Justin Begley (Helsinki/München)
Pre-Linnaean Plant Sexualities in England and France, ca. 1650-1720
10.02.2022
Ort: Historicum K 026
Zeit: 16-18 Uhr
My talk explores how the concept of plant sexuality developed in England and France from ca.1650-1720. In the extant historiography, Rudolf Jakob Camerarius, the Tübingen Professor of Medicine, continues to be credited with discovering plant sexuality and thus with paving the way for Carl Linnaeus to sever botany from its classical roots. But I argue in this talk that, far from a lone voice, Camerarius contributed to a live pan-European debate. While highlighting the sophistication of earlier ideas about plant sexuality, I also hope to show that it was far from evident to early advocates of a sexual model that sex would become the chief metric by which plants are classified.