Herbaria as manuscripts: Philology, ethnobotany, and the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

While interest in early modern herbaria has so far mainly concentrated on the dried plants stored in them, this paper addresses another of their qualities - their role as manuscripts. In the 1670s, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646-95) spent several years in Ceylon (today Sri Lanka) as a medical officer in the service of the Dutch East India Company. During his stay he put together four herbaria, two of which contain a wealth of handwritten notes by himself and several later owners. First, it will be shown that these notes provide information on the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants in an overseas trading settlement. Hermann's botanical practice demanded and, at the same time, generated knowledge of Sinhalese (an Indo-Aryan language that is spoken by the largest ethnic group on the island) and its script. In his herbarium, observations on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese are inextricably intertwined with those of botanical nature. Second, on the basis of these voluminous notes, the character of early modern herbaria as manuscripts will be highlighted. And third, Hermann's herbaria will be integrated into an investigation of scribal practices and publication strategies of eighteenth-century botany. Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

Networked names: synonyms in eighteenth-century botany.

This paper addresses early modern botanical nomenclature, the practices of identifying and publishing synonyms in particular, as a collaborative "information science". Before Linnaean nomenclature became the lingua franca of botany, it was inevitable that, over time, the same plant was given several names by different people, which created confusion and made communication among botanists increasingly difficult. What names counted as synonyms and actually referred to the same plant had to be identified by meticulously comparing living and dried specimens of this and similar plants as well as relevant illustrations und descriptions in the botanical literature. Identifying synonyms required and generated an ever-expanding mass of data, which was used continuously to adjust and rearrange plant names. Despite the greatest care, judgements on synonyms were not definitive, which meant that published lists of synonyms for individual species of plants were in a state of flux and had to be constantly updated, corrected, and rewritten. This required long-term international collaborations, the accumulated results of which were not published once but consecutively, in augmented and corrected editions of a book. As a result of this networked approach, synonyms are networked names that reflect the epistemic interconnectedness of the botanical community. These questions will be discussed with a focus on the Dutch botanist Johannes Burman (1706-1779), who placed synonyms at the centre of his work as posthumous editor-and co-author-of the botanical manuscripts that were left behind by other botanists.

Linnaeus' restless system: translation as textual engineering in eighteenth-century botany.

In this essay, translations of Linnaeus' Systema naturae into various European languages will be placed into the context of successively expanded editions of Linnaeus' writings. The ambition and intention of most translators was not only to make the Systema naturae accessible for practical botanical use by a wider readership, but also to supplement and correct it, and thus to shape it. By recruiting more users, translations made a significant contribution to keeping the Systema up to date and thus maintaining its practical value for decades. The need to incorporate countless additions and corrections into an existing text, to document their provenance, to identify inconsistencies, and to refer to relevant observations, descriptions, and illustrations in the botanical literature all helped to develop and refine techniques of textual montage. This form of textual engineering, becoming increasingly complex with each translation cycle, shaped the external appearance of new editions of the Systema, and reflected the modular architecture of a botanical system designed for expansion.