Englisches Seminar, room 11
Analogies and Disanalogies in English Botanical Texts c. 1700
This talk investigates how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century botanists used analogies and disanalogies to transform understandings of the relationship between plants and animals. It argues, in particular, that the literary techniques that an early modern training in ancient logic and rhetoric imparted shaped the observations and argumentative strategies of botanists at the very moment that, it is often said, the Renaissance epoch of “similitudes” gave way to the “modern” use of more rigorous experimental methodologies. Analogies and disanalogies, in provoking fruitful debates about the relationship between better and lesser-known beings, were, I suggest, not only instrumental in the expansion of the botanical domain within the universities and scientific societies but also popular culture, allowing once-overlooked vegetables to be reimagined as highly complex beings: indeed perhaps more complex than certain animals (with serious implications for the scale of nature).
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