In the early modern period, the fortunes of the word became closely connected to the milieu of naturalists without losing its original reference to a form of list or reference tool: *pinax* came to designate a catalog of names of plants, regardless of the criteria—if any—used for ordering. So was called the most influential (and probably also the first) work in this botanical genre: the *Pinax theatri botanici* by the Swiss Gaspard Bauhin, first published in Basel in 1623. (Not by accident, Bauhin had been professor of Greek at the university of that city before being appointed to the chair of botany and anatomy.) Bauhin's *Pinax* represented a relatively new way of dealing with the natural world: around 1550, botanical publications had been characterized by a claim to encyclopedism that was no longer tenable by the seventeenth century due to the surfeit of information on new plants. Although more than a century had by then elapsed since notice of a Western new world first began to spread throughout the continent, unheard-of species of plants still kept on reaching European shores. General or encyclopedic histories of plants in the fashion of, say, Leonhart Fuchs's *De historia stirpium* (1542) had become by Bauhin's time a nearly impossible task, at the very least as editorial enterprises. As Brian Ogilvie has argued, the quest for comprehensive, all-embracing approaches in botany was not abandoned: it took, according to him, the form of *pinakes*—that is, reference works listing and sometimes organizing into categories the names of plants.

Central to Bauhin's *Pinax*, therefore, is the problem of synonyms. Before Linnaeus succeed in imposing his system of nomenclature in the mid-eighteenth century, the same plants had often been described by various authors who had given to them different names in sometimes different languages; the establishment of correspondences tackling this "*confusio verborum*"—that is, identifying when, for instance, two names by two different authors were actually referring to the same plant—came then to be perceived by authors like Bauhin as a crucial preliminary step for any comprehensive endeavor in botany.<fnref n="71" /> The problem was one of identification: what Bauhin did in his *Pinax* was to offer a list with the names (including correspondences when these differed among authors for the same species) of all known plants, as well as precise bibliographical references to the authors and works these names were drawn from. Bauhin's *Pinax* stood as one of the cornerstones of the study of plants until well into the eighteenth century; by 1700, however, it was no longer up-to-date, to the point that the ambition of Plumier to

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Brian W. Ogilvie, “Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany: From ‘Historia’ to ‘Pinax,’” in *Pre-Modern Encyclopaedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1-4 July 1996*, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 89-99.</footnote>
compose a “new *pinax*” was by then far from original. Many were the naturalists who
then aspired to complete this noble project; one of the better known—and undoubtedly
one of the better placed financially to achieve it—was the English William Sherard (1659-
1728), a contemporary of Plumier and quite an influential figure in the world of botany.
A student of Tournefort in Paris in his youth, Sherard had good connections that earned
him the position of consul in Smyrna for nearly fifteen years. There, he amassed a
fortune and became, upon his return, a patron of noted naturalists such as the Italian
Paolo Boccone (of whom Plumier was a disciple in Rome), Sébastian Vaillant (the
publication of whose 1727 *Botanicon Parisiense* Sherard was closely involved with), or the
German botanist Dillenius (the first holder of the chair of Botany that Sherard endowed
at Oxford). As said, Sherard’s most ambitious plan consisted of completing, updating,
and even replacing Bauhin’s *Pinax*—which may well have been outdated by then, but still
offered the main intellectual framework for the study of the natural world. The project,
however, never came to fruition, despite his efforts and those of some of his *protégés*. By
the turn of the century, such a thoroughly encyclopedic impetus was probably only
achieved by the two thousand pages of John Ray’s *Historia plantarum*, which also aspired
to tackle the disorder reigning in botanical knowledge by offering an immensely erudite
catalog of all known plants, purified, so to speak, of all mistakes and repetitions.

If Plumier really aspired to compose a *pinax* "or general *recueil* of plants" during the
1680s, he was surely unaware of the real extent of the venture. Our friar was far from
being as well placed as Ray or Tournefort for collecting the colossal amount of
information required for such a project. As chance would have it, the opportunity of
joining a crown-sponsored journey to the French West Indies came up; in the end, his
relative celebrity would be built upon those islands' flora and fauna. Yet the spirit was
somewhat the same: to make an exhaustive natural inventory. For, at the time, making
natural history consisted to a large extent of crafting lists.

The lure of the list

Alongside a geographically delimited scope, the second important aspect of the
regional natural histories I reviewed above is that most of these local surveys actually
took the form of list-like inventories. Material practices of inventorying, such as the
making and collecting of lists and serial images, were salient in the project of natural
history by 1700. Among the works previously mentioned, those by Commelin, Ray,
Magnol, and Garidel consisted of single, alphabetically-arranged continuous lists.
Bauhin's, Tournefort's, and Sloane's catalogs (as well as the latter's *Voyage*) were also lists,
but organized according to other principles. Dillenius listed and described the species
and genera depicted on the plates of his catalogs on the floras of Giessen and Eltham. A
good case in point of the degree to which inventorying was a cornerstone of naturalists'
practices can be found in the account that John Ray gave of his 1663 tour through
Europe ("a Voyage beyond the Seas") in the company of three of his disciples. The
book, published ten years later, consisted of a five-hundred-page, blow-by-blow account
of the journey and more than one hundred pages of a "Catalogue of Plants not Native of
England, found Spontaneously growing in those Parts ["the Low-Countries, Germany,
Italy, and France"], and their Virtues." In the preface, however, Ray unabashedly
admitted that his initial plan was the publication of the catalog alone—the number and
diversity of plants found "exceeding my expectation," yet again. But "considering the
paucity of those who delight in studies and enquiries of this nature, to advantage the
Catalogue I have added thereto a brief Narrative of our whole Voyage."<fnref n="72" /> If we believe
Ray, then, this well-known account of his travel was but an editorial arrangement to have
his beloved inventory printed.

All in all, the materiality of the botanical text usually took the form of a list by
Plumier's time, along the lines of the earlier meaning of the Greek *pinax* as enumeration
or catalog. The originality of Plumier was his images. Written lists certainly pervaded his
manuscript papers and printed books alike, but it was through the iconographic form
that he set out to catalog nature from the very early project of a *pinax* or general history
of plants ("I had already a considerable number [of figures] drawn"). Nevertheless, it is
my contention here that Plumier's graphic seriality needs to be seen as part of a mode of
organization of knowledge in natural history that materialized also—and actually more
often—in other forms, such as the written list.<fnref n="73" />

The making and use of lists—and also, I will argue, of serial images—was
concomitant to the collective endeavor of information gathering and management. As
James Delbourgo and Staffan Müller-Wille recently reminded us, “no form of writing

<footnote n="72">⁷² John Ray, *Observations Topographical, Moral, & Physiological; Made in a Journey Through part of the Low-Countries, Germany, Italy, and France* (London: John Martyr, 1673).</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ The term “catalogue” referred by that time to specific forms of lists. Richelet, in 1680, defined it as a “list of several names in succession”; the Academy, by 1694, said a catalog was a “liste, denombrement,” and gave as examples the “catalogue des Saints” and that of a library: books and saints. The association of the notion of catalog with these two specific forms is not fortuitous: both library catalogs and martyrologies are probably among the oldest and surely among most popular forms of list genres. Just as catalogs and lists of plants, those of books and saints had the ambition of settling nomenclatures and limiting variety—identification and inventory.</footnote>
appears more matter-of-fact, unrhetorical, and innocent than the list.”<fnref n="74" /> Lists proliferated as a pervasive written device firmly tied to the accumulative logics of the culture of collecting across different fields, from natural history to antiquarianism. Their uses in Paris, for instance, ranged from inventories of the curiosities gathered in a cabinet to the enumeration of those cabinets to better inform curious people of the landmarks of the city. Stéphane Van Damme has shown that there was a proliferation of lists of antiquarians, bookstores, and scholars in Paris around the late seventeenth century. The practice of list-making connected scholarly activity to a geography of curiosities in the capital and grew more specialized as the eighteenth century progressed: Dezallier d’Argenville, the lawyer passionate for conchology, published in 1742 a list of the principal collections of natural history in the city, and the mathematician Jean Bernouilli gave in 1776 a *Liste des astronomes connus actuellement vivans* (List of the renowned astronomers currently alive), in which the reader found not only the scholars ordered alphabetically, but also their addresses.<fnref n="75" />

In the domain of natural history, lists materialized the need to cope with the perceived information overload resulting from the increase in the number of both new species and written accounts dealing with them.<fnref n="76" /> List-like paratextual devices, such as indexes and tables, became ubiquitous in books on botany and on the history of animals. Plumier’s *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* includes an “Index plantarum” and a “Table de plantes” listing alphabetically, in both Latin and French, the names of the plants mentioned in the work (including some that were not the object of a description and a plate): each of the entries refers to the page of text and, if any, to the engraving of the species in question. These two research engines (or rather a single bilingual one) is completed by a one-page “Table de matières” (Table of contents) that enumerates not the contents of the book, but a series of keywords arranged alphabetically and related to illnesses and disorders, from acid reflux to viper bites, that the listed plants served to treat, along with the pages of the book on which those plants were described. The *Traité*

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ James Delbourgo and Staffan Müller-Wille, “Introduction,” in “Listmania,” special issue, *Isis* 103 (2012), 711. Although not focused on the history of science, see also the interesting contributions in Gregorio Salinero and Christine Lebeau, eds., “Pour faire une histoire des listes à l’époque moderne,” special issue, *Mélagnes de la casa Velázquez* 44, no. 2 (2014), 9-179.</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ For the use of lists in the Parisian culture of collecting, see Stéphane Van Damme, “‘The World is Too Large’: Philosophical Mobility and Urban Space in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Paris,” *French Historical Studies* 29, no. 3 (2006), 287-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ On the use of lists in early modern botany, see Ogilvie, *Science of Describing*, 192 and 208; Cooper, *Inventing the Indigenous*, 74-5; Valentina Pugliano, “Specimen Lists: Artisanal Writing or Natural Historical Paperwork?,” *Isis* 103 (2012), 716-26; James Delbourgo, “Listing People,” *Isis* 103 (2012), 735-42.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_77.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.11. One of the indexes in the *Traité des fougères*: the specimens are listed alphabetically, with indications of the plate on which each is depicted and the page in which it is described. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

*des fougères de l'Amérique* also contained an “Index filicum et aliarum plantarum in America nascentium, quae in hoc volumine continentur” (Index of ferns and other American plants included in this volume), as well as its French counterpart (“Table des fougères et autres plantes de l'Amérique, qui sont contenuës dans ce Volume”) (fig. 4.11). The entries in both of these indexes referred the reader to, first, the plate on which the plant was represented and, second, the page of their written description. The same kind of index appeared in the *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera* (1703), also indicating page and plate in the volume for each genus.

Lists, usually of botanical names, were an equally central device in the manuscript workaday practices of the naturalist, from fieldwork to the cabinet.<fnref n="77" /> Tournefort’s teaching notes, for instance, contained interminable indexes of names: the extant drafts he used for his “botanical demonstrations” or lectures at the Jardin du roi in the year 1691 consisted, in fact, of long lists of plant names organized into thirty-one *démonstrations*. Each of them was accompanied by references to the authors who had

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ On lists in the field, see John Law and Michael Lynch, “Lists, Field Guides, and the Descriptive Organization of Seeing: Birdwatching as an Exemplary Observational Activity,” *Human Studies* 11 (1988), 271-303.</footnote>
previously designated and described those specific species, as well as marginal commentaries by the professor on, for instance, the etymological origins of the nomenclature used.<fnref n="78" /> The case of Tournefort offers a good example of the place that the making and managing of lists occupied in the manuscript economy of the scholar’s life: his papers contain, among other things, lists of correspondents living abroad or in the French provinces and their addresses, an inventory of his collection of portraits (in *grand and petit papier*), a “catalog of my books” organized thematically, different accounts of the expenses which he incurred during his herborizations in Spain, a good number of minute registers of the dried plants and seeds he sent to colleagues over the years (not only during his time in Paris, but also while journeying abroad), as well as a monthly household expense and an enumerative “state of my linen” (featuring, among other things, a couple of good damask tablecloths and no less than nine bedsheets).<fnref n="79" /> These disparate, mundane list-like documents highlight the centrality of recording and data management through paperwork in the daily life and work of the learned community— an aspect that has not yet received sufficient attention, partly because the notes and lists accumulated by these scholars have not survived to our day due precisely to their seemingly provisional nature.<fnref n="80" />

Although neither lists of portraits nor the “state of my linen” can be found among
Plumier’s papers, lists and list-like documents are pervasive in his naturalist work. To
start with, his books can be seen as a juxtaposition of various forms of lists. The friar’s
three printed botanical volumes—*Description, Traité des fougères, and Nova genera*—were
organized according to an identical serial structure: they were all composed of roughly
two parts, the first listing the descriptions of plants, the second gathering, in the same

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Tournefort, “Démonstrations botaniques,” BCMNHN MS 76.</footnote>

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Tournefort, “Régistre de Tournefort,” BCMNHN MS 253. The inventory of his book collection was devided in “Medici et ad rem medicam spectantes,” “Libri philosophi et Mathesim spectantes,” and “Libri miscellanei.” The lists of plant specimens send to colleagues in France and abroad were “Plantes seches que j’ay donné a Mr Maurin, docteur de la faculté de Paris,” “Semences que j’ay envoyé en Portugal à Mr Vannertinge marchand à Lisbonne sur la fin de janvier 1690,” “Semences que j’ay remis à Monsieur Breman apres mon voyage d’Espagne et de Portugal de 1 decembre 1689 sans conter celles que j’avois envoyé de Madrid et de Cádiz,” “Semences que j’ay envoyés a Monsieur Mappus professeur en botanique a Strassbourg le 25 mars 1690,” “Semences des plantes que j’ay envoyé à Monsieur Magnol a Montpellier 1683 le 25 7bre,” “Semences que j’ay envoyé à Mr Hermans professeur a Leyde le 6 janvier 1684,” “Semences reües de Dantzinc de Mr Breyn le 2 avril 1684,” “Semences receües de Leyde de Mr Hermans le 5 avril 1684,” “Plantes seches que j’ay envoyé au Pere de Beze de suite à Siam, 1687,” and “Semences envoyés à Mr Hermann professeur des plantes à Leyden 1690 le 5 janvier de Paris par la poste.”</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ The manifold documents by Tournefort mentioned here were bound after the professor’s death into a single volume (BCMNHN MS 253). Valentina Pugliano has addressed this sort of “practical scribblings, with a short life and rough immediacy” and, in particular, the specimen list: Pugliano, “Specimen Lists,” 716-26.</footnote>
order, the engravings illustrating them. The division into these parts was to a great extent
a printing commonplace for heavily illustrated books, especially when images were made
by means of copperplates rather than woodblocks, due to the division of labor in the
production of books rather than the wish of the author. (The printing of texts and
copperplate engravings required two different sorts of press and were consequently
carried out in different workshops—even when the books were produced in the very
same building, such as in the case of the Imprimerie royale.)<sup>81</sup> For this reason, finding
devices such as indexes, tables of contents, and catalogs in Plumier's books were placed
after the pages of text and before the plates, each of these two parts usually being printed
on different paper. The plates could potentially work as a *recueil* on their own,
independently from the textual part. Whether the choice of the author or an imposition
of the common usage in book production, the division of the books into text and images
made more evident the composition of these books as a juxtaposition of lists: there was a
series of written descriptions on the one hand, a series of engravings on the other, and an
array of indexes, tables, and catalogs (types of enumerations after all) between them. This
was the case of the *Description*: the preface was followed by a list of “authors quoted in
this volume,” the pages of descriptions, an index of plants in Latin, another in French, a
so-called “table of contents” (the said index of medical uses in actuality), and the series of
copperplates. The *Traité des fougères* was slightly more narrative—the preface was longer
(twenty pages), as were the descriptions—but the serial organization remained basically
the same: a first section enumerated short accounts of the medicinal properties of some
ferns, before turning to the series of botanical descriptions. In contrast to the *Description*,
however, the *Traité des fougères* was more strongly organized around the images: the object
of the written descriptions, for instance, was not the plants in question but the plates
themselves (the headings, in consequence, did not indicate the Latin or French name of
the species first, but the number of the engraving; furthermore, some of the descriptions
were not narrative, but consisted of a further level of lists enumerating and identifying
the different figures included on the plate). The *Nova genera* followed this structure, too:
the list of genera descriptions (each of which was followed by another enumeration of
the species comprised by that genus) was mirrored by the series of engravings, both parts
of the book being separated by an index and a catalog of American plant species.

<footnote n="81">81 For more on the production of Plumier's printed books, see below, chap. 5. On the division of labor between typographic and copperplates printers, see Roger Gaskell, "Printing House and Engraving Shop: A Mysterious Collaboration," *The Book Collector*, 53 (2004), 213-51.</footnote>
The juxtaposition of list-like structures was by no means limited to the printed medium. Consider now the “Synopsis botanica,” Plumier’s manuscript volume analyzed in the previous chapter: it was accompanied by an incomplete index of the botanical genera inventoried in it, each entry referring to the pages in question and, in only some cases, to the plates.<fnref n="82" /> The “Synopsis botanica” was actually bound together with three other unrelated documents (also by the hand of Plumier) in a single red morocco codex with the coat of arms of Napoleon I on the spine: whether gathered in the nineteenth century or not, the various documents in the volume are also a good example of the role that inventory-making played in the manuscript natural historical work of the Minim.

The first of these documents, with the title of “Botanicon parisiense” (Parisian
herbal), consists of an alphabetical list of plant species that runs for twenty-one pages in
two columns and encompassed references to the taxonomic literature. Unsurprisingly,
the works quoted in these included Bauhin’s *Pinax*, Tournefort’s *Institutiones*, Clusius’s
*Rariorum plantarum historia*, de l’Obel’s *Icones stirpium*, and Dodoens’s *Stripium historiae
pemptades* (e.g., “Angelica pratensis, Apii folio inst.,” or “Daucus vulgaris Clus. Hist.
CXCVIII”). A small slip inserted between pages announces that the plants in the
“Botanicon Parisiense” had been observed by Tournefort around Paris. The list,
however, did not appear in Tournefort’s *Histoire des plantes des environs de Paris* (1698), but
in one of the best-known works by Sébastian Vaillant, bearing the same title as Plumier’s
manuscript document: Vaillant bequeathed the draft of his herculean *Botanicon Parisiense*
to Hermann Boerhaave, who edited and published it for the first time in 1723. The list in
Plumier’s manuscript can be found in extended form in Vaillant’s book, and other
handmade copies other than Plumier’s have also been conserved, which suggests that the
inventory of plants elaborated by Vaillant (perhaps in collaboration with Tournefort)
largely circulated in manuscript form and in different states of composition during the
decades prior its publication—and that our friar copied it in whole or in part.<fnref n="83" />

The “Botanicon parisiense” was followed in the volume by two so-called
dictionaries (fig. 4.12). The first, an eight-page “Dictionarium Gallicum Plantarum Agri
Parisiensis” (French dictionary of plants in the Parisian countryside) in two columns,

<footnote n="82">⁸² BCMNHN MS 10, “Synopsis botanica.”</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 1r-12r: “Botanicum parisiense, seu catalogus plantarum quas in agro parisiensi circa [illegible] parisiense observarut Clarissimus D. Joseph Pitton Tournefort Academia Regiae Scientiarum Socii et in horto regio professoris regius Botanices anno [illegible]” Tournefort, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris*; Sébastian Vaillant, *Botanicon Parisiense*. *Operis majoris prodituri prodromus* (Leiden: apud P. Vander Aa, 1723). Apart from Plumier’s, there are other two manuscript copies of the “Botanicum parisiense” in the BCMNHN: MS 1178 by Bernard de Jussieu and MS 1449, also by Vaillant.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_78.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.12. Dictionaries gathered in the manuscript volume of the “Synopsis botanica.” They offered equivalences between French and Latin of species and genera names, including references to the authors from which those names were drawn. Dictionaries of botanical names such as this one were a crucial reference tool in the work of naturalists by 1700. For Plumier, this may also have been a device to find his way through his couple of thousands of images of plants, which were usually labelled with the names he gave to them. (Bibliothèque centrale de Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

gave the compound Latin equivalents (with the usual bookish references) of French names for botanical species (e.g., the *asperge*, or asparagus, was the Latin “asparagus sylvestris, tenuissimo folio” and referred to “Pin. 490,” or Bauhin’s *Pinax*, page 490). This was followed by a thirteen-page “Dictionarium Generum Plantarum Latino-Gallicum et Gallico-Latinum” (Dictionary of plants’ genera Latin-French and French-Latin), offering a double set of equivalences from one language to the other, and vice-versa (e.g., the Latin “Auricula ursi” was the French “Oreille d’ours,” and the French “Echalotte” corresponded to the Latin “Cepa alcalonica”).

