# Nature in draft: Images and overseas natural history in the work of Charles Plumier (1646-1704)

José Beltrán

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José Beltrán. Nature in draft: Images and overseas natural history in the work of Charles Plumier (1646-1704). History. European University Institute, 2017. English. NNT: tel-04250268

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DEPARTMENT
OF HISTORY
AND
CIVILIZATION

European
University
Institute

# Nature in Draft

## Images and Overseas Natural History
in the Work of Charles Plumier (1646-1704)

José Beltrán

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to
obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization
of the European University Institute

Florence, 2 May 2017
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# Nature in Draft

Images and Overseas Natural History
in the Work of Charles Plumier (1646-1704)

José Beltrán

Thesis submitted for assessment with a view to
obtaining the degree of Doctor of History and Civilization
of the European University Institute

**Examining Board**

Professor Ann Blair, Harvard University

Professor Jorge Flores, EUI (supervisor)

Professor Juan Pimentel, CSIC (external advisor)

Professor Stéphane Van Damme, EUI (second reader)
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## Researcher declaration to accompany the submission of written work
Department of History and Civilization - Doctoral Programme

I, José Beltrán, certify that I am the author of the work "Nature in Draft: Images and Overseas Natural History in the Work of Charles Plumier (1646-1704)" I have presented for examination for the PhD at the European University Institute. I also certify that this is solely my own original work, other than where I have clearly indicated, in this declaration and in the thesis, that it is the work of others.

I warrant that I have obtained all the permissions required for using any material from other copyrighted publications.

I certify that this work complies with the Code of Ethics in Academic Research issued by the European University Institute (IUE 332/2/10 (CA 297)).

The copyright of this work rests with its author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This work may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. This authorization does not, to the best of my knowledge, infringe the rights of any third party.

I declare that this work consists of 153,437 words.

## Statement of language correction:

This thesis has been corrected for linguistic and stylistic errors. I certify that I have checked and approved all language corrections, and that these have not affected the content of this work.

Signature and date:

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January 25, 2017
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Abstract

Upon his death in 1704, the Minim friar, botanist to Louis XIV, and intrepid traveler Charles Plumier (1646-1704) left in his Parisian convent a mass of drawings on the flora and fauna of the West Indies. The industrious Plumier was a naturalist with inky fingers: his firsthand observations on the Caribbean islands translated into thousands of paper materials extremely heterogeneous in form and content. They encompass exquisite ink-and-watercolor pictures and rapidly executed sketches, rough notes and elaborate written descriptions, detailed measurements and interminable lists. For all their diversity, Plumier's papers bear the common desire to depict, describe, and inventory flowery and non-flowery plants, seeds and leaves, fishes and shells, reptiles and birds—in one word, to capture a faraway nature on paper.

"Nature in Draft" mines this exciting and virtually untapped 8,000-page archive, and traces its history from the field, through the often tortuous paths that brought part of it into print, down to its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century afterlives. By paying particular attention to the materiality of Plumier's corpus and the practices by which it was crafted and subsequently put to use, my aim is to relocate the much-debated notion of "scientific image" within a broader perspective on the working methods and intellectual technologies that underpinned the production and transmission of natural knowledge in France around 1700. Each of the six chapters foregrounds a different aspect of Plumier's papers. The first two chapters consider the intellectual and political dimensions of the corpus; the third and fourth move towards an in-depth analysis of the archive as a tool for the recording, storing, and management of natural historical information; the last part of the dissertation deals with the transmission and reception of the collection, both in print and through the appropriations and relocations of which it was the object long after the death of the author.
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# Contents

List of Illustrations xi

Acknowledgements xvii

A Note on Conventions xxi

Introduction: A Naturalist with Inky Fingers 1

Pious craftsmanship, empire, and natural history, ca. 1700 6

Inscriptions on the move 24

Scholarly practices and the materiality of images 30

Chapter outline 36

1. "Ce qui peut tomber sous les yeux": Images and Learned Empiricism in the Work of Natural History 39

Fatiguing scholarship 44

Histories 51

"To take an exact account" 57

A knowledge of what "may be represented in Figures" 63

Natural books and the Book of Nature 76

The sources of Plumier's visual natural history of the Americas 89

Conclusion 108

2. "Par les ordres du Roy": Traveling Naturalists and the Culture of Scientific Royal Patronage in Louis XIV's France 111

Craftsmanship and royal patronage at the Trinità dei Monti 114

Surian and the first journey to the Americas: the erratic fates of natural history overseas 120

Traveling naturalists and the Atlantic flow of political information 132

The "inexhaustible curiosity" of a patronage broker 141

Conclusion 150

3. Observing and Reading "Quill in Hand": Note-Taking in the Field and Beyond 153

To describe the inner parts 159

"Faire voir les parties séparées" 171

Travel and inscription 181

Words in images 188

To note, to abridge, to copy: the naturalist as reader 197

Conclusion 222
4. “Soit en dessein, soit en nature”:

<table><tr><td>The Order of Images in the Knowledge of Nature</td><td>225</td></tr><tr><td>Collection and collation</td><td>229</td></tr><tr><td>Islands of knowledge</td><td>249</td></tr><tr><td>The lure of the list</td><td>258</td></tr><tr><td>The infinity of names</td><td>268</td></tr><tr><td>Material practices of memory</td><td>272</td></tr><tr><td>Plants as instruments of credit</td><td>279</td></tr><tr><td>Authorship and authority in a visual archive of nature</td><td>287</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>294</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>5. Tinkering with Ferns: Printmaking and Natural History Books</td><td>295</td></tr><tr><td>The Imprimerie royale and the politics of print</td><td>300</td></tr><tr><td>Negotiating audiences: the Art of tourner and the Nova genera</td><td>317</td></tr><tr><td>The tortuous printing history of the Traité des fougères</td><td>329</td></tr><tr><td>Crafting nature as commodity</td><td>337</td></tr><tr><td>The Spanish connection</td><td>357</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>6. Plumier Revisited: Transits in Time, Transits on Paper</td><td>361</td></tr><tr><td>Burman and the Codex Boerhaavianus</td><td>366</td></tr><tr><td>Plumier in England</td><td>373</td></tr><tr><td>The fortunes of an archive: Plumier's papers on the move</td><td>392</td></tr><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>407</td></tr></table>

<table><tr><td>Conclusion</td><td>409</td></tr><tr><td>Appendices</td><td>417</td></tr><tr><td>Abbreviations</td><td>431</td></tr><tr><td>Works Cited</td><td>433</td></tr></table>
Illustrations

1.1. Portrait of Charles Plumier. Anonymous engraving, n.d. Bibliothèque de l'Académie nationale de médecine, online at BIU Santé Banque d'images et de portraits.

1.2. The Jardin du roi in Paris. Etching from Pierre Dionis's *Cours d'opérations de chirurgie*, 1740. BIUM, online at BIU Santé Banque d'images et de portraits.

1.3. Turgot's map of Paris, ca. 1735. Kyoto University Library, online at Wikipedia.
"L'Eglise des R.P. Minimes de la place Royale à Paris." Etching by Jean Marot, seventeenth century. Musée Carnavalet, online at parismuseescollections.paris.fr/

1.4. Map of the Caribbean islands in the seventeenth century, from Joannes de Laet's "de groote ende kleyne eylanden van West Indien." Engraving, 1625. John Carter Brown Library, online at Luna JCB Map Collection.

1.1. Anatomy of a lion's paw. Black chalk drawing by Claude Perrault's circle, 1695.
Archives de l'Académie des sciences, Paris, reproduced from Guerrini's *The Courtiers' Anatomists*, 233.

*Salvia cretica*. Intaglio print from Joseph Pitton de Tournefort's *Relation d'un voyage au levant*, vol. 1, 92. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

*Spongia pumilia*. Ink-and-watercolor drawing by Augustin Lippi, ca. 1704.
BCMNHN MS 1299, fol. 139.

1.2. Antique medals and sculptures representing the Roman god Jupiter. Intaglio print from Bernard de Montfaucon's *L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures*, vol. 1, pl. X. Universitätbibliothek Heidelberg, online at Heidelberg historische Bestände.

1.3. Remora or *echeneis*. Ink drawing by Plumier, late seventeenth century. BCMNHN MS 24, fol. 82.

Remora. Pencil drawing by Plumier, late seventeenth century. BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated folio.

Remora and other Caribbean fishes. Intaglio print from Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's *Histoire générale des Antilles*, vol. 2, pl. following p. 208. BNF, online at Gallica.

1.4. Skeleton of a crocodile kept at the museum of the London Royal Society. Intaglio print from Nehemiah Grew's *Musaeum Regalis Societatis*. Florida State University Libraries, online at DigiNole.

Crocodile and other curious animal specimens at the cabinet of the Bibliothèque Saint-Geneviève. Intaglio print from Claude du Molinet's *Le cabinet de la bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève*. BNF, online at Gallica.

1.5. *Lignum colubrinum*. Intaglio print from Plumier's *Description*, pl. LVI and LVII.
Probably engraved by Jean-Louis Roullet. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.
*Lignum colubrinum*. Woodcut from Cristóvão da Costa’s *Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias Orientales*, p. 337. Biblioteca nacional de Portugal, RES-4055-P, online at Biblioteca nacional digital.

*Lignum colubrinum*. Woodcut from Jacques Daléchamps’s *Historia generalis plantarum*, 1911-2. Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid, online at Biblioteca Digital RJB-CSIC.

1.6. Minims at work in the library of their convent in Marseille. Watercolor frontispiece of the manuscript “Catalogus librorum bibliothecae Massiliensis Minimorum,” 1776. BMM MS 1485.

1.7. Woodcuts of the pineapple and of a canoe made of a one-piece tree trunk, from Oviedo’s *Historia general y natural de las indias*, 1535. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Gardens, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

1.8. Colored woodcut of the *Mucuna des Brasiliens* in Marcgraf’s and Piso’s *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*, 1648. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Woodcut of the *Phaseolus Nigritatum*, from Clusius’s *Exoticorum libri decem*, 1605. Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid, online at the Biblioteca Digital, RJB-CSIC.

Engraving of the *Phaseolus siliquis latis, hispidis, & rugosis, fructu nigro*, from Plumier’s *Description*. Bibliothèque nationale de France, online at Gallica.

2.1. “Piazza della Trinità de Monti.” Etching by Israël Silvestre, ca. 1660. Private collection, online at israel.silvestre.fr

2.2. Emmanuel Maignan, and perhaps Jean-François Nicéron, crafting the anamorphic fresco of St. Francis de Paola in the convent of Trinità. Intaglio print from Maignan’s *Perspectiva horaria*, pl. following p. 438. BNF, online at Gallica.

2.3. Table of French naturalists using the title “Botanist du roy” or similar in the title page of their publications.

2.4. “Plan du Fort Roial de l’isle de la Martinique.” Pencil-and-watercolor drawing by Plumier. BNF Est. JD-18-Fol.

“Jeune nègre dans un Canot fait du Tronc d’un seul arbre.” Watercolor drawing by Plumier. BNF Est. JD-18-Fol.

Pineapple. Watercolor drawing by Plumier. BNF Est. JD-18-Fol.

2.5. Colored copperplate from Plumier’s *Description*, this is probably Bégon’s copy. Intaglio engraving colored with watercolor, from Plumier’s *Description*. BNF Est. JD-16 (A)-Pet Fol, pl. LI.

2.6. Bégon’s bookplate bearing the motto *Michaeli Begon et amicis*, “Michel Bégon and his friends.” Hartfield House Library and Archives, online at www.daniellewesterhof.co.uk

3.1. A living American crocodile. Ink-and-pencil drawing by Plumier, with annotations on the time and place of its dissection. BCMNHN MS 30, fol. 11.

3.2. Anatomy of an American crocodile. Ink-and-pencil drawings by Plumier. BCMNHN MS 30, fols. 14, 15, 30, 29.
3.3. Anatomy of a pelican. Ink-and-pencil drawings by Plumier. BCHMN MS 27, following fol. 91.

3.4. Anatomical fugitive sheet. Superposed intaglio prints from Juan Valverde de Amusco's *Vivae imagines partium corporis*. Wellcome Library, London, online at Wellcome Images.

3.5. Anatomy of the chameleon. Intaglio print from Perrault's *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux*, vol. 1, pl. following p. 12. BNF, online at Gallica.

3.6. Title page of Jean Germain's *Breve e sostantiale trattato*. BIUM 5407.

3.7. Turtle's anatomy. Intaglio plate from Giovanni Caldesi's *Osservazione anatomiche*. BIU 5547, pl. 6.

3.8. Public anatomical lesson at the Jardin du Roi. Intaglio plate from Dionis's *Cours d'opération de chirurgie*. BNF, online at Gallica.

3.9. Anatomy of a chestnut's fruit. Ink-and-pencil drawing by Plumier. BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 129.

3.10. Dissection of a fox at the Paris Academy of Sciences. Intaglio vignette by Sébastien Leclerc from Perrault's *Histoire des animaux*. BNF, online at Gallica.

3.11. One of the loose sheets from Plumier's "Notes diverses." BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated folio.

Ink imprint of a leaf from Plumier's "Notes diverses." BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated folio.

3.12. Coastal profile with fragments of a travel diary in Plumier's "Notes diverses." BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated folio.

3.13. Three sketches of the Martinique's coastal profile as seen in different moments during a journey in ship. BCMNHN MS 33, unpaginated folio.

3.14. Issue of Plumier's *Nova genera* in which the plates have been printed in larger paper in order to keep images and text side by side. BHMV BH MED 7015.

3.15. Image of the Annunciation of the Virgin explained through cross-references. Engraving from Jerónimo Nadal's *Evangelicae historiae imagines*. Getty Research Institute, online at Archive Internet.

3.16. Title page from Tournefort's *Élémens de botanique* used by Plumier in his "hybrid notebook." Engraving with manuscripts annotations. Ars. MS 2502.

3.17. Engraving from Tournefort's *Élémens de botanique* and Plumier's notes on the *Élémens* and on Amé Bourdon's *Description anatomique*. Ars. MS 2502, fol. 18-9.

3.18. A man's trunk anatomized, from Bourdon's *Description anatomique*. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD, online at the exhibition "Historical Anatomies on the Web," www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/

3.19. Page from Plumier's "hybrid notebook." Ars. MS 2502, fol. 63-4.

3.20. Plumier's manuscript appropriation of Filippo Bonanni's *Ricreatione*. BNF Est. JB 68 4, fol. 2.

3.21. Colored frontispiece from Plumier's manuscript "Synopsis botanica." BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 24r.
3.22. Plumier’s “graphic excerpts” from Tournefort’s engravings of the *Mandragora* and the *Belladona*, compared to the originals. Ink and wash and engraving. BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 48v-49r, and Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

3.23. Plumier’s “graphic excerpt” from the engravings in Tournefort’s *Institutiones*, compared to the originals. Ink and wash and engraving. BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 37r and Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

3.24. Plumier settling scores with Tournefort. BCMNHN MS 10, fol. 202v.

3.25. Front and back cover of Plumier’s “Icones plantarum.” BMM MS 913.

3.26. Plumier’s manuscript appropriation of Marcgraf’s and Piso’s *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*. BMM MS 913, fol. 51v-52r, and Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

3.27. Engraving of the *Purpura Americana* (murex) after a drawing by Plumier, from Lister’s *Journey to Paris*, 1699. BNF, online at Gallica.

