BEFORE VITALISM: LIBERTINE BOTANY AND THE NON-OBSCURE LIFE OF PLANTS

In this article, I investigate how much the understanding of plants in French Libertine culture somehow anticipated the vitalistic interpretation of nature as entirely endowed with sensation, perception, and cognition, something one may call protovitalism.Situated between the Renaissance naturalism of Telesio, Cardano, and Campanella (and also Cesalpino) and Glisson's hylozoism, Libertine botany conceived of plants as key figures to challenge the restrictions on living bodies of the more traditional order of nature. Exploring the cases of Guy de La Brosse and Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac's work, two different segments of Libertine culture, I uncover two meaningful interpretations of plant life as comprehensive and non-obscure, therefore subverting both the Aristotelian and the mechanical understanding of nature, suggesting plants as a crucial subject to build a more exhaustive and clearer knowledge of life on.