TY - JOUR
T1 - Picturing Seeds of Poppies
T2 - Microscopes, Specimens, and Representation in Seventeenth-Century English Botany
AU - Eriksen, Christoffer Basse
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Copyright 2022 by Christoffer Basse Eriksen.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - The middle of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of botanical observation: Microscopical observations of seeds. Previously, naturalists had made observations of seeds to complete their description of plants published in herbals, but for the first generation of Royal Society microscopists-Henry Power, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew-seeds became the centre of attention. This essay details this transition in plant knowledge by zooming in on just one kind of seeds: The poppy seed. Poppy seeds were abundant in early modern England as they were found in fields, gardens, kitchens and pharmacies. They were also excellent specimens to look at through microscopes, but for different reasons. Focusing on pictorial representation, especially, I analyse the diverse ambitions behind Power, Hooke, and Grew's observations of poppy seeds, and how they used pictures to further these. The comparison of these three observations of the same specimen highlights the diversity of strategies for scientific representation in the early Royal Society while showing that intense, instrument-enhanced observation did not produce a stable epistemic object, but a multiplicity of epistemic images.
AB - The middle of the seventeenth century saw the emergence of a new kind of botanical observation: Microscopical observations of seeds. Previously, naturalists had made observations of seeds to complete their description of plants published in herbals, but for the first generation of Royal Society microscopists-Henry Power, Robert Hooke, and Nehemiah Grew-seeds became the centre of attention. This essay details this transition in plant knowledge by zooming in on just one kind of seeds: The poppy seed. Poppy seeds were abundant in early modern England as they were found in fields, gardens, kitchens and pharmacies. They were also excellent specimens to look at through microscopes, but for different reasons. Focusing on pictorial representation, especially, I analyse the diverse ambitions behind Power, Hooke, and Grew's observations of poppy seeds, and how they used pictures to further these. The comparison of these three observations of the same specimen highlights the diversity of strategies for scientific representation in the early Royal Society while showing that intense, instrument-enhanced observation did not produce a stable epistemic object, but a multiplicity of epistemic images.
KW - early modern botany
KW - microscopes
KW - seeds
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85124902110&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1163/18253911-bja10023
DO - 10.1163/18253911-bja10023
M3 - Journal article
AN - SCOPUS:85124902110
SN - 0394-7394
VL - 37
SP - 346
EP - 373
JO - Nuncius
JF - Nuncius
IS - 2
ER -