4.1. Plumier’s manuscript images of shells added to his copy of Bonanni’s *Ricreatione dell’occhio e de la mente*. Ink and pencil. BNF Est., JB 68 4.

4.2. A dried specimen of *Filix aurea*, *pinnulis rotunde incisis divisa* collected by Plumier and nowadays at Tournefort’s herbarium. Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle, Herbiers historiques, online at Banque des savoirs-Essonne.

*Filix aurea, pinnulis rotunde incisis divisa*. Etching by Plumier from his *Traité des fougères*. BHMV, online at Biblioteca Complutense.

4.3. Two colored views of a seashell. Pencil and watercolor. BCMNHN MS 26, fol. 2.

4.4. Two- or three-view images of seashells. Ink. BCMNHN MS 31, fol. 94

4.5. Seashells depicted in a comparative grid. Pencil and watercolor. BCMNHN MS 26, fol. 74.

4.6. Plumier’s drawings of Caribbean fishes. Ink, pencil, and red chalk. BCMNHN MS 24, fol. 1, MS 31, fol. 42.

4.7. Comparison of the woodcuts on the sea turtle in Pierre Belon’s *La nature et diversité des poissons* with Plumier’s manuscript drawings of the same. Woodcut and ink. BNF, online at Gallica, and BCMNHN MS 30, fol. 59 and 64.

4.8. Comparative anatomy of the sumac’s and the walnut tree’s trunks. Intaglio prints from Nehemiah Grew’s *Comparative anatomy of trunks*. Bibliothèque nationale Universitaire, Strasbourg, online at numistral.fr

4.9. Map of Martinique by Guillaume Delisle. Ink and watercolor. BNF, online at Gallica.

4.10. “Veüe des deux anses d’Arlet de chez Monsieur d’Orange.” BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 152.

4.11. French index in the *Traité des fougères*. BNF, online at Gallica.
4.12. Dictionaries gathered in Plumier's "Synopsis botanica." BCMNHN MS 10, unpaginated.

4.13. Bookish references in one of Plumier's manuscript botanical drawings. BCMNHN MS 16, fol. 46.

4.14. "Tableau élémentaire de botanique." Anonymous engraving with watercolor. BCMNHN MS Jus 30/58.

4.15. Table of Plumier's botanical dedications in the *Nova genera*.

4.16. *Begonia*. Intaglio print from Tournefort's *Institutiones*. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, online at Biodiversity Heritage Library.

4.17. Woodcut title page from Erasmus's *Adagia*, 1512. Rotterdam Public Library, online at Erasmus Online Database.

5.1. Table of the editions of Plumier's books.

5.2. Title page and plate XLV from Plumier's *Description*. Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Gardens, online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

5.3. The works on the Louvre Palace by 1670. Engraving by Sébastian Leclerc, ca. 1670. Musée Carnavalet, online at carnavalet.paris.fr.

The Imprimerie royale workshop. Anonymous ink and wash drawing, late-seventeenth-century. Musée Carnavalet, online at garamond.culture.fr.

5.4. Table of the books on natural history published at the Imprimerie royale from 1640 to 1720.

5.5. Frontispiece, title page, and plate 8 of the first edition of Plumier's *Art de tourner*. BNF, online at Gallica.

5.6. Frontispiece and title page of the 1776 German translation of Plumier's *Art de tourner*. CUL Lib 1.77.3.

5.7. Intaglio print from Plumier's *Nova genera*, pl. 30 Smithsonian Libraries, online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Intaglio print from Tournefort's *Élémens de botanique*. BNF, online at Gallica.

5.8. Plumier's signature on one of the plates of his *Traité des fougères*, pl. 112. BNF, online at Gallica.

5.9. Table of the signatures in the plates of Plumier's books.

5.10. Rolling-press workshop. Etching by Abraham Bosse, 1642. BNF, online at Gallica.

5.11. The printmaker's shop. Etching by Bosse, 1643. BNF, online at Gallica.

5.12. *Lingua cervina* from Plumier's *Description*, pl. XL. Engraving, probably by Roullet. BNF, online at Gallica.

*Lingua cervina* from Plumier's *Traité des fougères*, pl. 132. Etching by Plumier. BNF, online at Gallica.
5.13. Navy blue binding of the Madrid copy of Plumier's *Traité des fougères* and Leclerc's etching on the Louis XIV's visit to the Paris Academy of Sciences, 1671, added to it. BHMV, BH MED GF 98.

6.1. Colored intaglio print of Plumier's drawings of the anatomy of a sea turtle and a tortoise from Jacques-Fabien Gautier d'Agoty's *Observations sur l'histoire naturelle* (1752), pl. following p. 138 and p. 150. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

Original drawings of the anatomy of a sea turtle and the tortoise. Ink and pencil drawings by Plumier, late seventeenth century. BCMNHN MS 30, fol. 57, 50, 69.

6.2. Dried specimens of the *Trichomanes membraceum* L. and the *Lycopodium cernuum* L. collected by Plumier in America, currently at Hans Sloane's herbarium in the Natural History Museum, London.

6.3. James Petiver's annotated and altered copy of the *Nova genera*, early eighteenth century. CUL CCB.47.76, p. 44 and pl. 4.

6.4. Petiver, *Opera, historia naturalem spectantia*, vol. 1, pl. 121. Smithsonian Libraries, online at the Biodiversity Heritage Library.

6.5. Petiver, *Pteri-graphia Americana*, pl. 6. Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid, online at the Biblioteca Digital, RJB-CSIC.

Plumier, *Traité des fougères*, pl. 6. BNF, online at Gallica.

6.6. *Rivina floribus corydrosis* from Plumier's *Plantarum Americanarum*, fasc. 6, pl. 241. Intaglio print. NHM 581.9 PLU F.

*Rivina floribus corydrosis*, in the volume "Plants by Plumier" owned by Joseph Banks. Ink and watercolor drawing. NHM BAUER UNIT SHELF H 5, pl. 267.

Portrait Hugues-Adrien Joly. Anonymous, oil on canvas, ca. 1770. BNF, online at expositions.bnf.fr

6.7. "Bernard de Jussieu apporte d'Angleterre le pied de cèdre du Liban." Wood engraving by Charles Maurand, 1872. BIUM, online at Banque d'images et de portraits.
Acknowledgements

As any doctoral dissertation, these pages are the result of a learning process: one, in my case, of both history writing and English prose. I am greatly indebted to the institutions and individuals who made it possible. I feel tremendously fortunate to have been part of the doctoral program in History at the European University Institute. To the EUI I owe a great deal, both professionally and personally: it is not only a truly exceptional academic and international environment, but also an unequalled chance for students from often very different backgrounds to train in the world of scholarship and, in my particular case, in that of English writing. The program "Salvador de Madariaga" of the Spanish Ministry of Education sustained my doctoral studies at the EUI, as well as a visiting stay at the University of Cambridge. The EUI financed my archival work in France and a good number of conference trips. I also benefited from a fellowship from the INHA for additional research in Paris. I am writing these acknowledgements in a snowy Berlin thanks to the generosity of Lorraine Daston and the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

My greatest debt of gratitude goes to my advisors. Jorge Flores supervised my doctoral work with a witty eye and unfailing support. His advice always proved crucial, and if there is any clarity and coherence in this manuscript, it is largely due to him. Juan Pimentel initiated me into the mysteries and delights of the history of science when I was an undergraduate fellow at the CSIC in 2009: he taught me the value of history well told, and his imaginativeness has guided my research, interests, and writing to this day. Stéphane Van Damme bumped into Charles Plumier as soon as he set foot in the EUI: ever since, he has shaped this dissertation and me in fundamental ways. This dissertation would be far less rigorous and creative without his boundless erudition and enthusiasm. Jorge, Juan, and Stéphane read these pages several times, commented on them profusely, and gave every minute of their time that I asked them for: I am very grateful for that.

I would like to thank two other individuals. One of them, Fernando Bouza, I met almost at the end of my time at the EUI, but he jumped into my research with a contagious enthusiasm. He followed the trace of Plumier through several libraries in Madrid, accompanied me to scrutinize them, assured me of the importance of material bibliography, and tangibly influenced the later stages of my writing. The other individual, in contrast, was at the very origins of this research: Antonella Romano initially directed me towards Plumier and acted as my second reader during my first year at the EUI. Her
bottomless generosity and exemplary dedication to the historian's craft have always been an inspiration to me.

Several scholars read different parts of this dissertation. Simon Schaffer kindly hosted me at HPS and commented on my work with his legendary wit. During my time at Cambridge, I chased him to whatever presentation or class he gave, and they were breathtaking every single time. I spent hours contemplating Plumier's books and copperplates with Roger Gaskell: his generous and wise advice on material bibliography and book history (from which I have also benefited via mail after leaving England) permeates a good deal of chapter 5. Regina Grafe read chapter 2 and encouraged me to pose big questions, and to give small, solid answers. Jacques Revel read and commented on my early project with his usual perspicacity. Well into my third year, Nick Jardine read one chapter and remarked to me that, it not being likely that garments were kept inside Plumier, I should probably refer to him as a “draftsman” rather than a “drawer.” Sebastian Kroupa read chapter 2: he has also been a comrade extraordinaire in Cambridge and well beyond. Joserra Marcaida read different parts: his friendship and acumen have always meant a good deal to me, and his family always made me feel at home. I miss very much the long evening conversations with Joserra, next to what seemed streetlight and happened to be art.

I have also benefited from discussions with scholars who were generous with their time: Jean-Marc Besse, Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, Lorraine Daston, Jean-Marc Drouin, Anita Guerrini, Rafael Mandressi, Alice Lemaire (who kindly shared with me her unpublished dissertation), and François Regourd in Paris; Luca Molà, Ann Thompson, and Bartolomé Yun in Florence; Isabelle Charmantier, Charlie Jarvies (who kindly sent me images of, and long commentaries on, Plumier's dried plants in the herbarium of the London Natural History Museum), and Joanna Woodall in London; Anne Marie Roos in Lincoln; Margaret Carlyle, Raphaëlle Garrod, Sachiko Kusukawa, E. C. Spary, and Chris Preston in Cambridge; Pietro Corsi in Oxford; and Pamela H. Smith in New York. Ann Blair, Fernando Bouza, Charlotte Guichard, Neil Safier, and Peter Stallybrass (scholars whose research has deeply influenced my own views across these pages) found time in their short visits to Florence to endure my endless questions and kindly share their expertise. In particular, I am tremendously grateful to Ann Blair for having accepted to act as the external examiner for this dissertation.

This work is also greatly indebted to the assistance of many librarians and archivists, especially those at the EUI Library, the Bibliothèque centrale du Muséum national
d'histoire naturelle in Paris, the Whipple Library in Cambridge, the Biblioteca Histórica "Marqués de Valdecillas" in Madrid, and the Biblioteca del Museo Galileo in Florence.

I presented different parts of this research at conferences and seminars in Florence, Manchester, Oxford, Paris, St Andrews, London, Cambridge, Strasbourg, and Berlin. I would like to thank the participants for their feedback, as well as the organizers for their invitation, especially those who kindly covered the expenses of my trips.

The final word of thanks goes to family and friends. My parents, José and Tere, have never been completely clear about what a doctorate or a scholar is, and they became increasingly surprised to discover that one could somehow make a living out of reading and writing history. But their enduring confidence in my passions and choices is the best gift I could have ever received from them. I thank and apologize to my partner and colleague, Caroline Mezger, who had to spend too many dinners hearing about indexes and ferns, a surely weird and funny topic in the eyes of an expert in Nazi youth organizations and ethnic Germans. She is my best, most patient reader: she came up with the title for this dissertation and her prose skills improved every line in it. More importantly, her love and caring support made every moment of its writing happier. If I had to dedicate this dissertation to somebody, it would be to her and to the rest of my friends. Alexis, Brice, Élise, and François were remarkable flatmates and fellow gardeners; Cloé, Dónal, Laura, Luca, María Gómez, Michiel, and Saara made of Florence an unforgettable and exceptionally joyful place to live; and to Jonas, Malte, Martín, and Roel, I owe very happy and memorable moments. I hope María Lloret, Miquel, and Sergio know just how important they are to me: I cherish their friendship deeply and have missed them dearly since our paths had to diverge.
<figure><img src="image_9.png" /></figure>
A Note on Conventions

For the sake of convenience, all quotations in the body text are given in English.
Translations from other languages, mostly French and to a lesser degree Latin and
Italian, are all my own except if otherwise noted in the footnotes. For primary sources,
whether manuscript or printed, I provide the original text in the footnotes. When
quoting a text exclusively in the footnotes, I keep it in the original language.

I have modernized very lightly the spelling of book titles and quotations, mainly
limiting myself to simplifying early modern typographical uses (e.g., the interchangeable
use of “v” and “u,” or “i” and “j”). I have punctually capitalized the first word of
quotations when necessary. The spellings conventional in English for personal names
have been usually preferred (e.g., Johannes Burman over Johannes Burmannus). I kept the
use of “sic” to a minimum. I translated some of the institutional names and titles into
English (Paris Academy of Sciences, Secretary of State of the Navy, and so forth), but
kept others in French when I thought this was clearer (e.g., Jardin du roi, Bibliothèque du
Roi, Imprimerie royale).

There are some issues of terminology when discussing intaglio printmaking:
“engraving” is a technique consisting of carving a metal plate (usually copper) with a
burin; “etching” refers to the technique in which the grooves in the metal plate have
been made by means of an acid. Both techniques were often combined in the making of
an intaglio plate, and the differences between both are not always easily graspable at first
sight. I will refer to “intaglio print” in cases in which I do not know whether it is an
engraving, an etching, or both. The differences between etching and engraving are
explained in detail in chapter 5.

