, “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and Near the Tropicks,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 16, no. 183 (1686): 153–68 (quote on p. 162); discussed in Daston, “Super-Vision,” 190. On the networks that made certain kinds of global data collection projects possible, see Paula Findlen, ed., Empires of Knowledge: Scientifc Networks in the Early Modern World (London: Routledge, 2019). 44 The Diary of John Evelyn, ed. Austin Dobson, vol. 3 (London: Macmillan and Company, 1906), 337; see Druckman, The Nature of Wind, 87. 45 Manley, “A Preliminary Note,” 304; A. D. Atkinson, “William Derham, FRS (1657–1735),” Annals of Science 8, no. 4 (1952): 368–92. 46 George Lyman Kittredge, “Cotton Mather’s Scientifc Communications to the Royal Society,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (1916): 44; and Otho T. Beall, Jr., “Cotton Mather’s ‘Curiosa Americana’ and the Boston Philosophical Society of 1683,” William & Mary Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1961): 371 (on Mather’s November 28, 1712, letter to the Royal Society). 47 Golinski, British Weather; Deborah Coen, Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 48 The most detailed account of this story remains Martin Brayne, The Greatest Storm (Gloucester: Sutton Publishing, 2002); see also Dennis Wheeler, “The Great Storm of November 1703: A New Look at Seamans’ Records,” Weather 58 (November 2003): 419–27; Mark Laird, “‘Perpetual Spring’ or Great Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and His Contemporaries,” Garden History 34, no. 2 (2006): 153–73; Druckman, The Nature of Wind, 179–265; and Sean Silver, “Making Weather: Communication Networks and the Great Storm of 1703,” Eighteenth Century Fiction 30, no. 4 (2018): 495–518. 49 Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2019; 2000), esp. 132–5. For an interesting critique of this approach, see Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (2014): 301–25, and responses to their article in this special issue on “The Little Ice Age: Climate and History Reconsidered” as well as subsequent work by Dagmar Degroot cited elsewhere in this article. 50 Defoe, The Storm, 4. On this text, see Robert Markley, “‘Casualties and Disasters’: Defoe and the Interpretation of Climatic Instability,” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 102–24; and Annette Hulbert, “Defoe’s Storm Forms,” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 11, no. 1 (2019): 1–16. 51 Evelyn, Diary, vol. 3, 366. 52 Anon., A Wonderful History, 30. 53 Evelyn, Diary, vol. 3, 367; see Laird, “Perpetual Spring.” 54 Evelyn, Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, 4th ed. (London, 1706), 341bis [actually p. 349]. 55 Ibid. 56 William Derham, “A Letter for the Reverend Mr. William Derham, FRS Containing his Observations Concerning the Late Storm,” Philosophical Transactions 24 (1704–05): 1533. 57 Anon., An Exact Account of the Late Dreadful Tempest (London, 1704), 24; see Risk Management Solutions Risk Assessment Models, December 1703 Windstorm: 300 Year Retrospective (Newark, CA: Risk Management Solutions, 2003), https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/ws_1703_windstorm_300_retrospective.pdf.

382 Epilogue 58 Thomas Bradbury, God’s Empire Over the Wind Consider’d in a Sermon on the Fast-Day, January 19, 1703/4 (London, 1704), 5. On the cost exceeding the Great Fire, see Defoe, The Storm, 108–9; Anon., An Exact Account of the Late Dreadful Tempest, 24. The most thorough discussion of performing Shakespeare after the Great Storm can be found in Druckman, The Nature of Wind, 255–7. 59 Defoe, The Storm, 24. 60 Robert Boyle, “Some Observation and Directions about the Barometer,” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 565; Edmond Halley, “A Discourse of the Rule of the Decrease of the Height of the Mercury in the Barometer,” Philosophical Transactions 16, no. 181 (1686): 110. See Daston, “Super-Vision,” 214. 61 Francis Hauksbee, “An Experiment to Show the Cause of the Descent of the Mercury in the Barometer in a Storm,” Philosophical Transactions 24 (1704–05): 1629. 62 Defoe, The Storm, 16; Druckman, The Nature of Wind, 232–3. 63 Defoe, The Storm, 48 (frst quote), 49. 64 Anon., A Wonderful History, titlepage. 65 Lancing College Archive, Lancing, West Sussex, 1703 Weather Diary, as quote in Golinski, British Weather, 31. 66 Derham, “Observations Concerning the Late Storm,” 1531. 67 Anon., An Exact Account, 17. 68 Defoe, The Storm, 141, 148–9. 69 Silver, “Making Weather,” 499. 70 Defoe, The Storm, 13–14. 71 Defoe, The Lay-Man’s Sermon Upon the Late Storm; Held forth at an Honest CoffeeHouse-Conventicle (n.p., 1704), in idem, The Storm, 189, 187. 72 Defoe, Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, vol. 2 (London, 1724–27), 104. 73 Defoe, Tour, vol. 1, 47, 93 (Eddystone lighthouse), 107 (recycled wood). 74 Defoe, Tour, vol. 2, 26. 75 Davies, “Here Be Black Holes.”

BIBLIOGRAPHY Anon. The Cold Yeare. 1614. A Deep Snow: In Which Men and Cattell Have Perished. London, 1615. Anon. An Exact Account of the Late Dreadful Tempest. London, 1704. Anon. A Wonderful History of All the Storms, Hurricanes, Earthquakes, &c. London, 1704. Anon. The Wonders of This Windie Winter. London, 1613. Atkinson, A. D. “William Derham, FRS (1657–1735).” Annals of Science 8, no. 4 (1952): 368–92. Barnett, Lydia. After the Flood: Imagining the Global Environment in the Early Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Beall, Jr., Otho T. “Cotton Mather’s ‘Curiosa Americana’ and the Boston Philosophical Society of 1683.” William & Mary Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1961): 371. Behringer, Wolfgang. A Cultural History of Climate. Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. Blom, Philipp. Nature’s Mutiny: How the Little Ice Age of the Long Seventeenth Century Transformed the West and Shaped the Present. English trans. New York: Liveright, 2019. Bolster, W. Jeffery. “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800.” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 19–47. Boyle, Robert. New Experiments and Observations Touching Cold, or an Experimental History of Cold. London, 1665. Boyle, Robert. “Some Observation and Directions about the Barometer.” Philosophical Transactions 1 (1665–66): 565. Bradbury, Thomas. God’s Empire Over the Wind Consider’d in a Sermon on the Fast-Day, January 19, 1703/4. London, 1704.

