Early English Herbals, Knowledge Production, and Atlantic Empire

Herbals, encyclopedic volumes listing plants and their applications, are due for a reappraisal as windows into the boundaries and definitions of early modern science. Early seventeenth-century woodcut-illustrated herbals seem quaint in comparison to their successors, the Latin botany texts of the eighteenth century. Yet early modern “herbarists,” as the authors of herbals called themselves, pursued a bold, two-pronged agenda. They made scientific debates legible to a broad audience, while also participating in the production of English-language knowledge concerning new plants brought to England through global imperial exchange, a form of knowledge creation that I call “lived botany.” I read English herbals not merely as translations and abridgements of more complex scientific texts, but as dynamic sites where the botanical knowledge of ordinary English people was evaluated, incorporated into early modern science, and even enlarged. Vernacular knowledge was created by both men of science and common English people in ways that had deep repercussions for empire. As herbarists coined names in English for species recently introduced to England from the Americas, Asia, and other sites of European imperial expansion, herbarists helped create a national body of plant information that minimized ideas of global environmental difference and prepared non-elite English people for the work of colonizing new places and assimilating foreign plants and people. Consequently, herbals reveal how the fluid relationship between science and common knowledge in the early modern world was an important factor in the origins of Atlantic empires.