Browsing by Subject "Botany -- England -- Social aspects -- 18th century"

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    Collecting, Cultivating, Classifying: Status and Collaboration in Early Modern English Botany
    (2018) Arnold-Scerbo, Madison; Hayton, Darin; Graham, Lisa Jane, 1963-
    Making claims about the natural world is a social endeavor that is tied up in collaborative networks of people of varying statuses. In early eighteenth-century England, as exotic plants were streaming into Europe from New World colonies, English plant enthusiasts sought ways to comprehend and classify them. At the impetus of new Baconian scientific methods which emphasized empirical, first-hand observations, these naturalists viewed plants directly in order to make claims about botanical specimens in general. Gardens were crucial to this strategy. Those with the social and financial resources to do so amassed impressive collections of exotic plant specimens using complex networks to import them. These plants were then cultivated and experimented with in orangeries. Then, these plants were named and classified by those with the status and authority necessary to be believed when making botanical claims. The role that an individual could play in this botanical knowledge making process, as well as the extent to which their contributions were trusted and acknowledged, depended on their status—in particular, whether or not they were considered a gentleman. Duchess Mary Somerset and Reverend Robert Uvedale were two such figures who were not seen as gentlemen, yet employed markers of status that they did have to contribute to botanical classification. Somerset was a woman who lacked formal education but possessed land and social connections. Uvedale was an educated man, but lacked financial and social capital. Despite these limitations, Somerset and Uvedale collected exotic specimens, cultivated them in gardens and orangeries, and classified them into volumes of dried plants. Their participation and contributions proved that the creation of botanical knowledge in early modern England was a global and collaborative undertaking that was inherently linked to the social status of people involved. To ignore botany’s social history is to misrepresent the way botanical knowledge was formed.