A key to the abbreviations used in the footnotes to denote archives or libraries is
given in the back matter.
<figure><img src="image_10.png" /></figure>
# Introduction

## A Naturalist with Inky Fingers<fnref n="1" />

In August 1697, the squadron commanded by the French privateer Jean-Bernard Desjean, baron de Pointis (1645-1707), docked in the port of Brest. The ships were returning from the Caribbean basin, where they had been responsible for the raid on the Spanish colonial port of Cartagena de Indias—the last major military event of the Nine Years' War, right before the signing of the Peace of Ryswick, and one of the few significant ones on the Caribbean scene.<fnref n="2" /> The combined buccaneer and naval expedition was bringing to Louis XIV the substantial haul of the pillaged city, one of the jewels in the crown of the Spanish American empire. Among those reaching France with De Pointis's fleet was a French friar named Charles Plumier (1646-1704), who was carrying with him a different sort of booty: a bunch of papers, or “several *Books in Folio*, of Designs and Paintings of *Plants, Birds, Fishes*, and *Insects* of the *West-Indies*; all done by himself very accurately” (fig. I.1). The episode was related by the English naturalist Martin Lister (1639-1712), who visited the collection and its author in a Parisian convent soon after their arrival to the continent.<fnref n="3" /> Lister does not tell us, however, how many of those drawings actually came with Plumier from the West Indies and how many were entirely or partially made far from the flora and fauna they represented—say, in the convent itself. The Englishman also forgets to point out that the multitudinous sheets, folders, and volumes heaped in the friar's cell were not all filled with the exquisite representations to which his attention was mostly directed. Those papers were extremely heterogeneous in form and content. They brought together—sometimes within the space of the same page—ink-and-watercolor drawings with sketchy outlines, carefully composed observations with rough notes, detailed measurements with interminable lists. Whatever their variations in form, they all aimed at depicting, describing, measuring, and

<footnote n="1">¹ I use here the suggestive expression coined by Anthony Grafton for Renaissance correctors: Anthony Grafton, *Humanists with Inky Fingers: The Culture of Correction in Renaissance Europe* (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2011), 27-48.</footnote>

<footnote n="2">² On the French sack of Cartagena, see William Thomas Morgan, “The Expedition of Baron de Pointis against Cartagena,” *The American Historical Review* 37, no. 2 (1932), 237-54; Kris Lane, *Pillaging the Empire: Global Piracy on the High Seas, 1500-1750*, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016 [1998]), 181-2, and James Pritchard, *In Search of Empire: The French in the Americas, 1670-1730* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), chap. 7, esp. 326-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ Martin Lister, *A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698* (London: printed for Jacob Tonson, 1699), 72.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_11.png" /><figcaption>Fig. I.1. Portrait of Charles Plumier. We do not know when or by whom this portrait was made, but it was copied several times thereafter. Plumier is dressed in the austere, hooded habit of the order, made of coarse, undyed wool fabric. Minims were not allowed to use clothes other than this or take the hoods off, day or night. The austerity of the Minims' life is particularly known for their “fourth vow” of quadragesimal life, by which they removed any animal products (including eggs and dairy, but excluding fish) from their diets. (Bibliothèque de l'Académie nationale de médecine, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

inventorying flowery and non-flowery plants, seeds and leaves, fishes and shells, reptiles and birds—in one word, at capturing the whole nature of the West Indies onto paper. Plumier’s remarkable feat was a whole distant nature in draft.

This vast corpus of iconographic and textual descriptions of a nature far afield is the object of this doctoral dissertation. A manifold amount of papers ranging from simple sketches and scribbles to carefully colored drawings and detailed written descriptions, it constituted the site in which a natural knowledge of the Americas was produced for (and perhaps partially in) Europe. Some time ago, Roger Chartier wrote about “object studies,” an approach to the history of the book tracing the contexts of the multiple makings and remakings of a single book—from their usually tortuous printing to their plural readings—and studying the physical features of its different editions, issues, and copies, as well as the mutable meanings linked to each of them. A well-known case of such an approach is Ann Blair’s study of Jean Bodin’s *Universae naturae theatrum* (1596), in which she explores the worlds of European Renaissance natural philosophy by tracing the fates of this sole volume. In many ways, this dissertation aspires to be an “object study” of this sort: I will follow the fortunes and destiny of Plumier’s corpus of images
(and texts) at different stages of their history, from their conditions of possibility to their fluctuant reception. Through this mutable physical artifact, made out of paper, ink, and pigments, my aim is to examine the methods and practices that surrounded the production of visual representations within the then still ill-defined field of the study of nature about 1700. “Nature in draft” is, therefore, about the making of images and related inscriptions as a workaday practice of the naturalist in the decades around the turn of the eighteenth century.<fnref n="4" />

Cases such as this have often been approached from genealogical perspectives on early modern natural historical illustrations. From the standpoint of our modern art-and-science divide, images of the natural world have also been privileged objects of analysis in the exploration of the interactions and filtrations between the realm of artistic creation and that of scientific research.<fnref n="5" /> More recently, the notion of “visual culture” has permitted to marry the gesture of graphic representation with the act of scholarly observation, therefore isolating (when not directly opposing) images and image-making from written culture and other forms of inscription. In contrast to these approaches, this dissertation contends that what has unproblematically come to be known as “visual culture”—an expression I explicitly avoid in what follows—imposes an artificial compartmentalization upon its objects of scrutiny. It brings together phenomena that were not necessarily related at any time, while separating others that might have been. Image-making was not inevitably concomitant to observation; the recording of visual experience did not necessarily result in graphic forms; first-hand ocular inspection and the reading of books were not always two unquestionably opposed learned activities, and the boundary between written and iconographic cultures becomes, at times, historically untraceable.

<footnote n="4">⁴ Roger Chartier, “Print Culture,” in *The Culture of Print: Power and Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Chartier, trans. Lydia B. Cochrane (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014 [1987]), 3; Ann Blair, *The Theatre of Nature: Jean Bodin and Renaissance Science* (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). I found also inspiring two other “object studies” for the early modern period that do not deal with natural knowledge, namely Peter Burke’s *The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano* (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), and, for an “object study” of a “non-book” work, Chartier’s masterful history of Cardenio’s story through novels and theater plays: *Cardenio entre Cervantés et Shakespeare: Histoire d’une pièce perdue* (Paris: Gallimard-NRF, 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ It is worth remembering here that in early eighteenth-century French dictionaries, the word *art* was defined as “tout ce qui se fait par l’adresse & par l’industrie de l’homme,” and consequently opposed to *nature*. *Science*, on the other hand, was a near synonym of knowledge (“connaissance des choses, acquise par la lecture, ou par la meditation”) and sometimes of *art* itself (“se dit plus specifiquement d’un art particulier, de l’application qu’on a euë à approfondir la connaissance d’une matière, de la reduire en règle & en méthode”). I am quoting here from Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant generalement tous les mots français tant vieux que modernes, & les termes des sciences et des arts*, 2nd ed. (The Hague and Rotterdam: chez Arnoud et Reinier Leers, 1701 [1690]), vol. 1, sig. Bb2r, and vol. 3, sig. Oooo2r.</footnote>
To put it another way, “Nature in Draft” does not approach visual representations
in terms of a competitive opposition with written culture, and it does certainly not
analyze Plumier’s (largely, but not exclusively) iconographic archive to eventually reach
the conclusion that images were important and that the time has come to pay them
attention. Current scholars are already paying them a good deal of attention. My ultimate
aim is to understand the manifold and often changing roles that these very diverse forms
of visual representation played within concrete, local contexts—be they social, cultural,
or epistemic—that gave them various, and sometimes conflicting meanings. In doing so,
however, this dissertation pursues a rather different approach from those who focus on
highlighting the centrality of images and other phenomena we now range under the label
of “visual” in various historical situations, and who do so by means of a double
historiographical gesture that consists in homogenizing them and, by the same token,
isolating them from other “non-visual phenomena.”

The sketches, drawings, and copperplates by Plumier offer a compelling case for re-
centering the question of the function and functioning of visual representations in the
making of overseas natural knowledge. I argue that this collection of images needs to be
understood not only in relation to their supposed aim of making a distant reality visible
in Europe, but also within the context of the material practices on which the business of
natural history was based around 1700—practices such as observing, depicting, and
carving plates, but also reading, note-taking, and drawing written lists. Plumier’s
collection of images provides us with an intriguing point of entry into the history of the
practices of inscription involved in the work of naturalists during the period from the
1650s to the 1750s. What did naturalists do back then? They gathered, often obsessively,
animal, vegetable, and stony specimens,<fnref n="6" /> mesmerized as they and their audiences were by
the wondrous products of nature; or driven, as it happened, by ideas of how these
collections could serve this or that political project;<fnref n="7" /> or because they were involved in
(occasionally profitable) commercial exchanges across continents and oceans.<fnref n="8" /> Naturalists

<footnote n="6">⁶ Perhaps the best studied case is that of Ulisse Aldrovandi: see Giuseppe Olmi, *L'inventario del mondo. Catalogazione della natura e luoghi del sapere nella prima età moderna* (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992) and Paula Findlen, *Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For France, see especially Krzysztof Pomian, *Collectionneurs, amateurs et curieux. Paris, Venise: XVIe-XVIIIe siècle* (Paris: Gallimard, 1987) and Antoine Schnapper, *Le géant, la licorne, la tulipe. Collections françaises au XVIIe siècle, vol. 1, Histoire et histoire naturelle* (Paris: Flammarion, 1988).</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Pierre-Yves Lacour, *La République naturaliste. Collections d'histoire naturelle et Révolution française (1789-1804)* (Paris: Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ As studied, to name but two well-known examples, by Harold J. Cook, *Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and, more</footnote>
taught, observed with attention, and experimented from time to time.<fnref n="9" /> They once took
delight in uncanny natural wonders, only to repudiate them ultimately as vulgar and
destabilizing within an emerging worldview grounded on invariant laws rather than
flexible customs.<fnref n="10" /> They engaged with the local spaces of their cities and their regions,
while sharing the global aspirations of their times.<fnref n="11" /> Naturalists made books, or so they
believed, for numerous were the agents involved in the production of such often
nightmarishly intricate objects, from printers and booksellers to engravers and binders—
not to mention those who put forward the money.<fnref n="12" />

Naturalists did all that. But they also wrote and scribbled, drew and sketched, cut
and pasted, collated and compared, read books and took notes, amassed manifold
documents and arranged them, made lists and indexes. This analysis of Plumier's
iconographic corpus will open a small window, I hope, to the broader culture of paper
practices in which traveling naturalists plied their trade.<fnref n="13" />

<footnote>recently, Dániel Margócsy, *Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age*
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Karen Meier Reeds, *Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities* (New York: Garland, 1991); Claire Salomon-Bayet, *L'institution de la science et l'expérience du vivant. Méthode et expérience à l'Académie royale des sciences, 1666-1793*. 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2008 [1978]); Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., *Histories of Scientific Observation* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), and Mary Terrall, *Catching Nature in the Act: Réaumur and the Practice of Natural History in the Eighteenth Century* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013).</footnote>

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ The classic, of course, is Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, *Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750* (New York: Zone Books, 1998).</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ For the local scale, consider the city of Paris with Stéphane Van Damme, *Paris, capitale philosophique. De la Fronde à la Révolution* (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2005), and the German regions with Alix Cooper, *Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For the global scale, or rather that of cross-cultural encounter, the bibliography is immense, but especially remarkable are Kapil Raj, *Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900* (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), and Neil Safier, *Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008).</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Jesús Mª Carrillo Castillo, *Naturaleza e imperio. La representación del mundo natural en la Histoira general y natural de las Indias de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo* (Madrid: Fundación Carolina and Doce Calles, 2004).</footnote>

<footnote n="13">¹³ For half a decade or so, historians of science have been increasingly fascinated by “paper technologies” in the work of early modern natural knowledge. The bibliography is quite abundant by now, but especially relevant are Ann Blair, *Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Volker Hess and J. Andrew Mendelsohn, “Case and Series: Medical Knowledge and Paper Technologies, 1600-1900,” *History of Science* 48 (2010), 287-314; 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, and “Carl Linnaeus’s Botanical Paper Slips (1767-1773),” *Intellectual History Review* 24, no. 2 (2014), 215-38; Omar W. Nasim, *Observing by Hand: Sketching the Nebulae in the Nineteenth Century* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2013); Richard Yeo, *Notebooks, English Virtuosi, and Early Modern Science* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014); Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille, eds., “Worlds of Paper,” special issue, *Early Science and Medicine* 19, no. 5 (2014), 379-503; Elizabeth Yale, ed., “The History of Archives and the History of Science,” special issue, *Isis* 107, no. 1 (2016), 74-120, and her *Sociable Knowledge: Natural History and the Nation in Early Modern Britain* (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). Although not focussed on the history of science, see also Ann Blair and Jennifer Milligan, eds., “Towards a Cultural History of Archives,” special issue, *Archival Science* 7, no. 4 (2007), 289-397.</footnote>
Pious craftsmanship, empire, and natural history, ca. 1700

At his death in the Spanish port city of Cádiz in November 1704, just on the point
of embarking for what would have been his fourth journey to the Americas—and in the
wake of the alliance freshly forged between France and Spain as a result of a Bourbon
ascending to the throne of Madrid—Plumier left a considerable number of papers in his
cell of the convent of Minims near Place Royale (today Place des Vosges) in Paris. It
must certainly have been an astonishingly large corpus already at the time: its extant parts
add up to more than 9,100 papers, of which roughly three quarters are filled with
handmade sketches, drawings, and colored figures, as well as a number of loose sheets of
engravings and etchings. <fnref n="14" /> The corpus is nowadays mainly scattered across Parisian
libraries, mostly at the library of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, but also at the
archives of the Academy of Sciences and the different branches of the Bibliothèque
nationale de France. The overwhelming bulk of these documents deal with the vegetable
world, but a good number also treat shells and mollusks, lizards and insects, amphibians
and birds; these plants and animals are depicted entirely, but often also in anatomized
form, their skins and flowers open, their leaves and bones detached from the organisms.
Several other paper materials also picture and describe natives from the Caribbean
islands, or fortresses and cities of the overseas French dominions, or still landscapes and
views of islands and seas. The large majority of these documents list, describe, and
picture the flora and fauna of the French West Indies; some bundles, though, group
written and graphic materials copying and re-elaborating information found in printed
books; and several others deal with plants diligently cultivated at the *Jardin du roi*, the
royal gardens in Paris (fig. I.2). These papers are sometimes in the form of loose pages,
but most of them were bound in uniform volumes long after the death of their author.
This uncanny (and mostly iconographic) archive of nature is the result of about fifteen
years of work (between 1687, when Plumier shipped for the first time towards the other
shore of the Atlantic, and 1704, the year of his death) carried out between Europe (Paris,
Rome, and Marseille) and the Caribbean basin.

