Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court

Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court

Alix Cooper

September 1, 2018

en

Journal Article

Alix Cooper

Journal Article

10.1177/0073275318776515

0073-2753

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.

2018-09-27 08:38:03

September 1, 2018

3

Hist Sci

en

SAGE Journals

257-277

History of Science

Placing plants on paper

Placing plants on paper: Lists, herbaria, and tables as experiments with territorial inventory at the mid-seventeenth-century Gotha court

https://doi.org/10.1177/0073275318776515

56

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