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Brayne, Martin. The Greatest Storm. Gloucester: Sutton Publishing, 2002. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “The Climate of History: Four Theses.” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197–222. Chiari, Sophie. Shakespeare’s Representation of Weather, Climate and Environment: The Early Modern “Fated Sky.” Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Cocco, Sean. Watching Vesuvius: A History of Science and Culture in Early Modern Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. Coen, Deborah. Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Davies, Surekha. “Here Be Black Holes.” Aeon, July 13, 2020. https://aeon. co/essays/how-black-holes-are-like-sea-monsters-at-the-edge-ofour-vision. Degroot, Dagomar. “Testing the Limits of Climate History: The Quest for a Northeast Passage During the Little Ice Age, 1594–97.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 45, no. 4 (2015): 459–84. Degroot, Dagomar. “War of the Whales: Climate Change, Weather, and Artic Confict in the Early Seventeenth Century.” Environmental History 26 (2020): 549–77. Descartes, René to Nicolas de Flécelles, Stockholm, January 15, 1650, Oeuvres, vol. 5, p.  467, available online via Circulation of Knowledge and Learned Practices in the 17th-Century Dutch Republic Epistolarium, http:// ckcc.huygens.knaw.nl/epistolarium/letter.html?id=desc004/8702 (accessed July 31, 2022). Doody, Aude. Pliny’s Encyclopedia: The Reception of the Natural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Egmond, Florike. “On Northern Shores: Sixteenth-Century Observations of Fish and Seabirds (North Sea and Atlantic).” In Naturalists in the Field: Collecting, Recording, and Preserving the Natural World from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Arthur MacGregor, 129–48. Leiden: Brill, 2018. Egmond, Florike and Peter Mason, eds., with Kees Lankester. The Whale Book: Whales and Other Marine Animals as Described by Adriaen Coenan in 1585. London: Reaktion, 2003. Ellis, Thomas. A True Report of the Third and Last Voyage into Meta Incognita. London, 1578. Daston, Lorraine. “Super-Vision: Weather Watching and Table Reading in the Early Modern Royal Society and Académie Royale des Sciences.” Huntington Library Quarterly 78 (2015): 187–215. Defoe, Daniel. The Lay-Man’s Sermon Upon the Late Storm; Held forth at an Honest Coffee-House-Conventicle. n.p., 1704. Defoe, Daniel. The Storm. Edited by Richard Hamblyn. London: Penguin, 2005. Defoe, Daniel. Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain. London, 1724–27. Derham, William. “A Letter for the Reverend Mr. William Derham, FRS Containing His Observations Concerning the Late Storm.” Philosophical Transactions 24 (1704–05): 1533. Digges, Leonard. A Prognostication of Right Good Effect Fructfully Augmented, Contayninge Playne, Briefe, Pleasant, Chosen Rules, to Iudge the Wether for Ever . . . London, 1555. Druckman, Risha Amadea. The Nature of Wind: Myth, Fact, and Faith in the Development of Wind Knowledge in Early Modern England. PhD dissertation. Duke University, 2015. Evelyn, John. The Diary of John Evelyn. Edited by Austin Dobson. London: Macmillan and Company, 1906. Evelyn, John. Silva, or a Discourse of Forest-Trees, and the Propagation of Timber in His Majesty’s Dominions, Fourth Edition. London, 1706.

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Fagan, Brian. The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, Revised Edition. New York: Basic Books, 2019; 2000. Findlen, Paula, ed. Empires of Knowledge: Scientifc Networks in the Early Modern World. London: Routledge, 2019. Findlen, Paula. “Inventing Nature: Commerce, Science, and Art in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities.” In Merchants and Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern Europe, edited by Pamela H. Smith and Paula Findlen, 297–323. New York: Routledge, 2002. Findlen, Paula. “Objects of History: The Past Materialized.” History & Theory 59 (2020): 270–82. Findlen, Paula. “Science Turned Upside Down: Carolyn Merchant’s Vision of Nature, 40 Years Later.” Public Books, January 21, 2021. www. publicbooks.org/science-turned-upside-down-carolyn-merchantsvision-of-nature-40-year-later/ Findlen, Paula and Anna Toledano. “The Materials of Natural History.” In Worlds of Natural History, edited by Helen Anne Curry, Nick Jardine, James A. Secord, and Emma C. Spary,  151–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. French, Roger. Ancient Natural History: Histories of Nature. London: Routledge, 1994. Ghosh, Amitav. The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Gilson, Christopher Ryan. “Strange and Terrible Wonders: Climate Change in the Early Modern World.” PhD dissertation, Texas A&M, 2015. Golinski, Jan. British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Green, Monica. “The Four Black Deaths.” American Historical Review 125, no. 5 (2020): 1601–1631. Halley, Edmond. “A Discourse of the Rule of the Decrease of the Height of the Mercury in the Barometer.” Philosophical Transactions 16, no. 181 (1686): 110. Halley, Edmond. “An Historical Account of the Trade Winds, and Monsoons, Observable in the Seas between and Near the Tropicks.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 16, no. 183 (1686): 153–68. Hauksbee, Francis. “An Experiment to Show the Cause of the Descent of the Mercury in the Barometer in a Storm.” Philosophical Transactions 24 (1704–05): 1629. Heuer, Christopher P. Into the White: The Renaissance Arctic and the End of the Image. New York: Zone, 2019. Hulbert, Annette. “Defoe’s Storm Forms.” Digital Defoe: Studies in Defoe & His Contemporaries 11, no. 1 (2019): 1–16. http://digitaldefoe.org/ wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Hulbert-Final-Proof1.pdf Kelly, Morgan and Cormac Ó Gráda. “The Waning of the Little Ice Age: Climate Change in Early Modern Europe.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 44, no. 3 (2014): 301–25. Kittredge, George Lyman. “Cotton Mather’s Scientifc Communications to the Royal Society.” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 26 (1916): 44. Kupperman, Karen Ordahl. “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period.” American Historical Review 87, no. 5 (1982): 1262–89. Laird, Mark. “‘Perpetual Spring’ or Great Fall: The Greenhouse and the Great Storm of 1703 in the Life of John Evelyn and His Contemporaries.” Garden History 34, no. 2 (2006): 153–73.