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ My account is based on the corpus as I have been able to reconstruct it through libraries and archives, namely BCMNHN MS 1-37, 1335, 3355, Ars. MS 2502, 2875, 2078, 2104, BNF Est. Ad-3-Pet. Fol., JB-68-4, and, outside Paris, BMM MS 913. I have not taken into account BNF Mss. Latin 1847 (which is not clearly by the hand of Plumier). Especially in chap. 6, I also use copies made of Plumier's drawings after his death, such as BIF MS 979-82. For a more comprehensive list of the manuscript materials used, see the bibliography.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_12.png" /><figcaption>Fig. I.2. The Jardin du roi in Paris. Plumier never held an official appointment at any scientific institutions, yet scholarly sociability in late seventeenth-century Paris was largely dependent on organizations under royal patronage such as the Jardin du roi, a thirty minutes' walk away from the Minim convent at Place Royale, and the Bibliothèque du roi, where a circle of botanists around the Academy of Sciences (including Plumier) held regular meetings. Moreover, public "demonstrations" or lessons on anatomy and botany took place at the Jardin du roi—the latter by Plumier's friend Joseph Pitton de Tournefort. (Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Santé, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>

A considerable number of Plumier's drawings found their way into print, although all of these were pictures of plants: in 1693, the *Description des plantes de l'Amérique, avec leurs figures* (Description of American plants, with their figures) appeared, and, more than ten years later, the *Traité des fougères de l'Amérique* (Treatise of American ferns). Both were printed by the *Imprimerie royale*, the royal press housed at the Louvre palace; both were voluminous folio books and included 108 and 172 full-page copperplates, respectively, each depicting a different specimen of West Indian flora. Father Plumier authored two other books, both lavishly illustrated as well: one was a thin quarto volume on new genera of American plants; the other, a bulky manual on the art of turnery.

Craftsmanship and the sea were in Plumier's blood. He was born in the bustling, populous city of Marseille—France's leading port and a paramount hub of the Mediterranean's networks of exchange—to a family of artisans and small workers: his father, Plumier once said, practiced the art of turnery, on which the friar would write the manual mentioned—a book that would be destined for a far larger editorial success than
any of his hefty botany volumes. He entered into a Catholic monastic order of mendicant friars early in his teens, probably in Marseille: the austere order of Minims (from the Italian *minimo*, “the smallest”) counted several convents in the Provençal region, including one in Marseille’s old town, one in the neighboring city of Aix, and another in Bormes—where Plumier would spend some years during his late thirties, right before getting involved in his first transoceanic journey of natural exploration.<fnref n="15" />

Plumier’s life as a scholar would henceforth be closely tied to his identity as a Minim. Like the large majority of the friars in the order who indulged in intellectual undertakings, Plumier took his first steps in the world of scholarship through mathematics. At some point during his twenties, he left Marseille for the Minim community in Toulouse, where one of the most distinguished scholars of the order, Emmanuel Maignan (1602-1676), taught mathematics and optics. Maignan had come to be a prominent Catholic scientific figure of his time. His ambitious lifework, standing at the intersection of mathematics, physics, and theology, aimed at offering an alternative to scholastic Aristotelianism by reconciling two deceptively contrasting worlds: theological knowledge and the culture of experimentalism, spreading at the time among students of natural philosophy. The author of creations that were as delightful as useful, such as anamorphoses and stunningly sophisticated sundials, Maignan incarnates a particular

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ There are several articles devoted to the life and work of Plumier: Ignaz Urban, *Plumiers Leben und Schriften nebst einem Schlüssel zu seinen Blütenpflanzen* (Dahlem bei Berlin: Verlag des Repertoriums, 1920); François Bourlière, “The Ornithographia Americana of Father Plumier, 1689-1696,” *Wilson Bulletin* 61, no. 2 (1949), 103-5; P. J. S. Whitmore, “Charles Plumier: Craftsman and Botanist,” *The Modern Language Review* 54, no. 3 (1959), 400-1, and *The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France* (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 187-98; Odile Krakovitch, “La vie intellectuelle dans les trois couvents minimes de la place Royale, de Nigeon et de Vincennes,” *Bulletin de la Société d’histoire de Paris et d’Île-de-France* 109 (1982), 32-5; Francisco Pelayo, “La historia natural de las Antillas en el siglo XVII: La obra de Charles Plumier (1646-1704),” *Tebeto: Anuario del Archivo Histórico Insular de Fuerteventura* 5, no. 1 (1992), 179-200; François Regourd, “Sciences et colonisations sous l’Ancien Régime. Le cas de la Guyane et des Antilles françaises, XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles,” 4 vols. (PhD diss., Université Bordeaux III-Michel de Montainge, 2000), 282-90; Theodore W. Pietsch, “Charles Plumier (1646-1704) and his Drawings of French and American Fishes,” *Archives of Natural History* 28, no. 1 (2001), 1-57; “Charles Plumier (1646-1704) and his Drawings of French and American Fishes: Concordance with Equivalent Illustrations Found in the Vellums of Aubriet and Published Works of Gautier d’Agoty, Bloch, Lacepède, Bloch and Schneider, and Cuvier and Valenciennes,” *Archives of Natural History* 28, no. 2 (2001), 261-8, and “Plumier’s Passion,” *Natural History* 119, no. 7 (2011); Laurent-Henri Vignaud, “Le père Charles Plumier, un Minime botaniste à la Trinité-des-Monts,” in *La Trinité-des-Monts redécouverte. Arts, foi et culture*, ed. Yves Bruley (Rome: De Luca, 2002, 142-7), and “Des mathématiques à la botanique. La conversion scientifique du père Charles Plumier durant son séjour à Rome (1676-1681),” *Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée* 117 (2005), 131-57; Roy Mottram, “Charles Plumier, the King’s Botanist: His Life and Work,” *Bradleya* 20 (2002), 79-120; Georges Cremers and Cécile Aupic, “Spécimens de Charles Plumier déposés à Paris dans les collections de ptéridophytes américains de Tournefort, Vaillant, Danty d’Isnard et Jussieu,” *Adansonia*, 29, no. 2 (2007), 159-93; Michel Thireau *et al.*, “L’oeuvre ichthyologique de Charles Plumier aux Antilles (1689-1695),” in *Explorations et voyages scientifiques de l’Antiquité a nos jours*, ed. Christiane Demeulenaere-Douyère (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 2008), 47-56.</footnote>
blend of craftsmanship and natural inquiry that was at the core of the Minims'
intellectual engagement. We cannot know it for certain, but it was likely under Maignan's
guidance in Toulouse that Plumier trained in arts as practical as drawing and lens-making.

That Plumier's initiation into the worlds of scholarship took place within the realm
of his religious order is not unimportant. As a matter of fact, Plumier's belonging to the
Minims became particularly consequential for his career as a savant under the protection
of the king of France. The order of Minims produced a number of renowned French
scholars in the seventeenth century, especially mathematicians and natural philosophers.
Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) undoubtedly was (and still is) the most celebrated figure,
but constituted by no means an exception: other than Maignan, his almost contemporary
François Nicéron (1613-1646), too, worked on the most curious effects of optical
manipulation and published an influential treatise on perspective; and, in the mid-
eighteenth century, Thomas Le Seur (1703-1770) and François Jacquier (1711-1788)
became well-known Newtonians and editors of the *Principia Mathematica*. The list of
Minims who devoted themselves to the pursuit of natural inquiries reveal a geography of
knowledge within the order that crystallized around two principal loci before and during
Plumier's time: a French convent in Rome, known as the *Trinité dei Monti* or *Trinité-des-Monts*, and the Parisian convent near Place Royale. The Minim convent at Place Royale is
nowadays best known as Mersenne's headquarters and the center of his large intellectual
network: here, luminaries like Pierre Gassendi (1592-1655), Gilles de Roberval (1602-
1675), Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), and Thomas Hobbes (1688-1769) discussed about
mathematics and natural philosophy in the early seventeenth century (fig. I.3). Half a
century later, this and the Roman convent became consequential in Plumier's formation
and scholarly life: he spent most of his formative years in the Roman monastery, where
he moved from Toulouse after some time training with Maignan; after returning in 1689
from his first American journey, Plumier installed himself in the Parisian convent, where
he resided for the rest of his life when not traveling, engulfed in its library's books and
the bundles of drawings heaped in his cell. Unsurprisingly, the convents in Rome and
Paris hosted the largest libraries within the order at that time.
<figure><img src="image_13.png" /></figure>

Fig. I.3. (left) Detail, Turgot map of Paris, ca. 1735. The map shows the area around Place Royale (now Place des Vosges), barely one mile northeast of the Seine's islands. The church and convent of the Minims (marked "MINIMES" on the map) is on the bottom left of the image, and the Bastille on the top right (the north is at the bottom in this map). The Minims' privileged location in Paris was part of the reason why the convent became, under the leadership of Mersenne, a space of encounter for savants of all nationalities. This was not so much the case during Plumier's time, yet a good number of learned men passed by in the late seventeenth century to visit the friar, his collection of drawings, or the convent's well-equipped library. (Kyoto University Library.) (opposite) Church and convent of the Minims near Place Royale around the mid-seventeenth century. (Musée Carnavalet, Paris.)

Nevertheless, it is difficult to integrate the learned activities of individuals like Mersenne, Maignan, or Plumier into a clear institutional setting.<fnref n="16" /> Unlike the Jesuits, the Minims did not forge a corporate culture with an explicit accent on learning as a form of religious proselytism—the order’s *Règle*, the “rule,” barely touched on intellectual life, although a particular emphasis was placed indeed on the role of libraries in the life of the convents.<fnref n="17" /> Unlike the Maurists, the French pioneers of critical erudition, the Minims did not seem to have developed sustained forms of collective scholarly work. Nonetheless, it should be stressed that the moral economy of monastic life promoted by the Minims and other regular orders was coincident in several respects with the virtues that fashioned

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Whitmore, *Order of Minims*, 3-131; Odile Krakovitch, “Le couvent des Minimes de la Place-Royale,” *Paris et Île-de-France* 30 (1979), 98-104, and “La vie intellectuelle,” 24-7; Pascal Dubourg Glatigny and Antonella Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts dans la ‘République romaine des sciences et des arts,’” *Mélanges de l’École française de Rome. Italie et Méditerranée* 117, no. 1 (2005), 7-43, esp. 16-25 for an analysis of the (little) normative place accorded to intellectual life in the order; Benoist Pierre et André Vauchez, eds., *Saint François de Paule et les Minimes en France de la fin du XVᵉ au XVIIIᵉ siècle* (Paris: Presses Universitaires François-Rabelais, 2010); Valérie Malabirade, “Les Minimes et la province d’Aquitaine sous l’Ancien Régime: Un cadre provincial pour un engagement intellectual?” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Université Michel de Montaingne Bordeaux 3, 2013), esp. 25-35, 44-61, 269-85.</footnote>

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Dubourg Glatigny and Romano, “La Trinité-des-Monts,” 21-4; Whitmore, *Order of Minims*, 120-31.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_14.png" /></figure>

scientific life in the seventeenth century. The Minims were expected to cleave to a number of moral virtues: penitence, humility, ascetism, self-effacement. The ideal of heroic sanctity to which the Minims adhered was that of the hermitic type of saint embodied by their founder, St. Francis of Paola, and was at the basis of the rigorously austere rules of conduct structuring their lives and exalting the virtues of discretion, solitude, introspection, and contemplative life. (An early-seventeenth-century apologist of the order, the Minim Robert Regnault, who was also the translator into French of Acosta's *Natural and Moral History of the Indies*, remarked upon the need for the friar to appreciate with due regard "the flowers of solitude, gathered from the most beautiful lives of saints who have inhabited the deserts and cherished solitary life.")<fnref n="18" />

Here, however, we should be careful not to draw too clear an association between the moral virtues praised by the Minims and the variegated paths through which some of its members engaged in intellectual pursuits. And yet the Minims' and similar orders' principles of religious life posited some important questions that were consonant with the moral economies underpinning the worlds of scholarship in the late seventeenth century.<fnref n="19" /> This was particularly true in France, at least. It is worth remembering that Dom

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Quoted in Whitmore, *Order of Minims*, 85. Perhaps one of the best examples of the austerity of life to which the Minims were expected to adhere was the fact that they had, other than the three traditional monastic vows, a fourth one of “quadragesimal life” or perpetual Lent: that is, abstinence from meat and other animal products such as milk and eggs—which raised the incensed reaction of Martin Lister as an example of the “blind prejudice” of monastic life when he encountered a sickly Plumier. The translation is José de Acosta, *Histoire naturelle et morale des Indes, tant Orientales qu'Occidentales . . . Composée en Castillan par Joseph Acosta, & traduite en François par Robert Regnault Cauxois* (Paris: chez Marc Orry, 1606).</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ The most enlightening comparison is perhaps the one with the Maurists. See the indispensable work of Daniel-Odon Hurel, especially “Les Mauristes, consommateurs et producteurs de livres aux XVIIᵉ et XVIIIᵉ siècles,” in *Les religieux et leurs livres à l'époque moderne*, ed. Bernard Dompnier and Marie-Hélène</footnote>
Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), the French Maurist and author of hugely influential works of textual criticism, published his *Traité des études monastiques* (Treatise of monastic studies) in 1691. This was a bulky volume on the central role that erudition ought to play in monastic life—as exemplified by the remarkable research undertook by his religious community at Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The sort of scholarship described by Mabillon was a manual undertaking as much as an intellectual labor, one in which spirituality and religious observance leaned on even the most practical aspects of erudite study. He quoted, for instance, Cassiodorus’s praise of the manual exercise of copying books as one of the best exercises for the body, of the work of the “solitary” scholar’s hands while “sitting in his chair to copy books,” and of the materiality of this gesture as being a form of “preaching with the hand.”<fnref n="20" />

In the crafting of a paper archive of the West Indian flora and fauna may well have lain a practical means for affirming moral values in consonance with those around which the Minims' way of being in the world was structured.<fnref n="21" /> Rather than in the choice of specific objects of inquiry, the moralization of scientific practice should perhaps be sought in two elements that were at the core of Plumier's iconographic corpus: a method of inquiry and the valorization of practices themselves. The first highlights a further parallel of the Minims' scholarly enterprise with that of the Maurists: it is what Arnaldo Momigliano termed as the “quest for safe historical rules”: that is, the defense of the possibility of a sound knowledge against radical skeptical positions. The Minims, as P. J. S. Whitmore pointed out, “were not especially given to theological subtleties, neither could they claim any particular dogma or cult as their own.” They were generally also not inclined to polemicism and controversy.<fnref n="22" /> As I explore in chapter 1, the part that images

<footnote>Froeschlé-Chopard (Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2000), 177-94, and Hurel, ed., *Érudition et commerce épistolaire: Jean Mabillon et la tradition monastique* (Paris: Vrin, 2003).</footnote>

<footnote n="20">²⁰ Jean Mabillon, *Traité des études monastiques* (Paris: chez Charles Robustel, 1691), 35-6.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ As Pamela H. Smith pointed out for the world of artisans: “‘Doing’ was thus a way of being in the world which was not worth theorizing about and did not need much written attention,” in her “Why Write a Book? From Lived Experience to the Written Word in Early Modern Europe,” *Bulletin of the German Historical Institute* 47 (2010), 25-50. See also her previous *The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006).</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Even if I disagree with him on several points, I feel inclined to accept the bulk of Whitmore's conclusion that, in the order of Minims, “there is a move away from polemical towards scientific writing; away from controversy, towards instruction. In the minds of the more enlightened members of the Order prime importance was accorded to the conquest of superstition by the reconciliation of science with the tenets of the faith.” Whitmore, *Order of Minims*, 118. This aspect goes in line with the intellectual endeavors of Maignan: see Antonella Romano, “Mathematics and Philosophy at Trinità dei Monti: Emmanuel Maignan and His Legacy between Rome and France,” in *Conflicting Duties: Science, Medicine and Religion in Rome, 1550-1750*, ed. Maria Pia Donato and Jill Kraye, Warburg Institute Colloquia 15 (London: The Warburg Institute, 2009), 157–80,</footnote>
played in the making of Plumier’s natural history may have been linked to this attempt (pursued more famously by friars-antiquarians) of a sound descriptive historical knowledge (which included natural history) and a renewal of what counted as valid sources for building epistemic certainty. As Momigliano wittily suggested, it seems just natural that Catholic friars contributed to opposing, in the field of scholarship, forms of skepticism that hit hard on traditional religious beliefs.<fnref n="23" />

