ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The “Spontaneous” Cultivation of Mushrooms in the 18th century

• In Event: Reconsidering Spontaneous Generetation

English Abstract

Since Antiquity, Dioscorides, Tarentinus, and other authors described how to grow a few varieties of edible mushrooms by cutting the bark of poplar trees and placing it in manure. This technique was refined and published in 1600 by French agronomist Olivier des Serres. However, several alternative techniques were known at the popular level, and even books of secrets described methods to grow mushrooms. Given this long tradition, most believed that mushrooms arose through spontaneous generation. However, in 1707, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort started from the description of the technique used by Parisian growers to argue that mushrooms grow from seeds. A few years later, Pier Antonio Micheli took inspiration from Tournefort for his experiments to prove the existence of mushroom’s seeds (today’s spores).
This talk explores the relationship between agricultural practices and scholarly understandings of mushroom generation. Although Micheli’s experiments are widely credited in histories of mycology with founding the discipline, the experiment described in his Nova plantarum genera (Florence, 1729) failed to conclusively prove mushrooms’ generation from spores. The debate over mushroom generation continued for more than a century, with references to farmers’ techniques invoked by both sides. The elusive nature of mushroom reproduction—even today humans cannot cultivate many species from spores, and their reproductive mechanisms remain incompletely understood—prompted questions about chaos, continuity and discontinuity in the scala naturae, while in the meantime mushrooms’ cultivation became business.

Author

• Barbara Di Gennaro, University of Bologna