ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Distant empiricism: Exile, local knowledge, and Chilean plants in Enlightenment Bologna

• In Event: Hidden Botanical Cultures: Networks, Gender, and Exile in the Making of Botany in the Italian Peninsula (18th-20th centuries) | Sponsored by the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)

English Abstract

In the mid-eighteenth century, the expulsion of the Society of Jesus from the major European monarchies and their colonies altered the dynamics of knowledge production and circulation across the Atlantic world. Particularly, Creole Jesuits expelled from the Spanish American provinces carried a heterogeneous body of locally rooted knowledge and practices, which, once recontextualised within the cultural and scientific milieu of the Papal States, generated new trajectories of transmission and re-elaboration in the Italian Peninsula.

This contribution examines the exile of Juan Ignacio Molina, a Creole Jesuit from Talca, Chile, who settled in Bologna in 1773. There, having cultivated an early interest in natural history, Molina published Saggio sulla storia naturale del Chili (1782; 1810), intervened in taxonomic debates, and promoted the introduction of Chilean plants and ethnomedicinal uses into Enlightenment Bologna, while his role as a private tutor enabled him to access learned circles – including the Accademia delle Scienze dell’Istituto.

Focusing on Molina’s engagement with contemporary botanical works, the analysis reconstructs the epistemological grounds of his discourses, situating them within broader debates on scientific authority and the value of first-hand observation. By examining how Molina drew on long-standing familiarity with Chile’s local ecologies, the contribution illustrates how he articulated a form of ‘distant empiricism’ that asserted the authority of lived experience despite the constraints of exile.
This perspective thus demonstrates how Molina’s activity in Bologna contributed to the botanical Enlightenment culture of the Italian Peninsula and mediated the circulation of local and Indigenous plant knowledge in an Atlantic dialogue between the Americas and Europe.

Author

• Morgana Lisi, University of Turin