The Epistemic Lightness of Botany: An Introduction

In this introduction, I provide an overview of a few shortcomings affecting plant knowledge in pre-modern European sciences. Due to its uncertain condition and to the epistemic lightness of botanical studies, botany was mainly a practical endeavour. Plant cultivation, circulation, exchanges and the production of materia medica prevailed in Renaissance study of plants, revealing the role of artisans and practitioners, while a more theoretical attention to plant classification remained in the background. Since no clear epistemology directed knowledge, sixteenth-century naturalists and learned scholars mostly benefitted from the work of skilled people about plant knowledge. A few challenges however unearth the growing role of scholars, as for instance these latter intervened to authenticate specimens, to define the correct methodology to study plants, and to expound the role of illustrations and observation. In this period, a more foundational challenge surfaces, concerning the epistemic definition of the essential characters of plants used to systematize plants. While in the sixteenth century Aristotelianism prevailed, the mechanical investigation of the inner structures of plants and the chymical experimentation on plant changes, transformations, adaptations and regenerations, namely, plant life, paved the way to the definition of a more precise epistemology in botany, resulting in botanical achievement of disciplinary status. Contributions to this volume deal with several aspects and challenges emerging in this long path, as linguistic shortcomings, problems in authenticating plants, efforts to establish networks of exchange and new geographies of nature, as well as the pursuits of new methodologies, artisanal technologies, and chymical experiments with plants paved the road to establish botany as a fully-fledged discipline.