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LeCain, Timothy. The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Macadam, Joyce. “English Weather: The Seventeenth-Century Diary of Ralph Josselin.” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 43, no. 2 (2012): 221–46. Mancall, Peter C. “The Raw and the Cold: Five English Sailors in Sixteenth-Century Nunavut.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series 70 (2013): 3–40. Manley, Gordon. “A Preliminary Note on Early Meteorological Observation in the London Region, 1680–1717, with Estimates of the Monthly Mean Temperatures.” The Meteorological Magazine 90, no. 1072 (November 1961): 303. Manning, Gordon. “1684: The Coldest Winter in the English Instrumental Record.” Weather 30 (December 1975): 382–8. Markley, Robert. “‘Casualties and Disasters’: Defoe and the Interpretation of Climatic Instability.” Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 8, no. 2 (2008): 102–24. Martin, Craig. Renaissance Meteorology: Pomponazzi to Descartes. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Mather, Cotton. Winter Meditations. Bolston, 1693. McConnell, Anita. “Ralph Bohum.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004. https://www-oxforddnb-com.laneproxy.stanford. edu/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb9780198614128-e-70432?rskey=qqPPBD&result=1 Merchant, Carolyn. The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientifc Revolution. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. Murphy, Trevor. Pliny the Elder’s Natural History: The Empire in the Encyclopedia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Peters, John. A Philosophical Account of This Frost. London, 1684. Risk Management Solutions Risk Assessment Models. December 1703 Windstorm: 300 Year Retrospective. Newark, CA: Risk Management Solutions, 2003. https://forms2.rms.com/rs/729-DJX-565/images/ ws_1703_windstorm_300_retrospective.pdf Rossi, Paolo. The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations from Hooke to Vico. Translated by Lydia G. Cohcrane. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Shorto, Russell. Descartes’ Bones: A Skeletal History of the Confict between Faith and Reason. New York: Vintage, 2008. Silver, Larry. “De Profundis: Linear Leviathans in the Lowlands.” In Religion, the Supernatural and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe: An Album Amicorum for Charles Zika, edited by Jennifer Spinks and Dagmar Eichberger, 260–82. Leiden: Brill, 2015. Silver, Sean. “Making Weather: Communication Networks and the Great Storm of 1703.” Eighteenth Century Fiction 30, no. 4 (2018): 495–518. Smith, Pamela. “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe.” Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 47 (2010): 25–50. Wheeler, Dennis. “British Naval Logbooks from the Late Seventeenth Century: New Climatic Information from Old Sources.” History of Meteorology 2 (2005): 133–45. Wheeler, Dennis. “The Great Storm of November 1703: A New Look at Seamans’ Records.” Weather 58 (November 2003): 419–27. White, Sam. “Unpuzzling American Climate: New World Experience and the Foundations of a New Science.” Isis 106, no. 3 (2015): 553–62.

Afterword The Disorder of Things: A Virus Dispatch Alan Mikhail January 3, 2021. New York City. 37 °F, 29.95 inHg. As I write this, 2020 moves into 2021. The world is possessed by one natural thing—the coronavirus. What is this thing? From nature, clearly, and yet not a living thing. Something no human produced, or did we? Invisible yet everywhere manifest. Like thought, like God, like belief, les mots et les choses, the virus is an unseen force that moves everything. The marvelous essays in this vivid volume pose sets of challenging questions and offer incisive case studies from the early modern period that help to conceptualize what the coronavirus is and how we might think about it. Whether in the plague journal, the illness memoir, individual medical case histories, or historical epidemiology, disease has regularly been narrativized. The coronavirus has already been and its histories no doubt will continue to proliferate as the months move on and for years, decades, and centuries into the future. Where are we now and how might early modern natural things direct us toward an object biography of the coronavirus? We should frst not over exaggerate the importance of the distance in time between centuries ago and today. Both the Black Death and this coronavirus traveled from parts of East Asia, across Iran and Central Asia, and then to Europe, with Italy serving as an important vector in both instances. The primary means we have to mitigate against the disease today are strikingly similar to our main weapons of old—run away, shield yourself, shelter. Cities thus prove particularly dangerous, and as in earlier centuries, those who can afford to leave them or to stay isolated in them do. Food scarcity was both a fear and reality during early modern pandemics and is so again. In the realm of global disease, we might not have come as far as we like to think, though, of course, hopes for a vaccine make today very different indeed: natural thing as antidote to natural thing. The virus has thus reminded us, stubborn species that we are, that we remain—as we always have been and will continue to be—inseparable from the natures we inhabit. As Paula Findlen points out, early modern peoples understood this viscerally and unquestioningly. There is a lesson here, for us as humans on this planet and historians interested in the relationships between the history of science, environmental history, and materiality. In the realm of global politics, the early modern period offers us a productive mirror for today too. This was the last period before the nation-state became the prevailing mode of political organization around the world. Asian empires not western democracies ruled the globe. The early modern Little Ice Age was also the last example we have of a period of global history in which climate change proved an essential feature. Are we heading toward a future whose politics and environmental stresses will resemble those of the early modern period more than those of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries? While we will not be stepping in the same DOI: 10.4324/9781003351054-19

