ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Exchanging knowledge and materials across Europe: The network of an Italian botanist between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

• 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

Domenico Nocca directed the botanical gardens of the Gymnasium of Mantua and the University of Pavia for a total period from the early 1790s to the mid-1820s, passing through different political and social changes and working tirelessly to expand the botanical collections he was in charge of.

To this end, Nocca was able to weave a network of naturalists and agriculturists that stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to Central Europe (part of his training happened in Vienna). These contacts guaranteed him a constant flow of seeds, samples, texts and, more generally, scientific information, which he used in his writings and shared with others, emerging as a point of reference for the scientific community. This lively network of exchange complemented his teaching in Mantua and Pavia, but also his study and experimentation in the applied sciences, especially botany, functional to agriculture and manufacturing. Not without a polemical streak, his writings were published as textbooks, treatises, and articles in scientific journals.

My contribution aims to explore Nocca’s role as an essential hub in a network of contacts and exchanges that was created in those years as part of the connective tissue of the nascent modern scientific community. I will present an analysis of mainly unpublished manuscript sources to shed light on this not-very-well-known botanist.

Author

• Martino Lorenzo Fagnani, University of Pavia