ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Lost knowledge in an early modern herbarium: Plant knowledge production practices by Hans Sloane and his contemporaries

• In Event: After Loss: Ephemeral Histories of Science and Technology 1 - Ephemeral Instruments of Knowledge

English Abstract

A collection of dried plants is a technology devised to support and inform the learning and production of botanical knowledge. However, herbarium collections also serve to restrict, efface or occlude plant knowledges, and can also be read as embodiments of what Londa Schiebinger has called the ‘culturally produced ignorances of nature’s body’.

By considering the vast herbarium of Hans Sloane (1660-1753) as a site in the history of ignorance, my paper will consider how, as a technology, such collections may provide evidence of uncertainty and ambiguity, and of inaccuracy and forgetting. At the same time, some knowledge within collections was deliberately obscured, and other plant knowledges never made their way to Europe, or were lost in translation.

Though the making of botanical knowledge in Europe was often dependent on Indigenous and enslaved expertise and intermediaries elsewhere in the world, herbarium collections and their associated archives contain little of the knowledges and ways of knowing of the communities from which specimens were sourced. In these collections, common plants from locations little-known by Europeans may be missing, and the uses of plants were barely noted.

This paper will highlight these silences in Sloane’s herbarium. It will draw attention to specimens with uses and cultural significance that were not recorded by collectors, and suggest how absences in the herbarium can point to plural ways of knowing.

Author

• Bradley Lewis Scott, Queen Mary University of London