ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Death, Donation, and Demands in the Bunbury Herbarium: Curating Scientific Legacies in Natural History Collections

• In Event: Old Collections, New Stories:  Doing Natural History Humanities in Cambridge and Beyond

English Abstract

In 1887, Lady Frances Bunbury (1814–1894) began the process of donating her recently deceased husband’s herbarium to the University of Cambridge. By 1889, she had transferred sixty boxes of plant specimens once belonging to him, the Scottish botanist Charles Bunbury (1809-1886), from her Suffolk home to the University, complete with her own handwritten list of their contents. But – as this paper’s title suggests – her donation was not without conditions. Papers relating to the acquisition demonstrate that Lady Bunbury negotiated the labelling, storage, and display of the collection, right down to her preference for “wife” over “widow” on the brass plaque commemorating the donation. As Kate Hill’s Women and Museums (2016) has shown, women often used gifts to institutions for their own ends: collections memorialised loved ones, publicly codified relationships, and afforded women authority as guardians of an intellectual legacy.

The Bunbury Herbarium, I argue, should therefore be understood as more than just the residue of Charles Bunbury’s botanical career or a simple scientific collection: it is also the physical manifestation of Lady Bunbury’s will. Reading the collection alongside the detailed instructions she provided to its curators, this paper analyses how Lady Bunbury used the herbarium to carefully manage her husband’s reputation and immortalise her relationship to him – a wife rather than a widow. Simultaneously, however, the herbarium reveals another story. Though Lady Bunbury’s donation directed attention to her late husband, the specimens she collected reveal that Frances was far more than the wife she defined herself as: she was also an accomplished botanist. Close examination of the Bunbury Herbarium therefore reveals how the conventions of collection, donation, curation retain fragments of individuals’ agency, and sets about the task of putting them back together.

Author

• Grace Exley, University of Cambridge