The “Synopsis botanica,” the lengthiest document of the volume (303 pages), was in itself a list of numbered, short, and distinct descriptions (up to 806) of botanical genera, each of them accompanied by a hand-made drawing, frequently on the opposite page, of their most distinctive parts, most usually the flowers and seeds. After the “Synopsis” came two reference documents: a 307-page list of species organized by their classes—
and, in all probability, partly drawn from Tournefort's *Institutiones*<fnref n="84" />—and a seven-page index of the plants' genera illustrated in the “Synopsis” and referring to the page of the manuscript on which the image of each genus was to be found.<fnref n="85" />

Indexes and “dictionaries” are ubiquitous in printed and manuscript catalogs of plants, such as those by Plumier and other contemporary naturalists. Bauhin’s catalog of Basler plants included a fifteen-page index listing the names of the genera and the pages on which they were enumerated; Dillenius’ book, a two-page index; and Ray’s third volume of the *Historia plantarum* proudly announced on its title page that “a copious index of genera is added to summarize the work” (*addito ad Opus consummandum Generum Indice copioso*). Tournefort’s *Élémens* encompassed two indexes, one in Latin and one in French, with references in each entry to page and plate. The Latin extended edition of the book, published six years later as *Institutiones rei herbariae*, incorporated four of them: a Latin index of subjects to the “Isagoge re herbariam” (the introduction to botany printed at the beginning of the first volume) including authors (e.g., “Fuchsius,” “Plumerius”), parts and typologies of plants (e.g., “corona,” “flos monopetalos”), and general topics (e.g., “leges in generum institutione servandae”); two indexes of botanical genera (with references to pages and plates), one in French and another in Latin, and an index of name equivalences. It is worth pausing on this last finding device in Tournefort’s *Institutiones*: this seven-and-a-half list in two columns at the very end of the book bore the title “Index nominum plantarum, quae in propriis locis quaeri debent,” or “index of plant names that have to be sought in a particular place.” The list gave the reader the equivalences, in Tournefort’s nomenclature, of those plants that had received different names by other authors. Take the case of Tournefort’s *Mitella*, an American genus whose name Linnaeus kept and we still use nowadays. The *Mitella* had received a series of quite varied names before Tournefort: *Sanicula* or *Cortusa* by Denis Joncquet or Christian Mentzel (the latter drawn from Theophrastus), *Orleana* or *Orellana* by Paul Hermann, *Uracu* by Piso, *Medicina tingendo apta* by Hernández, and *Roucou*. All these denominations were listed in the alphabetical index, and each referred the reader to the same page: that on which the *Mitella* (Tournefort’s name) was described. To put it another way,

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 205r-357r. Apart from the “Synopsis botanica,” this is the only text signed by Plumier, on page 357r: “Frater Carolus Plumier Minimus B.[otanico] R.[egio] Parisiis. An.[us] D[omi]ni. 1703,” after a quotation from Daniel 3:76 used in the Catholic canticle Benedicite: “Benedicite universa geminantia in terra Domino” (Everything growing on the earth, bless the Lord).</footnote>

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 358r-361r: “Index Generum Plantarum prior numerus genera cum figuris, secundus vero genera cum speciebus, indicant.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_79.png" /></figure>

Fig. 4.13. Annotation at the bottom of one of Plumier’s drawings reading “Ammis majus C.B. pag. 159,” in reference to Gaspard Bauhin’s *Pinax*, page 159. Note also Plumier’s signature (“Fr. C. Plumier Minimus B[otanicus] R[egius]”). In the large majority of his drawings, the plants or animals are identified by name and by abbreviated references to the authors from which these names were drawn. (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, Paris.)

Tournefort was aiming here at making his nomenclature the definitive one, and imposing it upon all his predecessors. The obscure field of botanical nomenclature was, as we will see below, a scientific battlefield.

Tournefort’s “Index nominum plantarum, quae in propriis locis quaeri debent” is also a good case in point for understanding the place that material techniques such as list-making occupied in the work of natural history around the turn of the eighteenth century. Finding devices of the kind that I have reviewed here (tables, indexes or the so-called “dictionaries”) were usual paratextual tools in early modern scholarly publications, as Ann Blair has proven.<fnref n="86" /> These devices were also to be found in manuscript media, where they served the naturalists’ goal of managing the increasing flow of available information that came from overseas. More important, it allows us to relocate Plumier’s series of drawings into the broad context of the material practices of inscription by which European scholars around 1700 undertook the herculean project of making a comprehensive inventory of the natural world.

Tournefort’s index also points towards the philological aims of botany at the turn of the century, an aspect of this story that we have been encountering all along this chapter. Here again the opposition of texts and images is deceptive: names were at the very center of the naturalist’s vocation, also for one as skilled in drawing as Plumier. Virtually all of the friar’s images, manuscript and printed alike, included a written inscription indicating the name given to it, and a reference to the scholar from whom he had drawn the

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Ann Blair has largely been the moving force behind the renewed interest in the material techniques of information management in the early modern scholarly world. For her study on finding devices in early modern reference genres, see her *Too Much To Know*, 132-60.</footnote>
appellation, when he did not invent it himself (fig. 4.13). These inscriptions were by no means extraneous to the images: they demonstrate not only the central purpose of the images themselves, but also the function that Plumier's archive as a whole aimed at fulfilling in the study of the natural world. It is time now to turn to names.

## The infinity of names

"So many false genera! So many bad names! So much confusion!" complained Linnaeus in 1737.<fnref n="87" /> The sort of naming used by naturalists like Plumier, Tournefort, or Sloane was the main feature of early eighteenth-century botany against which Linnaeus furiously reacted thirty years later. Consider, for example, Plumier's discussion of a species of Lonchitis (a fern) in his *Traité des fougères*:

Mr Pluk.[enet] doubts whether or not this Lonchitis [called by Plumier *Lonchitis pulvurenta*, *pinnulis obtuse dentatis*] is the same Plant as the one he calls *very beautiful rock Fern with pointed leaves, or Capillary from Madeira with Fern-like leaves, and small, whitish stem* [in his] Almag.[estum] Bot.[anicum (1696)] [page] 150 & [the] phytog.[raphia] Plant.[arum] [*Phytographia, sive stirpium illustrium & minus cognitarum icones* (1691)] [page] 204. fig. 4. I rather think that this Lonchitis is the plant that he names *Fern from Jamaica, non-branchy, cut in the front with eared leaves, & with a root in small filaments*. Almag. Bot. 150. & phytog. Planche 283. fig. 1. The pinnules of this do not truly seem serrated as the pinnules of the one with which I deal, perhaps due to the smallness of the figure or to the fact of having been drawn from a dried plant in which the serration [of the leaves] is no further recognizable as a result of the alteration.<fnref n="88" />

This was the usual disquisition that one could find in written descriptions of plants, both in printed and manuscript form, by Plumier and the large majority of his contemporary fellow botanists. The fragment touches on several major trends in the work of botany around 1700. To start with, it shows that botanical names at that time were much more descriptive than nominal, as expressed by Tournefort in the notes for

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Carl Linnaeus, "Ratio operis," *Genera plantarum eorumque characteres naturales secundum numerum, figuram, situm, & proportionem omnium fructificationis partium* (Leiden: Apud Conradum Wishoff, 1737), translated by Staffan Müller-Wille and Karen Reeds, "A Translation of Carl Linnaeus's introduction to *Genera plantarum* (1737)," *Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences* 38 (2007), 566.</footnote>

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ Plumier, *Traité des fougères de l'Amérique / Tractatus de filicibus Americanis* (Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1705): "Le Sr Pluk. doute si cette Lonchite ne seraoit pas la mesme Plante que celle qu'il appelle *tres belle Fougere des rochers à feuilles pointuës, ou Capilaire de Madere à feuilles de Fougere, à tige menuë blanchastre*. Almag. Bot. 150. & phytog. Plant. 204. fig. 4. Je croirois plûtost que cette Lonchite est la plante qu'il appellee *Fougere de la Jamaique non rameuse, découpée assez avant par des feuilles oreillées, & dont la racine en gazon pouße plusieurs pedicules*. Almag. Bot. 150. & phytog. Planche 283. fig. 1. Veritablement les pinnules de celles-cy ne paroissent pas dentelées comme les pinnules de celle dont je traitte, peutestre à cause de la petitesse de la figure, ou pour avoir esté dessinée après quelque plante désechée, dont les dentelures ne paroissent plus par l'alteration qui y est survenuë."</footnote>
his teaching at the Jardin du roi: “the names of plants are also definitions in which we signify first the genus and then the difference of each plant in particular.”<fnref n="89" /> Before Linnaeus’s binomial system began to reign, botanical names were not limited to a fixed number of words: it adopted on occasion gargantuan lengths that made it all the more difficult to establish equivalences between the different denominations given to them by different authors.<fnref n="90" />

This is the second point that this fragment by Plumier showcases. A crucial part of the work of the naturalist was by then of a “philological” character, so to speak: it crucially required drawing correlations between different authors and collating written and graphic information to establish clear botanical identities. John Ray voiced such concerns in a letter to Sloane in 1696, asking for his help with determining equivalences between some species described by Plukenet that “are not referred to F. Plumier’s” and those in Sloane’s own inventory of Jamaican plants: “I find such a multitude denominated of Jamaica that I am quite confounded with them, and unable to reduce them (I mean so many of them as are probably the same) to those of your Catalogue.”<fnref n="91" /> Botany at Plumier’s time was not so much a problem of classification as one of identification and inventory. It is by considering the issue of naming that we can fully understand the role that Plumier aimed his images to fulfill in securing natural historical knowledge across distance.

Issues of inventory and identification troubled a field busy puzzling out not only how many separate plants there were, but also how many were actually already known. For the naturalist, the central problem of the work with names was, therefore, as bookish as it was empirical: to correctly establish correspondences between different languages and even, or especially, within the very same language.<fnref n="92" />

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Tournefort, “Demonstrations botaniques,” BCMNHN MS 76, unpaginated: “Les noms des plantes sont comme autant de définitions, dans lesquelles on exprime d’abord le genre et ensuite la différence de chaque plante en particulier.”</footnote>

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ For Lorraine Daston, “the shift between the prolixity of the Parisian botanists to the parsimony of Linnaeus”—in other words, the evacuation of details from natural historical description—“is emblematic of a far broader transformation in the ideals and practices of scientific description that curred circa 1660 and 1730.” Namely, a shift in the meaning of what a “fact” itself was and from “local specificity” to the “laborious project of universalizing nature.” Lorraine Daston, “Description by Omission: Nature Enlightened and Obscured,” in *Regimes of Description: In the Archive of Eighteenth Century*, ed. John Bender and Michael Marrinan (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 11-24.</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, July 22, 1696, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 298.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² Peter N. Miller has recently reminded us about the power of names, especially of proper names, in historical research and history writing in his brilliant *Peiresc’s Mediterranean World* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 20-3 and 143-52.</footnote>
A good example of the salience of the lexical component of the practice of natural history is the 1682 index of botanical names composed by Prussian physician Christian Mentzel (or rather by his son, on whom he imposed this monumental task so to have him learn botany) with a fanciful Greek title, *Πίναξ Βοτανώνυμος Πολύγλωσσος Κατολικός*, or “Universal polyglot botanical dictionary.” Menztel was probably as right as immodest when remarking that “this work is really necessary,” for it provided naturalists with a formidable three-hundred-page list of plant names’ correspondences across different languages and the bookish references for each of them—the *Lonchitis*, if we want to take an example dear to our friar, was the Latin name first found in Pliny and known in English as “splenewort,” in Italian as “lonchite,” and in “Belgian” (i.e. Dutch) as “Brachtvaaren.”<fnref n="93" /> Most of the time, though, the problem was not the equivalences across different languages, but within Latin itself—or within the same language, for that matter. This was the important challenge that lay behind Plumier’s cumbersome paragraph on the *Lonchitis*, as well as his manuscript dictionaries of species and genera names bound together with the “Synopsis botanica.” Equivalences of botanical names were a fundamental tool in the making of the knowledge of plants, and a major feature of the technical literature of the field since the early eighteenth century. Tables of “synonyms” were visibly advertised in the title pages of catalogs of regional floras. Bauhin’s catalog of the plants growing around Basel was announced to come “with their synonyms, and the places in which they can be observed, so as to serve for the medical school that is in Basel” (*cum earumdem Synonymiis & locis in quibus reperiuntur: in usum Scholae Medicae, quae Basileae est*), and offered for each of the species listed the potential alternative naming given by other authors (e.g., “Chamaemelum inodorum: Chamomilla fatua & 4. Trag. Buphthalmum, Fuch. Cotula, Tab. alba non foetida, Dod.,” in reference to the names given to the same species by Hieronymus Bock, aka Tragus; Leonhart Fuchs, and Rembert Dodoens).<fnref n="94" /> Similarly, the third volume of John Ray’s *Historia plantarum* (1704) promised on its title page to come “with necessary synonyms” (*cum synonymis necesariis*) to identify identical species that had been named differently.<fnref n="95" /> The same equivalences were

<footnote n="93">⁹³ Πίναξ Βοτανώνυμος Πολύγλωσσος Κατολικός [Pinax Botanonymos Polyglottos Katholikos] *Index nominum plantarum universalis* (Berlin: Officina Rungiana, 1682), sig. a-r-v.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Bauhin, *Catalogus plantarum circa Basileam*, 41;</footnote>

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ Ray, *Historia plantarum*, vol. 3, eg. 541: “Apocyno affine Gelseminum Indicum hederaceum tetraphyllum, folio subrotundo acuminato, *Sloan. Cat. Jamaic*. Clematis quadrifolia, flore Digitatis luteo, claviculis aduncis *Plumier* P. 80. Fig. 94. Clematis Myrsinites amplioribus foliis Americana, fortè Tetepoteiba Brasiliensibus seu Vitis arbustiva *Pis*. p. 250. An Clematis tetraphylla alia pulcherrima ex Guyana *Breyn*. prod. 1, p. 30?”</footnote>
announced in Hans Sloane's 1696 catalog of Jamaican plants ("with their synonyms, and the places where they grow," *cum earundem Synonymis & locis natalibus*): Sloane's work organized the items into broad categories (e.g., *Arbores flore à fructu sejuncto*, or "Trees with flowers separated from the fruit"), and devoted exhaustive paragraphs, sometimes page-length, to enumerating the synonyms in the existing literature for every species.<fnref n="96" />

Tournefort stated the importance of the naming of plants very clearly in his *Élémens de botanique* (1694), where he laid the ground for his proposed "method to know plants": "Botany, or the Science treating Plants, has two parts that need to be differentiated with care: the knowledge of plants, & that of their virtues." The first "is precisely to know the names that have been given to [plants] in relation with the structure of some of their parts." This structure, he continued, "is the basis of the character that distinguishes in essence one plant from another. The idea of this character has to be inseparably linked to the name of each plant."<fnref n="97" /> Tournefort reiterated these views four years later in his history of Parisian plants, and this lexical component of natural history came down to Linnaeus who, as ever with him, put it resolutely: "he is *botanist* who knows to call similar vegetables with similar names and distinctly different plants with distinctive names, intelligible to everyone."<fnref n="98" /> Yet this approach to botany was far from undisputed, at least outside of the realms of the scholarly world. The second edition of Furetière's dictionary put very clearly that "a person who contents himself with knowing the name of plants is just half a *Botanist*," for a proper student of flora is the one who not only is "devoted to the knowledge of plants," but also to their uses "for the healing of illness."<fnref n="99" /> The definition, certainly not by a practitioner of natural history, highlights the conflicting views of botany as either subordinate to medicine or as a field in itself. It confirms nonetheless the correlation announced by Tournefort, and crucial at the turn of the century, between the knowledge of plants and that of their names. At a more basic level,

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Sloane, *Catalogus plantarum quae in Insula Jamaica sponte veniunt*, eg. 196. Yet another example of contemporary work with synonyms can be found in James Petiver, "A Catalogue of Some Guinea-Plants, with Their Native Names and Virtues," *Philosophical Transactions* 19 (1695-1697), 677-86.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ Tournefort, *Élémens*, 1: "La Botanique ou la Science qui traite des Plantes, a deux parties qu'il faut distinguer avec soin: La connaissance des plantes, & celle de leurs vertus. / Connoître les plantes, c'est précisément savoir les noms qu'on leur a donné par rapport à la structure de quelques-unes de leurs parties. Cette structure fait le caractère qui distingue essentiellement les plantes les unes d'avec les autres."</footnote>

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Tournefort, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris*, sig. a4r; Linnaeus, *Genera plantarum*, trans. in S. Müller-Wille and K. Reeds, 565.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots François, tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et des arts*, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Arnoud & Reinier Leers, 1701), vol. 1, 256-7: "Botanist. s. m. Celui qui s'applique à la connaissance des plantes, & qui s'en sert pour la guerison des maladies: car une personne qui se contente de çavoir le nom des plantes, n'est Botaniste qu'à demi."</footnote>
it reflects that the work with names was indeed one of the central components of botany (although sometimes a disputed one).<fnref n="100" />

So it was for a naturalist like Plumier. Naming—that is, determining the names already given to plants and establishing new denominations for unknown species—was not only a central practice of his work as a naturalist, but also one firmly tied to the function that he intended his printed and manuscript images to fulfill. For the case of our friar, two aspects of this tie between the practices of naming and image-making need to be stressed. The first is related to the material practices of storing and managing memory (and consequently order): naming, listing, and stockpiling visual depictions played a tightly interdependent role in this respect. The second has to do with naming as a double-edged instrument of credit: new names (and new images) for previously unseen plants were used as dedicatory offerings, as much as they turned into disputed means for establishing one's own authority. I turn now to these two problems.

## Material practices of memory

Behind the knotty question of naming lay the problem of order in natural history. Engulfed by the anxiety of an immensely varied and often seemingly patternless flora and fauna, naturalists in the late seventeenth century became increasingly unsatisfied with unordered and merely cumulative descriptive approaches. Although a key component of natural history by 1700 was of a bookish nature (as I examined in chapter 1), scholars located the origins of this perceived information overload in their fabled turn of attention from the little books of men to the great Book of Nature. For the anonymous reviewer of Tournefort's *Institutiones* in the *Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences*, this was one of the pitfalls of modernity in the field: when “reason came finally back to the world with the Sciences,” he declared, naturalists began “to study Nature as much as Books, & to seek Plants in the countryside”; but then, he went on, “Botany immediately became more extended, & it augmented from day to day,” to the point that “this immense quantity of Plants, all different from each other, began to overwhelm Botanists.” Interestingly, this issue was not perceived as just a theoretical puzzle, but also (in fact, mainly) as a practical pickle. The anonymous author made this point clear: “What

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ The preocupação for etymology was far from limited to the field of natural history. In antiquarianism, for instance, it was just as central and controversial a point as it was in the study of flora and fauna. Montfaucon, for instance, discussed the concern for naming in antiquarian studies, which he branded as “rarely necessary, and most of the time frivolous, as well as one of the main reasons for too many and too long writings on that subject.” Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée et représentée*, iv.</footnote>
memory could suffice for so many names, or retain all the new names that were needed?”<fnref n="101" />

Naming, especially of genera, was intertwined with the practicalities of memorial or archival practices in natural history—that is, of storing and managing natural information. Even before Linnaeus’s two-part (genus-species) system of nomenclature was widely adopted, naming functioned as a means for arranging the information accumulated. “The distribution of Plants in their genera facilitates their naming,” wrote the anonymous reviewer quoted above: “They have first the generic & common name, to which those specifying them is added, so that their name is a sort of definition.” Fontenelle (perhaps the author of the review) gave a similar perspective in his panegyric to Tournefort: the latter’s system was meant to alleviate the burdened memory of the naturalist, for “what if one should learn immediately those 8,846 species” hitherto inventoried by the professor, “& with all the different names Botanists amuse themselves with giving to them?”<fnref n="102" /> The method allowed “to put order into the prodigious number of Plants, spread so confusedly on Earth . . . and to distribute them into Genera, & Species, so as to facilitate its knowledge, & prevent the memory of the Botanist to be overwhelmed by the weight of an infinity of different names.”<fnref n="103" /> Fontenelle’s assertions on order and method as relievers of memory in botany echoed ideas that were conventional at the time in the world of scholarship by and large. The Swiss theologian Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736) famously referred to memory as a “Treasure or Store-house” in a little book on commonplace writing and keeping published by John Locke. In it, Le Clerc advised the reader that, “lest the Memory should be Oppressed, or Over-burthen’d by too many Things, Order and Method are to be called in to its Assistance.”<fnref n="104" />

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, année 1700. Avec les Mémoires de Mathématiques & de Physique, pour la même Année, 2nd ed. (Paris: chez Gabriel Martin, Jean-Baptiste Coignard & Hippolyte-Louis Guerin, rue S. Jacques, 1761), 71: "Il n'étoit pas possible qu'enfin la raison ne revint au monde après les Sciences. On se mit à étudier la Nature aussi-bien que les Livres, & on osa chercher les Plantes dans les campagnes. Aussitôt la Botanique devint plus étendue, & elle s'accrut de jour en jour. / Mais d'un autre côté cette immense quantité de Plantes toutes différentes les unes des autres, commença à accabler les Botanistes. Quelle mémoire pouvoit suffire à tant de noms? où prendre même tous les nouveaux noms dont on avoit besoin?"</footnote>

