ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Hidden Botanical Cultures: Networks, Gender, and Exile in the Making of Botany in the Italian Peninsula (18th-20th centuries) | Sponsored by the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS)

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel is sponsored by the Italian Society for the History of Science (SISS).

The Italian historiographical trend in the history of botany has expanded substantially in recent years, with significant studies broadening its analytical scope and drawing renewed attention to the richness of botanical practices from the early modern period onwards. However, much remains to be explored, particularly concerning those considered as ‘hidden’ figures whose contributions have yet to be fully valued in the historiographical discourse.

This panel aims to offer new perspectives on the history of botany in the Italian peninsula by foregrounding people, exchanges, forms of knowledge, and practices that have received limited attention. By presenting a set of case studies that bring into view less visible yet highly revealing aspects of the peninsula’s botanical traditions, it illuminates the plural nature of botanical knowledge-making in Italy between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century.

The contributions trace a web of cultural, social, intellectual, and material interactions shaped by dynamics unfolding both within and beyond the peninsula, linking local practices to global scientific worlds. By exploring Chilean Jesuit knowledge reshaped in exile, the vast networks of Italian botany, the nineteenth-century debates over Rome’s ‘urban nature’, and the role of women in print-mediated worlds of floriculture, the panel uncovers a botanical culture marked by plurality, negotiation, and reconfiguration.

Together, these case studies recover a broader constellation of contributors and often-opaque networks through which botanical knowledge was constructed. Through a perspective attentive to networks, exile, and women’s participation, they also allow for a richer, more critical understanding of the history of botany in Italy between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Elena Canadelli, University of Padova

Individual Presentations

• Distant empiricism: Exile, local knowledge, and Chilean plants in Enlightenment Bologna - Morgana Lisi, University of Turin

• Exchanging knowledge and materials across Europe: The network of an Italian botanist between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - Martino Lorenzo Fagnani, University of Pavia

• 'Nudar di Poesia le venerande mura’: Elisabetta Fiorini Mazzanti and the defense of the Colosseum’s flora (1870-1878) - Federica Favino, La Sapienza University

• Cultivating knowledge: ‘Il Giardino Fiorito’ and women’s contributions to botanical worlds in the twentieth century - Federica Bonacini, Roma Tre University

Session Organizers

• Morgana Lisi, University of Turin

• Federica Bonacini, Roma Tre University