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river twice, we are certainly going to get wet and would hence do well to contemplate early modern politics, climate change, and our human relationships to the natures around us, the worlds we inhabit, that sustain us, that we change. The coronavirus is not a visible thing, at least not to the naked human eye. It manifests through its effects—sickness and death, empty classrooms and closed businesses. We encounter it through its force on the body. It is not a thing to hold, trade, or display, to be manipulated, felt, or preserved, as our twelve things here are. It is not a thing to smell or taste. In fact, it robs us of these faculties. It is a thing to be experienced, to have course through us, to survive or not. Visual creatures that we humans are, we long to see this thing and so we sketch a spike protein and call it the virus. The evanescence of the virus is part of its power, lying in wait and to disclose itself only when it is potentially too late. Many may carry it and never even know, spreading it to kill others or allowing it to dissipate with no consequence. It lurks. What kind of materiality is this, as the authors in this volume push us to ask of things? What agency does a thing like the coronavirus possess? Sometimes agentive as the editors provocatively suggest? Like nearly everything in this book’s cabinet of curiosities, coronaviruses too indeed possess a history beyond humanity that nevertheless only emerges in their encounters with humanity, or we might say animals. Like an evil spirit, the virus possesses the body. It surges. You cannot see, hear, or touch it, but only know it by what it does to the possessed. The pre-dead breathless body is what makes the virus known. It steals breath to take life. This is a particularly cruel means of global death in our breathless age. The deforestation that brought us humans closer to the zoonosis in the frst place robs us of air. There is less oxygen on earth for the growing number of humans and other animals that must have it. Some humans are robbed of air in other ways. Black Americans like Eric Garner and George Floyd are choked by the state’s racial violence. Activists in Hong Kong, Portland, and elsewhere cough on the teargas of their governments. Fires in Australia, California, and Russia make sullied air even harder to breathe. Pollution in India and China creates differentials in lung function, and therefore market opportunities, a piece of the more general phenomenon of how environmental disparities map unto social, economic, and political ones. Particulate levels have entered the lexicon of the daily weather report; the air purifer sector is strong. The virus has made ever clearer that air is now an arena of competition, a scarce resource that we will continue to fght over and destroy as we do all the others. Even before the virus, air pollution killed the poor, the unhoused, the most vulnerable around the world. In the midst of this pandemic of asphyxiation, hospitals in Mexico City, Los Angeles, Cairo, and elsewhere lack adequate supplies of portable oxygen tanks. There is literally not enough air. We are all so busy in the miasma of late capitalism, always running, always out of breath, spewing pollution as we jet across continents, streaming endless content through our devices, the privileged breathing deeply in their yoga and meditation classes to reduce stress in a political present in which the air of possibility seems increasingly sucked out of the room. In the age of corona, we fear the expectorated air of others, on the street, in the store, at home. We mask, we seclude, we test. The Nahuas thought wind brought life; today it has the potential to end it. The virus takes breath, the thing with which God animated Adam, that in the Arabic rūḥ and the Greek pneuma means both life and spirit. This is how this thing kills. In taking our air, it takes history too. Smell is the sense of memory, as Mackenzie Cooley and Kathryn Biedermann remind us. Without it, our

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conjuring of the past must seek out other, less direct paths to our brains. Writing is one way to try to overcome what the virus obliterates. Even as I write now to attempt to grasp this day, this hour, this moment, I know the alloyed truth that all will soon change but that there is value in marking this time. Still, as holding a hunk of fossilized ambergris in our hand or reading a description of its pungency cannot substitute for smelling the stuff itself, we will never be able to fully recover for the future the essential pasts that have wafted away to dissipation. Even if the killer virus is not alive, it needs life to maintain. It is a parasitic molecule that replicates itself in its hosts. In this way it acts alive. Seemingly, it feeds, mutates, reproduces, and dies, as we do, and yet has no life. It exists somewhere between alive and not alive, akin to a kind of fantasy monster whose terror derives from its ability to infltrate ourselves and then overturn our everyday, dwelling and growing undetected inside of us until it is too late, a killer that can never die because it was never alive and yet must kill to survive. No reason can be had with the almost-human thing. Almost human, the history of the coronavirus is nevertheless very much an animal one, a lesson in the interspecies nature of our existence on this planet, a lesson made clear throughout these chapters. From bat or pangolin, the virus jumped species to us. So close are we to other animals that the same confgurations of atoms course through all our bodies. At the risk of anthropomorphizing nonhumans—living or virus—the pandemic seems a warning to us to retreat or reconfgure. Earth’s most successful invasive species, you humans—some of you more than others—have taken and destroyed too much, encroached too far, extracted enough, killed too many. We will of course not heed the warning. “Getting back to normal,” an impossibility, mind you, would not solve our problems. Normal is the problem, difference the only possible solution. For nonhuman animals, the frst few months of the pandemic allowed many to return, if only briefy, to spaces where humans had displaced them—cougars in Santiago, dolphins in the Bosphorus, goats on the streets of Wales. At the same time, meatpacking facilities emerged as cluster bombs of the virus around the world, fusing together interspecies violence, capitalist greed, labor exploitation, and the government coddling of industry to spread the disease among the poorest and through communities around these blood houses of rent fesh and horror. Some animals we slaughter in darkness, others we share spoons with and so pet keeping has increased during the pandemic for those who can afford it. The alienation of late capitalism coupled with the isolation of social distancing has imposed affective labor demands on those with four legs. In speaking of herd immunity, our human language covets what animal collectives possess. This natural thing, like the bezoar or coffee, is global. Astoundingly so. It is hard to think of a society, social group, or physical location that has not been affected by some aspect of the virus. It is similarly hard to think of another historical phenomenon, even other diseases, that has been so totalizingly global. No war measures up. The world wars did not affect the whole world and neither did 9/11 or the conficts waged in its name. The ripples of capitalism’s regular fnancial crises, feature not bug of the system, generally also do not reach as far as the virus has. In the present, it seems that war and fnancial collapse are indeed mere secondary outcomes of the main event of the coronavirus, or we might say ecological fux more generally. Despite the possibilities, any grounds for collective action based on the shared experience of this thing has been shattered by how our differences have dissected us during the crisis. Gasping for

390 Afterword

the waning air, many of those who can inhale deeply into their perceived essences, animating their sense of difference over any trite notion of a shared humanity. In this way, the virus has served as a global accelerant of forces set in motion by many of the processes examined in this book, jerking us much more quickly towards what may have seemed on the horizon but still remote, even just a couple years ago. Global wealth disparities are diverging faster. China will become the world’s most powerful nation sooner. The dream of European unity withers. The ruse of American democracy will unravel more quickly. Perhaps we will transition away from fossil fuels earlier. Migrations will help to dismantle the nation-state system sooner rather than later, it seems, even as countries as varied as Britain, Sudan, the United States, Bangladesh, and Colombia attempt to keep people out. Coronaviruses of the kind killing humans today have long existed in the bodies of nonhumans. The virus is not a new thing, only new to us humans. Much like the manchineel, pitcher plants, or the armadillo, coronaviruses have long existed but only recently emerged as a problem because they impact humans and then certain humans. The story of how this particular natural thing entered human history, culture, thought, and bodies is exactly the sort of natural history this book interrogates. We have long lived with animals with coronaviruses kept safely—for us—inside them. As we have opened up their habitats, their bodies, their organs, their diseases have become ours. Extinctions have pushed viruses to other hosts. Now we live with the coronavirus and will for a very long time, our bodies wrapped around it. Retreat as a viable response seems an increasingly remote possibility, all the more as climate change reconfgures geographies of habitation. The natural things in this book are much more than just what they are. As our editors suggest so eloquently, they are unstable and ephemeral, strange, liminal objects that inhabit the blurry border between life and death, oscillating on the line between material certainty and phenomenological evocation. Composite and overlapping, human and not, nature and thing, they vibrate with meanings impossible to fx. That is their power and the imperative to think with them. They help us to contemplate and mark this uncertain and (hopefully) feeting moment. Future historians of the coronavirus and natural things beyond would do well to start here, with the book in your hands.

