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Cooking (with) Clio and Cleo: Eloquence and Experiment in Seventeenth-Century Florence

1991; University of Pennsylvania Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/2710045

1086-3222

Jay Tribby,

History of Science and Medicine

In 1694 the French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort states succinctly his reasons for proposing a reform of botany: Botanists, he says, not succeeded in their intentions to explicate the works of the ancient Authors.' These philologists of the natural world have merely generated a confusion of words around the plants mentioned by Aristotle, Theophrastus, Galen, Pliny, and Dioscorides.2 So great is this confusion, he claims, that in modern editions of their works the ancients would not find any of the plants they had actually described. To resolve this dilemma Tournefort proposes a fundamental reconceptualization of botany as inquiry: no longer will the botanist attempt to from the discoveries and work of those early days by means of the philological tools which for centuries had been the staples of his trade; instead, his sole interest will be the profit he derives from a systematic study of the characteristic marks (caracteres) of the plant itself.3 The botanist, once admired for his skills as a manipulator of ancient and contemporary anecdote, will, over the course of the eighteenth century, become an anonymous locator of identity and difference, a classifier of