ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Agricultural Instruments and Botanical Science in Renaissance Italy: The Knowledge of Rustics

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, I

English Abstract

In 1564, Milanese agronomist Agostino Gallo publishes his Le dieci giornate della vera agricoltura e i piaceri della villa, in which he provides a scientific framework to agriculture as a discipline. While this work draws from the tradition of Latin authors, such as Columella and Virgil, and the Medieval work of Pier de’ Crescenzi, Gallo provides some important novelties to the discipline. Indeed, the text reveals the importance of the expertise of rustics and how far scholars should interact with their wisdom, not only to identify plants, a practice that was already widespread in university teachings, but also in the cultivation, accommodation, and propagation of plants. Moreover, Gallo focuses attention on agricultural instruments, shaping this knowledge in a way that parallels the attention to instruments in Renaissance medical practices. While developing a comparison with the extant texts on agriculture of the time, and especially Anthony Fitzherber’s and Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s, in this paper I will shed light on the role of the trading zones between rustics and scholars in the foundation of agriculture, and how much this paved the way to the more theoretically grounded work of Giovanni Battista Della Porta and Francis Bacon, somehow influencing a new understanding of nature during the sixteenth century.

Author

• Fabrizio Baldassarri, University of Rome 3