<footnote n="102">¹⁰² Fontenelle, "Éloge de Tournefort," 143.</footnote>

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” in Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences. Année MDCCVIII (Paris: par la Compagnie des Libraires, 1708), 147-8: “il est fait [the book of the Élémens] pour mettre de l’ordre dans ce nombre prodigieux de Plantes, semées si confusément sur la Terre, & même sous les Eaux de la Mer, & pour les distribuer en Genres, & en Especes, qui en facilitent la connaissance, & empêchent que la memoire des Botanistes ne soit accablée sous le poids d’une infinite de noms differens.”</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Jean Le Clerc, “Monsieur Le Clerc’s Character of Mr Lock’s Method with his Advice about Use of Common-places,” in John Locke, *A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books* (London: printed for J.</footnote>
Francis Bacon is probably the best known of those who thought about the connection between memory and natural history. In *The Advancement of Learning* (1609), he associated the main divisions of knowledge that he had defined with the principal human faculties or “the three parts of Man’s Understanding”: poetry to imagination, philosophy to reason, and “History to his Memory.”<sup>105</sup> It was precisely in this work that Bacon offered one of the most famous and longstanding conceptualizations of natural history and indicated the place it should occupy in the general economy of knowledge.<sup>106</sup> In Bacon’s thought, natural history played a foundational role for the whole architecture of natural knowledge: from the subordinate position in which Bacon perceived it had hitherto been with respect to natural philosophy (the knowledge of the causes of natural phenomena), natural history was rather to be thought of as its unavoidable foundation, its “primary matter.” For Bacon, the reason for this lay in natural history’s object (i.e. natural “facts,” understood as nuggets of experience) and method (based on observation and description of particulars and their subsequent cataloguing and organization). It was only on the grounds of this collection and classification of secure material that the interpretative and generalizing powers of natural philosophy could work.<sup>107</sup> As pointed out by Ann Blair, “for Bacon, the sheer bulk of accumulation was a valuable step on the path toward mastery and knowledge of nature”—whether by means of objects or data.<sup>108</sup>

The perception of an information overload distressing so many naturalists by 1700 was, therefore, the unavoidable corollary of an understanding of natural history as formulated by Bacon. But for natural history to be the basis of natural philosophy, it required some methodical ordering, rather than an arbitrary gathering of particulars.<sup>109</sup>

<footnote>Greenwood, 1706), i-ii. On this text by Le Clerc, see also Richard Yeo, *Encyclopedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 112n46.</footnote>

<footnote n="105"><sup>105</sup> Francis Bacon, *The Advancement of Learning*, in *The Works of Francis Bacon*, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D. Heath, 14 vols. (London: Longmans, 1857-74), vol. 3, 329-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="106"><sup>106</sup> On the role of natural history in Bacon’s thought, see Paula Findlen, “Francis Bacon and the Reform of Natural History in the Seventeenth Century,” in *History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 1997), 239-60. Compare with Peter Anstey, “Francis Bacon and the Classification of Natural History,” *Early Science and Medicine* 17, no. 1-2 (2012), 11-31. Bacon’s woks, however, offered neither a totally new and revolutionary definition of natural history, nor a single and coherent one, as argued by Dana Jalobeanu, “Francis Bacon’s Natural History and the Senecan Natural Histories of Early Modern Europe,” *Early Science and Medicine* 17 (2012), 197-229.</footnote>

<footnote n="107"><sup>107</sup> Alexis Tadié, *Francis Bacon. Le continent du savoir* (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2014), 92-4. In Bacon’s thought, however, natural history and philosophy were not as hermetically distinct as disciplines as it has sometimes been suggested: see Anstey, “Classification of Natural History.”</footnote>

<footnote n="108"><sup>108</sup> Ann Blair, *The Theater of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 227-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="109"><sup>109</sup> Bacon, *Novum organum*, in *The Works of Francis Bacon*, 127: “First of all, we must prepare a *Natural and Experimental History*, sufficient and good; and this is the foundation of all. . . . But [it] is so various and</footnote>
Apart from a cognitive capacity, memory (the human faculty associated with history) was an array of material practices.<fnref n="110" /> Among these, the making of written lists and series of images were closely intertwined in Plumier’s series of drawings and copperplates. For late seventeenth-century authors like him, then, the problem that we would now be tempted to define in terms of natural classification was, first and foremost, an issue of practical information management. This came out in print with a particular intensity. Denis Dodard voiced the question in the preface to his *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes*. The book, published in 1676 (that is, eighteen years before Tournefort publicly announced his system in the *Élémens*), was conceived as the first of several illustrated volumes on the history of plants, but the author acknowledged that “we cannot yet say in which order are we arranging the Plants; whether we are following the order of letters [alphabetical], of genera, of flavors, of the main virtues, of some principal circumstances, or of their shapes, or of the most considerable of their parts, such as the seeds, in line with the opinion of Cesalpino and Prospero Alpini.”<fnref n="111" /> Plumier also had to face the practical problem of ordering plants in print when composing his *Description*, and he solved it following his own intuition: “I divided this volume in three groups [genres] of plants; the first in *Ferns, Hermionites, Polypodes, Hart's Tongues & Capillaries*; the second in *Arum & Dracontium*, & the new genus of *Saururus*, & the third in *Periploques*, that is, in plants that climb to trees.”<fnref n="112" />

<footnote>diffuse, that it confounds and distracts the understanding, unless it be ranged and presented to view in a suitable order. We must therefore form *Tables and Arrangements of Instances*, in such a method and order that the understanding may be able to deal with them.”</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ For a convincing case about the role of different media of communication (i.e. speech, visual images, and written texts) in practices of knowledge and memory, see Fernando Bouza, *Comunicación, conocimiento y memoria en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII* (Salamanca: Seminario de Estudios Medievales y Renacentistas, 1999), which has appeared in English translation as *Communication, Knowledge, and Memory in Early Modern Spain*, trans. Sonia López and Michael Agnew (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press, 2004). On the link between memory and inscription, I found useful the reading of Roger Chartier’s *Inscrire et effacer. Culture écrite et littérature (XIᵉ-XVIIIᵉ siècle)* (Paris: Le Seuil, 2005), as well as his reading of Ricoeur in “Memory and Writing,” in *The Author’s Hand and the Printer’s Mind* (Cambridge: Polity, 2015), 123-34. For the link between memory, paperwork, and natural history in particular, see Richard Yeo, “Between Memory and Paperbooks: Baconianism and Natural History in Seventeenth-Century England,” *History of Science* 45 (2007), 1-46.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ Denis Dodart, *Mémories pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des plantes* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1676), 52: “Nous ne pouvons encore dire selon quel ordre nous rangerons les Plantes; si nous suivrons l'ordre des lettres, des genres, des saveurs, des principales vertus, de quelques circonstances principales, ou de leur figure, ou des plus considerables de leurs parties, commes les graines, suivant la pensée de Caesalpinus & de Prosper Alpin.”</footnote>

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Plumier, *Description*, sig. [A4v]: “Enfin j’ay divisé ce volume en trois genres de plantes; le premier en *Fougères, Hermionites, Polypodes, Langues-de-cerf & Capillaires*; le second en *Arum & Dracontium*, & en ce nouveau genre de *Saururus*, & le troisième en *Periploques*, c’est-à-dire, en plantes, qui montent en grimpant sur les arbres.”</footnote>
In the wake of Tournefort’s method for the ordering of botanical names, Plumier understood such a distribution of vegetable species into broader groups primarily as a way of comforting the distressed memories of naturalists and readers: what the ordering of species into genera (and then into classes) offered was clarity. Rather than the quest for what Linnaeus would eventually call a “natural system” of classification, order in Tournefort’s method (and in Plumier’s practice) was oriented towards the organization of the information collected.<fnref n="113" /> Plumier was not far from this line of thought when he upheld, in the preface to the *Description*, his having created new species and genera names: “I decided, *for the greater satisfaction of curious people*, to arrange [these plants] under known genera and to give them Latin names according to their genera.”<fnref n="114" /> Similarly, around the same time, Ray praised Sloane for having “done botanists [a] great service in distributing or reducing the confused heap of names, and contracting the number of species.”<fnref n="115" /> The French word *méthode*, used by Tournefort to define his system (“Méthode pour connoître les plantes”) was actually associated at the time with the idea of ordering for better knowing, and defined as a “rule, ... [an] art to arrange things in a way *so that they can be understood more easily*, either to discover the truth when this is unknown to us, or to prove it to others.”<fnref n="116" />

Then, how was one to order plants? For Tournefort and those who espoused his system (like Plumier), “it is absolutely necessary to combine into groups those plants which resemble one another, and to separate them from those which they do not resemble. This resemblance [*ressemblance*],” continued Tournefort, “should be deduced solely from the closest sign of a relationship, i.e., from the structure of one of the parts of the plant, and must pay no attention to more distant signs of relationship that can be found between certain plants, such as the possession of similar [medicinal] virtues, or the place in which they grow.”<fnref n="117" /> (fig. 4.14)

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ This hinges on the distinction between “artificial” and “natural” methods of classification, first established by Linnaeus and developed later by—a distinction that did not exist in Plumier’s time. On these prickly questions, see two classics: Daudin, *De Linné à Lamarck*, 19-33; Phillip R. Sloan, “John Locke, John Ray, and the Problem of the Natural System,” *Journal for the History of Biology* 5, no. 1 (1972), 1-53, and Staffan Müller-Wille, “Systems and How Linnaeus Looked at Them in Retrospect,” *Annals of Science* 70, no. 3 (2013), 305-17.</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v-a4r]: “J’ay voulu aussi, pour la plus grande satisfaction des curieux, les ranger sous des genres connus, & je leur ay donné des noms Latins convenans à leurs genres.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, June 23, 1696, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 295-6.</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Furetière, *Dictionnaire*, vol. 2, sig. [Xxxxx4r]: “Méthode. s. f. Regle; art de disposer les choses d’une manière qu’on les puisse faire comprendre avec plus de facilité; soit pour decouvrir la verité quand nous l’ignorons, soit pour la prouver aux autres.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, 13, trans. Sloan, “Natural System,” 40.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_80.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.14. "Elementary table of botany," probably made during the late eighteenth century (it was among the papers of Antoine-Laurent Jussieu). The table visually compares Linnaeus' and Tournefort's systems of botanical classification through the main categories on which they were based. For Tournefort, the convenience of a system was partly that "the study of plants does not tire the imagination when undertaken with method." (Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

For those accepting these premises, visual representation would prove particularly useful for the cataloging of closely resembling species—say, ferns. Ferns were Plumier's signature plant: not only were they the exclusive subject of his *Traité des fougères* (a unique work of its kind, for it seems that no other book of such characteristics devoted to a single sort of plant was ever published before),<fnref n="118" /> but also most of his previous *Description* was devoted to these vegetables; the empire of ferns extended also beyond his printed volumes, and Lister noted that, in 1698, ferns were undoubtedly "of all others the most numerous" among the hundreds of drawings collected by the friar in his Parisian cell.<fnref n="119" /> Plumier overtly used the term (*fougères* in French, *filix* in Latin) to designate not only

<footnote n="118">¹¹⁸ The only one similarly specialized that I could find is John Ellis's *An Essay Towards a Natural History of the Corallines* (London: printed for the author, and sold by A. Millar, 1755).</footnote>

<footnote n="119">¹¹⁹ Lister, *Journey to Paris*, 74.</footnote>
those specifically known as ferns and encompassed within a single genus, but also flowerless plants by and large. <fnref n="120" /> He referred specifically to those plants included in Tournefort’s sixteenth class, the one concerning “herbs of which we do not know their flowers”—one of the professor’s two hodgepodge classes jumbling plants that daringly escaped his classificatory commandments, based on the flowers. <fnref n="121" /> Furthermore, because of their close resemblance, ferns were complicated plants for establishing genera, if not species themselves. (One of Ray’s preoccupations, as we saw earlier, was about collating Plukenet’s Jamaican ferns with those described by Sloane and Plumier, for he believed Plukenet had been confusing different specimens with separate species.) <fnref n="122" />

Visual representations allowed naturalists to better determine the differences between species, thus enabling them to clearly arrange them into separate groups and to name them accordingly. The order of nature was, in the hands of a naturalist like Plumier, the order of images. <fnref n="123" /> Indeed, the arrangement of the *Traité des fougères* was not entirely random: the copperplates (and, therefore, the species themselves) were organized into a series of consecutive genera: *Filix* (ferns strictly speaking), *Lonchitis*, *Trichomanes*, *Polypodium*, *Adiantum*, *Lingua cervina*, *Hemionitis*, *Osmunda*, and *Ophioglossum*. (The whole was closed by a number of fungi and mosses—for, after all, they had no flowers either.) Interestingly, Plumier determined the ascription of plants to each genus by means of their physical appearance (*le port de chacune*). The friar criticized Plukenet (who begins to look like a rather scorned authority as far as ferns are concerned) for having confused all genera under the all-embracing umbrella of “ferns,” because “nature,” said Plumier, “has distinguished all these plants in their particular appearances” (*par des ports tous particuliers*). In

<footnote n="120">¹²⁰ He made this clear in the preface of his *Traité des fougères*, v: “J’ay cru ne pouvoir donner à mon livre un meilleur titre que cely qu’il porte, non pas que je n’y traite specialement que du genre propre des Fougeres, j’y parle aussi des autres contenus dans la seizième classe des Institutions Botaniques que j’ay crû pouvoir comprendre sous le titre general des Fougeres, puisque la nature les a fait naître toutes avec le même caractère de ne produire aucune fleur, & de ne donner que des semences; outre que les Fougeres proprement appellées Fougeres sont la partie la plus noble de cette seizième classe, comme en étant le premier genre & les plus remarquable de tous.” For the sixteenth class, see Tournefort, *Élemens*, 22, 428-38.</footnote>

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ Linnaeus also kept a residual grouping for cryptograms, or plants that have neither fruits nor seeds: Lisbet Koerner, *Linnaeus: Nature and Nation* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 15.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, July 22, 1696, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 298, and Margócsy, *Commercial Visions*, 52-3. Ferns would also become controversial later in the study of fossils, as Juan Pimentel kindly pointed out to me: on this, see Martin J. S. Rudwick, *The Meaning of Fossils: Episodes in the History of Paleontology* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985 [1976]), 83-6, 145-9; Rhoda Rappaport, *When Geologists Were Historians, 1665-1750* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 215, and Rudwick, *Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geobistory in the Age of Revolution* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005), 64, 262-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³ Compare with Linnaeus’s case as studied by Staffan Müller-Wille and Isabelle Charmantier, “Natural History and Information Overload: The Case of Linnaeus,” *Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences* 43 (2012), 4-15, as well as their “Carl Linnaeus’s Botanical Paper Slips (1767-1773),” *Intellectual History Review* 24, no. 2 (2014), 215-38.</footnote>
this, he avowedly followed Ray and Tournefort, who established “as many genera as different appearances there are.”<fnref n="124" />

In his preface to the *Description*, Plumier summarized the main problems reviewed above regarding the inventorying of a far-flung flora: “I do not pretend at all,” the friar went on, “to take the due glory away from those authors who wrote about American plants before me. I have greatly benefited from their knowledge; but I think the reader would be pleased to find [the plants] arranged into known species and genera of Botany, for most of [those authors] have not given to these plants other names than those in the vernacular of those countries, which makes very difficult their identification for those who have never seen them in nature.”<fnref n="125" /> A naturalist like him, exploring the largely untapped natural world of the French Caribbean islands, was directly confronted by the naming of plants that were either poorly familiar or altogether unknown: “I was forced, however, to establish new genera for some particular plants, for there were not known genera in which I could include them.”<fnref n="126" /> Novelty sprang up as an issue to tackle, but also as an opportunity for social and intellectual credit.

## Plants as instruments of credit

When new genera had to be invented, new names for them were required. The void left in nomenclature by new species of plants was soon seized by naturalists as an opportunity for advancing their social and intellectual authority. This was seemingly not yet in Plumier's mind at the time of his *Description*, in which he grouped some unknown species of fern into some inventive but forgettable genera, such as the “*Saururus*,” because they resemble the tail of a lizard, and *σάβρος* means *liżard*, & οἶρα means *tail*.”<fnref n="127" /> By the turn of the century, however, the naming of new genera appeared to him as a potential tool for intellectual authority. A stunning case in point is Plumier's *Nova plantarum genera*.

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, v-vi: “le sieur Plukenet sans distinction d’aucun port les unes d’avec les autres, à confondu presque tous les genres de cette mesme classe sous ce nom général de *Fougeres*. . . . Mais puisque la nature a bien voulu distinguer toutes ces plantes par des ports tous particuliers, je trouve la conduite de Messieurs Tournefort & Ray bien meilleure, lorsqu’ils ont établi autant de genres differens qu’elles ont de differens ports entr’elles.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v-a4r]: “Je ne pretends point oster aux Auteurs qui ont écrit avant moy des plantes de l’Amérique, la gloire qui leur est deuë. J’avouë que j’ay profité de leurs lumieres; mais comme la pluspart n’ont donné les noms de ces plantes, que dans le langage vulgaire de ce païs-là, ce qui fait que ceux qui ne les ont jamais veuës en nature ont beaucoup de peine à distinguer de quel genre elles sont, je crois que le Lecteur me sçaura quelque gré de les avoir reduites sous des genres & sous des especes connuës dans la Botanique.”</footnote>

<footnote n="126">¹²⁶ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a3v-a4r]: “J’ay pourtant esté obligé d’établir un nouveau genre pour quelques plantes particulières, n’en trouvant point de ceux qui sont connus, sous lequel je pusse les ranger.”</footnote>

<footnote n="127">¹²⁷ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a4r]: “je leur ay donné le nom de *Saururus*, à cause de leur ressemblance avec la queue d’un lezard, car *σάβρος* signifie *leżard*, & οἶρα signifie *queue*.”</footnote>
*Americanarum* (1703), the book in which the friar announced the new botanical species he had discovered in the West Indies throughout his three journeys. In it, Plumier organized these plants into 106 genera, a good number of which were also new and thus innominate. He explained his naming choices in the Latin preface to the volume:

> In favor of both curious people and botanists, I have assigned known genera to plants that were uncertain according to the disposition of their flowers and fruits, and adopting either the nomenclature (*nomenclatura*) already given by botanists of the Indies in their books, or creating a new one from the names of famous botanists and botany-lovers (*Botano-philorum*), for Justice so wills it that men worthy of praise shall outwit death and be crown with laurels for their merits.<fnref n="128" />

Indeed, Plumier drew a good number of names from either scholarly or popular nomenclature already in use (fig. 4.15). He used Native American or even Asian names for thirty-five of the genera. Some of these denominations had already been consecrated by authors, mainly Piso and Marcgraf, but also Oviedo, Hendrik van Rheede, Clusius, and Giacomo Zanoni; some others were in common usage among Spanish settlers (*Hispanicum seu apud Hispanicus Americam incolentes vulgare*), natives of the islands like the Caribs (*Americanum apud Caribas vulgare*), or Europeans (*satis apud Europam notum*).<fnref n="129" /> The friar also invented a few metonymical appellations, such as with the abovementioned *Saururus* (or lizard-tail), and the *Bucephalon* (from the Greek βοῦς, ox, and κεφαλὴ, head, due to the resemblance of part of the flower with two horns). But about two thirds of the genera names in the volume (sixty-nine out of the hundred-odd) were derived “from the names of famous botanists and botany-lovers” (*ex celebriorum quorumdam Botanicorum, aut Botano-philorum nominibus*). For each of them, Plumier gave a paragraph-long biographical note after the list of species included in each genera.