INDEX Acosta, Cristóbal 59 Acosta, José de 24, 59–64, 66, 71 Age of Sail 145 aguardiente 317, 319, 322, 331 Al-Biruni, Abu al-Rayhan Muhammad ibn Ahmad 56–8 Albret, Jeanne d’ 121–2 Alchemy 119, 120, 121 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 116, 300, 304–6 alienation 1–4, 9, 161, 184–5, 209–10, 300, 369, 389 Alpini, Prospero 186 amber 8, 69, 111, 113, 115–18, 120–2 ambergris 4, 8, 58, 61, 111–34, 145, 389 ambra 115–18 Amerindians 26, 32, 43, 207, 209, 213–15, 219, 221, 224, 296, 306; see also Nahua anatomy 42, 71, 141, 365 Anemaat, Louise 16 anglerfsh 367 animals 1, 4, 5, 8, 31, 53–6, 59, 64–6, 68–9, 69–73, 111–13, 116, 118, 119, 122, 124, 126, 140–1, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 150–2, 153, 215, 221, 231, 232, 236–7, 250, 276, 293–7, 301, 304–8, 317, 319–20, 323, 325–9, 348, 351–2, 354–6, 388–90 Antilles 207, 209, 213–14, 216, 219–20 Appletree, Thomas 377 Archimboldo, Giuseppe 377 armadillos 1, 5, 293–315, 390 armchair scientists 323, 330, 368 aromatherapeutic practice 124 Ashworth, William 295 Asúa, Miguel de 326 Audubon, John James 329 Azara, Félix de 317–32 Azara, José Nicolás de 322 Azara, Marqués de Nibbiano D. Agustín de 327 Baartman, Saartjie, “Hottentot Venus” 343, 356–8 Baccegli, Paolo 120 Bacon, Francis 369–70, 372–3 Badiano, Juan 60 Baffn Island 368 Banks, Joseph 139, 141, 144, 146, 148–54, 157–8, 236 Barlow, Roger 297 Barlow, William 147 barometer 376, 378 Barrera-Osorio, Antonio 300 Barthes, Roland 15 Battle of Vienna 195, 198 Bauer, Ralph 2 Beadle, George 24 Beale, Thomas 156 Begum, Fatema 161 Belon, Pierre 192, 301–2, 306, 367 Bernon, Léonard 306 Bertin, Henri 87, 89, 94–5, 98, 101 Bevanda asiatica 195–6, 198 bezoar 53–86; artifcial 54–5, 69; composition 55–7; names 55, 58; varieties of bezoars 54, 59–66 Bianco, Renato 122 Bills of Mortality 376 Blas Nozeda, Don Pedro 318 Bleichmar, Daniela 3, 55, 326

Bligh, William 158–9 Blom, Philipp 368 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 355 Boerhaave, Herman 193 Bohun, Ralph 373 book fold 276–7, 283–4 Boorde, Andrew 122 Borneo 2, 9, 211, 231–4, 240–50 botany 1, 29, 32, 33, 237, 244, 266–70, 272–3, 283 boundary objects 152 Boyle, Robert 193, 367–8, 376 brain 18, 19, 113, 124, 198, 300, 308, 343–64, 365 breadfruit 2, 139, 144, 157–61, 236 Breton, Raymond 214 Brixius, Dorit 90 Brooke, James 231, 242–4, 248 Brosseder, Claudia 63 Browne, Janet 236 Burgos-Ellis, Helen 60, 266 cabinet 9, 68, 113, 160, 161, 293, 300–2, 304, 307, 317–19, 322–3, 327, 328, 331, 332, 388 Cabot, Sebastian 297 Calestani, Girolamo 122 camelids 8, 63, 70, 293 Camerarius, Rudolf Jacob 26 Campanella, Tommaso 193 Canal 7, 87–109; canal de Briare 87, 89, 95, 96, 98; Grand Canal of China 87, 88, 94, 96–101 cannibalism 186, 231–2, 239, 246 Cantino Planisphere 297 capitalism 388–9 capybaras 326 Carlyle, Thomas 348 Cartesian dualism 2 Castañeda, Juan de 299, 300 Castellanos de Losada, Basilio Sebastián 327–8 Castillo, Bernal Díaz del 26 Catesby, Mark 145 Çelebi, Evilya 186 Cesalpino, Andrea 265, 267–75, 280, 282, 283 Chakrabarty, Dipesh 369 changeling object 8, 55 Chapultepec Gardens 24–5 Charles V 60, 297 Chiari, Sophie 371 Cibot, Pierre Martial 100–2 Cinteotl 31 Cioli, Andrea 116 citizen science 374 Clark, Malcolm 144 Clavijo Fajardo, José 319 Clément, David 26 climate 192, 232, 246, 367–9, 371, 387, 390 Clusius, Carolus 115, 116, 186, 298–301 Cobo, Bernabé 66, 69 cochineal 299 Codex Borbonicus 38, 39, 40, 41 Codex Borgia 32, 33, 35, 36 Codex Laud 38, 39, 40, 41 Codex Magliabechiano 34–5 Codex Tudela 34