If Plumier’s iconographic corpus embodied a method of inquiry that was recognizably congruent with Catholic values, the craftsmanship by which it was produced was interwoven with moral virtues at the time. Here, it is worth remembering Plumier’s esteem for turnery. In his intriguing manual on this artisanal art, *L’art de tourner* (1701), the friar characterized any manual occupation—and that of shaping materials with a lathe in particular—as an “honnête exercise” serving “to avoid the flaws that an excessive idleness in life entails.”<fnref n="24" /> As pursued by Plumier, natural historical inquiry, too, was an enterprise particularly demanding for the body of the scholar, not only because of the privations that any traveling naturalist ought to be willing to embrace, but also due to the manual dimension of erudite labor. Gestures long-deemed more cerebral than practical— such as writing, reading, and drawing—were often seen as virtuous at the turn of the eighteenth century precisely because they engaged the mind as much as the body. (Writing in one’s own hand, for instance, was often valued as a form of both mental and physical discipline in early modern times.) The virtues of penitence, humility, withdrawal into the self, and occupied devotion promoted by the Minims not only fit well with Plumier’s laborious journeys across the Caribbean islands, but were actually coherent on several points with the moral values extolled by many of those who engaged in scholarship as a way of life. As Matthew L. Jones has beautifully demonstrated, a number of seventeenth-century natural philosophers and mathematicians sought knowledge not

<footnote n="23">²³ Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” *Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes* 13, no. 3-4 (1950), 296: “Historical Pyrrhonism was hitting both at traditional historical teaching and at traditional religious beliefs. It was only natural that members of religious congregations (Bollandists, Maurists) should make some of the best contributions towards distinguishing between reasonable and unreasonable doubts in history.” Compare this with some of Mabillon’s passages in the *Traité des études monastiques*, e.g. 291: “mais souvent on en abuse [de la critique], & on se donne des libertez, qui ne sont guere moins préjudiciables à l’esprit, que l’erreur ou l’ignorance.”</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Plumier, *L'art de tourner, ou de faire en perfection toutes sortes d'ouvrages au tour* (Lyon: chez Jean Certe, 1701), sig. [a4v]: “entre les divertissement & les plaisirs raisonnables, [l'art de tourner est] celuy qui est le plus consideré par ceux qui cherchent dans quelque excercise honnête le moyen d'éviter les défaults où jette une trop grand oisiveté de la vie.”</footnote>
as an end in itself, but as a means to live a virtuous life.<fnref n="25" /> Interestingly, they aspired to perfect the moral self through gestural procedures, even if these appeared then to some as too mechanical for the noblest minds. In other words, Jones argues that the cultivation of the self through knowledge was pursued at the level of practices: routine scholarly techniques thus became, in the hands of these savants, means for cultivating virtue and specific values.

The concentration on practice is a key component of the cultural setting in which Plumier trained as a scholar. The culture of scholarship within the order of Minims was characterized by a blend of craftsmanship, natural and mathematical inquiry, and the esteem for creations both instructive and delightful, so as to capture the interests of patrons and grandees. Creations such as Maignan's alluring anamorphosis (see chapter 2, fig. 2.2), Nicéron's tract on the most curious optical games of perspective, and Plumier's stunning and numerous drawings of a distant world all fall into this category. The Minims did certainly not elaborate explicit principles for structuring a corporate culture in which their intellectual engagement was thoroughly detailed at the normative and ideological levels. We can, however, approach the cases mentioned above from the standpoint of practices. They qualify for what Michel de Certeau termed as the "formality of practices": he meant that doctrines and ideologies do not need to change in their formulation so as to be appropriated differently.<fnref n="26" /> The values at the basis of the Minims' monastic life were not new: the novelty may well have resided in the way they were now *put into practice* by individuals like Maignan, Nicéron, and Plumier.

Another component of Plumier's religious identity may be recognized as particularly significant for his intellectual activity: his belonging to the order of Minims as a Frenchman in particular proved consequential to his career as a learned practitioner, for this was a social identity with deep political implications in the closing decades of the seventeenth century. Since the foundation of the order in the late fifteenth century by St.

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Matthew L. Jones, *The Good Life of the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), and the review essay of this work by Stéphane Van Damme in “Mathematical Meditations: Revisiting Moral Practice in the Sciences of the Classical Age,” *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales* 67 (2012), 133-49.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ Michel de Certeau, “La formalité des pratiques. Du système religieux à l’éthique des Lumières (XVIIe-XVIIIe),” in *L’écriture de l’histoire* (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 152-212 (165: “Les pratiques permettent de saisir les modes d’une combinaison nouvelle: elles définisent en effet le champ où s’effectue le déplacement qui va refluer les ideologies. Leur formalité différente manifeste leur réemploi au titre d’un autre fonctionnement”; and 166: “Même intactes en elles-mêmes, les conduits s’inscrivent sur d’autres trajectoires sociales. Elles obéissent à des critères, elles se classent selon des catégories, elles visent des objectifs qui changent. Ces questions relèvent d’une formalité des pratiques.” There is an English translation: *The Writing of History*, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 147-205.</footnote>
Francis of Paola (1416-1507)—a Calabrian hermit who ended up in the court of Louis XI of France due to his reputed thaumaturgical competencies and the king's unwillingness to die—the Minims developed a close link with the French kings, who kept the order under their direct protection for most of the early modern period. The Minims spread rapidly in France after the Wars of Religion: it reached its height around Mersenne's time and, by the end of the seventeenth century, there were more than 150 convents in the kingdom—although the communities in them tended to be rather small, with the notable exception of the Place Royale. Over time, the Minims strengthened their fidelity to the crown of France: the order counted a number of overt apologists of the monarchy among its ranks, and the convents in Paris and Rome were both royal foundations. (Trinità dei Monti is actually a striking example of Louis XIV's territorial ambitions in the Papal city, as we will see in chapter 2.)

If Plumier's belonging to a religious order so close to the French monarchy played a key role in securing the necessary funding for his research, so, too, did his choice to render his natural historical research in the form of manuscript and printed images. Plumier's numerous drawings and boastfully illustrated books on West Indian animals and plants were both the direct result of royal patronage and actually, I argue, the main reason for this. True, a royal pension provided his sustenance from the 1690s; the monarchy bestowed on him the right to be called *botaniste du roi* (or was indifferent at him using it); the navy's (and privateers') ships munificently covered most of his trips to, from, and across the West Indies; and the Imprimerie royale printed both of his two-hundred-copperplate books. Yet, as I argue in chapter 2 in particular, little or none of this state support would have materialized had he not been an accomplished draftsman. His corpus of drawings and engravings were not subsidiary to his work under the aegis of the monarchy, but the very key of his usually successful but often painful negotiations to secure royal funding for his trips and publications.

Plumier's iconographic corpus embodies both the defining features and the unsolvable paradoxes that underpinned, first, the place of the Caribbean colonies in the monarchy's imperial imaginary and, second, the royal patronage of the sciences and the arts. To begin with, “empire” is an elusive term to describe France's early modern overseas possessions, especially during the last decades of the seventeenth century. Authors like Jean-Baptiste Labat (1663-1738) or Plumier himself, as well as naval officers like Michel Bégon (1638-1710), recurrently referred to the Caribbean islands as “our islands Antilles” or “nos Îsles” tout court. Plumier's geography of exploration in the
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /><figcaption>Fig. I.4. A seventeenth-century map of the Caribbean islands by Joannes de Laet. Despite Plumier’s continuous reference to the “West Indies” or simply “the Americas,” his natural peregrinations were mostly limited to Martinique, on the eastern arc of the Windward Islands, and Saint-Domingue or the western part of the island of Hispaniola, at the center of the Caribbean basin. (John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.)</figcaption></figure>

Caribbean—the one, at least, I could trace in his printed books and manuscript notes—is largely coincident with that of French official dominions, roughly circumscribed to Saint-Domingue (or the western half of the island of Hispaniola) and the nearby island of Tortuga in the western part of the Caribbean Sea, and to Martinique and (to a much lesser extent) Guadeloupe and Saint-Vincent, located in the arc of the Windward Islands. The unity of France’s Caribbean dominions was far from clear: Saint-Domingue, for instance, not only was found by Plumier in a pitiful situation due to wars and poverty (as described by him in a couple of reports to the minister), but also developed practically in isolation from the French stronghold of Martinique (only a week of navigation was needed to reach it, but more than a month to come back from it) (fig. I.4).<fnref n="27" />

<footnote n="27">²⁷ In this and the next paragraphs, I follow mainly Jean Meyer, Jean Tarade, and Annie Rey-Goldzeiguer, *Histoire de la France coloniale*, vol. 1: *La conquête: des origines à 1870* (Paris: Pocket, 1996), 101-30; Kenneth J. Banks, *Chasing Empire across the Sea: Communications and the State in the French Atlantic, 1713-1763* (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003), 3-42; Pritchard, *In Search of Empire*, esp.</footnote>
Plumier’s presence on the islands, roughly between 1687 and 1697, coincides with a
very specific moment in the history of the French West Indies: one between, on the one
hand, the attempts of Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) to impose
administrative, fiscal, and juridical order in the French Atlantic during the two decades
running from the mid-1660s to the mid-1680s, and, on the other hand, the consolidation
of the islands as sugar-and-slave societies and economies in the first decades of the
eighteenth century. These reforms resulted in the consolidation of two figures to which
Plumier’s destiny in the tropics was tightly linked: the privateers or *flibustiers*, incentivized
and controlled (as best as possible) by the navy (and on whom the friar largely relied on
his journeys) and the Royal Navy itself. Colbert had made it his priority to expand the
royal fleet and to improve ports or build them from scratch (like La Rochelle, under the
command of Intendant Michel Bégon, Plumier’s most consequential patron). The navy
then became officially in control of all colonial (or simply non-European) matters,
including traveling naturalists: most of Plumier’s patrons were navy officers, from
secretaries of state like Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay (1651-1690) and the
two Pontchartrains (Louis Phélypeaux [1643-1727] and his son, Jérôme Phélypeaux
[1674-1747]) to intendants like Bégon or colonial governors of different kinds. Even if it
is probably true that what subsequently came to be known as France’s “first colonial
empire” was a creation of Louis XIV’s absolutist monarchy, this does not mean that
there was any clear overall colonial policy before 1700—partly because of the
government’s limited capabilities due to an almost continuous state of war, and partly
because what the monarchy was mainly looking for on the islands at that time were
immediate military and economic benefits.<fnref n="28" />

Plumier’s time on the islands also coincides with a period of deep unrest,
uncertainty, and dislocation in the Caribbean area: the reality was far from the serenity of
a two-dimensional map with clear and stable borders. Plumier’s years in the tropics
coincide with the Nine Years’ War (1688-1697) opposing Louis XIV to practically every
other European power: the French, on the one hand, and the allied Dutch, English, and

<footnote>31-43, 231-41, 303-20, 402-22; Philip P. Boucher, *France and the American Tropics to 1700: Tropics of Discontent?* (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 1-39, 202-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ As beautifully articulated by Meyer, Tarade, and Rey-Goldzeiguer in their classic *Histoire de la France coloniale*, 51: “sur le velleités du siècle de la Renaissance, sur les fondements limités de la première moitié du XVIIᵉ siècle, Colbert, et non sans hesitations ni retours ou renversements de politique, a édifié quelque chose qui peut, étalé sur une carte du monde, ressembler à un ‘Empire’ terrien et maritime, . . . mais qui, dans la réalité, s’apperente plus à des séries de chaines d’îlots de peuplement humain perdus dans la nature sauvage ou l’immensité maritime.”</footnote>
Spanish naval and buccaneer forces, on the other, ravaged each other without cease. The conflict culminated with De Pointis's spectacular raid of Cartagena in 1697—it was in his fleet that Plumier would leave the Americas for the last time.

The European powers' competitive territorial ambitions in the Caribbean basin may have had its equivalent in the more placid waters of scholarship. The nature of the West Indies captured in Plumier's drawings and copperplates, above all an exclusive product for a metropolitan elite audience, needs to be seen in a close relationship with a sort of empire that was made of symbols and monuments as much as of colonies and ships. The imperial image of the monarchy, fed by the myths of Antiquity and cultivated in France at least since the Renaissance, became a key factor in both the politics and imaginary of Louis XIV's reign.<fnref n="29" /> Plumier's career and books largely rested on the symbolic economy by which the glory of the king was obsessively cultivated.<fnref n="30" /> But the royal patronage of scholarship was fraught with tensions and contradictions. Take those, for instance, explored in chapter 5 on the culture of print: while the best way for Plumier's images to extoll the glory of the monarchy was through print—and as a crown-supported traveling naturalist and draftsman he was supposed to produce illustrated books—, the state was not always able to honor its own expectations due to the intermittent economic crisis.