<footnote n="128">¹²⁸ Plumier, *Nova genera*, sig. a3r: “Libuit itaque curiosorum & Botanicorum ergo, plantas incertas certis generibus insignire, iis characterem generis ex florum, & fructuum constitutione imprimendo, ac nomenclaturam generum, partim ex Indicorum Botanicorum Libris, partim etiam ex celebriorum quorumdam Botanicorum, aut Botano-philorum nominibus desumendo; sic namque potenti placitum justitiae, dignos laude viros chartis vetare mori, ipsorumque comamingere quaesita meritis lauro.” The expression “potenti placitum justitiae” comes from Horace’s *Odes* (2:17 addressed to Maecenas), as well as “comam lingere quaesita meritis lauro” (3:30).</footnote>

<footnote n="129">¹²⁹ Namely *Caraguata*, *Mangles*, *Tapia*, *Caapeba*, and *Cururu* are borrowed from Piso; *Arapabaca*, *Inca*, *Nhandiroba*, *Cuiete*, *Camara*, and *Iabotapita* from Marcgraf; *Cainito*, *Guazuma*, *Ceiba*, *Guanabanus*, and *Mamei* from Oviedo; *Isora* and *Kodda-pail* from the *Hortus malabaricus*; *Persea* from Clusius; *Bonduc* from Zanoni, and *Palma*, *Karatas*, *Roioc*, *Musa*, *Vanilla*, *Guaiacum*, *Calaba*, *Sapota*, *Icaco*, *Monbin*, *Courbaril*, *Arachidna*, *Mançanilla* and *Hypericoides* from commonly used names.</footnote>
<table><caption>Fig. 4.15. Botanical dedications by Plumier in his Nova plantarum americanarum genera (Paris: Jean Boudot, 1703).</caption><thead><tr><th>Name of the genus</th><th>Dedicatee</th><th></th><th></th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1. Borbonia</td><td>Gaston d'Orléans (1608-1660)</td><td>35. Cortusa</td><td>Giacomo Antonio Cortuso (1513-1603)</td></tr><tr><td>2. Guidonia</td><td>Guy-Crescent Fagon (1638-1718)</td><td>36. Alpina</td><td>Prospero Alpini (1553-1617)</td></tr><tr><td>3. Pittonia</td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708)</td><td>37. Gesnera</td><td>Conrad Gessner (1516-1565)</td></tr><tr><td>4. Brassaca</td><td>Joseph de La Brosse (1586-1641)</td><td>38. Columnea</td><td>Fabio Colonna (1567-1650)</td></tr><tr><td>5. Ximenia</td><td>Francisco Ximénez (1666-ca.1729)</td><td>39. Caesalpina</td><td>Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603)</td></tr><tr><td>6. Hernandia</td><td>Francisco Hernández de Toledo (1514-1587)</td><td>40. Besleria</td><td>Basilius Besler (1561-1629)</td></tr><tr><td>7. Pistonia</td><td>Willem Piso (1611-1678)</td><td>41. Dorstenia</td><td>Theodor Dorsten (1492-1552)</td></tr><tr><td>8. Margravia</td><td>Georg Marggrave (1610-1644)</td><td>42. Castora</td><td>Castore Durante (1529-1590)</td></tr><tr><td>9. Coa</td><td>Hippocrates of Cos (ca.460-ca.370 BC)</td><td>43. Gerardia</td><td>John Gerard (1545-ca.1612)</td></tr><tr><td>10. Eresia</td><td>Theophrastus of Eresos (ca.371-ca.287 BC)</td><td>44. Barleria</td><td>Jacques Barelier (1606-1672)</td></tr><tr><td>11. Dioscorea</td><td>Dioscorides (ca.40-ca.90 BC)</td><td>45. Bontia</td><td>Jacobus Bontius (1592-1631)</td></tr><tr><td>12. Plinia</td><td>Pliny the Elder (23-79 AC)</td><td>46. Cornutia</td><td>Jacques-Philippe Cornut (1606-1651)</td></tr><tr><td>13. Vaidia</td><td>Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557)</td><td>47. Iau-Raia</td><td>John Ray (1627-1705)</td></tr><tr><td>14. Ruellia</td><td>Jean du Ruel (1474-1537)</td><td>48. Seyania</td><td>Philippe Sergeant (n.d.)</td></tr><tr><td>15. Brunsfelsia</td><td>Otto Brunfels (1488-1534)</td><td>49. Pereskia</td><td>Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637)</td></tr><tr><td>16. Cordia</td><td>Valerius Cordus (1515-1544)</td><td>50. Baconia</td><td>Paolo Boccone (1633-1704)</td></tr><tr><td>17. Tragia</td><td>Hieronymous Bock, aka Tragus (1498-1554)</td><td>51. Morisona</td><td>Robert Morison (1620-1683)</td></tr><tr><td>18. Fuchsia</td><td>Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566)</td><td>52. Suriana</td><td>Joseph-Donat Surian (d.1691)</td></tr><tr><td>19. Rondelietia</td><td>Guillaume Rondelet (1507-1566)</td><td>53. Rotalnia</td><td>Paul Reneaulme (1560-1624)</td></tr><tr><td>20. Turneria</td><td>William Turner (d.1568)</td><td>54. Zanonia</td><td>Giacomo Zanoni (1615-1682)</td></tr><tr><td>21. Matthiola</td><td>Pier Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577)</td><td>55. Magnolia</td><td>Pierre Magnol (1638-1715)</td></tr><tr><td>22. Maranta</td><td>Bartolomeu Maranta (1500-1571)</td><td>56. Breynia</td><td>Jacob Breyne (1637-1697)</td></tr><tr><td>23. Lonicera</td><td>Adam Lonicer (1528-1586)</td><td>57. Triumfetta</td><td>Giovan Battista Trionfetti (1656-1708)</td></tr><tr><td>24. Dalechampia</td><td>Jacques Dalechamps (1513-1588)</td><td>58. Mentzellia</td><td>Christian Mentzel (1622-1701)</td></tr><tr><td>25. Tabernaemontana</td><td>Jacobus Theodororus, aka Tabernaemontanus (1525-1590)</td><td>59. Muntingia</td><td>Abraham Munting (1583-1658)</td></tr><tr><td>26. Cameraria</td><td>Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534-1598)</td><td>60. Oldenlandia</td><td>Henrik Bernard Oldenland (ca.1633-ca.1697)</td></tr><tr><td>27. Rawolvia</td><td>Leonhard Rauwolf (1535-1596)</td><td>61. Capania</td><td>Francesco Cupani (1657-1710)</td></tr><tr><td>28. Bellonia</td><td>Pierre Belon (1517-1564)</td><td>62. Vanheedia</td><td>Hendrik van Rheede (1636-1691)</td></tr><tr><td>29. Dodonaea</td><td>Rembert Dodoens (1517-1585)</td><td>63. Malpighia</td><td>Marcello Malpighi (1628-1694)</td></tr><tr><td>30. Clusia</td><td>Charles de l'Écluse, aka Carolus Clusius (1526-1609)</td><td>64. Bromelia</td><td>Olof Bromelius (1639-1705)</td></tr><tr><td>31. Lobelia</td><td>Matthias de l'Obel, aka Lobelius (1538-1616)</td><td>65. Pluknetia</td><td>Leonard Plukenet (1641-1706)</td></tr><tr><td>32. Penaea</td><td>Pierre Pena (n.d.)</td><td>66. Rininia</td><td>Augustus Quirinus Rivinus (1652-1723)</td></tr><tr><td>33. Bauhinia</td><td>Johann (1541-16133) and Gaspard Bauhin (1560-1624)</td><td>67. Commelina</td><td>Jan Commelin (1629-1692)</td></tr><tr><td>34. Parkinsonia</td><td>John Parkinson (1567-1650)</td><td>68. Sloana</td><td>Hans Sloane (1660-1753)</td></tr><tr><td></td><td></td><td>69. Petiveria</td><td>James Petiver (ca.1665-1718)</td></tr></tbody></table>
Among the *botanophili* that Plumier acknowledged, there were at least three patrons of natural history. One was quite an obvious choice: the *Guidonia* aimed at immortalizing Guy-Crescent Fagon, the all-powerful king’s “first physician” and superintendent of the Jardin du roi from 1699 to 1718. The other, however, was less plain, for it acknowledged the late Gaston, duc d’Orléans, uncle of Louis XIV, passionate collector, and munificent patron of the first half of the seventeenth century. Plumier, who obviously never met the duke, nevertheless praised his sponsorship of natural knowledge: in this, Gaston was certainly a noted figure, since he was the promoter of the botanic gardens in Blois (once directed by the English naturalist Robert Morison) and of the sumptuous collection of paintings of plants and animals initiated by Nicolas Robert (later to be known as the *vélins du Roi*). The choice may seem risky, though: after all, Gaston’s uncertain loyalties during the Fronde earned him an exile for life to his Blois domains by Mazarin. Interestingly, however, the name by which Plumier honored Gaston was not his own, but that of his dynasty: he baptized that genus as *Borbonia*.<fnref n="130" /> The move was smart. Back in 1693, the friar attempted to dedicate his *Description des plantes de l’Amérique* to Louis XIV, just as Tournefort would do in his 1694 *Élémens de botanique*. He even wrote the dedication to the monarch, never to see the light of day: it was assuredly not accepted. But by consecrating the *Borbonia* to the late duke, Plumier was glorifying the king tangentially: for, as he learned, he was not sufficiently well placed to do it directly, nor could he extol the Sun King among artisans and savants.

Indeed, most of Plumier’s dedications of botanical genera were not to patrons and political figures, but to *botanici*, botanists from Plumier’s past and present, or simply learned men who, through history, had something significant to say about plants. There were eminences from antiquity, like Hippocrates, Theophrastus, Dioscorides, and Pliny the Elder; from the Renaissance, like Francisco Hernández, Oviedo, Clusius, Fuchs, Mattioli, and Rondelet; from the seventeenth century, like the Bauhin brothers (Gaspard and Johann), Piso, Marcgraf, Peiresc, and Morison; and from Plumier’s own time, like

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰ Plumier’s biographical note on the Duc d’Orléans runs as follows: “Serenissimus Princeps Gasto Borbonicus, Regius sanguis, Magnorumque Regum genus, Henrici Magni filius, Magnique Ludovici patruus, inter caeteras virtutes Regias tanto Botanices delectabatur amore, ut apud Blesas & Parisios, Hesperideos hortos, plantas scilicet totius Orbis rariores immensis sumptibus transtulisset, quasve ne hyeme absentes sibi abessent, peritissimi Pictoris, Nicolai Roberti Blesensis manu in membranas transferri, nativis nempe coloribus ad vivum depingi amplis etiam sumptibus curabat. Miraris in tanto Principe tantum erga Botanicem amore? Mirare tot Principum, totque Magnatum tam raros apparere nantes in tam vasto innocentium deliciarum gurgite, non animos obruente, sed oblectante. Quid etenim plantas intueri delectabilius & innocentius? Quid tandem plantis utilius? Plantae nos nutriunt, plantae nos sanant, plantae nos tuentur; Achemenio costo, Mygdoniis opibus, Phyrgio lapide, purpurarum sidere clariores: earum usus nos deliniunt dolentes.” Plumier, *Nova genera*, 4.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_81.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.16. Plate of the *Begonia* in Tournefort's *Institutiones*. Although the genus' name was a dedication by Plumier to Bégon, it did not appear in the *Nova genera* but in Tournefort's book. (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>

Surian, Ray, Magnol, Plukenet, Rivinus, Sloane, and even Petiver. This was the friar's original plan, as he expressed in a letter to Bégon soon before the publication of the *Nova genera*. "I have a hundred and two genera and, because I do not have the name of most of them, I will give them the names of some famous Botanists[:] *Bauhina*, *Caesalpina*, *Pittonia*, *Columnea*, &c. It will have thirty-eight copperplates. . . . After the Genus and all the Species I could find of it, I add a small accolade of the person after whom I name it."<fnref n="131" />

Plumier was not alone in offering botanical nomenclature to colleagues and patrons. Three years earlier, Tournefort took advantage of the appendix he added to his *Institutiones* at the last moment to name several genera after some contemporary personalities: *Poinciana* after Philippe de Longvilliers de Poncy (1584-1660), governor of the American isles; *Garidelia* after Pierre-Joseph Garidel, his fellow Aixois botanist; *Hermania* after Paul Hermann, his student in the late 1680s at the Jardin du roi—and *Plumeria*, after "the Illustrious Plumerius, Royal Botanist, who enriched Botany by so many and such great plants."<fnref n="132" /> Anecdotally, it was in Tournefort's *Institutiones* (and not in

<footnote n="131">¹³¹ Plumier to Michel Bégon, Paris, March 6, 1703, in MMC MS 867 "Recueil de pièces," fol. 147c: "J'auray cent et deux genres et parce que je n'ay pas le nom de la plus grande partie, je les nommeray du nom de quelque célèbre Botaniste *Bauhina*, *Caesalpina*, *Pittonia*, *Columnea*, &c. J'auray trente et huit Plantes [sic: Planches], je vous envoye par avance l'épreuve de deux. Après avoir mis le Genre et toutes les Espèces que je puis avoir de ce genre, je fais un petitéloge de Celuy dont je mes le nom."</footnote>

<footnote n="132">¹³² Tournefort, *Institutiones rei herbariae* (Paris: Ex Typographia Regia, 1700), vol. 1, 659: "Plumeria, ab inventore Clariss. Plumerio, Botanico Regio, qui tot tantisque plantis Botanicem locupletavit."</footnote>
the *Nova genera*) that Plumier's most famous botanical dedication was made public: the
*Begonia*, a genus of subtropical plants with delicate, colorful flowers discovered by the
friar in the West Indies, immortalized the name of his life-long patron and protector,
Michel Bégon (fig. 4.16).<fnref n="133" />

By the turn of the century, botanical dedications had become a standard practice,
albeit a highly disputed one. When the English James Petiver named some plants after
several of his providers, gentlemanly naturalists responded with outrage: for Linnaeus,
the way in which a simple apothecary liberally offered the "highest honor that mortal
man can desire" not to gentlemen, but to "the uneducated"—"florists, monks, relations,
friends, and the like"—was "a derision and scandal."<fnref n="134" /> In Linnaeus hand's, however, the
use of affixing proper names to genera and plants as an instrument of credit reached its
fullest: with cheeky aplomb, Linnaeus modified slightly a good many of Plumier's genera
names (e.g., he turned Plumier's *Pittonia* into *Tournefortia*) and thus appropriated them.

Unlike Tournefort's handful of dedicatory names hastily inserted in the appendix to his *Institutiones*, Plumier's botanical dedications in the *Nova genera* worked as a whole, and displayed several original features. First, a good deal of the book's originality came from having two thirds of the hundred-odd new genera named after botanists: by mapping the principal past and present authors on whose shoulders the study of plants had stood by 1700, Plumier was drawing the contours of a disciple yet to be and, by the same token, attempted to place himself within it. As James Delbourgo has recently reminded us, "listing people," especially when this was publicly advertised through print, "was an art of self-construction through collective association: the production of a self defined by a collectivity."<fnref n="135" /> The move echoed those of scholars like Erasmus: the 1520 Basel edition of his *Adagia* (*Proverbiorum chiliades*) bore a title page portraying not the author himself, but a series of twenty-one ancient Greek and Roman celebrities, from Herodotus and Solomon to Pliny and Livy; those the humanist aspired "to be remembered for interacting with" (fig. 4.17).<fnref n="136" />

<footnote n="133">¹³³ Tournefort, *Institutiones*, vol. 1, 660: "Begonia est plantae genus, autore Clariss. Plumerio. . . . Begoniam appellavit Clariss. Plumerius tanquam perenne observantiae suae monumentum erga Illustriss. virum D D. *Bégon*, Regi ab intimis consiliis & Rei nauticae Praefectum in orâ Santonum."</footnote>

<footnote n="134">¹³⁴ Carl Linnaues, *The “Critica Botanica” of Linnaeus*, trans. Arthur Hort (London: Ray Society, 1938), 54, quoted in Delbourgo, “Listing People,” 741.</footnote>

<footnote n="135">¹³⁵ Delbourgo, “Listing People,” 735-42. Delbourgo’s object of inquiry is another published list of proper names: James Petiver’s list of suppliers printed in his *Musei Petiveriani* (1695-1703).</footnote>

<footnote n="136">¹³⁶ I am drawing this example and the quotation from Ann Blair, “Hidden Hands: Amanuenses and Authorship in Early Modern Europe,” A.S.W. Rosenbach Lectures in Bibliography, University of</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_82.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 4.17. Title page of Erasmus’s *Adagia* (Proverbiorum chiliades) in the 1520 Basel edition. Erasmus portrayed on the title page the scholars with whom he aspired to be associated with. (Rotterdam Public Library.)</figcaption></figure>

Second, by presenting his invention of these names as a necessity—“because I do not have the name of most of them”—and extolling a rather undisputed body of authorities, including a good number of living contemporaries, Plumier not only stressed (once again) his almost unequaled access to the flora of the French West Indies, but also advanced the novelty of his botanical findings and attempted to present himself as a discoverer in front of the international intellectual community. The botanical dedications in the *Nova genera* were a scientific commemoration not only of those he honored by naming genera after them, but also of his own activity as an explorer, naturalist, and draftsman.137 As Mario Biagioli emphasized apropos of the Medicean Stars, discovery and invention are tightly bound.138 Third, by including engraved images (even if not of the plants in their entirety, but—in line with Tournefort’s prescriptions—of the definitional “characters” allowing for the identification of broader genera within the infinity of species), the *Nova genera* materialized these dedications into something more substantial

<footnote>Pennsylvania Libraries, Philadelphia, PA, March 17, 18, 20, 2014, podcasts on http://repository.upenn.edu/rosenbach/8/.</footnote>

<footnote n="137">137 I use the notion of scientific commemoration found in Neil Safier, *Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.</footnote>

<footnote n="138">138 See Mario Biagioli, *Galileo, Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), esp. chap. 2.</footnote>
than mere words: images stood here for factual gifts—many of them to individuals whose dead hands would not have allowed them to accept them otherwise—and made the offering public by means of print.

That the politics of scientific naming was tightly bound up with the production and circulation of imagery has been clear to scholars for several decades, especially to historians of astronomy and cartography. Galileo's dedication of the satellites of Jupiter to the Medici is perhaps the best-known example.<fnref n="139" /> More enlightening for our case is probably the story of the mapping and naming of the moon during the first half of the seventeenth century. Consider the famous map by Michael Florent van Langren, or Langrenus (1612-1675), printed in 1645 as *Plenilunii Lumina Austriaca Philippica*. As the title alone suggests, van Langren's map was unabashedly political: the lunar features were carved (and thus baptized) not only with the names of contemporary celebrities like Rubens and Galileo, but primarily also with those of the principal European political figures—thus reflecting both the geopolitics of the time and van Langren's own patronage networks within them.<fnref n="140" /> Soon after van Langren's *Plenilunii* appeared, a controversy over the mapping and naming of the moon's cartography opposed Johannes Hevelius and the Jesuit Giambattista Riccioli. Hevelius mirrored the terrestrial geographic nomenclature onto the lunar surface—a deceptively neutral move that actually sought to foster the still controversial Copernican views. The latter, Riccioli, named a good number of lunar features after astronomers and philosophers who had dealt with the topic, partly as a way to highlight the worldly nature of selenographic knowledge—and, therefore, to undermine those same Copernican views.<fnref n="141" />

Whether lunar craters or American plants, naming was a means for pursuing novelty, stabilizing it as discovery, and—ironically enough—affixing one's own name and views onto it.

<footnote n="139">¹³⁹ And probably the best-known account of this is Biagioli's sophisticated account in his *Galileo, Courtier*. See also his *Galileo's Instruments of Credit: Telescopes, Images, Secrecy* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="140">¹⁴⁰ For instance, his patron Manuel de Moura, a Portuguese agent of the Spanish king, found a prominent place in the picture; in contrast, John IV of Portugal, a rebel and usurper in the eyes of Spain, was not even mentioned. On this, see Fernando Bouza, “Realeza, aristocracia y mecenazgo (del ejercicio del poder *modo calamo*),” in *Mecenazgo y Humanidades en tiempos de Lastanosa: Homenaje a Domingo Ynduráin*, ed. Aurora Egido, José Enrique Laplana Gil (Huesca: Instituto de Estudios Altoaragoneses-Institución Fernando el Católico, 2008), 79-80. I thank Fernando Bouza for calling my attention to Van Lagren's map.</footnote>

<footnote n="141">¹⁴¹ On this, see Ewen A. Whitaker, *Mapping and Naming the Moon: A History of Lunar Cartography and Nomenclature* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), esp. 45-6, and Bouza, “Realeza, aristocracia y mecenazgo,” 79-80. On the controversy between Hevelius and Riccioli, see Janet Vertesi, “Sicily or the Sea of Tranquility? Mapping and Naming the Moon,” *Endeavour* 28, no. 2 (2004), 64-8.</footnote>
Authorship and authority in a visual archive of nature

Whether it can be explained in relation to a Baconian program of knowledge or not, the collection of such a vast quantity of “(drawn) facts” by Plumier stems from the enduring cultural practice of collecting. From the Renaissance onwards, cabinets of exotica shaped not only the descriptive study of nature, but also natural knowledge as such. First, collections of curiosities spurred the emergence in natural philosophy of what Lorraine Daston called “the ideal of factuality,” or an empirical and “factual sensibility”—in other words, the value of “facts,” in their individuality and variety, as valid objects for building up a solid knowledge of the natural world and, therefore, of careful and minute “inspection of Particulars” as the desired moral economy of the students of nature.<fnref n="142" /> Second, cabinets brought together *artificialia* and *naturalia*, objects of art and objects of nature, and helped blur the boundaries (if any by then) between the two of them and understand both the creations of man and those of nature as belonging to one and a single realm.

