On the Ironic Specimen of the Unicorn Horn in Enlightened Cabinets

This essay takes a material culture approach to the fate of the unicorn, that ultimate symbol of irrationality and credulity, in the natural history collection of the age of Enlightenment. Exploring the interplay between unicorn horns, narwhals, rhinos and other kinds of horn present in the eighteenth-century French collection, it shows that in fact unicorns never disappeared from the cabinet, but rather presided over new narratives of what Enlightenment was about. Further, it argues that this change in the status of unicorns was associated with changing patterns of the global whaling industry, which made narwhal horns widely available to Europeans, and the narwhal into a natural historical object. What real objects could, or could not, be represented in the collection as specimens had an important bearing upon the credibility of animal kinds outside the space of the cabinet, yet within that space, the juxtaposition and financial value of specimens produced important narratives of the relationship between horn specimens and natural species like rhinos and narwhals existing in the real world—species which never completely shed their fictive character, like the unicorn itself

Opium, Experimentation, and Alterity in France

AbstractThe effects and dangers of opium were subject to intense scientific scrutiny and experimentation in Paris in the decades around 1700, as rival networks of healers contended for commercial advantage over the compound drugs that contained it. Opium, widely consumed in the Ottoman empire, became a subject of European scientific interest in an attempt to render it safe, agreeable, and beneficial for European bodies. Apothecaries sought to resurrect an ancient drug and infuse it with new life in the laboratory; physicians conducted chemical experiments upon it. Yet it was hard to reach agreement as to opium's harmful or beneficial effects; some aspects of its nature proved impossible to ‘domesticate’ in the same way as other exotic drugs like coffee or tea, or even cinchona. I argue that only by investigating the discrete networks which sold and experimented upon opium can the historian account for the ways in which this drug generated social, political, and financial capital for experimenters as it circulated throughout society.Leverhulme Trust Research Project RPG-2014 'Selling the Exotic in Paris and Versailles

The production of a physiological puzzle: how Cytisus adami confused and inspired a century’s botanists, gardeners, and evolutionists

‘Adam’s laburnum’ (or Cytisus adami), produced by accident in 1825 by Jean-Louis Adam, a nurseryman in Vitry, became a commercial success within the plant trade for its striking mix of yellow and purple flowers. After it came to the attention of members of La Société d’Horticulture de Paris, the tree gained enormous fame as a potential instance of the much sought-after ‘graft hybrid’, a hypothetical idea that by grafting one plant onto another, a mixture of the two could be produced. As I show in this paper, many eminent botanists and gardeners, including Charles Darwin, both experimented with Adam’s laburnum and argued over how it might have been produced and what light, if any, it shed on the laws of heredity. Despite Jean-Louis Adam’s position and status as a nurseryman active within the Parisian plant trade, a surprising degree of doubt and scepticism was attached to his testimony on how the tree had been produced in his nursery. This doubt, I argue, helps us to trace the complex negotiations of authority that constituted debates over plant heredity in the early 19th century and that were introduced with a new generation of gardening and horticultural periodicals

Climate change and creolization in French natural history, 1750-1795

In eighteenth-century France, the term “Creole” applied to anyone born under a different climate from their parents. Unlike today, it had no additional significance in terms of racial origin. The term “race” itself was frequently deployed loosely and even interchangeably with “species” in the period. Its original meaning, denoting a breeding stock, remained dominant into the nineteenth century. This essay will suggest the importance of taking that continuity seriously, in order to avoid a terminological confusion which has caused key transformations in early modern uses of the term to be overlooked

Reenchanting the Enlightenment

In light of research which, since the publication of Rousseau and Porter’s Ferment of Knowledge, has demonstrated the continued centrality of magic and the occult to what may be termed “scientific knowledge” in the early modern period, this essay argues that one domain of practice where these concerns remained paramount well into the eighteenth century is the consumption of recipes. Whether exchanged between individuals or collected in print format, these mobile informational media relied on forms of proof underpinned by personal experience and collective accreditation, with an inductive and empirical focus that was distinct from Cartesian deduction. Because the culture of recipe exchange was so widespread, encompassing scholars, savants and lay readers, secrets offered ways to challenge strict mechanistic interpretations in favour of a view of the natural world as informed by unseen active powers, particularly where the virtues of materials such as magnets or medicinal simples were concerned. Using private library catalogues of book owners, a commonplace book and a scientific periodical produced in France during the decades after 1700, the article traces the way secrets culture continued to foster an epistemological space in which mechanical explanations evidently fell short of accounting for quotidian experience

Publishing virtue: Medical entrepreneurship and reputation in the Republic of Letters

A frequently recounted episode in the history of early modern medicine concerns the physician Adrian Helvetius’s introduction of ipecacuanha to French medical practice in the late seventeenth century, following his successful cure of Louis XIV’s son of dysentery using this medicinal drug. Yet to this day, the Helvetius story remains riven with contradictions, obscurity and confusion, even down to the nature of the drug involved. This article, challenging histories of “information” as homogeneous and neutral, explores the crafting of Helvetius’s reputation as physician and pharmaceutical entrepreneur through print and correspondence. Rather than seeking to establish a definitive account of ‘what actually happened’, it addresses the ways in which different media shaped and mediated the politics of knowledge surrounding Helvetius and his drug. Considerations of intellectual and commercial property inflected medical knowledge in different ways, producing distinct strategies of publicity. While Helvetius capitalised on courtly connections to promote himself and his drug, rivals eyed the Republic of Letters as an alternate route for establishing natural knowledge-claims. Yet the arch-newsmonger of the Republic of Letters, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, elected to preserve the connection between Helvetius and ipecacuanha in print. I argue that Leibniz’s actions stemmed from a view of the public domain which downplayed discovery and emphasised the disclosure of medical secrets in the public interest.Leverhulme Trust RPG 2014-289, “Selling the Exotic” Faculty of History, University of Cambridg

The Naturalist Collecting Community in Paris, 1760—1789: A Preliminary Survey.

Historical studies have usually separated collecting in the fine arts, where the focus is upon connoisseurs, amateurs and the art market, from that in the sciences, where instruments, cabinets and classificatory schemes have been of central importance. For the Renaissance, it has long been established that collectors of natural history were a subset of fine art collectors. But narratives of the later eighteenth century are dominated by the rise of the scientific institution, and few studies of natural history collecting outside institutions exist. What did the community of natural history collectors in late Old Regime France in fact collect? Who were these collectors? How did they understand the purpose of collecting itself? These questions, which can be explored using a range of sources including auction catalogues, guidebooks, travel accounts and inventories, take on added significance towards the end of the Old Regime within debates over the role of nature as the source of lasting and virtuous social order. In this essay, I will argue that an object-based approach to the history of collecting offers new possibilities for understanding natural history collecting as a way of connecting orderly minds and households to new concerns with governance and the nation. At the same time, this approach breaks down anachronistic divisions between ‘scientific’ and ‘amateur’ collecting in natural history, affording a new perspective upon the priorities, practices and approaches of institutional naturalists