The specificity of the relatively short and often elusive period running from the 1680s to the first decade of the eighteenth century is an idée fixe of “Nature in Draft,” especially with regard to the much-invoked partnership between science and empire.<fnref n="31" />

<footnote n="29">²⁹ Thomas James Dandelet, *The Renaissance of Empire in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 228-45</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ The indispensable reference here is Peter Burke, *The Fabrication of Louis XIV* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), a study all the more important for my purpose given the central place Burke accords to visual imagery.</footnote>

<footnote n="31">³¹ The bibliography on natural history and empire in the early modern period is vast. Particularly remarkable are George Basalla, “The Spread of Western Science,” *Science* 156, no. 3775 (1967), 611-22; Roy MacLeod, ed., “Nature and Empire: Science and the Colonial Enterprise,” special issue, *Osiris* 15 (2000), esp. “Introduction,” 1-13; Juan Pimentel, “The Iberian Vision: Science and Empire in the Framework of a Universal Monarchy (1500-1800),” 17-30, and James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime,” 31-50; Charlotte Castelnau-L’Estoile and François Regourd, eds., *Connaissances et pouvoirs. Les espaces impériaux, XVIe-XVIIIe siècle. France, Espagne, Portugal* (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2005); Londa Schiebinger and Claudia Swan, eds., *Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce and Politics in the Early Modern World* (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Raj, *Relocating Modern Science*; Simon Schaffer, Lissa Roberts, Kapil Raj, and James Delbourgo, eds., *The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820* (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009); James E. McClellan III and François Regourd, *The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime* (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010); and Morit von Brescius, “Empires of Opportunity: German Scholars between Asia and Europe in the 1850s” (PhD diss. European University Institute, 2015).</footnote>

<footnote>On the relationship between natural history and empire in the Atlantic world, see, among many others, Regourd, “Sciences et colonisation sous l’Ancien Régime”; James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., *Science and Empire in the Atlantic World*. (New York: Routledge, 2008), esp. “Introduction: The Far Side of</footnote>
Plumier’s position between the world of learning and the service to the absolutist and increasingly colonial state is paradigmatic of the space that science and scholarship occupied during Louis XIV’s reign. More importantly, it provides us with an extraordinary example of how historians have all too often projected their ideas on the role of colonial natural history within the mid- and late eighteenth-century imperial state back onto Plumier’s time—or simply perpetuated a common tendency in the historiography of early modern and modern French science by which the state is given a specially strong explanatory role.<fnref n="32" /> This idea is developed throughout the dissertation, but chapter 2 explores it in particular detail: by studying the specificities of the French crown’s support for Plumier’s Caribbean and iconographic enterprise—as well as the reasons why other naturalists lacked or lost this support at one point or another—, it argues that the flow of information on non-European natures towards European metropolises was fragile and its utility still uncertain in the eyes of the imperial powers by the late seventeenth century. This does not mean, however, that the paths of knowledge did not cross those of the absolutist state or of European imperial and military attempts of expansion overseas: they did, and often in intricate ways. But the specificity of the global scale in this respect needs to be relativized. As Dena Goodman has convincingly argued, the Republic of Letters—that “extremely free State” in Pierre Bayle’s words, and a concept that became widely spread only by the end of the seventeenth century—more often than not thrived hand in glove with the absolutist monarchies’ state-building, rather than in parallel to or isolation from it.<fnref n="33" /> This was especially true in France, where most scientific institutions (the academies and the Jardin du roi, for instance) and individuals (traveling naturalists included) were supported by royal funds and placed under the direct patronage of the crown and its officials. Yet Plumier and his contemporaries need to be

<footnote>the Ocean,” 1-28, Safier, “Fruitless Botany: Joseph de Jussieu’s South American Odyssey,” 203-24, Daniela Bleichmar, “Atlantic Competitions: Botany in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Empire,” 225-52, and the excellent afterword by Margaret C. Jacob, “Science, Global Capitalism, and the State,” 333-44; James E. McClellan III, *Colonialism and Science: Saint-Domingue in the Old Regime* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010); François Regourd, “Localités et centralités scientifiques: les mondes atlantiques (XVIe-XVIIIe siècle),” in *Histoire des sciences et des savoirs*, vol. 1: *De la Renaissance aux Lumières*, ed. Stéphane Van Damme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2015), 325-44; and Samir Boumediène, *La colonisation du savoir: Une histoire des plantes médicinales du “Nouveau Monde”* (Vaulx-en-Velin: Les éditions des mondes à faire, 2016).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² J. B. Shank, “The Sciences in Old Regime France: A Review of Recent Scholarship,” *French Historical Studies* 28, no. 4 (2005), 661-95, and Nicholas Dew, “Scientific Travel in the Atlantic World: The French Expedition to Gorée and the Antilles, 1681-1683,” *The British Journal of the History of Science* 43, no. 1 (2010), 1-17.</footnote>

<footnote n="33">³³ Dena Goodman, *The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 12-23.</footnote>
studied on their own terms, rather than as the forerunners of the grand overseas scientific expeditions of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.<fnref n="34" />

The economic, military, and political upheaval of Louis XIV's France's "fin de siècle" finds a sort of epistemic equivalent in the unsettled field of the study of nature at the time. But what was natural history at the turn of the eighteenth century? By natural history, I will mostly mean here the study of plants and animals. Yet the story is more complicated than that; the question points, once again, to the particularity of the short and often neglected decades that are studied here. To start with, the specificity of the years spanning from the 1650s to the 1710s (roughly those that Paul Hazard famously identified with a "crisis of the European mind," and known in French as the "Classical Age")<fnref n="35" /> becomes evident from a historiographical point of view. In respect to the history of natural history (if not the history of science in France, by and large), Plumier's times correspond to a period that has attracted far less scholarly attention than those between which it is sandwiched, each of them still pervasively homogenized within the powerful concepts of "Renaissance" and "Enlightenment."<fnref n="36" /> This alone seems to me a good enough reason to inquire into the worlds of natural history in Plumier's age. In fact, one of the main theses of this dissertation (and of chapters 2 and 6, in particular) is that the history of natural history around 1700 has all too often been considered through the distortive lens of the Enlightenment.<fnref n="37" />

<footnote n="34">³⁴ The case seems to confirm Romain Bertrand’s general diagnosis of the current global history writing: “Les praticiens de l’‘histoire globale’ . . . tracent le plus souvent des lignes droites: des trajectoires sans zigzags ni pointillés. . . . Quant au saut dans le passé, il vise le plus souvent à documenter des précédents ou à circonscrire des origines: ‘prodromes’ du capitalisme, ‘genèse’ (au singulier) de l’État, ‘prémices’ de la raison politique contemporaine.” Romain Bertrand, “Un continent de possibles oubliés. Les relations économiques Europe-Asie à l’époque moderne,” *Esprit* 12 (2013), 33. To get a sense of the naturalist-explorer during the Enlightenment, see Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “L’explorateur,” in *L’homme des Lumières*, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), 285-346.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ Paul Hazard, *La crise de la conscience européenne, 1680-1715* (Paris: Boivin et Cie., 1935). See also Anthony Grafton’s introductory essay to the English edition: *The Crisis of the European Mind: 1680-1715* (New York: The New York Review of Books, 2013), vii-xii. Hazard’s approach was unmistakably teleological and rupturist: for him, this age of intellectual “crisis” was one in which the “ferment” of the Enlightenment was formed. In many ways, Hazard’s account bears comparison with another famous narrative, also grounded on an intellectual history perspective: Jonathan Israel, *Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750* (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).</footnote>

<footnote n="36">³⁶ This was partly because, until the 1980s or 1990s, historians of early modern science placed little emphasis on natural history, which, as pointed out by Paula Findlen, “did not fit well with the model of science” erected upon the study of mathematical fields such as physics and astronomy. Paula Findlen, “Natural History,” in *The Cambridge History of Science*, vol. 3: *Early Modern Science*, ed. Katharine Park and Lorraine Daston (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 436.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ An excellent and recent summary and state of the art of early modern natural history is in Marie-Noëlle Bourguet and Pierre-Yves Lacour, “Les mondes naturalistes: Europe (1530-1802),” in Van Damme, *De la Renaissance aux Lumières*, 255-81. I have largely followed here Bourguet’s and Lacour’s persuasive account. See also Jacques Roger, “The Living World,” in *The Ferment of Knowledge: Studies in the Historiography of Eighteenth-Century Science*, ed. G. S. Rousseau and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,</footnote>
In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the study of nature was an ill-defined and not yet altogether distinct field of knowledge, but one that experienced profound mutations. During the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a new mode of studying flora and fauna emerged due to a series of factors: the diffusion of printing and the consequent expansion of the book market, the revival of classical scholarship, and the rise of medical humanism are probably the most important ones.<fnref n="38" /> At the other end of the early modern period, the second third of the eighteenth century witnessed the clear delimitation of the contours of natural history as a distinct discipline—up until natural history slowly began to decline with the emergence of the word and concept of biology in the early nineteenth century.<fnref n="39" /> In the 1760s, when the *philosophes* were trimming the tree of knowledge, “histoire naturelle” became—in the *Encyclopédie*, for instance—a clearly distinct discipline structured around an object “as vast as nature,” but clearly identifiable: plants, animals, and minerals.

This was not so clearly the case during Plumier’s lifetime. Natural history in these decades requires attention on its own terms so as not to assume that its advances constituted a mere intermediary step between those which we know took place in the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In France, as elsewhere in Western Europe, several developments had deeply affected the way in which the natural world was studied in the late seventeenth century. For instance, the diffusion of new techniques and modes of inquiry such as microscopy and experimentalism had a profound impact in the field. (Both are present in Plumier’s practice, as he not only directed his magnified gaze to the smallest details of seeds and plants, but also delighted in tormenting West Indian vipers with poisonous plants.) But three other phenomena had even more consequentially defined the contours of natural history by Plumier’s time: the consolidation of European states’ expansion overseas and of the interconnections at the global scale; the

<footnote n="1980">1980), 255-83; Nick Jardine, J. A. Secord, and E. C. Spary, eds., *Cultures of Natural History* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. 17-124; Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi, eds., *Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early modern Europe* (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), esp. “Introduction,” 1-38, and Brian Ogilvie, “Natural History, Ethics and Physico-Theology,” 75-103; Findlen, “Natural History”; John Gascoigne, “The Study of Nature,” in *The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Philosophy*, ed. Knud Haakonssen, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 854-72; Brian Ogilvie, *The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006); Alix Cooper, *Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); and Pierre-Yves Lacour, “Histoire naturelle,” in *1740: Un abrégé du monde. Savoirs et collections autour de Dezallier d’Argenville* (Lyon: Fage, 2012), 112-20.</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ The unavoidable reference here is Ogilvie, *Science of Describing*.</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ Michel Foucault was probably the first to point out that it was incorrect to use the word “biology” for the eighteenth century. “Biology” first appeared in 1802 in the works of Lamarck, in France, and Treviranus, in Germany. See Roger, “Living World,” 258.</footnote>
reinforcement of the study of plants and animals for their own sake, rather than for its
medical utility; and naturalists' general abandonment of classical scholarship (that is, the
textual criticism and exegesis of the Greek and Latin authors from Antiquity) but not, as
I will argue below, of bookish tradition.

At the end of the seventeenth century, natural history was history above all. True,
the ill-defined contours of the field were often blurred with neighboring forms of
knowledge having plants and animals as their object, from materia medica to gardening
and the collection of exotic natural curiosities. From a social point of view, Plumier was
an exception as a botanist because, unlike most contemporary natural historians, he had
no medical training. But what does it mean that natural history was history above all? In
the late seventeenth century, the word "history" referred not so much to the study of the
past or to a chronological approach to human actions, but rather to an approach based
on description or on accounts devoid of interpretation. "Natural history"—or the
"history of nature"—was the description of natural "things," and thus opposed to
"natural philosophy," which searched for the causes of natural phenomena.<fnref n="40" /> In other
words, a natural historian would have been concerned by, say, whether ferns had seeds or
not, while a natural philosopher would instead have worried about the causes for some
bodies' buoyancy in water. The unity of natural history at that time is to be sought not so
much in a series of specific objects (plants, animals, minerals), but rather in a concrete
mode of inquiry roughly based on the description, collection, and arrangement of natural
facts.<fnref n="41" />

History, therefore, straddled our current disciplinary boundaries between human and
natural matters. The French word *histoire* encompassed natural history as well as anatomy
and civil history—the one closest to today’s usage—as reflected in the dictionaries of the
time.<fnref n="42" /> Gianna Pomata’s and Nancy Siraisi’s powerful account of the concept of *historia*

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ For Roger, natural history represented, unlike natural philosophy, “the primacy of fact over theory.” Roger, “Living World,” 264.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ On the early modern notion of “natural fact,” see Barbara J. Shapiro, *A Culture of Fact. England, 1550-1720* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), chaps. 5 and 6—although Shapiro deals here with both natural history and natural philosophy (sometimes confused) and her account is circumscribed to England.</footnote>

<footnote>For the notion of *historia*, see the indispensable work by Pomata and Siraisi, *Historia*. As they point out in the introduction (2), “it would be more correct to talk of a proliferation of natural histories—in the plural—all with different philosophical pedigrees and correspondingly different notions of what *historia* was about.” See also Rafael Mandressi’s interesting pages on *historia* in anatomy, Mandressi, *Le regard de l’anatomiste. Dissection et invention du corps en Occident* (Paris: Le Seuil, 2003), 18-25.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² José Beltrán, “Nature *au naturel* in late-seventeenth-century France,” in *Ad Vivum? Visual Materials and the Vocabulary of Life-Likeness in Europe Before 1800*, ed. Joanna Woodall and Thomas Balfe (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). On civil history, see a classic: Anthony Grafton, *What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modern Europe?* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).</footnote>
across the early modern period uncovered that this was not only a literary genre, but
actually what they called an “epistemic genre”: that is, a cognitive category grounded on
the “descriptive knowledge of particulars” and embracing “intellectual practices common
to natural and human sciences,” as well as material practices of empiricism based on
“gathering, observation and description.”<fnref n="43" />

Drawing from this perspective, “Nature in Draft” follows images in an attempt to
trace the history of natural history in the decades from the 1680s to the 1710s. In doing
so, it reveals that Plumier’s practices of visual representation are representative of the
genre of natural history in France and well beyond. The boundary between human and
natural sciences was far from clear-cut: two fields as seemingly distant by modern
standards as antiquarianism and natural history were, as Pomata and Siraisi put it, equally
“idiographic”: that is, “highly suspicious of generalization and primarily bent on
capturing the protean world of particulars through strongly analytical and descriptive
skills.”<fnref n="44" /> All the more so, indeed, when an interrogation on the role of visual
representations is brought into the picture: this is why, in order to understand better the
place that images played in late seventeenth-century natural history, I will be drawing
comparisons (especially in chapter 1) between Plumier’s iconographic work and that of
contemporary antiquarians, such as Bernard de Montfaucon (1656-1741).

By focusing mostly on images, this dissertation traces the two main intellectual
bedrocks upon which natural history stood at Plumier’s time. The first is the close tie
between empiricism and erudition, or between observational skills and scholarly
learning.<fnref n="45" /> “Autopsy,” or firsthand observation, offered not an alternative to bookish
information, but the grounds on which to carry out its verification—an idea clearly
opposed to Michel Foucault’s staunch opposition of history and science in the
seventeenth century.<fnref n="46" /> This also raises the question of the naturalist’s self from both a
cognitive and a social perspective: the material and intellectual parallels between
observation and reading, evinced for the case of Plumier in chapter 3, show that what

<footnote n="43">⁴³ Pomata and Siraisi, “Introduction,” 4-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ Pomata and Siraisi, “Introduction,” 5-6.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ This has also been pointed out by the editors and contributors to the volume of *Historia: A good formulation is in Pomata and Siraisi, “Introduction,”* 7.</footnote>

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Michel Foucault, *Les mots et les choses. Une archéologie des sciences humaines* (Paris: Gallimard, 1994 [1966]), 69-70, who pronounces in his typical oracular style that “puisque connâtre, c’est discerner, l’histoire et la science vont se trouver séparées l’une de l’autre. D’un côté, il y aura l’érudition, la lecture des auteurs, le jeux de leurs opinions. . . . En face de cette histoire, et sans commune mesure avec elle, se dressent les jugements assurés que nous pouvons faire par les intuitions et leur enchaînement.”</footnote>
was at stake in the combined acts of perusing the “little books of men” and eyeing the
“big Book of Nature” was the definition of the naturalist as a scientific persona.