The collection of drawings by Plumier stood at the crossroad of the natural—which it represented—and the artificial—which it was. The piles of drawings heaped in his cell in the convent at Place Royale were a specific sort of collection, one that served the purposes of stockpiling observational information on far-flung animals and plants. The constitution by a scholar of a visual archive of images, texts or objects on which (natural) historical writing could be based was not limited to the study of nature, and antiquarian studies have offered an enlightening comparison: lists, dictionaries of name correspondences, and series of drawings served, there too, the purpose of inventory and identification, partly to discard errors transmitted by authors from observable realities. Accumulating, whether series of drawings or items in a list, allowed a “cautious empiricism and [the] avoidance of futile (because insoluble) controversies.”<fnref n="143" />

The comparison of archives such as Plumier's with antiquarianism also highlights the social aspect of this sort of collection, which came to be a source of intellectual authority for scholars. The hundreds of drawings and other sorts of manuscripts kept by Plumier in his cell at the convent of the Minims might well not have enjoyed the same

<footnote n="142">142 Lorraine Daston, “The Factual Sensibility,” *Iesis* 79, no. 3 (1988), 452-67. On the important notion of “moral economy” in the sciences, see her “The Moral Economy of Science,” *Osiris* 10 (1995), 2-24, as well as the two enlightening commentaries by Stéphane Van Damme in the French translation: “Lorraine Daston et la nouvelle histoire intellectuelle des sciences” and “Nous n’avons jamais été désintéressés: les sciences entre moralisation, éthique et affects,” in *L’économie morale des sciences modernes* (Paris: La Découverte, 2014), 7-18 and 65-108.</footnote>

<footnote n="143">¹⁴³ Francis Haskell, *History and Its Images* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 132.</footnote>
sort of circulation as his printed books, but they certainly had a traceable social life, however limited this might have been. Part of this becomes more obvious when one recalls Lister's visit to the friar in 1698: "I was not better pleased with any Visit I made," the Englishman wrote, "than with that of F. *Plumier*, whom I found in his Cell in the Convent of the *Minimes*." Plumier showed Lister his "several *Books in Folio*, of Designs and Paintings of *Plants*, *Birds*, *Fishes*, and *Insects* of the *West-Indies*," and the Englishman described them with certain detail: "he had designed and Dissected a Crocodile; one of the Sea Tortoises; a Viper, and well described the Dissections"; "his birds also were well understood, and very well painted in their proper colors"; "among the *Insects* there was a *Scolopendra* of a foot and an half long, and proportionably long . . . also the *Julus* very elegantly painted, which I had seen before in Dr. *Turnefort's* Collection."<fnref n="144" />

Lister was not the only scholarly tourist who frequented the Parisian private collections of natural wonders: David Krieg (ca. 1669-1710), a German physician settled in Riga and well connected to the English botanical circles, took advantage of his time in Paris to pay a visit to the Minim and his paper collection of American curiosities. A well-traveled naturalist of his own—he had been herborizing in Maryland some years earlier—Krieg encountered the friar in 1702, in one of the meetings that Parisian naturalists frequently held at the Bibliothèque du roi in rue Vivienne, along with the botanist Sébastian Vaillant and the apothecary Étienne-François Geoffroy, both professors at the Jardin du roi. Krieg reported to Petiver on his meeting with the friar: "Pere Plumier is [the] most friendly & sincere man I met with in this country. He shew'd me . . . a great quantity of his designs of plants, fowls, lizards, snails etc." Four months later, Krieg visited the friar in his cell, where the entire collection was stored, he wrote: "Yesterday I was at the convent des Minimes & spoacke with pater Plumier. He is a very civil & curious man & designed very well. He sheu'd me a vast quantity of his designing viz plants & animals." Receiving learned guests was one of the few means of diffusion that Plumier's drawings were enjoying at the time, for putting them into print was proving more difficult than expected: "he designs to have them printed in a little some," wrote Krieg; but the printing of the book of ferns had by then been delayed for almost a decade.<fnref n="145" /> Yet there was a good deal of scholarly authority to be drawn from the visits of people like Krieg and Lister, as well as from a form of circulation that did not go through

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ Lister, *Journey to Paris*, 73.</footnote>

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵ David Krieg to James Petiver, Paris, March 20, 1702 and Paris, July 11, 1701/2, in BL MS Sloane 4063, fol. 139. See also fol. 11, 42, 112, and 147.</footnote>
print. A good case in point is the “incomparable” Peiresc who, according to Montfaucon, “supplied materials to most of the scholars in Europe.”<fnref n="146" /> It is difficult to measure, however, the exact extent of Plumier’s corpus’ manuscript circulation. We know at least that Lister left Paris with a couple of copies from the friar’s drawings in his luggage.<fnref n="147" />

The collection of drawings amassed by Plumier in his cell at the convent of Place Royale appealed to a public that was broader than one composed of physicians and shell-lovers. It certainly appeared in several of the printed guides that flourished in Paris during the late seventeenth century to offer amateurs and curious people advice on the most remarkable places to visit in the city, including private collections of natural history and rarities coming from afar. In 1692, the *Livre commode des addresses de Paris* (The Convenient Book of the Addresses of Paris) by Nicolas de Blegny briefly informed of a certain “Tournesol” (i.e. Tournefort) who was “particularly knowledgeable about the culture of medicinal plants,” as was “a Father Minim at Place Royale.”<fnref n="148" /> In another guide from 1698, the *Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris* (New Description of the City of Paris), the little-known teacher Germain Brice referred to the friar more at length:

> Father Plumier, who lives still, is the first man of the century for Botany. He made very long-distance voyages in different Parts of the world, particularly in America, in order to discover extraordinary plants, of which no one had noticed before him so many different species. He has composed several volumes on this science that show not only his deep knowledge of Botany, but also the fatigues and efforts that he had to suffer in crossing the large Regions, and the deserts even, with the purpose of informing himself of what is exposed in his works.<fnref n="149" />

<footnote n="146">146 Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée et représentée*, vol. 1, viii.</footnote>

<footnote n="147">147 Lister, *Journey to Paris*, 74.</footnote>

<footnote n="148">148 Abraham du Pradel [Nicolas Blegny], *Le livre commode des addresses de Paris pour 1692*, ed. Édouard Fournier, 2 vols. (Paris: Paul Daffis, 1878 [1692]), vol. 2, 280: "M. Tournesol, demonstrateur au Jardin du Roy, entend particulièrement la culture des plantes medicinales. Aussi fait un des Pères Minimes de la Place Royale."</footnote>

<footnote n="149">149 Germain Brice, *Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris, ou recherche curieuse des choses les plus singulières & les plus remarquables qui se trouvent à present dans cette grande ville*, 2 vols. (Paris: chez Nicolas Le Gras, Nicolas Le Clerc, Barthelemy Girin, 1698), vol. 1, 337-8: "Le Pere Plumier qui vit encore, est le premier homme du siecle pour la Botanique. Il a fait des voyages d'un tres-long cours, en differentes Parties du monde, particulierement en Amerique, pour découvrir des plantes extraordinaires, dont personne n'avoit avant lui remarqué plus d'especes differentes. Il a donné quelques volumes sur cette science, qui font voir non seulement son profond sçavoir dans la Botanique, mais encore les fatigues & les peines qu'il a été obligé de supporter pour parcourir les grandes Regions, & les deserts même, afin de s'instruire des choses qu'il expose dans ses ouvrages." Brice is an obscure figure, "qui fut l'homme d'un seul livre, mais constamment remis sur le métier": see Sabine Juratic, "Le guide de Paris de Germain Brice," *Patrimoine* (blog), *Service commun de la documentation*. École normale supérieure, May, 2013, http://www.bib.ens.fr/mai-2013-Germain-B.675.0.html.</footnote>
Plumier’s interminable series of drawings and lists of names were nothing new in the late seventeenth century: Rondelet’s and Belon’s respective books offer a clear example that this was a mode of representation that had been deeply rooted in the visual imagination of European naturalists since at least the Renaissance. Yet this alone cannot account for such an investment of time and effort (let alone the money coming from the king’s pockets) in making as comprehensive an archive of drawings on the West Indies’ nature as possible. The acute awareness and preoccupation of naturalists about the many mistakes riddling the literature, and the need to establish clear identifications and inventories, play an important role in this story. But they are not alone. From the review of the practices surrounding the corpus as a whole, or of the images as grouped into series, emerges the picture of a fragmented and elusive sort of authorship—or, to put it another way, of Plumier’s attempts to shape his authorial identity and intellectual authority by means of his manuscript corpus as much as print. The previous consideration of the botanical dedications in Plumier’s *Nova genera* offered a good case in point of the first, and the next chapter will explore more in depth the exchanges and negotiations that underpinned the printing of his images and, more generally, of his books. But what about his manuscript corpus? Did those heaps of papers not play any role in this story? Were they but a failed attempt to go public? Despite Plumier’s purported assertion, recorded by Lister, that “these Drawings would make 10 Books, as big as” the *Description des plantes de l’Amérique*, many of the handmade images in the corpus were certainly not destined for the press. Even so, the manuscript medium could serve as much as the printed one for the shaping (successfully or not) of one’s authority as a naturalist and scholar. This can be seen in at least two aspects of Plumier’s corpus: the choice of some of its objects of study and its construal as a collection.

Let us begin with the first and consider, for instance, the series of animal drawings. Amid the hundreds of manuscript sketches and drawings, we find a crocodile and two turtles, a few insects here and there, and even an elephant—perhaps copied by Plumier from some book, or simply made by another hand and slipped into the friar’s collection during its many relocations. Yet most of the series of fauna drawings by the friar are limited to shells, fishes, and birds. These choices were undoubtedly linked to the interests of scholars and curious people at the time, but not only to those: they also aimed for the attention of potential patrons, that is the agents who held in their hands the management of the king’s patronage in its many forms—for, after all, they were a main arbiter of scientific utility. Remember the case of the draftsman Philippe de La Hire and the
anatomist Joseph-Guishard Duverney, who journeyed in 1679 and 1680 along the French West coast, particularly Brittany and Normandy, to dissect and draw fishes. Interestingly, they were sent to do so by minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert himself, who personally entrusted them “to seek together as many fishes as they can find in the coasts of Brittany and Normandy, to make their dissection, and to draw them, for I am convinced that this will be a very pleasant and very curious work, and that it will prove useful.”<fnref n="150" /> Fish indeed may have seemed less sexy a naturalia to the refined, curious people of Paris than shells, but they were nonetheless the contested objects of another sort of attention at the time. Fish was the vital economic element in the Western coastal regions of France that La Hire and Duverney patiently roamed, pencil and scalpel in hand, on the orders of Colbert. It was precisely on the aegis of that minister that the government took an active interest in regulating and developing an industry that was already amid the most powerful in Europe: “in the mid-seventeenth century,” as James Pritchard put it, “the French fishing fleet comprised over 400 ships and almost 10,000 men”; France was the only European country by that time that had a fishery commissioner. Yet competition was harsh with the Dutch and, particularly, with the bellicose English who slowly but steadily pushed the French out of their traditional fishing areas.<fnref n="151" /> Furthermore, the star-crossed Nicolas Fouquet and then Colbert sought not only to develop fisheries (for instance, by promoting a colonial fishery in New France), but also attempted to control more tightly an activity as unregulated as reluctant to regulation.<fnref n="152" />

Putting it another way, fish was a matter of political concern for late seventeenth-century politicians like Colbert. This is certainly part of the rationale that motivated the

<footnote n="150">150 Jean-Baptiste Colbert to Jean Picard, Fontainebleau, September 21, 1679, in *Lettres, instructions et mémoires de Colbert. Publiés d'après les ordres de l'empereur sur la proposition de son excellence M. Magnet, ministre secrétaire d'État des finances*, ed. Pierre Clément, vol. 5, *Fortifications, sciences, lettres, beaux-arts, bâtiments* (Paris: à l'Imprimerie impériale, 1868), 403-4: “j'ay estimé bien nécessaire pour tous nos ouvrages d'envoyer le sieur Verney vous trouver, mon intention estant que le sieur de La Hire demeure avec luy et qu'ils recherchent ensemble tous les poissons qui se pourront trouver sur la coste de Bretagne et sur celle de Normandie, pour en faire les dissections et les dessiner, estant certain que ce será un travail fort agréable et fort curieux, et qui apportera mesme de l'utilité.” Some of the drawings are in BCMNHN MS 244 “Dissections de divers poissons faites dans sur les costes de France pendant les années 1679 et 1680.” See also Aline Hamonou and François J. Meunier, “Les dessins icthyologiques réalisés par J.-G. Duverney et P. de la Hire pendant leur voyage en Basse-Bretagne en 1679-1680,” *Cybium* 34, no. 1 (2010), 19-27, and Guerrini, *Courtiers' Anatomists*, 201-2.</footnote>

<footnote n="151">151 A. R. Michell, "The European Fisheries in Early Modern History," in *The Cambridge Economic History of Europe*, vol. 5, *The Economic Organization of Early Modern Europe*, ed. E. E. Rich and C. H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 133-84; James Pritchard, *In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 139-50.</footnote>

<footnote n="152">152 Pritchard, *Search of Empire*, 145.</footnote>
minister to personally encourage La Hire's and Duverney's intellectual undertaking on France's western coast. It was also perhaps one of the reasons for Plumier to invest particular effort in producing such an encyclopedic visual archive of the fishes of the West Indies—the friar held, after all, a prominent role in the communication between the colonial and metropolitan authorities as a promoter, on behalf of the former, of the islands' natural resources.153 As it is shown in chapters 1 and 5, Plumier moved astutely enough in the world of patronage: he might have considered fishes as a topic worth the interest of some patrons in the government. It had not been a long time, after all, since an important book on fishes, Francis Willughby's *De historia piscium* (1686), had been printed posthumously on the other side of the Channel “at the order and expenses of the Royal Society” (*Jussu & Sumptibus Societatis Regiae Londinenses*). Including nearly 190 full-page engravings, this magnificent folio volume almost financially ruined the Society when it proved unsellable—its calamitous failure eventually became notorious because it partly provoked the Fellows' retraction from their initial engagement to fund Newton's *Principia*.154

Before the world knew about the consequence of Newton's book, a book on fishes might have seemed like a pretty good idea to both the Royal Society in London and a French naturalist seeking patronage and recognition through his drawings—one, at least, aware of Colbert's commission to members of the Paris Academy of Sciences only a decade beforehand. Yet both flopped: the printing history of Willughby's book became infamous, and Plumier's numerous and carefully crafted drawings of fishes never made their way out of his cell in the convent of Minims, let alone into print, and did not attract the interest of a state besieged by debt and deficit—not, at least, during the friar's lifetime.155

A second group can be identified as a potential target of Plumier's attempts to build up his scholarly authority (or, at the very least, to shape the presentation of his self as a naturalist) by means of the manuscript: the learned community of students and lovers of nature. Numerous were the sorts of genres that enjoyed a wide circulation in the

<footnote n="153">153 As shown, for instance, in his reports to Pontchartrain on the “estat present de l’isle de St Domingue,” AAE Mémoires et documents, 5 (1690). See Philippe Hrodej, “Saint-Domingue en 1690. Les observations du père Plumier, botaniste provençal,” *Revue française d’histoire d’outre-mer* 84 (1997), 93-117.</footnote>

<footnote n="154">154 Francis Willughby, *De Historia Piscium Libri Quatuor*, ed. John Ray (Oxford: e Theatro Sheldoniano, 1686).</footnote>

<footnote n="155">155 But they will after the 1760s: see chap. 6.</footnote>
manuscript format, from lyric poetry to transgressive texts. <fnref n="156" /> Natural historical knowledge, and scholarly texts more generally, also were transmitted by non-printed means.<fnref n="157" /> The collection of Plumier’s papers, however, did not circulate so widely after all, not even in manuscript form. In contrast, Montfaucon’s *recueils*, so painstakingly collected by the monk on his journey through Italy and France, saw the glorious light of print in no fewer than fifteen volumes, and Peiresc “supplied materials to most of the scholars in Europe” from the drawings or actual objects that he had gathered. But think about a collection that was not made of words and lines such as the herbarium, defined as a “a pile (*amas*) of dried plants that we conserve in boxes or books, so that we can examine them in detail during all the seasons of the year.” Perhaps Plumier’s drawings, just like Tournefort’s four closets of “dried plants . . . on gray paper,” were collected not only or primarily to be the object of as large a diffusion as possible, but to be “conserved” and “examined” as a factual collection would be, one in which beauty, exoticism, and botanical information were intertwined.

Regardless of the actual (if any) transmission of his manuscript drawings, lists, and descriptions, questions of authority and authorial identity were not absent from the heaps of papers stockpiled by the friar in his cell. The accounts of the corpus given by learned authors like Lister or Kriegg, as well as in guides addressed to broad audiences of curious people such as Blegny’s and Brice’s, can be seen as a form of circulation in itself: one attempting to establish a firm bond between a work (a visual history of the flora and fauna of the West Indies), a physical object (some heaps of papers with “Designs and Paintings . . . all done by him very accurately”), and a name (Charles Plumier, naturalist,

<footnote n="156">¹⁵⁶ The (rather reduced) list of classics includes Harold Love, *The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England* (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 [1993]; François Moureau, ed., *De bonne main. La communication manuscrite au XVIIIᵉ siècle* (Paris/Oxford: Universitas/Voltaire Foundation, 1993); Arthur F. Marotti, *Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric* (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Miguel Benítez, *La face cachée des Lumières. Recherches sur les manuscrits philosophiques clandestins de l'âge classique* (Paris/Oxford: Universitas/Voltaire Foundation, 1996), and *Le Foyer clandestin des Lumières. Nouvelles recherches sur les manuscrits clandestins* (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2013); H. R. Woudhuysen, *Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558-1640* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Peter Beal, *In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Fernando Bouza, *Corre manuscrito. Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro* (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2002). New studies have also appeared more recently: two brilliant English works published in the last years are Daniel Starza Smith, *John Donne and the Conway Papers: Patronage and Manuscript Circulation in the Early Seventeenth Century* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) and Noah Millstone, *Manuscript Circulation and the Invention of Politics in Early Stuart England* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="157">¹⁵⁷ See the work of Elizabeth Yale, and in particular her *Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain* (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).</footnote>
traveler in the French Caribbean islands, and image-maker).<fnref n="158" /> The authorial identity, or
the naturalist's self, was here constructed via a form of circulation that did not necessarily
entail the actual transmission of the corpus (by means, say, of copy), but through the
promotion of its sole existence.<fnref n="159" />

Conclusion

This chapter sought to address Plumier's corpus as a whole and, in doing so, it
revealed that lists (in written form, graphic series, or herbaria) stood as central elements
in the world and work of the naturalist at the turn of the eighteenth century. The "order
of nature" was, at Plumier's time, the order of images and of material records by and
large. Graphic, textual, and factual seriality was a way for practitioners to grapple with the
still growing number of vegetable and animal species. This expository mode allowed
them to tackle the central problems of a description-oriented field, namely identification
and inventory—rather than classification. Moreover, in the case of Plumier in particular,
seriality allows us to understand the geographically delimited practice of natural history,
as well as to grasp the importance of a deceptively superficial element in the friar's
drawings: the names of plants written, or carved, onto the images. The names of plants,
as we have seen, became in the hands of some scholars an instrument of authority, one
with which Plumier tried to assert his place in the field. Finally, the analysis of this corpus
as a single object of inquiry revealed that a manuscript archive—even one that did not
circulate widely or at all—could become a means for defining and fostering the
naturalist's intellectual authority.

