About the Event
Lauren Cannady is a scholar working at the intersections of art history, intellectual history, and environmental humanities whose research examines artistic production and taxonomies of knowledge in early modern Europe and colonial North America. With a PhD in Art History from New York University, her research has been supported by the Huntington Library, the Newberry Library, the Clark Art Institute, and the Deutsches Forum für Kunstgeschichte. She is co-editor of Crafting Enlightenment: Artisanal Histories and Transnational Networks (2021). Her most recent article, “On the Persistence of the Organic: The Material Lives of the Robinia pseudoacacia,” (2023) traces the environmental and social histories of European botanical colonialism through a North American tree species. She is completing a book on early modern patterned gardens as sites of knowledge production and transmission.
Lecture Abstract:
In his haste to be the first to taxonomize North American plant specimens in Pinax theatri botanici (1623), an expansive yet unillustrated work foundational to the emerging field of botanical systematics, the Basel physician and botanist Caspar Bauhin inevitably made mistakes. Lacking direct experience with many of the plants he taxonomized, he relied on secondhand reports from his personal network and vernacular garden catalogs, or “paper gardens,” produced by gardener-artisans, who were largely responsible for introducing and cultivating non-endemic American plants. Though these “paper gardens” differed in scale and ambition from Bauhin’s taxonomic treatise, they were nevertheless essential to his project. By comparing visual and textual descriptions of American flora newly planted in European gardens, this lecture will consider the ways that natural knowledge traveled differently in the early modern world.
Join us after the talk for a Q&A and reception. For catering purposes, please RSVP.