392 Index Coenan, Adriaen 365–7 Coenens, Adriaen 306 coffee 5, 6, 16, 93, 183–205, 389; bean described 196–9 coffeehouse 184, 190, 378 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 348 collage 3–4, 16–19 Columbre, Agostino 53–5, 72 Columbus, Christopher 29, 213, 296–7 compendium 270, 306 Comte de Buffon 207, 319, 323–8 Constantino, María Eugenia 150 Cook, James 144, 153–4, 160 Cooley, Mackenzie 145 Cordius, Euricius 274 Cordus, Valerius 274 coronavirus 387–90 Cortés, Hernán 26, 27, 59, 297 Cosimo I 120, 121, 123, 270 cosmopolitan species 144 Cospi, Fernadino 301 Cowie, Helen 326 critical image-making 15–19 cross-cultural 55, 87–8, 98, 99, 101–2, 184, 191 Cruz, Martín de la 60 Cuetlaxtla 23 cuttlefsh 116 Cuvier, Georges 326–7, 356 Dampier, William 373 Da Orta, Garcia 57–9, 62, 66, 116, 273, 274 Darwin, Charles 317, 319, 328, 329–30, 354–5 Darwin, Erasmus 32 Darwinism 354–6, 359 Daston, Lorraine 4 Davies, Surekha 378 Davini, Giovanni Battista 193 de Ávila, Alejandro 60 deer 55, 64, 66, 69, 72, 112; mazame 64, 66 DeFoe, Daniel 371, 376–8 Derham, William 374–5, 377 Descartes, René 369, 371 Digges, Leonard 369 Dioscorides 115, 271, 273–5 dogs 9, 153, 154, 157, 207, 216, 218, 221, 325 Don Saltero 294 Dorsey, Lauren 161 Dufour, Philippe Sylvestre 188, 191, 194 du Halde, Jean Baptiste 101 Durán, Fray Diego 23, 24, 27, 30, 36 Dutch East India Company 69 Dutch West India Company 69 Dyak 242 Earle, Rebecca 153 early modern worlds 2–3, 183 ecologies of knowledge 6–8, 54, 87, 89, 98, 102, 125, 143, 160, 199, 209–13, 231 Egmond, Florike 366 Einstein, Albert 344 El Escorial 307 Ellis, John 235, 236, 238 Ellis, Thomas 367–9, 371 emblematics 33, 293, 295, 297 Emmart, Emily Walcott 61 empiricism 185, 199, 300, 326–30 Enciso, Martín Fernández de 294

Endeavour voyage 139, 143–4, 146, 149, 150–4, 157, 162 English East India Company 69, 237, 242–4, 248–9, 373 Enlightenment 101, 102, 103, 149, 150, 185, 295 enslaved persons 9, 58, 139, 142–3, 147, 152, 157, 159–61, 184, 190, 195, 199, 207, 209, 210, 213–16, 224, 241; Jacob’s testimony 218–21, 223, 224 entangled histories 2, 7, 9, 140, 161, 192, 210, 213, 232, 297 environment 7, 9, 16, 87, 89, 92–3, 103, 184, 189, 207, 209–10, 213–15, 219, 224, 231–3, 236, 240–1, 250, 331, 367–9, 371 Etzalcualiztli 36 Evelyn, John 373, 375 Fairchild, Thomas 28, 29 Fairchild’s mule 28 Ferdinand, Karl Wilhelm 350 Ferdinand I, King of Naples 60–1 Ferdinand of Spain 297 Findlen, Paula 4, 269 Flammarion, Camille 356–7 foating images 15–16 food history 2, 139, 142–3, 144–50, 160 foodways 139, 143, 154, 157, 185–6, 191–2 forestry conservation 90 Förster, August 343 Frahm, Jens 347, 358 Frielander, Amy 19 Frobisher, Martin 367 Fuchs, Conrad Heinrich 358 Fuchs, Leonhart 3, 265–7, 269–76, 282, 283 Galera Gómez, Andrés 326 Garay, Francisco de 295 Garden, Alexander 147 gardens 25, 28, 32, 61, 93, 160, 265–72, 275–83, 299 Gau, Mok 91–2 Gauss, Carl Friedrich 8, 18–19, 343–60 Genette, Gérard 267 genius 343, 345, 347–8, 350, 352, 358–9 George, Wilma 300 Gerritsen, Anne 4 Gessner, Conrad 3, 116, 274, 302–6 Ghosh, Amitav 368 gift exchange 53, 55, 61, 66–8, 101, 120, 125 global 2–5, 32, 53–4, 59, 61–2, 65, 69, 73, 88–9, 144, 152, 183, 190, 199, 213, 293, 300, 345, 373–6, 389–90; global disease 387–8 goats 53, 54, 59, 64, 66, 118 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 348 Golinski, Jan 369 Gómez, Pablo F. 2, 214 Gonzaga family 66–68; Vincenzo 121 Goya, Francisco 332 Gratiolet, Louis Pierre 352 Graves, George 146 Griesemer, James R. 152 Grimm, Melchior 93 Grove, Richard 90 Guadeloupe 9, 207, 209–12 Guaraní 317, 319, 323, 328, 330, 331 Habsburg 66–8, 69, 120 Hagner, Michael 345 Haitian Revolution 215 Halley, Edmond 373, 376 Hassig, Debra 60 Hauksbee, Francis 376 Hausmann, Johann Friedrich Ludwig 352

Index 393 Hecquet, Philippe 193 Helmholtz, Hermann von 344 Henle, Jakob 343 Henri II 186 herbal 60, 63, 265, 267, 272–3, 289 Hermann, Carl Friedrich 345, 347 Hernán, Cristóbal Pérez 295 Hernández, Francisco 59, 63–4, 66, 69, 72, 119, 213 Herzog, Tamar 320 Heuer, Christopher 368 hippocampus controversy 343, 352, 353–5 Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas 31 HMS Beagle 317, 329 HMS Providence 159 Hobbes, Thomas 150 Hooker, Joseph Dalton 244–9 Hooke, Robert 372 horses 5, 53–4, 72, 294, 296, 306 huaca 63 Huaxtepec Garden 23, 25, 29, 32 Hughes, William 149 Humboldt, Alexander von 144, 319, 328–9, 345, 350, 359 Humboltiana 345–6 hummingbird 35, 37–8, 296 humoral 118, 153, 191 Hun Hunahpu 35 Hunter, John 139, 162 Hunter, William Percival 329, 330 Huschke, Emil 348 Hüseyin, Hezarfenn 195 Huxley, Thomas Henry 343, 351, 354–6 Huxley’s Rule 18, 355–8 hydropsy 194 hypochondria 193–5 iatrochemistry 192–3 Ilhuicamina, King Moteuczoma 23, 24, 25 Imperato, Ferrante 301 Indo-Pacifc 2, 87, 89, 90, 92–3, 98, 101, 102 insects 28, 143, 150–1, 161, 237, 246, 322 Isle Bourbon 90 Isle de France 90–1, 99, 101, 102 Istanbul 183, 186, 191, 192, 195, 198, 301–2 Izquierdo de Rivera y Lazaún, Eugenio 318–19 Jack, William 237–40 Janissaries 183–4 Jesuits 69, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 371 Jordan Gschwend, Annemarie 66–8 Kiang-tse 91 Kitchen in the Cabinet 160–1 Knille, Otto 348 Kô, Aloys 7, 87, 89, 94, 95, 98, 100, 101, 102 Kölreuter, Joseph Gottlieb 32 Kua, Shen 96 La Fosse, Philippe Etiènne 72 Lafuente, Antonio 150 Lagrange, Joseph Louis 350 Laird, Andrew 60 laissez-faire 88 Landa, Diego de 27 Laurent, Antoine 101 Le Comte, Louis 97, 101 Lee, Sarah Bowdich 146 Lehleiter, Christine 32