<footnote n="158">¹⁵⁸ Roger Chartier, “Foucault’s Chiasmus: Authorship between Science and Literature in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in *Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science*, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 28 and “The Order of Books Revisited,” *Modern Intellectual History* 4, no. 3 (2007), 513-4.</footnote>

<footnote n="159">¹⁵⁹ This form of construction of the “scholarly self” is better seen in the case of collections than in that of print. For a comparative case on Aldrovandi’s construction of his identity as naturalist through his collection, see for instance Paula Findlen, *Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy* (Berkely: University of California Press), 291-392.</footnote>
## 5. Tinkering with Ferns

### Printmaking and Natural History Books in Paris around 1700

In a letter dated 1701, Intendant Michel Bégon reported to a friend on that certainly active Father Plumier: the friar had been translating into Latin Charles Perrault's *Éloges*, a command by Bégon that never came to fruition; his book on turnery had just been printed, and two other publication projects occupied him now: one on usual plants, or simples, and a collection of plates on "extraordinary fishes, insects, and shells that he has seen on his voyages." In actual fact, Bégon wrote, the friar was by then "very solicited to go to Guinea on one of the ships of the *assiente*," the slave triangular trade connecting Europe, West Africa, and the Spanish Americas. The intendant, however, had doubts about the botanist accepting the assignment, since it was "much more convenient for him to have his works printed, which are ready, than leaving this care to other people who would not achieve the publication like him."<fnref n="1" />

Bégon's assertion poses the question of the involvement of a scholarly author in the printing of his books, a problem all the more complicated when illustrated publications on far-flung natural phenomena were concerned. It points at the tension in which traveling naturalists (especially those, like Plumier, concerned with the making of images) might have been caught at the time, between fieldwork and the convoluted world of print. But no matter how implicated Plumier might have been in their printing, he would not see his books easily through the press. Take Lister's account of his visit to the friar in the Parisian convent of Minims in 1698:

> He told me these Drawings would make 10 Books, as big as that he had publisht [the Description des plantes de l'Amérique]; and Two Books of Animals: He had been often at

<footnote n="1">¹ Michel Bégon to Esprit Cabart de Villermont, Rochefort, December 27, 1701, in “Lettres de Michel Bégon,” ed. Louis Delavaud and Charles Dangibeaud, vol. 2, *Archives historiques de la Saintonge et de l’Aunis* 48 (1930), 101: “Le P. Plumier m’a envoyé la traduction qu’il a commencé de faire en latin des *Eloges* de Mr Perrault, je ne sçais s’il prendra la résolution d’aller jusqu’au bout. . . . Je suis persuadé [desie] le livre du tour que ce Père vient de donner au public, il travaille aux plantes usuelles dont il m’a envoyé une feuille. Cet ouvrage est fort avancé, il en commence un autre dans lequel il y aura une infinite de planches sur les poissons extraordinaires, les insectes et les coquilles, qu’il a vu dans ses voyages, on le sollicite fort d’aller en Guinée sur l’un des vaisseaux de l’assiente, mais je ne crois pas qu’il accepte ce party, luy convenant beaucoup mieux de faire imprimer les ouvrages qu’il a prests que de laisser ce soin à d’autres qui ne s’en acquiteroient pas si bien que luy.”</footnote>
*Versailles* to get them in the Kings *Imprimerie*; but as yet unsuccessfully; but hoped e're long
to begin the Printing of them. Note that the Booksellers at *Paris* are very unwilling, or not
able to Print Natural History; but all is done at the Kings Charge, and in his Presses.<fnref n="2" />

Lister's reference to the reluctance of Parisian printers to publish books on natural
history is not to be taken lightly, especially in the case of works as lavishly illustrated as
those by Plumier. Intaglio images entailed a great expense in the printing of books, which
further added to the difficulties of having works on natural history published, for
accounts on flora and fauna were held to be a predominantly visual sort of publication. A
tension thus existed between such a seemingly pervasive reliance of natural history on
images, on the one hand, and the constraints of the book market, on the other. Around a
decade after Plumier's death, another well-traveled Minim scholar born in Marseille,
Louis Feuillée, a so-called disciple of Plumier, expressed similar troubles regarding the
publication of accounts on natural history. Feuillée had explored South America and the
Caribbean basin extensively, also "on the orders of the King," and came to exhibit, too,
the title of *Botaniste du roi* in some of his printed works. He became mainly known among
European scholars because of his astronomical observations and physical measurements,
some of which earned Newton's objections for being seemingly faulty.<fnref n="3" /> Feuillée
published an account of his journeys in two volumes, the *Journal des observations physiques, mathématiques et botaniques* (Paris, 1714-25). It opened with a declaration of intent
concerning the four fields with which the author was concerned during his American
journeys: astronomy, physics, natural history, and instruments. Regarding natural history,
Feuillée listed four aims of his research concerning the natural world: first, to draw
plants, to describe their history, and to discover their usages among the Indians; second,
to draw animals and to represent them in their "natural colors" (*dans leurs couleurs naturelles*); third, to draw maps of ports and landscapes of the main cities and the lesser-
known coasts; and fourth, to get informed about the more common illnesses among the
Indians, their symptoms, and remedies. This ambitious research program
notwithstanding, the friar ended up acknowledging that, as a matter of fact, there was but
a small part devoted to natural history in his book, "because of the funds that would be

<footnote n="2">² Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 74-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Simon Schaffer, "Newton on the Beach: The Information Order of the *Principia mathematica*," *History of Science* 47, no. 3 (2009), 264.</footnote>
necessary for the engraving of the plates, which are numerous: this will more likely be executed in easier times, & after peace is happily brought back to Europe.”<fnref n="4" />

Feuillée’s explanation for the small place that natural history played in his book manifests the tension between the internal dynamics of a recomposing field of knowledge on the one hand, and the unsteady conditions of possibility for it to take a printed form, on the other. Feuillée was seemingly assuming that making the history of overseas flora and fauna rested to a large extent on a visual language—to draw plants, to draw animals, to draw maps. At the same time, however, the French book market at the turn of the eighteenth century was in a difficult situation. The scene was particularly arid regarding large formats and illustrated editions. Historians like Henri-Jean Martin have already pointed out the stagnation of the book trade in France during the last third of the seventeenth century, in part because of a generalized economic recession of the period further aggravated by Louis XIV’s endless war adventures.<fnref n="5" /> The book production in Paris entered a slow decline interspersed by punctual crisis after some brilliant years around the end of the 1660s—the peak of the seventeenth century was in 1671.

The printing crisis particularly affected large formats: Martin’s statistics for the period show that less than 10 percent of the volumes printed during the 1680s were folio format or larger, whereas around 80 percent were octavo or smaller.<fnref n="6" /> Furthermore, the years 1690 to 1710 have also been identified as a time of crisis in the French production of books, including woodcut or intaglio images.<fnref n="7" /> In other words, Martin concludes, large formats and illustrated editions were for several decades largely banned from the shelves of private booksellers and limited to prestige editions and official commands. Feuillée was precisely pointing to this same fact: the kind of books that natural history required—large, richly illustrated formats—was mainly limited to editions under the auspices of the

<footnote n="4">⁴ Louis Feuillée, *Journal des observations physiques, mathematiques et botaniques, faites par l'ordre du Roy sur les Côtes Orientales de l'Amérique Meridionale, & dans les Indes Occidentales, depuis l'année 1707 jusques en 1712*, vol. 1 (Paris: chez Pierre Giffart, 1714), 7: “1. De dessiner les Plantes le plus curieuses . . . d’en décrire l’histoire, & de tâcher par le moyen des Indiens d’en découvrir l’usage & les propriétez. / 2. De dessiner aussi tous les animaux que je trouverois, & de les representer dans les couleurs naturelles. / 3. De lever le Plan des ports, dessiner les veües des villes principales & des côtes les moins connuës, pour avoir par leur représentation quelque connaissance des terres tout-à-fait utiles aux Pilotes, & à ceux qui voyagent sur mer. / 4. De tâcher de m’informer exactement des maladies ordinaires. . . . l’Histoire naturelle n’y aura que peu de part, à cause des fonds qu’il faudroit pour la graveure des planches qui sont en grand nombre: ce qu’on pourra executer dans des temps plus faciles, & au retour d’une heureuse paix dans toute l’Europe.”</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Henri-Jean Martin, *Livre, pouvoir et société au XVIIᵉ siècle*, vol. 2 (Geneva: Droz, 1999), and “Une croissance séculaire,” in *Histoire de l’édition française*, ed. Henri-Jean Martin and Roger Chartier, vol. 2 ([Paris]: Promodis, 1984), 95-103.</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ Martin, *Livre, pouvoir et société*, vol. 2, 1064.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Alain-Marie Bassy, “Le texte et l’image,” in Martin and Chartier, *Histoire de l’édition française*, vol. 2, 140-61.</footnote>
crown, more often than not conflated with political projects aiming at the glorification of the king through the sponsorship of scientific enterprises and publications. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, when Feuillée was writing, the depletion of the state funds due to internal financial and economic crisis and external war exhaustion hindered the monarchy's support for the printing of illustrated natural history books that had been at its zenith in the last third of the previous century.

The printing of Plumier's books needs to be understood within this context. His beginnings as a published author may be interpreted in terms of an attempt to overcome the difficulties of the market by means of remaining outside the commercial sphere and integrating, instead, that of political propaganda of Louis XIV's monarchy. This is the case with two of his books, the *Description des plantes de l'Amérique* (Description of American Plants) and the *Traité des fougères* (Treatise on Ferns), both published by the Imprimerie royale in 1693 and 1705 respectively. In this chapter, my aim is to scrutinize the way in which Plumier, like other naturalists and scholars of his time, took part in the “whole system of communication,” as Peter Burke put it, which the Sun King's government attempted to implement as a means of reinforcing a symbolic projection: lavishly illustrated accounts of overseas flora and fauna, like those authored by Plumier, saw the light of day under the auspices of the state because, for a certain time, they functioned as one more of its symbolic tools.<fnref n="8" /> Some points need to be made in this respect. First, the cultural and scientific sphere of this regime of political propaganda was far from coherent and straightforward, especially regarding illustrated accounts of overseas natures. In a period of increasing economic recession, the interest of the government in works of natural knowledge fluctuated: whereas the symbolic power of such representations still seemed quite clear in the eyes of the policymakers when the first of Plumier's books saw the light in 1693, signs of incertitude began to emerge shortly thereafter.

The publication of the *Traité des fougères* illustrates these growing doubts of the state not only re regarding the role that scientific publications could have in its efforts to implement a certain image of the monarchy, but also related to the propaganda program itself. Furthermore, the book of ferns was conceived by its author as a sort of continuation of the *Description*, but its subject matter was far more specialized: it focused exclusively on a very particular group of genera, namely ferns and similar non-flowering

<footnote n="8">⁸ Peter Burke, *The Fabrication of Louis XIV* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chaps. 1 and 12.</footnote>
American plants. This may well have been a compelling topic for his fellow botanists, then busy sorting out how to integrate plants with seemingly no flowers or fruits into their classificatory grids; but it certainly was at odds with the polite "goûts" of the courtly circles and the sphere of "curieux" in which a book of such formal characteristics—folio format and around two-hundred intaglio images—was intended to circulate. Admittedly, a point of caution is necessary at this point: as Antoine Schnapper warned in the case of art collecting, one should not confuse two all-too-often mixed phenomena that had very different dynamics and motivations, namely what has come to be called a "culture of curiosity," on the one hand, and the state's support of the arts, on the other.<fnref n="9" /> The same applies for books like the ones we have in hand: they were appreciated, no doubt, because of their eye-catching images, the exotic objects they represented, and the adventurous sort of erudite knowledge that was behind them. That being said, the heteroclite social group constituted by amateurs, connoisseurs, collectors, or simply "curious people" was the target audience of such illustrated natural history books partly because it was also the one sought by the royal program of self-visualization. He hoped to attract an educated, in addition to a learned, readership so as to secure royal funding.

Eventually, the crown did not fail to grant Plumier the support for the printing of the *Traité des fougères* that he was seeking, but the numerous problems encountered along the way delayed its publications for around three or four years. This chapter is about the ways in which its author attempted to overcome these difficulties. More generally, it is about how Plumier had to negotiate with the changing social, cultural, and political circumstances of his time so as to get part of his work into print. Drawing inspiration from the approach of material bibliography, I argue that these negotiations affected both the contents and the formal qualities of those books, and therefore shaped the kind of natural knowledge they transmitted. The book of ferns, and particularly its images, show how the project of royal patronage offered naturalists like the Minim friar the opportunity for getting their works into print, but not without implicitly imposing certain characteristics onto them. The system of patronage in absolutist culture that enabled such publications can be traced in the precise manner in which visual information was traced out on the page. The same applies for the two books by Plumier that were not printed by Imprimerie royale: granted that royal patronage was probably the most

<footnote n="9">⁹ Antoine Schnapper, "The King of France as Collector in the Seventeenth Century," in *Art and History: Images and Their Meaning*, ed. Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore K. Rabb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 185-202.</footnote>
obvious means for publishing natural history at the time, it was not the only. Both the
*Nova plantarum Americanarum genera* (New genera of American plants) and the *Art de tourner*
(Art of turnery) were published by private printers, and yet similar negotiations with their
forms and contents were operated so as to make them publishable (fig. 5.1).<fnref n="10" />

The Imprimerie royale and the politics of print

Despite his complaints to Lister, Plumier was not an unpublished author by 1698. His first book, the *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*, had been printed five years earlier at the Imprimerie royale. The *Description* was the kind of work no Parisian printer would have dared to publish: a folio volume of more than a hundred pages of text, including no less than one 108 full-page copperplates on diverse samples of the West Indies' flora (fig. 5.2). Such a book had few possibilities to see the light of day outside the circuits of royal patronage or to get printed by presses other than those of the Imprimerie royale, the royal press housed at the Louvre Palace. In the preface of the *Description*, Plumier stated how much its printing was due to the same patrons that supported his travels to the Americas: whereas Secretary of State of the Navy Seignelay "obtained for me the liberality of the King for providing for the expenses of my travels," his successor Pontchartrain, the friar wrote, "had also the generosity of honoring me with the protection of His Majesty for the engraving and for the printing of this first volume."<fnref n="11" /> His acknowledgement of the monarch's liberality was limited to these few lines at the end of the preface. Yet among Plumier's preparatory papers to the printing of the *Description* (proofs of the engravings and manuscripts drafts of the text), there is a provisional dedication to Louis XIV himself—one that never appeared in the definitive printed edition. In this unpublished dedication to the king, Plumier formulated the place that natural historians like himself sought to have in the state project of political propaganda: “[I] publish not your conquests, that nobody ignores, . . . [but] the quality of Father of the Nation that Your Majesty

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ This is the thesis underpinning Sachiko Kusukawa’s account on the making of illustrated natural historical books in the Renaissance, where she focuses on Fuch’s *De historia stirpium*, Vesalius’s *De fabrica*, and Gessner’s images for the unpublished *Historia plantarum*. Kusukawa, *Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Sixteenth-Century Human Anatomy and Medical Botany* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012). As she concludes (249), “the printed book, as a material product, did not come into being out of thin air to capture ideas. Its production was governed by technical, financial and other conditions that authors needed to negotiate and harness in order to have their views published.”</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Charles Plumier, *Description des plantes de l'Amérique avec leurs figures. Par le R. P. Charles Plumier, Religieux Minime* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1693), sig. [a4r]: “Il me reste à avertir le public, que s’il tire quelque plaisir de ce travail, il en a l’obligation à feu Monsieur de Seignelay, Ministre & Secretaire d’Estat, & à Monseigneur de Pontchartrain, qui luy a succédé. Le premier m’obtint de la liberalité du Roy, de fournir aux frais de mes voyages, & le second a eû la bonté de m’honorer aussi de sa protection auprès de Sa Majesté, pour la graveûre, & pour l’impression de ce premier volume.”</footnote>
<table><caption>Fig. 5.1. Editions of Plumier's books</caption><thead><tr><th>Title</th><th>Year</th><th>Place and printer</th><th>Format</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>Description des plantes de l'Amérique</td><td>1693</td><td>Paris: Imprimerie royale</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td>L'art de tourner, ou de faire en perfection toutes sortes d'ouvrages au tour . . . composé en français et en latin</td><td>1701</td><td>Lyon: Jean Certe</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>1706</td><td>Paris: Claude Jombert</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>1749</td><td>Paris: Charles-Antoine Jombert</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td>[Facsimile reprint of the 1749 edition]</td><td>1976</td><td>Nogent-le-Roi: Librarie des Arts et Métiers</td><td>--</td></tr><tr><td>Khudozhestvo tokarnoe, ili delati v sovershenstvo vsiakia raboty tocheniem<br>[Bilingual edition in Dutch and Russian, translation attributed to Peter I the Great]</td><td>1716</td><td>N.p.</td><td>--</td></tr><tr><td>Die Kunst zu drechseln, oder alle Arten von Arbeit auf der Drehbank vollkommen zu verfertigen<br>[Bilingual edition in French and German]</td><td>1776</td><td>Leipzig: Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf und Sohn</td><td>--</td></tr><tr><td>The art of turning<br>[English translation of the 1749 edition]</td><td>1975</td><td>N.p.: Paul L. Ferraglio</td><td>--</td></tr><tr><td>Filicetum americanum, seu filicum, polypodiorum, adiantorum . . . in America nascentium</td><td>1703</td><td>Paris: Imprimerie royale</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td>Traité des fougères de l'Amérique<br>[Bilingual edition in French and Latin]</td><td>1705</td><td>Paris: Imprimerie royale</td><td>Folio</td></tr><tr><td>Nova plantarum americanarum genera</td><td>1703</td><td>Paris: Jean Boudot</td><td>Quarto</td></tr><tr><td>Plantarum americanarum fasciculus primus [-decimus] continens plantas quas olim Carolus Plumierius . . . detexit eruitque atque in insulis Antillis ipse depinxit<br>[Edition by Johannes Burman]</td><td>1755-1760</td><td>Amsterdam: widow and sons of Salomon Schouten</td><td>Folio</td></tr></tbody></table>

manifests in the benefits with which He honors those who are devoted to the study of plants, aware as He is of how much this can contribute to the conservation and pleasure of His subjects.”<fnref n="12" />

The dedication was probably not accepted by the crown, but the book was printed at its expense nonetheless. The support of the French government to traveling naturalists seemed therefore to be understood in terms of two complementary aspects: the funding of travels and the printing of the collected materials. “The book that I present to you,” wrote Plumier in his unprinted dedication to the king, “contains the fruits that I gathered during the two travels that I made to the West Indies on Your orders; since it is but the result of your Royal liberality, it is fair that it appears under your august protection.”<fnref n="13" />

<footnote n="12">¹² Ars. MS 2875 “Description des plantes de l’Amérique,” unpaginated: “C’est pourquoi je vous suplie . . . de me permettre d’y publier non pas vos conquestes . . . [mais] la qualité de père de la patrie que V.M. fait paroistre dans les bienfaits dont elle comble ceux qui s’appliquent à la recherche des plantes, persuadée qu’elle est qu’on contribue par ce moyen à la conservation et au plaisir de ses sujets.”</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ Ars. MS 2875, unpaginated: “L’ouvrage que je prends la liberté de présenter à V.M. contient les premiers des fruits que j’ay recuillis dans les deux voyages que j’ay fait par les ordres au Antilles;</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_83.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.2. Title page and plate XLV of the *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*. Printed at the Imprimerie royale as largely a luxury commodity, the *Description* was a large folio volume with more than one hundred full-page engravings such as the one presented here. (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>

Despite the discourse, things seemed to be different at the level of practices: it is worth remembering Lister's evocation of the frequent trips made by the friar to Versailles in the hope of getting more of his images printed at the king's charge. In other words, Plumier did not get published without effort: the winding ways in which some of his drawings got into press show the extent to which the practice of science in absolutist France relied on a system of patronage—a patronage that, regarding the culture of print, was sustained by both a heterogeneous network of individuals and an institution, the Imprimerie royale.

As was the case for his travels to the West Indies, an intricate web of sponsors was involved in the managing of the royal largesse for the publication of books at the state's

<footnote>comme donc ce n'est que l'effect de votre liberalité Royale, il est bien juste qu'il ne paroisse au jour que sous vostre auguste protection."</footnote>
expense. Almost a decade after his first book appeared in the Louvre, Plumier was still struggling to get his new work printed under the same conditions, but the circumstances seemed to be far less favorable than those in which the *Description* had been published. In June 1702, he wrote to his friend and protector, Intendant Michel Bégon, about these problems:

> I am always waiting, from Sunday to Sunday, to positively know my destiny. I visited also today Monsieur the abbé [Jean-Paul] Bignon, and the only answer he offered me was that Monsieur [Jean] Anisson gave him a summary of what my little work contains and that he would talk to Monseigneur de Pontchartrain. This is the situation in which I still am. I will tell you what the work in question is about: it is a treatise of all the ferns, spleenworts, maidenhairs, &c. that I discovered during my three journeys. I am asking the favor of printing it, since the plates are already done, and all my manuscripts in order. Then I will go wherever I am asked to go. My superiors made clear to me that it would not please them that I travel any more before this book appears.<fnref n="14" />

Once again, Louis II Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain occupied a central position in the network: by the time Plumier was writing, Phélypeaux was chancellor of France, one of the highest dignities of the kingdom to which he ascended in 1699, after leaving his previous position as Secretary of State of the Navy and of the King's House to his son Jérôme. The latter was officially in charge of the navy, the colonies, and the cultural and scientific royal institutions like the Observatory, the Jardin du roi, and the academies. The chancellor, moreover, was the Keeper of the Seals and the man responsible for the department of justice, which means that he commanded over the book trade and had control over printing censorship and permissions. Though the position of chancellor granted more prestige than real political power, the old Louis Phélypeaux was the head of the Pontchartrain clan and presided over an extended network of relatives and clients spread over different layers of the administration.<fnref n="15" /> His actual influence therefore went

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Plumier to Bégon, Paris, June 11, 1702, in MMC MS 656, fol. 110r: "J'attends toujours de dimanche en dimanche pour savoir positivement ma destinée. Auiourdhuy j'ay esté encore voir Mr l'abbé Bignon [et] pour toute réponse il m'a dit que Mr Anisson luy avoit donné un deduit de ce que contient mon ouvrage et qu'il en parleroit à msgneur de Pontchartrain. Voilà Monsieur en quel terme je suis encore. Je vous diray en quoy consiste l'ouvrage dont est question, c'est un traité de toutes les fougères, capillaires, langues de cerf, &c. que j'ay decouvert dans mes trois voyages. Je demande par grace qu'on le fasse imprimer puisque les planches sont toutes faites et touts mes manuscrits en ordre. Ensuite j'iray là où on voudra. Mes supérieurs m'on témoigné que je ne leur fairois pas plaisir de plus voyager que cet ouvrage ne fut au iour."</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Sara E. Chapman, *Private Ambitions and Political Alliances: The Phélypeaux de Pontchartrain Family and Louis XIV's Government, 1650-1715* (Rochester, NY: The University of Rochester Press, 2004), and Charles</footnote>
far beyond his official positions. Besides, he had personally supported Plumier during his three travels to the West Indies, when he was still minister of the navy.

