ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Exotic Fruits and Contested “Firsts”: Horticultural Fame in Early Modern Europe

• In Event: Grafting Colonial Botanies

English Abstract

In the history of science and knowledge, the status of being “the first” is often controversial, especially when questions of gender and colonialism are involved. This paper examines one such case: the cultivation of a tropical fruit in the late Golden Age of the Dutch Republic. Among many newly introduced exotic plants and fruits, pineapples attracted particular attention from European enthusiasts. After Columbus’s second expedition encountered pineapples in the Caribbean, the fruit spread across tropical regions along routes of European expansion. Because the fruit was too fragile to survive the long voyage from the Americas to Europe, access to fresh pineapples remained limited to royals and to Europeans who travelled or settled in the East and West Indies.
In 1687, the Dutch woman Agnes Block (1629–1704) succeeded in cultivating a pineapple in her garden at Vijverhof, near Utrecht. To commemorate this achievement, she commissioned a family portrait and a portrait medal featuring a pineapple, and thus attempted to associate her posthumous image with the fruit. Around the same time, the Dutch botanist Johannes Commelin (1629–1692) also successfully cultivated a pineapple at the Hortus Medicus in Amsterdam. However, when we look at the entries on “ananas” in Philip Miller’s Gardeners Dictionary (1731) and in the Encyclopédie (1751) edited by Diderot and D’Alembert, a different name appears: Pieter de la Court van de Voort (1664–1739), a Leiden textile merchant and horticulturist.
This paper analyses accounts of pineapples and pineapple cultivation in printed works on botany and horticulture, mainly from England and the Dutch Republic between the 1680s and the 1750s. It shows how repeated references across books conferred fame on figures with wider social and textual networks, rather than accurately reflecting chronological priority or horticultural skill. In this process, information that authors considered peripheral was often simplified, misrepresented, or omitted, especially when it concerned women or colonial geographies.

Author

• Lynn Okamoto, The University of Tokyo