Lejeune-Dirichlet, Peter Gustav 345, 347 Leopold, Emperor 195 Lettson, John Coakley 150 Libellus de medicinalibus indorum herbis 60–2 life and death 8–9, 53–4, 72–3, 113–15, 207, 210, 218–21, 231–4, 319, 325, 343–8, 357–60 Linnaeus, Carl 26, 72, 144, 152, 235–6, 319 Linnean Society 147, 244, 353 Linschoten, Jan Huyghen van 301 little apple of death 207, 210 Little Ice Age 368, 375, 387 locks 96–7 lord of poison 53–4 Low, Hugh 211, 231, 240–4, 246, 248 Lucas, C. C. 161 Lusitanus, Amatus 273–4 Lyell, Charles 329 Macolo, Giacomo 116 Macuilxochitl 32, 33 maize 7, 23–5, 28–34, 36–9, 42 Makandal, François 215 manchineel 9, 143, 152, 207–29 Mangelsdorf, Paul 24 mangroves 207, 210, 212 Māori 153, 157 Marcgrave, Georg 70–2 María of Austria 66–8 Marinello, Giovanni 124 Marsigli, Luigi, Ferdinando 191–3, 195–9 Martin, Craig 369 Martire, Peter 296 Martyr, Peter 214 Mason, Peter 366 materiality 5–6, 16, 26–7, 42–3, 55–7, 116, 139–44, 147–9, 159–61, 195–8, 231–4, 265–6, 276–81, 283–4, 317–20, 326–8, 343–8, 351–3, 371–4, 388, 390; materialism 1, 343, 351–5, 356 materia medica 8, 54, 57–9, 61, 68, 69, 73, 188, 214, 271, 273 Mather, Cotton 23, 26, 33, 371, 374 Matienzo, Isidro Fernández 190 Mattioli, Andrea 265, 267–9, 271–5, 278, 282–3 Mauritius 90 Mayr, Ernst 32 McMeekin, Dorothy 31 mechanical physiology 192–3 Medici 120, 121, 125, 270; Catherine dei 121 melancholy 5, 6, 53, 56, 191, 193–5 memory garden 265, 269, 271, 282 Mencius 100, 101 Mesoamerica 23–43 Meta Incognita 367 Mikhail, Alan 7 mind-body 2, 191, 343–4, 347–8, 351–2, 359 Momahuti, Martín 60 Monardes, Nicolás 55, 59, 61–2, 66, 116, 274 Moñino y Redondo, José 317 Montano, Benito Arias 298 morphology 31, 247, 344, 348, 352 Motley, James 231, 241–2, 244–5 Mount Kinabalu 231, 236, 240–2, 244–6, 248, 250 Muratori, Ludovico Antonio 193 museum 56, 139, 145, 153, 159–62, 244, 252, 301, 317, 319, 322–3, 326–30, 354 musk 61, 69, 116–25 Nahua 7, 8, 23–43, 59–62, 63–5, 307 Nahuatl 31, 33, 34, 42, 43, 60–1

394 Index natural history 2–6, 9, 15, 16, 19, 61, 69, 73, 90, 115, 125, 139–40, 143, 145–6, 148, 149, 150, 152, 157, 160–1, 185, 189, 216, 231, 232, 266, 271, 275, 283, 293, 295, 298, 301, 302, 304, 317, 319, 320, 322, 324, 325, 326–8, 330–1, 365, 369, 372, 390 naturalia 275, 282, 293, 295, 297–9, 302, 305 natural selection 249 natural things 1, 4–9, 53–5, 87–9, 102, 111, 113, 125, 139, 142–4, 150, 161, 183–5, 195, 199, 207, 231, 265, 272, 275, 282–3, 300, 345–6, 359, 365, 367–8, 369, 371–3, 378, 387, 389–90 nature studies 3, 26, 43, 94, 102, 125, 139, 143, 145, 185, 189, 199, 266, 283, 295, 297, 317, 328, 331, 367–8 Nemours, Pierre Samuel du Pont de 87, 89, 94 Nepenthes rajah 231–4, 243–5 New Holland 69 New World 2, 63, 69, 159, 213, 214, 215, 274, 294–5, 297–300, 301, 304, 377 Nezahualcoyotl 25 Nezahualpiltzintl 27 Nhandiroba 221–3 Nicolay, Nicolas de 186 nopal 299 Norton, Marcy 2, 153 nosegays 24 nutrias 325 Ochoa, Lorenzo 42 Ochpaniztli 39, 41 Old World 2, 54, 55, 57, 295, 326 opossums 330–1 Oriental Other, The 187 Orthner, Hans 345 Orto Botanico di Padova 29, 266 Osma, Pedo de 62–3 Ottoman 2, 4, 6, 7, 183, 184–99 oviparous 303 Owen, Richard 140–1, 144, 343, 348, 351–5, 358 Paganelli, Cristoforo 269 Palladio 267, 273 Paludanus, Bernadus 301 paper garden 265, 269, 271–2 Paraguay 317, 319–30 paratext 267, 269–73 Pardo-Tomás, José 55, 59 Parkinson, Sidney 139, 146, 153–4, 157 parrots 61, 140, 296–7, 327 Pascal, Blaise 369 Pepys, Samuel 373 Perronet, Jean-Randolphe 98 Peter, John 373 Pfaff, Johann Friedrich 350 Philip II 62, 63, 68, 120 Philip IV 297 physicians 5, 9, 55, 58–9, 60, 62, 70, 115–17, 122, 123, 124, 152, 183, 185, 186, 189, 190, 193, 194, 207, 209, 210, 213–16, 219, 221, 223, 224, 299, 301, 302 physiocrats 87–9, 102–3 Piazzi, Giuseppi 350 Piltdown hoax 343, 359 Piltzintecuhtli 31 Pinotl 23 Pinzón, Vicente Yañez 297 Piso, Willem 70–2 pitcher plant 1, 5, 9, 17–18, 211, 231–61, 390 plague 56, 63, 116, 122, 123, 125, 192–3, 377, 387 plant sexuality 27–33, 42–3, 232, 236, 246 Podgorny, Irina 323