It was under the Chancellor's wing that the abbé Jean-Paul Bignon, actually his nephew, also came to be an essential personality in the Parisian cultural scene. Born into a family of influential magistrates and administrators and with a strong theological and scientific education, Bignon became a member of the Academy of Sciences in 1691, of the French Academy in 1693, and of the Academy of Inscriptions and Medals in 1701— the same year that he was named counselor of state. When Louis XIV granted letter patents to the Academy of Sciences in 1699, it was Bignon who was charged with designing the formal rules that regulated the number, duties, and recruitment of its members. From then on, the abbé held its annual presidency on sixteen occasions during the first thirty-five years of the official life of the company. Through him, too, the chancellor wrested control of the declining *Journal des savans* in 1701, which he subjected to the crown's sway and left in actuality in the hands of a board of editors led by the abbé himself.<fnref n="16" /> Bignon informally became “moderator of all the academies,” according to the famous formula of the duke of Saint-Simon, as well as master of the press by his appointment to the direction of the *Bureau de la librairie*—the chancellery's office responsible for the regulation of the book trade.<fnref n="17" />

As implied by Plumier's letter to Bégon, Bignon was an unavoidable cog in the wheel of the royal patronage of the sciences and the arts and played a very significant role in the printing of prestige editions at the Imprimerie royale, including those of the Minim. Bignon acted in favor of the naturalist as a broker between Chancellor Pontchartrain, who administered a good deal of the royal liberality, and the third personage mentioned in the letter, Jean Anisson (1642-1721), a Lyonnais printer and bookseller appointed at the direction of the Imprimerie royale in 1691.<fnref n="18" /> Anisson was at the head of the royal printing house during the period in which both the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères* appeared in its presses, and he may have supervised directly the

<footnote>Frostin, *Les Pontchartrain, ministres de Louis XIV: Alliances et réseau d'influence sous l'Ancien Régime* (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Raymond Birn, “Le *Journal des savants* sous l’Ancien Régime,” *Journal des savants* 1, no. 1 (1965), 15-35.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Louis de Rouvroy, Duke of Saint-Simon, *Mémoires*, ed. Arthur de Boislisle, vol. 8 (Paris: Hachette, 1891), 385; Jack A. Clarke, “Abbé Jean-Paul Bignon ‘Moderator of the Academies’ and Royal Librarian,” *French Historical Studies* 8, no. 2 (1973), 213-35, and Henri-Jean Martin, “La direction des lettres,” in Martin and Chartier, *Histoire de l'édition française*, vol. 2, 65-83. On the *Bureau de la librairie* in particular, see also Jane McLeod, *Licencing Loyalty: Printers, Patrons, and the State in Early Modern France* (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2001), 75-81.</footnote>

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ For an informative biography, see Geneviève Willemetz, *Jean Anisson, 1642-1721. Un homme d'affaires et de culture au Grand Siècle* (Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 2004).</footnote>
making of these books. The process bore some particular features in the workshops of
the Louvre: while in private printing houses the letterpress printing, the manufacturing
and impression of the intaglio plates, and the binding were most often carried out in
different workshops, the Imprimerie royale centralized the entire process of book
production on the same premises. Proximity to Anisson, therefore, meant a certain
closeness to the entire production of the books. A 1767 inventory of Plumier's papers
lists a number of exchanges between the botanist and Anisson, most of which are now
lost. In October 1694, for instance, Anisson asked the botanist to acknowledge receipt of
a bill of exchange of 130 *livres*, probably in relation to the *Description*, and congratulated
him on the travel he was just about to undertake, his third one. The director also asked
him for accounts of this journey and promised to extol their quality in front of the abbé
Bignon. Two years later, in another missive sent to the West Indies, the printer showed
interest in Plumier's research on the cochineal and reported news about the evolutions of
the War of the League of Augsburg.<fnref n="19" /> The frequent correspondence between Plumier
and Anisson suggests that the naturalist was fairly close to the director of the royal
printing house, and thus probably also to the making of his own books in the workshops
of the Louvre Palace.

As we have seen, naturalists as authors were assumed to be involved in the printing
of their books to a certain extent, especially when illustrations were involved. But there
was also a certain expectation—as suggested already—that the traveling naturalist would
hand over his works for publication, in particular when funded by the state. Plumier's
complaints to Bégon in 1702 about his “superiors” requiring him to concentrate on the
printing treatise of ferns before undertaking any more travels are worth recalling here,
even if it is not clear to which “superiors” he was referring, those of his monastic order
or, more likely, his patrons in the government. For some among the latter, it was obvious
that his travel materials were to be published. In April 1704, for instance, a dispatch from
Versailles by the Secretary of State of the Navy, Jérôme Phélypeaux, was addressed to
Anisson on the subject of Plumier:

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ BNF Est. Réserve YE-27-Pet Fol “Catalogue des portefeuilles du père Plumier remis en 1767 au garde des Estampes du Roi,” fol. 2-3: “Lettre de M. Anisson en datte du 27 8bre 1694, par laquelle il s’informe si le père Plumier a reçu une lettre de change de 130#, qu’il lui a adressé ; il le félicite sur l’heureux voyage que ce religieux va entreprendre et lui en demande des relations qu’il lui promêt de faire valoir auprès de M. l’abbé Bignon”; “Lettre de M. Anisson, en datte du 30 mars 1696, par laquelle il lui marque beaucoup d’intérêt pour la conservation du petit insecte, la cochenille, qu’il seroit à souhaitter que élevions dans nos possessions d’outremer, afin d’éviter les sommes que l’étranger en retire de nous. Il l’ invite à continuer les autres observations d’histoire naturelle.”</footnote>
Father Plumier, known by you, came to ask me permission to go to the Chartreuse Mountains in order to continue working on his botanical passions, and I urged him to explain to me why he did not rather begin to put in print the works he has hitherto done. He told me that this was his wish, but he was in an arrangement with you thereof, and that you did not consider it opportune to follow your first words. I beg you to inform me about the motives you have to do so.<fnref n="20" />

The minister’s surprise at finding out that the botanist’s book was in difficulty for getting printed is remarkable. Up to that year the *Traité des fougères* had always remained unpublished in its definitive form, although a provisional version had been printed a year earlier at the Imprimerie royale, probably with a very limited print run. This provisional version was entitled *Filicetum americanum, seu, filicum, polypodiorum, adiantorum, &c. in America nascentium icones* (American ferns, or images of ferns, polypodies, maidenhairs, etc. growing in America), and consisted of a collection of 222 plates with no text. Only 172 of these were eventually reissued in the definitive *Traité des fougères de l’Amérique* or *Tractatus de filicibus Americanis*, an edition printed at the Louvre workshops, too, in 1705—only a few months after the death of its author. In this the number of plates was reduced from 222 to 172, but almost two hundred pages of text were now included: a preface, a short essay on the medical virtues of several types of fern, a hundred pages of descriptions of the plates, and two indexes of botanical names. These texts were not only in French, but also in Latin “for the benefit of foreigners.”<fnref n="21" /> The book gave printed form to the investment of the crown into Plumier’s journeys of natural exploration: “since in my travels,” wrote the naturalist, “I have never limited my purpose to the sole pleasure of my discoveries, & I have always wished to share them with the public, I publish this small treatise on Ferns, which finally sees the light of day thanks to the favor of our Great Monarch, who agreed to make the expense.”<fnref n="22" />

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Jérôme Phélypeaux to Anisson, Versailles, April 16, 1704, in AN Marine B² 178, fol. 396r-v: “Le père Plumier que vous connoissez m’estant venu demander la permission d’aller dans les montagnes de la grande Chartreuse pour y continuer d’y travailler sur ces joies botaniques je l’ay pressé de m’expliquer pourquoi il ne commençoit par plustost a donner au public les ouvrages qu’il a fait jusqu’à présent. Il m’a repondu qu’il l’auroit beaucoup désiré mais qu’estant enlié [?] en accommodement avec vous sur ce sujet vous n’avez pas jugé a propos de suivre les premières paroles que vous luy aviez donné je vous prie de me faire sçavoir ce que en est et le motif que vous en avez.”</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ Remember that Tournefort had his *Élémens* translated into Latin in 1700 for similar reasons. On translating into Latin from vernacular, see Brian Ogilvie, “Science and Medicine,” in *The Oxford Handbook of Neo-Latin*, ed. Sarah Knight and Stefan Tily (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 263-77.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Plumier, *Traité des fougères de l'Amérique / Tractatus de Filicibus Americanis* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1705), iv: “Comme ne je n’ay point dans mes voyages borné mes desseins à jouir seul du plaisir de mes découvertes, & que j’ay toûjours souhaité d’en faire part au public; je l’entreprens par ce petit traitté des</footnote>
Phélypeaux's admonition of the director of the Imprimerie royale convincingly
shows that the state program of scientific sponsorship, materialized in the funding of
both trips of natural exploration and their representation in printed form, was far from
straightforward or coherent. The agents involved in such editorial enterprises were
manifold: high bureaucrats like Phélypeaux probably were not as conscious as an
Anisson or a Bignon of the difficulties of getting a volume of the characteristics of the
*Traité des fougères* printed. Besides, the good wishes of the state patrons were not always
accompanied by the corresponding economic provisions. Furthermore, the episode
suggests that print played a central role in the eyes of the highest state agents as a means
to visualize the crown's support of traveling naturalists. This dimension of the scientific
self-fashioning of the monarchy was embodied in the institution of the Imprimerie royale
directed by Anisson. The Imprimerie royale embodied this particular dimension of the
state support to the arts and the sciences that was expressed through fanciful editorial
projects.

In this sense, it is worth pausing over the institution of the Louvre printing house so
as to trace the possibilities and limits that royal patronage offered to naturalists to get
their work printed. The Imprimerie royale was formally founded in 1640 by Cardinal
Richelieu to replace the small typographic workshop established in the early years of the
reign of Louis XIII, the origins of which can be traced back to the acquisition of Greek
types by Francis I around the end of the 1610s.<fnref n="23" /> Originally located on the ground floor
of the gallery connecting the Louvre Palace with the Tuileries, the institution was the
object of profound reforms in the 1660s within Colbert's program for a systematic
development of the royal manufactures: the premises of the press were renovated and its
spirit was reoriented with the aim of serving the glorification of the monarchy (fig. 5.3).

Printed images came to have a prominent role in such a newly defined political
program of cultural sponsorship: in 1667, Colbert had an act passed at the Royal Council
for the engraving of “the plans and the elevations of the royal buildings, the ornaments
of painting and sculpture within them, as well as the figures of plants and animals of all
kinds and other rare and singular things.”<fnref n="24" /> Three years after the controller-general sent a

<footnote>Fougères, qui enfin voit le jour par la faveur de nôtre Grand Monarque qui en a bien voulu faire la dépense.”</footnote>

<footnote n="23">²³ Auguste Bernard, *Histoire de l’Imprimerie royale du Louvre* (Paris: à l’Imprimerie impériale, 1867), 65-119.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Act of the Royal Council (*Arrêt du Conseil*) on December 22, 1667, quoted in André Jammes, “Louis XIV, sa Bibliothèque et le Cabinet du Roi,” *The Library* 20, no. 1 (1965), 5: “[Le Roi a] resolu de faire graver les plans et elevations des maisons royalles, les ornemens de peinture et sculpture estans en icelles, les</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_84.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.3. (above) Engraving by Sebastien Leclerc of the works on the Louvre Palace, where the Royal Press was housed, during the 1670s. (Musée Carnavalet, Paris.) (opposite) Late-seventeenth-century anonymous ink-and-wash drawing of the Royal Press workshop. The scene presents several of the separate processes of book production that were carried out on the same premises: type founding, composition, and printing, among others. (Musée Carnavalet, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

report on this project to Charles Perrault, secretary of the Academy of Belles Lettres, and to Pierre Carcavy, head of the Bibliothèque du roi: his plan was to print engravings of the disparate items integrated in the king's collections, from "[plants and] animals whose Anatomy and dissection has been done" to paintings and "antique medals." Colbert's emphasis was placed on the uniformity of such printed images, so that volumes of the same size could appear annually. In this way, "the King will keep in his library the work of each year, and after ten or twelve years, different volumes on every kind of science."²⁵ Although it was not accomplished in the exact terms Colbert envisaged in the 1660s, this project was at the origins of the *Cabinet du Roi*, the "King's Cabinet," a collection of

tableaux et figures, antiques du Cabinet de Sa Majeste ou qui se trouveront ailleurs comme aussy, les figures des plantes et animaux de toutes especes et autres choses rares et singulieres."

²⁵ AN O¹ 1964 2, no. 2 "Mémoire que Monseigneur a dressé touchant la publication des ouvrages où il y a des planches gravées," unpaginated: "Il faut dis-je les réduire toutes d'une grandeur telle qu'elles puissent composer des volumes d'une grandeur égale affin qu'à la fin de chacune année nous puissions composer une volume de tout ce qui aura esté fait de toutes ces sortes de travaux avec les discours imprimez en françois et après dix ou douze années nous composerons des volumes desd. choses séparées en sorte que le Roy aura dans la bibliothèque le travail desd. années et ensuitte au bout de dix ou douze ans il aura des volumes séparez de toute sorte de science."
<figure><img src="image_85.png" /></figure>
sumptuous folio volumes of engravings made by outstanding artists like Claude Mellan (1598-1688) or Sébastien Le Clerc (1637-1714) and which reproduced the buildings, paintings, sculptures, medals, tapestries, and public celebrations of the king. The *Cabinet* collection of books of engravings, usually large folio formats bound in scarlet Morocco leather with the royal coat of arms, became part of what Louis Marin labeled “absolutist imaginary,” the symbolic program of the monarchy and closely related to scriptural (and graphic) economies of collecting.<fnref n="26" /> Conceived by Colbert as a closed and uniform collection, this encyclopedic project aspired, as an author put it, “to harmonise in a single *opus* the heterogeneous work of the reign”—one might even say of “king-making” or nation-building.<fnref n="27" /> Yet the *Cabinet* turned out to be a project as coherent and uniform as the absolutist monarchy itself, and was actually given most of its uniformity around the mid-eighteenth century, when this series of prestige editions, painfully published during the 1670s and the 1680s, came to be inventoried and reorganized.<fnref n="28" />

In the 1670s, Perrault and Carcavy replied to Colbert's report with an evaluation of the work achieved so far in the domain of natural knowledge: in addition to about one hundred and fifty plates already printed in specific publications, nearly the same number of plates had been carved. Together with the engravings, the volumes would include *discours* or pieces of writing by scholars chosen according to the "talents required by such different topics." Each author would give his own style to the texts, but "on the condition that they would be revised beforehand by the Academy [of Sciences], if dealing with physics and mathematics, and by the assembly of Belles Lettres, if on another topic."<fnref n="29" /> One half of the plates that, according to Perrault and Carcavy, were ready in 1670 consisted of the anatomical depictions of exotic animals by Abraham Bosse (1602/4-1676) and Leclerc for the *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux*, the

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Louis Marin, *Le portrait du roi* (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1981). See also Thomas W. Gaehtgens, “The Arts in the Service of the King’s Glory,” in *A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV, 1660-1715*, ed. Peter Fuhring, Louis Marchesano, Rémi Mathis, and Vanessa Selbach (Los Angeles/Paris: The Getty Research Institute/Bibliothèque nationale de France, 2015), 1-8.</footnote>

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Claire Goldstein, “Collecting Versailles: Scriptural economis of the Cabinet du Roi,” *Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes: An International Quarterly* 23, no. 3 (2003), 258.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ Georges Duplesis, “Le Cabinet du Roi: Collection d’estampes commandées par Louis XIV,” extract of the *Bibliophile français* (Paris: Bachelin-Deflorence, 1869); Jammes, “Le Cabinet du Roi”; Marianne Grivel, “Le Cabinet du Roi,” *Revue de la Bibliothèque nationale* 18 (1985), 36-57; Goldstein, “Collecting Versailles”; Maxime Préaud, “Printmaking under Louis XIV,” in Fuhring, *Kingdom of Images*, 11.</footnote>

<footnote n="29">²⁹ AN O¹ 1964 2, no. 2, unpaginated: “Il faudroit que chacun de ceux qui ferait des discours peut mestre son [illegible] à son ouvrage mais à condition qu’il seroit reveu auparavant par l’Académie si ce sont choses qui sont de mathematiques ou de physique, et si c’est d’autre matière, par l’assemblée des belles lettres.” See also Martin, *Livre, pouvoir et société*, vol. 2, 672-3, and Simone Balayé, *La Bibliothèque nationale des origines à 1800* (Geneva: Droz, 1988), 109-11.</footnote>
project led in the newly established Academy of Sciences by Charles Perrault's brother, Claude. Six years later, another report by Charles Perrault and Carcavy informed Colbert of the works "ready to be delivered to the public": the second part of the history of animals, an equivalent for the history of plants directed by Denis Dodart, a work on the motion of bodies by Edme Mariotte, and a treatise on the anatomy of the eye.

The editorial enterprises commonly gathered under the label of the *Cabinet du Roi* thus embody the process by which, from the end of the 1660s, the Imprimerie royale and the recently constituted royal societies became closely associated with the propaganda aims of the monarchy. The catalog of the books printed at the Louvre presses illustrates such an evolution for the Paris Academy of Sciences: according to the inventory drawn up by the historian and typographer Auguste Bernard in 1867, no book on natural history, natural philosophy, mathematics or any other kind of natural knowledge was published at the Imprimerie royale until the first volume of Claude Perrault's *Histoire des animaux* in 1671. Before that year, only 107 books in total had been printed (an average of less than three and a half per year) and they were almost exclusively of religious, classical, and historical content. (The first work issued was a folio edition of Thomas à Kempis's *De Imitatione Christi*.) Few of these hundred books included engravings, apart from some vignettes, tailpieces, frontispieces, and (occasionally) portraits of the authors. (The exception were commemorative editorial enterprises such as *Les triomphes de Louis le Juste, XIII du nom, roy de France et de Navarre*, which appeared in 1649 with more than sixty folio copperplates, thirty-five half-page engravings and over forty double-folio maps.) In other words, the institution was, even before the 1660s, aimed at a luxury production related to the celebration of the monarchy. The publications' formats give another insight in this respect: out of the hundred works printed before Colbert's reforms, around seventy-five were editions in folio size or larger.<fnref n="30" />

Claude Perrault's *Histoire des animaux*, whose first volume appeared in 1671, inaugurates a new episode in the history of the Imprimerie royale regarding not so much its aims, but rather the place that scientific literature played in it. A project of the Academy from its early years, it was initially conceived by Colbert himself as a collection of engravings on animals and plants. The relationship with the enterprise of the *Cabinet du Roi* becomes evident in the importance given by the Controller-General to the intaglio plates, which were probably produced in a small copperplate workshop installed on the

<footnote n="30">³⁰ Bernard, *Imprimerie royale*, 122-40.</footnote>
very premises of the Bibliothèque du roi in rue Vivienne—the same, by that time, used
by the members of the Academy, which had already produced hundreds of engravings
for the collection of the *Cabinet*.<fnref n="31" /> From the year of the *Histoire des animaux*’s publication
until 1720, another 158 works appeared in the presses of the Louvre: a few more than
three per year on average. More than fifty of these may be placed in the fields of natural
history, mathematics, astronomy, and physics—the seven issues of the *Histoire de
l’Académie royale des sciences* for that period left aside. Although only roughly one third of
the total works printed at the Imprimerie royale in those fifty years included engravings
according to Bernard, twenty-eight of these illustrated editions were books on natural
history and natural philosophy. The number of illustrations varied substantially from one
book to another: the abbé Jean Picard’s 1671 *Mésure de la terre* had only five plates,
whereas 451 figures were included in Tournefort’s *Élemens de botanique* in 1694. The
prestige character of the publications on natural history and natural philosophy published
at the Imprimerie royale was also reflected in the short print runs of which they were the
object: a fixed number of two hundred copies were printed for the first and second part
of Perrault’s *Histoire des animaux* in 1670 and 1676—the same as its botanical counterpart,
the *Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire des plantes*, authored by Dodart.

It is difficult to draw definitive conclusions from these numbers, particularly because
we still need to rely on the nineteenth-century study by Auguste Bernard, which is not
always accurate—it includes, for instance, two nonexistent editions of Plumier’s
*Description* (dated 1697 and 1702), as well as the *Nova genera*, which never appeared with
the Imprimerie royale.<fnref n="32" /> For want of an exhaustive survey on the activity of the Louvre’s
printing house for the period of Louis XIV’s reign, it is necessary to turn to Bernard’s
numbers to sketch a general picture of the production in the Louvre’s workshops—one
to which Plumier’s works needs to be compared. Two inferences can already be deduced
with a certain confidence. First, Bernard’s inventory confirms the view of the Imprimerie
royale as being mainly devoted to the publication of monumental and prestige books:
that is, editorial enterprises that would not have been profitable for private printers.
(Around eighty works of the total production for the years 1671-1720, more than half,

<footnote n="31">³¹ Anita Guerrini, “The King’s Animals and the King’s Books: The Illustrations for the Paris Academy’s *Histoire des animaux*,” *Annals of Science* 67, no. 3 (2010), 385-6, and Balayé, *La Bibliothèque nationale, 160*. In the abbé Bignon’s “Mémoires concernant les ouvrages de l’Académie [des sciences],” the plates of a reduced edition of the *Histoire des animaux* are said to have been printed in the “bibliothèque,” too: BNF Mss. Français 22225 “Papiers de l’abbé Bignon, Mémoires et correspondances,” fol. 36r-v.</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² Bernard, *Imprimerie royale*, 153-7.</footnote>
were folios or large folios.) Second, regarding scientific books in particular, the press actually served official institutions: virtually all the works on topics related to natural knowledge printed during the same period were authored by members of the Academy of Sciences. There is only one single exception: Charles Plumier.

