Placing plants on paper

Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court

Bibliographic Data

ID4392365
AuthorsAlix Cooper (Stony Brook University, corresponding author)
Year2018
Volume56
Issue3
Pages257-277
Publication date2018-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueHistory of Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0073-2753 • E-ISSN: 1753-8564
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0073275318776515
PMID29909654
OpenAlexW2809347603
LanguageEN
Citations received2

Over the past several decades, historians of science have come increasingly to focus on the role of so-called "paper technologies," reorganizing and transforming information through the use of paper and pen, in the emergence of modern science. Taking as a case study an effort by administrators in the seventeenth-century German princely state of Saxe-Gotha to enlist foresters and herb-women to catalog the medicinal plants of the territory, this article analyzes the varied forms of paperwork produced in the process, including an extremely unusual table, and argues that the table represented an effort to produce a synoptic visualization, akin to but not identical to a map, of the location of the territory's herbs. While this table may not have ultimately succeeded as a viable paper technology, due to problems of incommensurability, it demonstrates the role of administrative practices and state actors in experimenting with information about the natural world during the early modern period

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Database · German · Natural (archaeology) · Period (music) · Process (computing) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Table (database) · Computer Science · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · History of Science and Medicine · History of Science and Natural History · Philosophy

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