poison 5, 9, 53–4, 64, 123, 152, 183–4, 207, 209–10, 213–15, 218–21, 224, 240 Poivre, Pierre 7, 87, 89–94, 95, 97, 99, 101, 102 pollination 5, 23, 26, 28, 30–43, 31 Pomar, Juan Bautista de 27 Pona, Francesco 69 Popol Vuh 34–5 Porret, Christiaen 301 Portuondo, María 302 Postclassic Era 26–7 Powers 293–5, 306, 308, 315 Powers, Richard 375 printing press 266 Qing 90, 91, 92, 94, 99, 100 Quatrefages, Jean-Louis-Armand de 354 Quesnay, François 88, 89, 94 Quetzalcoatl 25–6, 32, 33–7, 41–3 Raffes, Sir Thomas Stamford 237, 240–2, 244 Ray, John 26 Redi, Francesco 183 Remarks on the Natural History of the Birds of Paraguay 319, 320, 322, 328 Renaissance 111, 113, 116–17, 120, 193, 269, 271 Réunion 90 Ricettario Fiorentino 117, 122, 125 Ricord, Jean-Baptiste 9, 207–24 Riello, Giorgio 4 Rio de la Plata 317, 319–22, 328 Riskin, Jessica 185 Rochefort, Charles de 214 Rondelet, Guillaume 367 Rowlandson, Thomas 148 Royal Cabinet of Natural History, now the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid 9, 317–19, 322, 328, 331 Rudolf II 66–8 ruminants 55, 64 Rumphius, George Eberhard 236, 240 Ruscelli, Girolamo 118 Safer, Neil 2 Sahagún, Bernardino de 306–7 Saint-Hilaire, Isidore Geoffroy 326, 354 St. John, Spenser Buckingham 231, 243, 246–8 St. Mery, Barthelemy de 329 Salter, James 294 Salviani, Ippolito 111, 114 Sarawak 241–2, 248 Saternus, Klaus-Steffen 347 scent 5, 6, 111–13, 116, 117, 119, 120, 121–6, 153, 184, 188, 190, 198, 214, 232, 323 Schiebinger, Londa 28, 214, 223–4 Schnapper, Antoine 300 Schwediawer, Franz Xavier 145 Schweizer, Renate 358 scurvy 53, 152 secrets 62, 118–19, 121–2, 145, 190, 209, 213–15, 345 selective breeding: artifcial selection 23–6, 28, 30, 63, 157 sensory 6, 123–5, 147, 184–5, 195, 198, 199 Serapion 115 Shteir, Ann 236 Simmonds, Peter Lund 149, 155, 156 Sloane, Hans 207, 214, 223, 294 Smith, Christopher 159 Smith, Paul 330 soul 122, 190, 192, 343, 344, 347, 348, 351, 352 South Sea 153, 157

Index 395 Spary, Emma 149, 295 specimens 5, 8, 9, 16–18, 23, 28–9, 101, 139–40, 142, 144, 146–9, 152, 159–62, 189, 232, 241, 244–5, 277, 282, 296, 301, 304, 317, 325, 327, 344, 352, 358 spices 64, 90, 240 squid 5, 6, 111, 113–15, 139–80; Dana octopus squid 144; Humboldt squid 144 Star, Susan Leigh 152 Stephenson, Marcia 62 The Storm 376 storms 365–8, 371, 374–8 Strauss, Claude Levi 295 Swainson, William 150 tatu 293, 304, 306 taxonomy 1, 5, 32, 69–73, 90, 125, 144, 197, 273, 319; Linnaean taxonomy 69, 148, 317, 331 The Tempest 371, 376 Tenochtitlan 23, 25–7 Ten Songs of Hà Tiên 92 Te Pau 154 terraforming 93 thermoscope 369 thing studies 4 Thistlewood, Thomas 215 Thompson, John 140 Tlacaelel 23 Tlazolteotl 30, 38–41 Tocqueville, Alexis de 88 Toledo, Eleonora di 119 Tonacatecuhtli 34 Tournefort, Joseph Pilton de 188, 190 Toussaint-Louverture 215 Tovar, Simón de 298–9 Tröhler, Ulrich 345 Tứ, Mạc Thiên 87, 89, 90, 92, 102 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 89, 94 Turner, William 265

vegetable sensitivity 5, 235, 250 Venus fytrap 235–6 veterinary medicine 53–4 Vieillot, Louis Jean Pierre 319, 328, 330 Vierhaus, Rudolf 359 Vietnam 90, 91, 92, 93, 101 visual strategies 17–19 Vogt, Carl 343, 351–3, 355–7, 358 Von Hagen, Victor Wolfgang 322 Wagner, Hermann 358 Wagner, Rudolph 343–4, 347–8, 351–6 Walckenaer, Charles Athanase 324, 327 Wallace, Alfred Russel 243–4, 246 weather 272, 299, 365–6, 369–78, 388 Weaver, Karol Kimberlee 215 Weber, Wilhelm Eduard 350 whales 6, 111–19, 125, 145, 365–9 Wiles, James 159 Wilkins, John 372 Willis, Thomas 193 Winstanley, Henry 377 winter 116, 369, 371–4 Wittfogel, Karl 102 womb 31, 35, 39, 123–4 World Register of Marine Species 144 Worm, Ole 301 worms 16, 61, 188, 223 Wren, Christopher 372 Xingshui jinjian 87, 99–100 Xochipilli 31 Xochiquetzal 30–1 Xocoyotzin, King Moteuczoma 26 Yang, Etienne 94–5, 98, 101 Yarrell, William 149 Yemen 185, 186, 195, 196 ylla 63

Upas tree 240 Valle, Pietro della 186, 192 Vallisneri, Antonio 193

Zamorano, Rodrigo 299 Zirkle, Conway 32 Zuhr, Ibn 56