Enfilade

From ArtHist.net:

Collecting, Growing, and Exploring in Early Modernity
EPHE Sorbonne, Paris 11 June 2024

Organized by Maddalena Bellavitis and Catherine Powell-Warren

Registration due by 6 June 2024

The last few decades have produced a number of studies devoted to the relationship between collecting and science, highlighting the relationship between a growing interest in botany and the fascination with the collection of naturalia, especially from the mid-sixteenth century onward. These objects of natural origins aroused the admiration of enthusiasts and scientists alike. Underexplored, however, is the extent to which collecting and scientific experimentation and exploration were related in the early modern period. Thus, this workshop aims to focus attention on the collections of naturalia, on the one hand, and on the attempts to grow exotic plants in Europe and the adventurous journeys that the search for tropical plants and animals they encouraged, on the other. To be included in the list of participants, please send an email to maddalena.bellavitis@gmail.com.

p r o g r a m m e

10.00  Morning Session
• Maddalena Bellavitis (Saprat, EPHE) and Catherine Powell-Warren (Ghent University/FWO) — Welcome and Introductions
• Marie Bigotte (Durham University) — Politics and Diplomacy in Early Modern Princely Garden Collections of Naturalia
• Madeline White (University of Oxford) — ‘Indian Maiz…in my Garden at Mitcham’: Global Networks, Local Gardens, and Oxford’s du Bois Herbarium
• Baijayanti Chatterjee (University of Calcutta) — The Foundation and Growth of the Calcutta Botanical Garden: Plant Collecting and Botanical Science under the East India Company, 1786–1815
• Anil Paralkar (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies, Ruprech-Karls-Universität Heidelberg, WittenLab, Witten/Herdecke University) — The Datura in Gottorf: Botanizing, Ethnographing, and Imagining India in 17th-Century Germany

13.30  Lunch

15.00  Afternoon Session
• Seán Thomas Kane (Binghamton University) — Cosmographic Singularities: André Thevet as a Collector of American Exotica, 1556–1590
• India Cole (Queen Mary University of London) — The Duchess of Beaufort’s Pioneering Collections
• Silvia Papini (Università di Firenze – Pisa – Siena) — Exploring Nature in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany: Mercantile Perspectives in the Late 17th and Early 18th Centuries
• Celia Rodriguez Tejuca (Johns Hopkins University) — Stabilizing Materials across Time and Space: A Natural History Cabinet in 18th-Century Havana

17.15  Discussion and Conclusions