What Nature? Picturing Flora in Early Modern Europe and Japan

Early modern Europe and Japan, almost contemporarily and without mutual influences, witnessed the emergence of networks of scholars specialized in the study of nature, known in Europe as Natural History (either historia naturalis or one of its vernacular renditions) and in Japan as honzôgaku (usually translated as “materia medica” or “pharmacology,” but better described as “natural history” because of its broad scope). These fields of study initially emerged in the two historical contexts as sub-disciplines ancillary to medical practice, but in the course of the sixteenth (in Europe) and seventeenth (in Japan) centuries, they acquired institutional authority, large followings, a corpus of canonical texts, and elite patronage. Their practitioners possessed a consistent methodology of empirical observation and research and a specialized language which allowed them to produce sophisticated descriptions of the morphological, organographical, physiological, and anatomical aspects of plants and animals. In both Europe and Japan, these scholars were similarly involved in producing pictorial descriptions of plants and animals that often enriched texts with additional cognitive information. They mobilized professional painters and engravers to create images that were conceived as “true-to-nature” and aimed at taming nature’s variability to produce standard depictions of the various species of plants and animals. However, far from merely mirroring the physical aspect of plants and animals, these pictures contributed to inventing ideal standards of vegetable and animal species: they contributed to inventing a new idea of nature.
In my talk, I analyze two sets of pictures from the European and Japanese traditions of natural history and show how scholars that lived in different social and intellectual contexts developed new and revolutionary conceptions of “nature” and “reality” that, by the nineteenth century, evolved (in Europe) or merged (in Japan) into today’s natural sciences.