This book is the first in-depth study of eighteenth-century botanical illustrations. Its findings offer a completely new insight into the working practices of the botanists and scientific draughtsmen of this period. The author describes the different production stages of these illustrations. For the first time, the author presents a convincing description of how botanical illustrations developed, ascertaining the criteria that drove this process.

Explores the development of natural history since the Renaissance and contextualizes current discussions of biodiversity.

James Cook’s voyages of exploration are a turning point not only in the history of the British Empire, but also in the history of science and exploration of the Pacific. The last decades have seen a wide-ranging scholarly interest in Cook’s voyages, focusing on their impact on European and Polynesian societies, their scientific results, and their protagonists, such as Cook himself or the nobleman Joseph Banks who took part in Cook’s first voyage of exploration. This book examines the hitherto underestimated role of the German scholar Johann Reinhold Forster who, together with his son Georg Forster, accompanied Cook on his second voyage of exploration (1772–1775) as a principal naturalist. For a long time, the German traveler has remained a rather shadowy figure of Cook’s voyages of exploration and has only attracted scholarly attention occasionally. Focusing on the making of knowledge onboard the ship and the islands where it made landfall, the study provides a historical reappraisal of Forster’s scientific performance as a leading naturalist of his time. By examining Forster’s Resolution Journal, Anne Mariss takes a microhistorical approach toward the making of natural history knowledge during the expedition to the Pacific. Mariss unveils the difficulties the traveling naturalists encountered while collecting, describing, classifying, and painting the natural world. Her study brings to light the contribution of the various actors who were involved in this undertaking, such as the scientific assistants, sailors, officers, and the local actors of the Pacific world.

A new biography of Carl Linnaeus, offering a vivid portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778), known as the father of modern biological taxonomy, formalized and popularized the system of binomial nomenclature used to classify plants and animals. Linnaeus himself classified thousands of species; the simple and immediately recognizable abbreviation “L” is used to mark classifications originally made by Linnaeus. This biography, by the leading authority on Linnaeus, offers a vivid portrait of Linnaeus’s life and work. Drawing on a wide range of previously unpublished sources—including diaries and personal correspondence—as well as new research, it presents revealing and original accounts of his family life, the political context in which he pursued his work, and his eccentric views on sexuality. The Man Who Organized Nature describes Linnaeus’s childhood in a landscape of striking natural beauty and how this influenced his later work. Linnaeus’s Lutheran pastor father, knowledgeable about plants and an enthusiastic gardener, helped foster an early interest in botany. The book examines the political connections that helped Linnaeus secure patronage for his work, and untangles his ideas about sexuality. These were not, as often assumed, an attempt to naturalize gender categories but more likely reflected the laissez-faire attitudes of the era. Linnaeus, like many other brilliant scientists, could be moody and egotistical; the book describes his human failings as well as his medical and scientific achievements. Written in an engaging and accessible style, The Man Who Organized Nature—one of the only biographies of Linnaeus to appear in English—provides new and fascinating insights into the life of one of history’s most consequential and enigmatic scientists.

Romanticism was a cultural and intellectual movement characterized by discovery, revolution, and the poetic as well as by the philosophical relationship between people and nature. Botany sits at the intersection where romantic scientific and literary discourses meet. Clandestine Marriage explores the meaning and methods of how plants were represented and reproduced in scientific, literary, artistic, and material cultures of the period. Theresa M. Kelley synthesizes romantic debates about taxonomy and morphology, the contemporary interest in books and magazines devoted to plant study and images, and writings by such authors as Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Letitia Barbauld. Period botanical paintings of flowers are reproduced in vibrant color, bringing her argument and the romantics' passion for plants to life. In addition to exploring botanic thought and practice in the context of British romanticism, Kelley also looks to the German philosophical traditions of Kant, Hegel, and Goethe and to Charles Darwin's reflections on orchids and plant pollination. Her interdisciplinary approach allows a deeper understanding of a time when exploration of the natural world was a culture-wide enchantment. -- Alan John Bewell, University of Toronto

This book explores how European naturalists and artists perceived, investigated, and presented the relationship between insects and colors from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. The contributors to this volume examine the creative methods and strategies that were developed to record color-related information about insects through studies on Hoefnagel’s glazed metal and hand-coloring practices; the lepidochromy technique used in paintings by Marseus van Schriek and later naturalists; the representation of sexual dimorphism of color and variable color of caterpillars in the images of Goedaert, Merian, Albin, and Rösel von Rosenhof; the painting-by-numbers technique applied to Schäffer’s bookplates on Regensburg insects; Schiffermüller’s watercolor originals of caterpillars; and finally, the color fading of exotic cabinet specimens and how this issue was tackled by Abbot and Smith. The volume is lavishly illustrated with rare and unpublished images and offers new insights into the interrelation between natural history and visual practices concerning the color of insects, with a special focus on butterflies and moths. Contributors are Harald Bruckner, Kay Etheridge, Beth Fowkes Tobin, Stefanie Jovanovic-Kruspel, Karin Leonhard, V.E. Mandrij, Kimberly Schenck, Stacey Sell, Giulia Simonini, and Friedrich Steinle.

Pennsylvania naturalist William Bartram (1739–1823) is best known as the author of a travelogue describing his botanizing journey through the American South in the late eighteenth century. Writing was not, however, Bartram’s only or even preferred method of recording the natural world around him. His deeply unconventional drawings, depicting sentient plants and hybrid organic forms, lie at the heart of his understanding of nature. With this book, Elizabeth Athens considers the strangeness of Bartram’s graphic enterprise, exploring the essential role his renderings played in his natural history. For Bartram, the making and interpretation of figures on a surface was a dynamic and collaborative relationship between nature, the observing artist-naturalist, and the audience. This book offers the first in-depth investigation of Bartram’s drawing practice as central to his understanding of nature. Through an examination of Bartram’s approach to botanical and zoological representation, Athens highlights the struggle between different modes of seeing nature in eighteenth-century Enlightenment science.