Naming herbs in a pre-Linnaean culture

by | Feb 9, 2023 | Belfast Herbalist | 0 comments

Names are useful for the historian to work with—but they must also be associated with specific kinds of plants before classification can happen. Conferring names—the privilege accorded to Adam in Scripture—also confers the power to order, relate and manipulate, as early modern authors well understood. Prior to the universal scientific acceptance of Linnaean nomenclature, indeed before Linnaeus himself had published a single book, naming was not necessarily correlated with the identification of distinct species. Protestant naming projects like those of Carolus Linnaeus or John Ray seem to have been more likely to aim at enumerating individual species, each with their own essence, than Catholic ones, for which the genus was a more important epistemological unit. Our project studies the ways herbs were referenced in c.180 Francophone recipe books published between 1660 and 1730. This involves drawing up a list of searchwords—names used for herbs in this literature. These names can be further investigated using computer analysis: for example, to learn which plants were most often associated with one another in recipes, or which were associated with particular diseases. However, we’re keenly conscious of the way our decisions about what counts as a distinct ‘kind’ of plant in historical sources may be functioning to shape our conclusions. Read more at The Herbal History Research Network:

https://www.herbalhistory.org/home/naming_herbs_in_a_pre-linnaean_culture/

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