ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Floral Messengers from Palestine: Biblical Plants as Spiritual Souvenirs and Scientific Specimens

• In Event: Plant Humanities 2 - Rethinking Scientific Collections: Herbaria and Exsiccata

English Abstract

Arrangements of dried, pressed plants were common souvenirs for pilgrims to the Holy Land in the late nineteenth century. Often labeled in English, French, German, or Russian, these souvenirs ranged from greeting cards garnished with ornate floral wreaths and Christmas hymns, to scrapbooks organized as exsiccatae of the species that appear in the Bible. These pressed plants are at once artisanal and mass-produced; material and spiritual; amateur, artisanal, and scientific. In fact, their nostalgic and affective value as devotional objects hinged on their creators’ careful engagement with botanical and scholarly authorities on the plants of the Bible, which informed their choice of specimens and their visual and textual curation. They contain the epistemic labor of men and women missionaries from the United States and Europe, of Palestinian shopkeepers, and of Palestinian fellahin who picked, dried, and arranged these flowers. Together, they show how a wide range of amateurs—Arab, European, and otherwise— collaborated in the centuries-long humanistic tradition of biblical natural history and in the pursuit of the biblical past in the modern, living landscape of Ottoman Syria and Palestine. Given the lacuna for the modern Middle East world in histories of natural knowledge, such collections are valuable sources for histories of Arab botany, for material and labor histories of science, and for complicating the so-called western “rediscovery” of Palestine in the nineteenth century by orientalists and biblical scholars.

Author

• Theo Detweiler, University of Cambridge