Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme (éd.), Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledge

Linnaeus, natural history and the circulation of knowledge

Ed. Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme

Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment 2018:01

ISBN 978-0-7294-1205-6, xvi+274 pages, 10 illustrations, £75.00

The name of Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) is inscribed in almost every flora and fauna published from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. However, his rich legacy has been largely overlooked in recent scholarship. In this book a group of specialists argue for the need to re-centre Linnaean science and de-centre Linnaeus the man by exploring the ideas, practices and people connected to his taxonomic innovations.

Contributors examine the various techniques, materials and methods that originated within the ‘Linnaean workshop’: paper technologies, publication strategies, and markets for specimens. Fresh analyses of the reception of Linnaeus’s work in Paris, Königsberg, Edinburgh and beyond offer a window on the local contexts of knowledge transfer, including new perspectives on the history of anthropology and stadial theory. The global implications and negotiated nature of these intellectual, social and material developments are further investigated in chapters tracing the experiences and encounters of Linnaean travellers in Africa, Latin America and South Asia.

Through focusing on the circulation of Linnaean knowledge and placing it within the context of eighteenth-century globalization, authors provide innovative and important contributions to our understanding of the early modern history of science.

List of illustrations and tables

Preface

Notes on naming conventions

List of abbreviations

Introduction: de-centring and re-centring Linnaeus, Hanna Hodacs, Kenneth Nyberg and Stéphane Van Damme

1. Notebooks, files and slips: Carl Linnaeus and his disciples at work, Isabelle Charmantier

2. What is a botanical author? Pehr Osbeck’s travelogue and the culture of collaborative publishing in Linnaean botany, Bettina Dietz

3. The price of Linnaean natural history: materiality, commerce and change, Hanna Hodacs

4. In the name of Linnaeus: Paris as a disputed capital of natural knowledge (1730-1789), Stéphane Van Damme

5. On the use and abuse of natural history: Linnaean science in Kant’s Königsberg, Jonas Gerlings

6. The Edinburgh connection: Linnaean natural history, Scottish moral philosophy and the colonial implications of Enlightenment thought, Linda Andersson Burnett and Bruce Buchan

7. Negotiating people, plants and empires: the fieldwork of Johann Gerhard König in South and South East Asia (1768-1785), Niklas Thode Jensen

8. Lives of useful curiosity: the global legacy of Pehr Löfling in the long eighteenth century, Kenneth Nyberg and Manuel Lucena Giraldo

Summaries

Bibliography of works cited

Index

Parution de la Voltaire Foundation, dans la collection des Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment.

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