Describing plants and exploring their appearance, occurrence and usefulness have been common practice from antiquity. Even though the term “herbarium” underwent various changes in meaning over the centuries, it generally referred to a book on herbs, listing plants that were believed to possess pharmaceutical properties. Illustrations – some of them of high artistic quality – in books on herbs have been known since the Early Modern Period. Illustrative woodcuts created between 1530 and 1546, depicting the herbaria of the three pioneers of botany, Otto Brunfels, Leonhart Fuchs and Hieronymus Bock, had additional value as botanical reference points (Dressendörfer 2011). Nature printing, using the plant itself as the printing plate, was another method used in illustrating botanical books. It drew on the idea of nature inscribing itself to determine the technique of illustration. The rather elaborate procedure, described by Leonardo da Vinci and perfected during the 19th century, allowed for a detailed image of the plant in question.

The Enlightenment did not end with the French Revolution but extended into the nineteenth century, effecting a transformation to modernity. By 1850, science became increasingly institutionalized and technology hastened transmission of cultural exchange. Restricting Enlightenment to solitary movements, philosophic text, or national contexts ultimately creates insular interpretations. The Enlightenment was instead a transnational phenomenon, of interconnected communities, from diverse geographical and cultural spaces. A revealing example is the Delessert family. Their British-Franco-Swiss network demonstrates the uniqueness, extent, and duration of the Enlightenment. This network’s origins lie in the 1680s. French and British desires for stability resulted in contrasting policies. Toleration, through partial rights, let British Dissenters become leading educators, manufacturers, and natural philosophers by 1760. Conversely, Huguenots were stripped of rights. Thousands fled persecution, and France’s rivals profited by welcoming waves of industrious Huguenots. French refugee communities became vital printing centres, specializing in Enlightenment attacks on the Ancien régime, and facilitated the expansion of the Delessert network. The Delessert banking family made a generational progression from Geneva to Lyon to Paris, linking them to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His friendship fostered passions for botany and education. The Delesserts parlayed this into participation in Enlightenment science and industry, connecting them to the Lunar Society, Genevan radicals, and British reformers. By 1780, a transition toward modernity began. Grand Tours shifted from places of erudition to practical sites of production. Lunar men sent sons to the Continent for practical education, as Franco-Swiss visited English manufactories and Scottish universities to expand knowledge. Moderates greeted the French Revolution with enthusiasm. In the early 1790s this changed significantly. Royalist mobs threatened Lunar men, destroying property, in Birmingham. In France, moderates tried to defend the monarchy from republican mobs. Even so, the network, fragmented both by revolution and war, continued espousing reform and assisting members who were jailed, endangered, or escaping to America. The Delessert network reconnected in 1801. Franco-Swiss toured Britain as Britons visited Paris, gathering at the hôtel Delessert, a crossroads of the Enlightenment. New societies encouraged science, industry, and philanthropy. Enlightenment exchange continued, despite warfare, into the nineteenth century. Industrial partnerships and scientific collaborations, formed during the peace, circumvented trade barriers. Over three generations (1760-1850) cosmopolitanism helped usher in a transition to modernity. Ultimately, the Delessert network’s endurance challenges traditional interpretations of the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution.

This thesis explores the history of botany as a global collection-based science by tracing parallels between utopian traditions and botanical collecting, from their sixteenth-century beginnings to the present. A range of botanical collections, such as gardens, herbaria and classification systems, have played a central role in the struggle to discover a global or universal scientific order for the chaotic, diverse and locally shaped kingdom of plants. These collections and utopia intersect historically, and are characterised by the same epistemology of collecting: the creation of order through confined collecting spaces or “no-place.” They are manipulations of space and time. Between chaos and order, both seek to make a whole from – often unruly – parts.   The long history of botanical collecting is characterised by a degree of continuity of practice that is unusual in the sciences.  For instance, the basic technology of the herbarium – preserving plants by mounting and labelling dried specimens on paper – has been in use for almost five centuries, from sixteenth-century Italy to ongoing digitisation projects. The format of the compilation thesis is well-suited to handling the historiographical challenge of tracing continuity and discontinuity with such a long chronological scope.   The thesis is structured as a walled quadripartite garden, with the Kappa enclosing four research papers and an epilogue. The papers take a diachronic approach to explore different perspectives on botanical collections: botanical collecting in seventeenth-century Oxford, pressed plants in books that are not formally collections; and the digitisation of botanical collections. These accounts are all shaped by the world of books, text and publication, historically a male-dominated sphere. In order to acknowledge marginalisation of other groups and other ways of knowing plants, the epilogue is an explanation of an embroidered patchwork of plant-dyed fabric, which forms the cover of the thesis. / Denna avhandling behandlar historien om botanik som en global samlingsbaserad vetenskap genom att följa paralleller mellan utopiska traditioner och botaniskt samlande från dess början på femtonhundratalet till idag. Olika sorters botaniska samlingar, till exempel trädgårdar, herbarier och klassifikationssystem, har historiskt spelat en central roll i sökandet efter en global eller universell vetenskaplig ordning i växtrikets lokalt rotade och till synes kaotiska mångfald. Det finns historiska kopplingar mellan dessa botaniska samlingar och utopi, som båda även präglas av vad man kan kalla samlandets epistemologi: skapandet av ordning genom avgränsade samlingsutrymmen eller ”icke-platser”. De är manipulationer av tid och rum.   Det botaniska samlandets långa historia utmärks av en praktisk kontinuitet som är ovanlig inom naturvetenskapen. Herbariets grundläggande teknik att bevara växter genom att pressa, identifiera och montera dem på pappersark har varit i bruk i nästan fem sekel. Avhandlingen utnyttjar sammanläggningsformatet för att hantera den historiografiska utmaning det innebär att studera en så lång tidsperiod, genom att de ingående artiklarna behandlar skilda tidsepoker och disciplinära perspektiv samtidigt som de alla delar avhandlingens centrala tematik: ordnande genom avgränsade samlingsutrymmen.     Avhandlingens struktur är baserad på den muromgärdade fyrdelade trädgården, med kappan som inneslutande fyra artiklar och en epilog. Artiklarna är diakrona analyser av botaniska samlingar: om samlande i Oxford på sextonhundratalet, om pressade växter i böcker som inte formellt utgör del av samlingar, och om digitaliseringen av botaniska samlingar. Dessa sammanhang är alla formade i en värld av böcker, text och publicering – en värld som historiskt har dominerats av män. Epilogen belyser den marginalisering av andra grupper och deras kunskaper om växter som detta har inneburit, genom att förklara avhandlingens omslag, ett lapptäcksbroderi av växtfärgade tyger. / <p>QC 20171115</p> / Saving Nature: Conservation Technologies from the Biblical Ark to the Digital Archive