The second foundation of natural history at Plumier’s time regards what would
much later be known as natural classification or taxonomy. Images provide us, once
again, with an excellent case for highlighting that the kind of order with which naturalists
like Plumier were concerned was not that of the natural world itself but that of the
information scholars had on it. This was not classification, but the clear identification of
plants and animals and the inventory of the knowledge on them.

For these reasons, “Nature in Draft” places emphasis on material practices of paper
production and management. As Marie-Noëlle Bourguet and Pierre-Yves Lacour have
recently written, “far from being limited to the observation of nature, the naturalist’s task
was a very material practice, made out of quotidian gestures—collection, preparation,
inscription, arrangement—and natural history as a technology mobilizing both boxes and
tags, both journals and registers; in other words, both objects and inscriptions.”<fnref n="47" /> This
dissertation goes along the lines proposed by Bourguet and Lacour: it aims at relocating
the making and “reading” of images within a broader history of the material practices of
inscription and paper management that sustained the daily work of the naturalist at
around 1700 as a form of mobilizing and stockpiling the natural world on a global scale.

Inscriptions on the move

“Nature in draft” tackles the question of scientific images in the making, from the
field and the cabinet to the printing workshop, and of their multiple transformations
along the way. While focusing on visual productions, it adopts an approach that aims at
not isolating these from other forms of inscription made and mobilized in the making of
natural knowledge. In drawing from the resources offered in the last decades by studies
in visual culture, memory practices and information management, manuscript culture,
and the history of the book, it aspires to challenge and complicate—but not to blur
altogether—two deceptively self-evident boundaries: that between graphic and written
inscriptions, and that between manuscript and print.

Traveling scholars' work in crafting inscriptions—graphic or not—and mobilizing
them as a means for garnering knowledge of all that was afar has been a major focus in
recent studies on the global deployment of European sciences, all the more when these

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Bourguet and Lacour, “Les mondes naturalistes,” 265 (and on naturalists’ inscription practices, both scripturary and iconographic, 265-70).</footnote>
attempts happened to be closely intertwined with imperial ambitions. No one has probably articulated such a view more ingeniously, influentially, and provocatively than sociologist Bruno Latour in the 1980s. For Latour, inscriptions and the practice of inscribing allow scientists to stabilize claims onto paper so that they circulate without distortion through space and time; in doing so, they can account for modern sciences' purported long-range powers as the dominant form of knowledge. To illustrate his thesis, Latour uses the case of Jean-François de Galaup, count de Lapérouse (1741-ca. 1788), and his expedition to the South Seas on board of *L'Astrolabe*. Latour pays particular attention to Lapérouse's encounter with Chinese fishermen in Sakhalin in 1787: not knowing if Sakhalin was an island or a peninsula, Lapérouse inquired with the Chinese, who answered by drawing a map of the island on the sand. Seeing that the Europeans feared that the map could be erased by the mounting tide, one of the Chinese drew it again in one of the traveler's notebooks. While Lapérouse and his crew never made it back to Europe, the notebook did: hence Sakhalin and their geography came to the knowledge of Europeans. It is not, Latour says, that Lapérouse and his crew knew Sakhalin better than the Chinese fishermen—quite the contrary. The asymmetry between Lapérouse's and the Chinese fishermen's knowledge (i.e. the divide between modern science and other forms of knowledge) is grounded on the fact that Lapérouse's, in contrast to the fishermen's, operates in cycles of accumulation allowing European powers/sciences to deploy action at a distance. In Lapérouse's episode as in Plumier's case, Paris stood as a center of calculation, a cumulative hub in those long-distance networks of knowledge capitalization—or, to put it another way, of collection of inscriptions, be they Lapérouse's notebooks or Plumier's folders of drawings.<fnref n="48" />

At first sight, Plumier's drawings and notes could indeed be enlisted as the purest example of such a view. For most of Plumier's corpus deals with a far-flung nature and with territories over which the French—but not only they—had imperial ambitions. The friar's corpus came into being thanks to the munificence of an increasingly colonial European power. Moreover, Plumier did not linger long on those islands (roughly seven

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Bruno Latour, “Visualization and Cognition: Thinking with Eyes and Hands,” *Knowledge and Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present* 6 (1986), 1-40; *Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 215-47, and “Drawing Things Together,” in *Representation in Scientific Practice*, ed. Michael Lynch and Steve Woolgar (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990 [1988]), 19-68. For the practice of inscribing as the key for (European) modern sciences’ long-range powers, compare with Simon Schaffer, “‘On Seeing Me Write’: Inscription Devices in the South Seas,” *Representations* 97, no. 1 (2007), 90-122. On the notion of centers of calculation, compare with the recent issue edited by Lissa Roberts, and especially her introduction, “Accumulation and Management in Global Historical Perspective: An Introduction,” *History of Science* 52, no. 3 (2017), 227-46.</footnote>
non-consecutive years in total) and, much like Latour's Lapérouse, he seemed "not so much interested in this place as [he was] in bringing this place *back* . . . to Versailles."<fnref n="49" /> Like the crew of *L'Astrolabe*, inscriptions seem to have been "the *final goal* of [his] travel." Like them, Plumier's papers allowed Parisian fellow scholars and policy-makers "to be familiar with things, people and events, which are *distant*." That must have been the intention, after all, in sending him there. Just like Lapérouse's representations of Sakhalin, Plumier's drawings, notes, lists, and maps of the plants, animals, lands, and peoples of the West Indies appear to be "some of these stable, mobile and combinable [i.e., liable to be accumulated] elements that allow a center to dominate faraway lands."<fnref n="50" />

Upon close scrutiny, however, Plumier’s drawings and practices of inscription
become uncomfortably complex for a perspective such as Latour’s. To begin with, their
traveling across distance is not as clear a process as a simple movement from A to B. It is
difficult—if not plainly impossible—to asses which or how many, if any, of Plumier’s
drawings of the West Indian flora and fauna were made in front of the reality they
represent; or how many were made in the West Indies, although not in front of the
animal and plants they depict but rather, say, in the cell of one of the convents in which
the friar stayed during his journeys, while recollecting what he had seen earlier that day;
or on board a ship navigating through the Atlantic back to Europe; or in Paris, while
staying in the convent of the Minims at Place Royale, surrounded by books. Or simply in
all these places at the same time, sketching here, completing there.<fnref n="51" /> Moreover, we are
assuming perhaps too many things when we say that Plumier—or any state-sponsored
traveling scholar at that time, for that matter—was “commissioned” by the crown to
undertake a journey overseas in order to produce inscriptions on distant worlds. Chapter
2 will analyze how far more complex the equation between science, empire, and images
actually was. Plumier’s visual archive, one of the few in Europe portraying the nature of a
highly disputed imperial and epistemic space (the Caribbean basin was at the time a

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ As Daniela Bleichmar has rightly pointed out: she remarked that the case she studies in-depth, the expedition to New Granada in the 1770s led by José Celestino Mutis, fundamentally contrasts with previous enterprises of natural expedition to the New World (such as Plumier’s or Sloane’s) in that Mutis spent twenty years in New Granada before the expedition received oficial approval and then continued for almost another decade. The dynamics of Mutis’s expedition, especially regarding collaborative work with local populations, are therefore quite different from those in Plumier’s journeys through the West Indies— at least as far as we can know, for the evidence of Plumier’s presence on the islands is virtually nonexistent. See Daniela Bleichmar, *Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. 17-41.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Latour, *Science in Action*, 217, 220, 224.</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Not unlike travel records: on the “moment” of travel note-taking and the subsequent elaborations of field records, see Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “A Portable World: The Notebooks of European Travellers (Eighteenth to Nineteenth Centuries),” *Intellectual History Review* 20, no. 3 (2010), esp. 384-9 and 394-400.</footnote>
coveted territory for both European governments and scholars), was ignored by the French crown until long after its author's death.

Two more points need to be made on the question of distance. First, trust in the accuracy and validity of specific inscriptions was neither immediate nor obvious: as chapter 1 will show, there was quite a lot of debate among naturalists and scholars by and large on how and who was to make observations at a distance.<fnref n="52" /> Second, my interest here is not so much how Plumier's images made facts move from one point to another, but rather how the distance these inscriptions claimed to bridge affected the way in which they were (or tried to be) put to use and allowed their author to operate specific transactions in terms of social and intellectual credit and authority. In other words, my emphasis is not so much on how these images traveled as on how the fact that they traveled shaped the way in which they were then (and are now) perceived.

Along with the far-from-plain notion of distance, there is a second point of resistance of Plumier's corpus to a Latourian approach to scientific travel inscriptions: their materiality. The friar's drawings, as any inscription when looked at in the making, reveal themselves as distressingly unstable.

The “instability” of inscriptions has been a fruitful object of inquiry for the history of the book and written culture in the last quarter of a century. In a memorable article of the early 1990s, literary scholars Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass were among the first to raise this question through a witty examination of the often minute editorial modifications of Shakespeare’s early plays. With the expression “materiality of the text,” De Grazia and Stallybrass stressed that the physical appearance of a text and its variations, however diminutive these might be, offer a unique glimpse into the changing social practices that make and transform their meanings through readings and appropriations. Their end, as they put it beautifully, is “the practices recorded on [texts’] surfaces.”<fnref n="53" /> The lesson is an important one for historians willing to reflect on the nature of their own sources. It forces us to be aware of the fact that our approach to images (or to any historical document, for that matter) is crucially conditioned by the operations that transformed them over time and brought them to the material state in which they can be

<footnote n="52">⁵² These debates stood on Renaissance controversies over the value of visual representations as instruments of knowledge. For such sixteenth-century controversies in the case of the printed book, see Sachiko Kusukawa, *Picturing the Book of Nature: Image, Text, and Argument in Human Anatomy and Medical Botany* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="53">⁵³ Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, “The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” *Shakespeare Quarterly* 44, no. 3 (1993), 255-83.</footnote>
consulted today as historical sources. Plumier’s iconographic archive of the West Indian flora and fauna is a unique case study to explore this problem: in the form in which we can access it nowadays, this corpus is to a large extent an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century product—a story that is further evinced in chapter 6.

Images, too, are objects after all. Art history has not failed to pay attention to the implications of such an assumption. Philosopher Georges Didi-Huberman, for instance, articulated in the 1990s a criticism of a Panofskian art history (or a history of images, for that matter) exclusively based on a rational interpretation of visual representations—that is, in terms of discourse (the *lisible*) and mimesis (the *visible*).<fnref n="54" /> Closer to my own perspective, Jérôme Baschet, a historian of medieval iconography, coined the expression “image-object” as an attempt to put forward two points: first, that the materiality of visual representations is intimately intertwined with both the message their authors aspire to convey and the sundry meanings viewers derived from of them; second, that images, as artifacts, are both the result and the object of various sorts of practices—made, but also used in many and complex ways.<fnref n="55" /> As Baschet pointed out, their being representations cannot make us “forget their materiality and their being objects.”<fnref n="56" /> Baschet’s posture is partly based on Louis Marin and his foundational twofold definition of images as both *representations* (a discourse on an absent reality) and *presentation* (an object in itself).<fnref n="57" /> “Every sign is both a thing and a representation,” Marin famously wrote.⁵⁸

<footnote n="54">⁵⁴ Georges Didi-Huberman, *Devant l'image: Question posée aux fins d'une histoire de l'art* (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1994), esp. 9-17. Didi-Huberman's is a dense book, but has enlightening fragments like this: "Where is the 'specificity' of a Gothic stained glass window? Absolutely nowhere. It is in the firing of the glass, it is in the long route of traders in colored minerals, it is in the dimensions of the window piercing determined by the architect, in the tradition of forms but also in the *stylet* of the monk recopying his translation of Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, it is in a Sunday sermon on the divine light, it is in the tactile sensation of being touched by color, and of simply looking up toward the source of this contact. Visual objects, objects invested with a figurability value, develop all of their efficacy to establish multiple bridges between orders of reality that are nonetheless quite heterogeneous. . . . Their functioning is multidirectional, their efficacy polymorphous. . . . [Art historians need] to think the dynamic and *economy* of visual objects (qualities that exceed the visible, physical limits of said objects)." From the English translation: *Confronting Images* (Philadelphia, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 34. I thank Stéphane Van Damme for bringing this paragraph to my attention.</footnote>

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ Jérôme Baschet, *L'iconographie médiévale* (Paris: Gallimard, 2008), esp. 9-21. The third part of the book, moreover, puts forwards the notion of “serial iconography,” with which I deal in chapter 4 for the case of natural historical images. However, Baschet’s approach to graphic seriality differs substantially from mine: while he adopts a morphological perspective drawn from historical anthropology (one in which the historian brings together images that had the same theme, but were not necessarily related historically), I study graphic series as a historical object, a central aspect, I argue, of the work of historically-oriented fields of knowledge such as natural history or antiquarianism.</footnote>

<footnote n="56">⁵⁶ Baschet, *Iconographie médiévale*, 16.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">⁵⁷ See Louis Marin, *Des pouvoirs de l'image. Glosses* (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1993), esp. 9-22 (“L'être de l'image et son efficace”), as well as Roger Chartier’s informative commentary on this point in his “Pouvoirs</footnote>
This tension between the image as representation (or discourse) and the image as an object with social (and even epistemic) effects was echoed in the analysis of texts proposed by bibliographer D. F. McKenzie, especially in his *Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts* (1999).<fnref n="59" /> McKenzie took up the notion of “textual instability” to address the historicity of texts, and of books in particular, as artefacts. His aim was to reshape the methods and objects of material bibliography into what he termed a “sociology of texts.” This renewed field, McKenzie hoped, would address the historical “relation between form, function, and symbolic meaning.” Put another way, he placed the “historical study of the *making and use of books and other documents*” at the center of his program. The stakes in doing so were high indeed, for he was proposing a double shift that is of prime importance for my analysis of images in the making of natural knowledge. In the first place, he was including “all forms of texts” in his proposition: McKenzie had a rather catholic notion of “text” that encompassed “verbal, visual, oral, and numeric data” alike. Not all texts are verbal, nor are all verbal texts in the form of books. Without conflating all significant forms as if they were ontologically one and the same, McKenzie’s underlying statement was that the analysis of any “recorded form” should take into serious account their materiality.

