ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Species Identification and Literary Hermeneutics (1662-1749)

• In Event: Science and Literature

English Abstract

When a plant is described or alluded to, how can we positively identify that text with a species observed in nature? How can we be sure that it is the same plant? In modern botany, taxonomic standards have developed to aid that process—chief among them the collecting and preserving of specimens, accompanied by Linnaean nomenclature. But certainty was hard to come by for seventeenth-century botanists attempting to match textual description with nature. Textual descriptions were frequently ancient and literary. The proliferation of published botanical catalogues was accompanied by a proliferation of different names for identical species (botanical ‘synonymy’). My paper examines attempts to positively identify plant species mentioned in poetic contexts. What species, for example, was the “hyacinth” created by Apollo? Was Homer’s “Moly” a kind of garlic? This paper examines the epistemological status of these questions in the late 17th and 18th centuries, centring on two case studies: Abraham Cowley's extensively annotated Plantarum Libri Sex (1662-1667), and the translations and commentaries of Virgil’s Georgics and Eclogues (1741; 1749) by John Martyn, Professor of Botany in Cambridge between 1732 and 1762. Both cases demonstrate, in different ways, the relationship between identification and translation. Together they also reflect a form of realist hermeneutics that scholars such as Peter Harrison have linked to a distinctively Protestant approach to scripture during this period. My paper questions how far this interpretive framework can account for "species realism" in contemporary literary and classical contexts.

Author

• Bethany Kidd, UCL