A summary survey of the works published at the Imprimerie royale specifically dealing with natural history (fig. 5.4) enables us to put Plumier's botanical books into a broader perspective. This scrutiny reveals the repetition of a few authors, the first of whom is Tournefort who, between 1694 and 1717, authored five books printed at the Louvre: the three octavo volumes of the *Élémens de botanique* in 1694; the duodecimo *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris* in 1698; the Latin extended edition of the *Élémens* in three quarto books published with the title *Institutiones rei herbariae* (Botanical institutions) in 1700, along with a *Corollarium* (Collorary) three years later, and, finally, his posthumous *Relation d'un voyage du Levant* (Account of a voyage into the Levant) in 1717, in two quarto volumes. Two names are repeated twice: that of Claude Perrault for the two volumes of his *Histoire des animaux*, published in 1671 and 1676, respectively, and that of Dodart for the two editions of the *Histoire des plantes* (the first 1676 folio edition was reduced, three years later, to a duodecimo text without figures). Apart from the admittedly extraordinary case of Tournefort, only Plumier's name appears more than twice: his 1693 *Description* is followed by the two folio editions of the treatise on ferns, the *Filicetum* of 1703, and the definitive *Traité des fougères* of 1705. Plumier's publication rate at the Imprimerie royale seems remarkable when considered within the general figures of the Louvre's printing house regarding natural history—all the more so given the format of the books and the number of plates. First, Plumier's volumes are among the few to be printed in folio format, along with the projects on the natural history of animals and plants of the Academy of Sciences. Second, the number of plates included in each of them largely exceeds the fifteen and thirty engravings of the two respective volumes of the *Histoire des animaux*, or the thirty-eight of the *Histoire des plantes*. Tournefort's main works constitute once more a striking exception: more than 450 plates were included in both the *Élémens* and the *Institutiones*—although the latter actually reemployed those of the former and added forty new ones. Tournefort's works, however, are composed of several volumes (three in the case of the *Élémens* and the *Institutiones*, two in that of the *Voyage to the Levant*) and, more importantly, they are quarto or octavo editions. In contrast, all the three works by Plumier are folio editions of one single volume each, and still they included 108, 222, and 172 copperplates of the same size, respectively.
<table><caption>Fig. 5.4: Books on natural history published at the Paris Royal Press from its foundation in 1640 to 1720.</caption><thead><tr><th>Year</th><th>Author or editor</th><th>Title</th><th>Size</th><th>Engravings</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>1671</td><td>Claude Perrault</td><td>Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux</td><td>Fol.</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>1675</td><td>Samuel Cottereau du Clos</td><td>Observations sur les eaux minéraux de plusieurs provinces de France, faites en l'Académie royale des sciences, dans les années 1670 et 1671</td><td>12°</td><td>None.</td></tr><tr><td>1676</td><td>Claude Perrault</td><td>[Suite des] Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux</td><td>Large fol.</td><td>30</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Denis Dodart</td><td>Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes 2<sup>nd</sup> ed.: 1679</td><td>Large fol.</td><td>38</td></tr><tr><td>1679</td><td>Denis Dodart</td><td>Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes [2<sup>nd</sup> ed.]</td><td>12°</td><td>None.</td></tr><tr><td>1692</td><td></td><td>Observations physiques et mathématiques pour servir à l'histoire naturelle et à la perfection de l'astronomie et de la géographie, envoyées des Indes et de la Chine à l'Académie des sciences, à Paris, par les Jésuites; avec les réflexions de messieurs de l'Académie et les notes du P. Th. Gonye, jésuite</td><td>4°</td><td>2 maps.</td></tr><tr><td>1693</td><td>Charles Plumier</td><td>Description des plantes de l'Amérique, avec leurs figures</td><td>Fol.</td><td>108</td></tr><tr><td>1694</td><td>Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle</td><td>Éloge de M. de Tournefort, par M. de Fontenelle; lettres sur la botanique, par M. P. Collet; réponse de M. Chomel (Tournefort) à deux de ces lettres</td><td>4°</td><td>None.</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort</td><td>Éléments de botanique, ou methode pour connoître les plantes, 3 vols. Latin edition: Institutiones rei herbariae, 1700.</td><td>8°</td><td>451</td></tr><tr><td>1698</td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort</td><td>Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris, avec leur usage dans la medicine</td><td>12°</td><td>None.</td></tr><tr><td>1700</td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort</td><td>Institutiones rei herbariae; aditio altera gallica longe auctior, quingentis circiter tabulis aeneis adornata, 3 vols.</td><td>4°</td><td>489</td></tr></tbody></table>
<table><tr><td>1703</td><td>Charles Plumier</td><td>Filicetum americanu, seu filicum potypodiorum, adiantorum . . . in America nascentium, icones</td><td>Fol.</td><td>222</td></tr><tr><td></td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort</td><td>Corollarium institutionum rei berbariae</td><td>4°</td><td>33</td></tr><tr><td>1705</td><td>Charles Plumier</td><td>Traité des fougères de l'Amérique, en latin et en français</td><td>Fol.</td><td>172</td></tr><tr><td>1717</td><td>Joseph Pitton de Tournefort</td><td>Relation d'un voyage du Lenant fait par ordre du roy en 1700, contenant l'histoire ancienne et moderne de plusieurs isles de l'Archiipel, de Constantinople, des costes de la mer Noire, de l'Arménie, de la Géorgie, des frontières de Perse et de l'Asie mineure; avec des figures en taille-douce et des remarques, 2 vols.</td><td>4°</td><td>148</td></tr><tr><td>1719</td><td>Antoine de Jussieu</td><td>Appendices ad Josephi Pitton de Tournefort institutiones rei berbariae</td><td>4°</td><td>?</td></tr></table>

Source: Auguste Bernard, Histoire de l'Imprimerie royale du Louvre (Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1867).
The books by Plumier or Tournefort have not usually been considered as an integral part of the *Cabinet du Roi* project. In fact, they were not. Yet the project, in any case far from being an explicit and coherent editorial program, paved the way for naturalists like them to profit from the royal liberality and have their works printed. Plumier's *Description* and *Traité des fougères* fit in the formal characteristics and aims of this royal enterprise: they were both large folios, lavishly illustrated, and richly bound in the very same manner as the rest of the volumes of the collection. Such illustrated accounts of the flora and fauna of the French West Indies were also prone to serve very well the symbolic purposes of the monarchy and its ambitions to represent its control—real or sought—across the Atlantic. Among the means by which the crown made its power visible, a prominent place was occupied by editorial enterprises of scientific knowledge with a strong dimension of aesthetics and pleasure. Books like those by the Minim friar can be seen as commodities that were, paradoxically, outside the commercial market by having been printed at the Imprimerie royale rather than by a private undertaker. In both the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*, the only reference to the publication process was a page separating the part of the text from the part of the engravings: it limited itself to laconically indicating that the works had been printed at the Imprimerie royale under the supervision of Jean Anisson. Neither of them included any kind of printing permission, and both surely fell under the act passed in 1667 to forbid printmakers from reproducing works in the king's cabinet unless expressly authorized.<fnref n="33" />

Nevertheless, negotiations had to be made regarding both the contents and the format of the books, as we shall see below. And these did not always work as hoped. As witnessed by Lister, Plumier had to struggle to get his images in the king's presses, and the difficulties in this respect would last a long time: more than a decade elapsed from the publication of his *Description* until the book on ferns finally appeared under similar conditions. Yet only three of the five printed books authored by Plumier were printed under the aegis of the state: the *Nova genera* and the *Art de tourner* both made their way into print through the book market. It is thus worth tracing these two publications before coming back to the friar's pains in getting his book on ferns into print.

<footnote n="33">³³ Act of the Royal Council (Arrêt du Conseil) on December 21, 1667, reproduced in Claude-Marin Saugrin, *Code de la librairie et imprimerie de Paris* (Paris: aux dépens de la Communauté, 1744), 460, and quoted in Katie Scott, “Authorship, the Académie, and the Market in Early Modern France,” *Word & Image* 21, no. 1 (1998), 27-41.</footnote>
Negotiating audiences: the *Art de tourner* and the *Nova genera*

Modern scholars may see it as an example of the ironies of academic life. Plumier spent about seven years in the lush forests of the Caribbean islands and thousands of pages painstakingly recording the plants and creatures inhabiting them. Yet the book of his that eventually enjoyed the largest editorial success was not on botany, but on turnery. Turnery was the craft of shaping wood and metal by means of a lathe, a machine that makes a piece of wood rotate and works against a cutting tool. For Plumier, as for many by that time, ornamental turning became a “honnête occupation to spend some hours of pleasure.”<fnref n="34" /> The friar is said to have practiced the art of turnery since his youth (his father, he affirms, “took delight in this activity”) and improved his skills in the use of the lathe during his years in Toulouse with his mentor Father Emmanuel Maignan—from whom he also probably acquired some knowledge of drawing and the making of optical instruments. It seems that Plumier continued to practice the art of turnery afterwards: the choir stalls of the convent of Trinità dei Monti in Rome, today extant and in use, are attributed to his hand, and once in Paris, he was in contact with artisans like Jacques Maubois (d. ca. 1715), “King’s Turner at the Louvre.”<fnref n="35" /> Although turning had not been his main occupation, the *Art de tourner* had an editorial life that his books on botany could never enjoy. To begin with, it was reedited a striking number of times: the original French edition of 1701 was reprinted soon afterwards and a new one appeared in 1749—its last edition in French was reprinted as late as 1976. The work also was translated to several languages: a version in German was published in 1776 and a translation was reputed to have been commanded by Peter the Great, a passionate turner himself, for a purported 1716 bilingual edition in Russian and Dutch. The work enjoyed a favorable reception until well into the nineteenth century: it was mentioned on occasion as a classic, and Plumier was praised by some as the equivalent in turnery of “what Ambroise Paré is for surgeons.”<fnref n="36" />

<footnote n="34">³⁴ Plumier, *L'art de tourner ou de faire en perfection toutes sortes d'ouvrages au tour* (Lyon: chez Jean Certe, 1701), vi-xix: “Et bienque je n'aye pas pu y vaquer avec assiduité n'ayant jamais regardé le tour que comme une honnête occupation pour passer quelques heures de plaisir, j'ay neanmoins cette satisfaction que je ne donne ici rien au public, que je n'aye éprouvé souvent.”</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ P. J. S. Whitmore, *The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France* (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 187, and Plumier, *Art de tourner*, v.</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ In 1701, the *Art de tourner* was printed in Lyon by Jean Certe and sold in Paris by Jean I Jombert. The latter's son, Claude, had the book reprinted in Paris in 1706. Claude's son, Charles-Antoine, issued a new edition in Paris in 1749, a facsimile reprint which was printed in 1967 in Nogent-le-Roi by the Libraire des Arts et Métiers. The German translation, *Die Kunst zu drechseln, oder alle Arten von Arbeit auf der Drehbank vollkommen zu verfertigen*, was printed by Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf and son in Leipzig in 1776, and the supposed Russian-Dutch edition commanded by Peter the Great, *Khudozhestvo tokarnoe, ili delati v*</footnote>
The success of the book was not altogether surprising: turning was a hobby fit even for a king. Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, Peter the Great, and Louis XV were reputed to have been skillful amateur turners. Ornamental turnery reached its apogee as an aristocratic hobby in eighteenth-century France. While nobles and gentlemen made use of the lathe, learned men studied its mathematical implications at the Paris Academy of Sciences. The *Art de tourner* was one of the few manuals on turnery, practically the only (before Bergeron’s 1792 *Manuel du tourneur*) that was made available to a large public, by means of both illustrations and descriptions, a practical knowledge usually passed within the space of the workshop.<fnref n="37" />

The first edition of the *Art de tourner* was printed in Lyon in 1701 by Jean Certe, a bookseller mostly specialized in geographical and medical works who had been sued on several occasions for counterfeiting and imprisoned twice for pirating offenses (fig. 5.5). The involvement of Plumier in the publication of this book is unclear: he accorded the privilege of printing to a certain abbé Perichon, to which the author attributed both “the expenses of the printing & of the engraving of [the] about eighty Copperplates which constitute the main part of this Book.” According to the frontispiece, it was this abbé who took care of the edition. The book was simultaneously sold in Paris by Jean I Jombert, whose son seemingly reprinted it five years later. Moreover, forty-eight years after that, Jombert’s grandson, Charles-Antoine, a prominent publisher in Paris and bookseller for the “Artillery and Genius,” issued a new and augmented edition in 1749, when he undertook the reedition of several technical books on mathematics, the art of dyeing, and glass-making.<fnref n="38" /> In the hands of Charles-Antoine Jombert, the book was entirely recast. The same copper plates were reemployed, although rearranged and slightly modified in their numeration. The frontispiece, the same as in the original edition, was altered so as to erase every reference to the abbé Perichon. The contents and structure were reorganized and the text was “corrected & augmented” from ten to twelve chapters: an addendum by Plumier to the first edition, with the suggestive title of

<footnote>sovershenstvo vsiakia raboty tocheniem, seems to be dated 1716, but I could not find any extant copy of this. For Plumier's comparison in turning to Ambroise Paré in medicine, see Paulin Desormeaux, *L'art du tourneur*, 2 vols. (Paris: Audot, 1824), 1.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Klaus Maurice, *Der drechselnde Souverän: Materialien zu einer fürstlichen Maschinekunst* (Zürich: Ineichen, 1985). Prior to Plumier's *Art de Tourner* was Joseph Moxon's *Mechanick Exercises: Or, the Doctrine of Handy-Works*, a volume illustrated with eight engravings and devoted to manual activities such as smithery, joinery, carpentry, and bricklaying; sold in chapters, the part on turnery appeared in 1678. See Graham Jagger, "Joseph Moxon, FRS, and the Royal Society," *Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London* 49, no. 2 (1995), 193-202.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ Catherine Bousquet-Bressolier, “Charles-Antoine Jombert (1712-1784): un libraire entre sciences et arts,” *Bulletin du bibliophile* 2 (1997), 299-333.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_86.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_87.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_88.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.5. Frontispiece, title page, and one of the plates of the first edition of the *Art de tourner* (1701) published by Jean Certe in Lyon and sold by Jean I Jombert in Paris. In the 1740s, Jombert's grandson gave a new edition of the book. The treatise on turnery enjoyed an editorial success that Plumier's books on plants were far from attaining. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
"Secrets," was now included as part of the body, and several articles drawn from the memoirs of the Academy of Sciences were added as well. Jombert's reedition shows the well-extended interest of which turnery was the object in the mid-eighteenth century, not only among aristocratic and *honnête* amateurs, but also in the scientific milieu: the articles now included were authored by members of the Academy, namely Gabriel-Philippe de La Hire, son of the mathematician and astronomer Philippe de La Hire, and Charles-Marie de La Condamine (1701-1774), the prominent geographer and mathematician mostly known for his travel to the province of Quito to make measurements on the meridian and test Newton's hypothesis on the curvature of the earth. The two papers by La Condamine had been read in front of the academicians two years before his departure to South America and connected to the research he was to carry out there, for he was using Plumier's manual to study the circular movements traced by the turning machine.

From a material point of view, all these French editions of the *Art de tourner* were
folio volumes with between seventy (for the Lyon original edition of 1701) and eighty
full-page plates (for the 1749 Parisian reedition). Furthermore, these three editions
counted about 250 pages, images aside: the preface alone of the 1749 edition occupied
twenty pages. In spite of such formal characteristics, the editorial life of the book
suggests that it became far more profitable for booksellers than any of Plumier's
botanical works probably ever were, even if its formal characteristics (a folio volume, half
of which consisted of full-page copperplate pictures) do not differ substantially from
those of the *Description* and the *Traité des fougères*. In this sense, the prices at which his
works were sold at the time may cast some light on the diverse audiences they reached:
booksellers' catalogs from the mid- to the late eighteenth century enable us to draw a
partial picture of the readers of the Minim's works. In 1740, for instance, the first edition
of the turnery manual was sold for 20 livres, and a decade later it reached the price of 66
livres.<fnref n="39" /> Even for a first edition, these are costly figures for a technical book, especially
when compared to the botany books of the Minim. In 1744, the library of Antoine-
Tristan Danty d'Isnard (1663-1743), an associated botanist at the Paris Academy of
Sciences linked to the Jardin du roi (he succeed Tournefort after his death as *démonstrateur*
for a short period of time) was put on the market and the catalog included all the
botanical books by Plumier: the *Description* was sold for 15:1 (that is, 15 livres and 1 sou),
and the *Nova genera* for 4:15; the *Filicetum*, including "9 plates of plants more than in the

<footnote n="39">³⁹ *Catalogue des livres de feu M. Bellanger, Trésorier general du Sceau de France* (Paris: chez Gabriel and Claude Martin, 1740), 235, and *Catalogue des livres de feu M. le comte d'Autry* (Paris: chez Gabriel Martin, 1750), 38.</footnote>
other copies,” and the *Traité des fougères* were valued at 18 livres each. As a way of comparison, the same selling catalog listed Tournefort’s *Élémens* for 33:1 and Dodart’s *Histoire des plantes* for 31 livres.<fnref n="40" /> The *Description* had a similar price in 1753 (16 livres), whereas the *Nova genera* reached 18 livres on the same sale.<fnref n="41" /> The prices of Plumier’s books on botany began to grow only some decades afterwards, as their bibliophilic value rose: in 1763, the *Description* was priced at 35:5, and the *Traité des fougères* at 29:19. In 1786, the *Description* reached 44:19 and a colored edition 72:15. The book on ferns was valued at 80 livres in the same catalog, and the *Filicetum* nothing less than 100 livres.<fnref n="42" />

That the *Art de tourner* proved highly profitable from quite early in its printing history is also suggested by the German translation that appeared in 1776 from the hand of Bernhard Christoph Breitkopf, a Leipzig printer whose business came to be one of the leading publishers in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly for music.<fnref n="43" /> In all likelihood, a pirated version of Jombert’s 1749 book, the Breitkopf edition, offered a translation into German of the French text, reemployed the seventy-nine full-page engravings, and added four more. Although their order is exactly the same as in Jombert’s, the figures were not printed from the same copperplates, but most likely copied from the printed edition, for some details of the images are forgotten or misrepresented (fig. 5.6).<fnref n="44" />

The manual on the art of turning was not, however, the only book by Plumier printed outside the realm of royal patronage. His book on new American botanical genera, the *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera* (New genera of American plants) was printed in 1703, the year in which the engravings on ferns appeared under the provisional form of the *Filicetum*. Like his work on ferns, Plumier’s description and drawings on the

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ Catalogue de feu M. Danty d'Isnard, Medecin, Ancien Professeur Royal des Plantes au Jardin du Roy; & de l'Académie royale des sciences (Paris: chez Gabriel Martin, 1744), 70.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ Catalogue des livres de feu M. Giraud de Moucy (Paris: chez Barrois, 1753), 135.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Catalogue des livres de feu M. Imbert, ecuyer et premier apothicaire du corps du roi (Paris: chez Davidts, 1763), 30, and Catalogue des livres rares de Mr Le Camus de Limare (Paris: chez Guillaume de Bure, fils aîné, 1786), 71.</footnote>

<footnote n="43">⁴³ George B. Stauffer, “The Breitkopf Family and Its Role in the Eighteenth-Century Music Publishing,” in J. S. Bach, *the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-Century Music Trade*, ed. George B. Stauffer (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 1-8. The title of the 1776 Leipzig edition is *Die Kunst zu drechseln, oder alle Arten von Arbeit auf der Drehbank vollkommen zu verfertigen, ehemals in franzsischer und lateinisher sprache vom hrn P. Carl Plümier, aus dem Orden der Minimen, abgefaßt, nun neben der französischen Urschrift mit einer deutschen Uebersetzung, einigen Anmerkungen, Zusäßen und Kupfern vermehrt herausgegeben von einem Liebhaber der Drehkunst. Mit vier und achtzig Kupfertafeln.*</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Adrian Johns elaborated a taxonomy of piracy or infringments in order to chart, as by inversion, the countours of early modern scholarly authorship; these included translation, “an industry in their own right” because “regimes of literary propriety [or economic ownership, as opposed to “property” or intellectual ownership] stopped short at national boundaries.” Johns, “The Ambivalence of Authorship in Early Modern Natural Philosophy,” in *Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science*, ed. Mario Biagioli and Peter Galison (New York: Routledge, 2003), 67-90, esp. 76. See also Johns, *The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), 227-8 and 507.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_89.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 5.6. Frontispiece and title page of the *Die Kunst zu drechseln*, the 1776 German translation of Plumier’s *Art de tourner*. The Breitkopfs, a firm that had become famous for publishing J. S. Bach’s scores, pirated Jombert’s 1749 edition: they translated the text into German and roughly plagiarized the copperplates. (Cambridge University Library.)</figcaption></figure>

new botanical genera he discovered in the West Indies did not easily make their way into print. In his correspondence with Bégon a year before the publication, Plumier was once again bitterly grumbling about the uncertain future of his editorial projects in general, and that of the *Nova genera* in particular. His concerns were this time about the reluctance of his friend and intellectual reference, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, to include the friar’s discoveries into his own publications. Plumier frequently expressed his hopes to get the help of the professor at the Jardin du roi for the publication of several of his works. (This was the case of a book on the *Umbelliferae*: he claimed to have more than a hundred plates already drawn, despite his awareness that they were all the more unlikely to get printed, given that there was already a work published on that family of plants by “Monsieur l’Anglois,” the English botanist Robert Morison.)<fnref n="45" />

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Plumier to Bégon, Paris, June 11, 1702, in MMC MS 656, fol. 110r. The book by Morison to which Plumier may have been referring was more than thirty years old by then: *Plantarum umbelliferarum distributio nova, per tabulas cognationis et affinitatis ex libro Naturae observata & detecta* (Oxford: Sheldonian Theater, 1672).</footnote>