In the second place, McKenzie’s emphasis on the materiality of “texts” was based on his famous assumption that the physical aspects of discourses deeply affect both the message their authors intend to convey through them and the multiple meanings readers and viewers construct when appropriating them. “Forms effect meaning.” The assertion reaches its most dramatic consequences when the materiality of a text varies. Hence his

<footnote>et limites de la représentation: sur l'oeuvre de Louis Marin," *Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales* 49, no. 2 (1994), 407-18. Chartier wittily connects this twofold notion to seventeenth-century definitions of "représentation" such as the one by Antoine de Furetière in his dictionary ("image qui nous remet en idée et en mémoire les objects absents," but also "comparaître en personne et exhiber les choses"). This tension between meanings and materiality echoes also the fertile studies which have sometimes been referred to as the American Ceremonialist School, of which Ernst H. Kantorowicz's *The King's Two Bodies* (1958) is perhaps the best-known example.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">⁵⁸ He elaborated these views further in Marin, *Opacité de la peinture. Essais sur la représentation au Quattrocento* (Paris: Usher, 1989), 73: “Tout signe est à la fois une chose et une représentation: considéré comme chose, le signe focalise sur lui-même la ‘vue de l’esprit’, il ne représente rien mais se présente lui-même. Comme représentation, il se dérobe à la considération et déplace la vue de l’esprit de lui-même à l’objet qu’il signifie. Le signe est alors comme la vitre transparente qui laisse voir autre chose qu’elle-même: lorsqu’elle s’opacifie, elle cesse de se dérober dans sa diaphanéité pour s’offrir à la vue et l’arrêter.”</footnote>

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ D. F. McKenzie, *Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts* (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 [1999]). See also McKenzie's *Making Meaning: "Printers of the Mind" and Other Essays*, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez, S.J. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), esp. "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices" (13-85) and "Typography and Meaning: The Case of William Cotgrave" (198-236). See also Roger Chartier, "Bibliographie et histoire culturelle," in *Au bord de la falaise. L'histoire entre certitudes et inquiétude* (Paris: Albin Michel, 2009), 305-20.</footnote>
insistence on “the processes of [texts’] transmission including their production and reception”: “not only the technical,” he adds, “but also the social process of their transmission.” By this, McKenzie meant the “study of the social, economic, and political motivations for publishing, the reasons why texts were written and read as they were, why they were rewritten and redesigned, or allowed to die.”<fnref n="60" />

McKenzie’s propositions for a “sociology of texts” had an enduring impact on the history of the book. French historian Roger Chartier has probably been the most creative champion of such an approach: in his studies on the relationship between inscription and forgetfulness, for instance, Chartier put into practice the view that “no text exists apart from the material object that makes it available to be read or heard.” But he went one step further by proposing “not to eliminate or resolve this irreducible tension [between the text as discourse and the text as object] in one way or another but rather to identify the way in which it was constructed at various historical moments.”<fnref n="61" /> Hence my focus on the operations by which Plumier’s corpus was made and reshaped, at different historical moments, into the forms in which it can be found today—and on which my historical account is based. Images are things that, to use Lorraine Daston’s words, “knit together matter and meaning.”<fnref n="62" />

## Scholarly practices and the materiality of images

When approaching Plumier’s drawings of the West Indian flora and fauna, “Nature in Draft” takes seriously the meaningful materiality of inscriptions. It further affirms that the comprehension of the processes by which they were produced is indissociable from those by which they were circulated and appropriated. To put it simply, what I propose here is to use the sophisticated methodological tools mainly developed in the history of the book (but which, I strongly believe, are not specific to nor exclusively applicable to written culture) to revisit two intertwined questions: that of “scientific images” and that of the circulation of (graphic) inscriptions in long-distance networks as a means for stockpiling information on faraway realities for purposes in which both epistemic and political (or imperial) considerations were at stake.

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ McKenzie, “The book as an expressive form,” in *Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts*, 9-30.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Roger Chartier, *Inscrire et effacer. Culture écrite et littérature (XIᵉ-XVIIIᵉ siècle)* (Paris: Gallimard/Le Seuil, 2005). I quote from the English translation *Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture from the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century*, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), ix-x.</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Lorraine Daston, “Introduction,” in *Things that Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science* (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 9-24.</footnote>
This thesis approaches Plumier's images from a double standpoint: that of their *meaningful materiality*—that is, as artifacts whose (often mutable) physical characteristics had social, cultural, and epistemic effects—and that of the *practices* by which they were produced, modified, circulated, and used. To put it another way, paying attention to the meaningful material aspects of Plumier's images means to place equal emphasis on the practices by which they were made, seen, copied, and interpreted. Such a methodological position has several consequences for the way I delimit my object of inquiry. One of them has already been sketched out: what I call Plumier's "corpus" is to a certain extent the result of my own operations as a historian, in my attempt to integrate into my analysis the transactions by which those papers have reached us. I do not limit myself to MS 1 to 37 in the Bibliothèque centrale of the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle (which would probably be the obvious choice) because this is a product of the material modifications of which Plumier's papers were the object during the second half of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. Perhaps the best example of this are Plumier's "reading notebooks," dealt with in chapter 3: manuscript volumes in which the friar copied, abridged, or modified images and texts from printed books. In the mid-eighteenth century, however, these volumes were judgmentally branded as "copies" by the scandalized librarians who reorganized the collection between the 1760s and 1810s, and were probably excluded from the corpus for this reason. For these "reading notebooks," or *enchiridia* (as Plumier once referred to them), did not conform, it can reasonably be argued, to the notion of originality (in the sense of being made by the author from his own observations) that began developing in Western Europe from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.

The second consequence of my methodological standpoint regarding the demarcation of my object of inquiry has to do with two pervasive boundaries whose pertinence I aim at relativizing. In approaching Plumier's corpus as a whole, "Nature in Draft" reveals that two taken-for-granted delimitations in the history of images can actually prove to be highly permeable: that between graphic and written cultures, on the one hand, and that between manuscript and printed media, on the other. The consequences with regard to the history of science are of prime importance.

In the first place, the case of Plumier's corpus convincingly shows that graphic and verbal elements were interwoven in manifold ways, and that the function and functioning of texts and images were equally varied. The work of Sachiko Kusukawa on sixteenth-century botanical and anatomical images has been consequential in stressing the links
between written and visual culture in the sciences, while calling into question any hasty
association of the graphic form with the act of scholarly observation. Hence her
emphasis on the “importance of understanding the uses and functions of images in
relation to text, and the larger project envisaged by” their authors, while calling
historians—and historians of science in particular—“to appreciate and acknowledge a
visual and pictural world . . . which was not necessarily defined by direct observation.”<fnref n="63" />
Such an approach gives us the opportunity to elaborate on the much-debated notion of
“epistemic image.” For Lorraine Daston, an “epistemic image” (a term largely attributed
to her) “is one made with the intent not only of depicting the object of scientific inquiry
but also of replacing it. A successful epistemic image becomes a working object of
science, a stand-in for the too plentiful and too various objects of nature, and one that
can be shared by a dispersed community of naturalists who do not have direct access to
the same flora and fauna.”<fnref n="64" /> But, when images like these are considered in relation to the
density of the practices by which they were made and used and to their mutable
materiality, a question arises: to what extent are these characteristics exclusive to visual
representations?

One of my aims in this thesis is to cast serious doubt on historical accounts that
depart from a sharp opposition between images and texts. Louis Marin devoted much of
his writing to tracing the multiple ways in which the written and the graphic “registers”
are interwoven in works of art. Yet, Marin concluded, they are mutually irreducible after
all: images cannot be approached with the methodologies of textual analysis.<fnref n="65" /> I agree
fully: my purpose here is not to “read” images as if they were verbal texts. But, by
approaching scientific images from the standpoint of the intellectual and manual
practices by which they were crafted and often diversely put to use, the boundary
between “text” and “image” appears not only to be problematic for the reasons already
stated, but on occasion even more flexible than the one between different sorts of images

<footnote n="63">⁶³ The quote is from Sachiko Kusukawa, “The Sources of Gessner’s Pictures for the *Historia animalium*,” *Annals of Science* 67, no. 3 (2010), 327. She put such views into practice in her “Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures,” *Journal of the History of Ideas* 58, no. 3 (1997), 403-27, and recently developed them further in *Picturing the Book of Nature*, esp. 229-48.</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ Lorraine Daston, “Epistemic Images,” in *Visions and Its Instruments: Art, Science, and Technology in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Alina Payne (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015), 13-35.</footnote>

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Louis Marin, “Lire un tableau. Une lettre de Poussin en 1639,” in *Pratiques de la lecture*, ed. Roger Chartier (Paris: Payot, 1993 [1985]), 129-57 (154: “Le plus haut sense travaille dans l’écart entre le visible, ce qui est montré, figuré, représenté, mis en scène, et le lisible, ce qui peut être dit, énoncé, déclaré; écart qui est à la foi le lieu d’une opposition et celui d’un échange entre l’un et l’autre registres”). There is an English translation: “On Reading Pictures: Poussin’s Letter on *Manna*,” in *Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook*, ed. E. S. Shaffer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 3-18.</footnote>
or various kinds of texts. In line with Kusukawa's argument, chapters 3 and 4 explore some of the intricate and varied ways in which texts and images worked together in Plumier's corpus. Chapter 3, for instance, looks at how Plumier used graphic depictions as a means for recording his field observations: his drawings appear not only to be interspersed with textual annotations, but also to be in a close dialog with the bookish tradition. What is more, his field records (graphic and textual) can be seen in parallel with the notes resulting from his reading of books, where Plumier copied, abridged, excerpted, and modified printed images and texts by hand. Another example of how textual and graphic elements were often employed for the very same purpose is presented in chapter 4: there, I study Plumier's manuscript corpus as a whole, and conclude that iconographic seriality was the result of the very same preoccupations and anxieties that resulted in written lists and catalogs.<fnref n="66" />

Incidentally, another division becomes far more fluid than it seemed at first: that separating the cabinet scholar from the scholarly traveler. Writing very recently about the Portuguese missionary in Asia, Gaspar da Cruz, Antonella Romano rightly pointed out that “throughout the early modern period, authors with a ‘direct’ knowledge elaborate their experiences anew with a close confrontation with the written sources, indigenous or not, visual materials, cartographical or not, [and] material traces, seen *in situ* or in cabinets.”<fnref n="67" /> Indeed, the tension between observational practices and erudite culture is a leitmotif of this dissertation; they can both be approached, I believe, from the standpoint of what Anke te Heesen has suitably called “paper technologies.”<fnref n="68" /> In sharp contrast to Michel Foucault's famous and resolute claims regarding late seventeenth-century natural history, the observation of nature was all about paperwork of one sort or another.<fnref n="69" />

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ For a compelling later example of a naturalist's material practices of reading, see Dorothée Rusque, “L'histoire naturelle dans les marges: écrire dans et à partir des livres. Le cas de Jean Hermann,” in *Écrire les sciences*, ed. Isabelle Laboulais and Martial Guédron (Brussels: Éditions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 2015), 81-96.</footnote>

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ Antonella Romano, *Impressions de Chine: L'Europe et l'englobement du monde (XVIe-XVIIe siècle)* (Paris: Fayard, 2016), 59.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ Anke te Heesen, “The Notebook: A Paper Technology,” in *Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy*, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005), 582-9. Though very brief and with a quite generalistic scope, te Heesen's article has posed a good number of powerful questions that recent historiography on the history of science and paperwork has been exploring in the last decade or so, some of which are explored in this dissertation: she notes, for instance, that “one is member of a paper-community” and that “noting means paying attention.”</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Foucault, *Les mots et les choses*, 143: “Les documents de cette histoire neuve ne sont pas d'autres mots, des textes ou des archives, mais des espaces claires où les choses se juxtaposent: des herbiers, des collections, des jardins.”</footnote>
Few have given as much due heed to note-taking and paper recording in the history of scientific observation as Marie-Noëlle Bourguet.<fnref n="70" /> In her work on Alexander von Humboldt’s travel notebooks—and particularly the one that resulted from Humboldt’s peregrinations through Italy, the *Tagebuch*—, Bourguet studies the quotidian practices of inscription produced not only during Humboldt’s travels, but also his visits to libraries and museums. Even more important that the contents of these records are, for Bourguet, the practices of inscription by which they are produced. When paying attention to these, field and cabinet do not appear as antithetical as they might have seemed at first sight.

In the second place, by tracing Plumier’s scholarly practices of inscription from the field to the cabinet, “Nature in Draft” shows that the circulation of visual representations—but also of written texts—between the manuscript and the printed media were manifold and complex in the early modern period, far from limited to the linear, unidirectional transmission postulated by approaches such as genetic criticism.<fnref n="71" /> Chapter 5 is centered on the printed images in Plumier’s books, and argues that these could be just as unstable as manuscript depictions. By now, a substantial number of studies have convincingly shown that print was no guarantor of textual fixity.<fnref n="72" /> But, as a matter of fact, neither was it of graphic stability: as the study of Plumier’s plates of ferns convincingly shows, woodcuts and copperplates were not necessarily more stable than text—despite the former being in a single wooden or metal piece while the latter was composed of movable types.

Although not without difficulties, Plumier successfully saw a good number of his depictions into print. Yet the transmission of images and texts across media was put to

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “Écriture du voyage et construction savante du monde. Le carnet d’Italie d’Alexander von Humboldt,” Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Preprint 266 (2004); “La fabrique du savoir. Essai sur les carnets de voyage d’Alexander von Humboldt,” in “Festchrift für Margot Falk,” special issue, *Humboldt im Netz* 7, no. 13 (2006), 17-33, and “A Portable World.”</footnote>

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Genetic criticism or “la génétique des textes” proposed an innovative approach to printed texts, and literary texts in particular, by paying attention to the preparatory manuscripts at their origin, thus shifting the focus from the finished product to the process of writing. See especially the work of Pierre-Marc de Biasi, *Génétique des textes* (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2011) and, for the history of science, Biasi’s “Sciences: des archives à la genèse. Pour une contribution de la génétique des textes à l’histoire des sciences,” *Genesis* 20 (2003), 19-50, as well as Michel Contat and Daniel Ferrer, eds., *Pourquoi la critique génétique? Méthodes, théories* (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1998) and Michel Espagne, *De l’archive au texte: Recherches d’histoire génétique* (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1998).</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² This has been the main argument of Adrian Johns, *The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998). Johns dismantled the idea of fixity most famously articulated by Elizabeth L. Eisenstein in her ground-breaking *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe*, 2 vols. in 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [1979]). The debate between Johns and Eisenstein ensued: see the 2002 AHR Forum: Eisenstein, “An Unacknowledged Revolution Revisited,” and Johns, “How to Acknowledge a Revolution,” in *American Historical Review* 107, no. 1 (2002), 87-105 and 106-28, respectively.</footnote>
use in the reverse direction, too. Throughout the entire early modern period—that is, long after the so-called revolutionary “impact of print”—copying and re-working printed materials by hand was a pervasive practice among scholars, much more so than historians used to think.<fnref n="73" /> This is, as stated above, the question I tackle in the last section of chapter 3 by looking at volumes of manuscript images copied from printed books. The reasons for such curious artifacts need to be sought in a culture that relied on and cherished manuscript transmission. The production and circulation of handwritten texts in social spaces as diverse as the literary underground and the humdrum political administration worked concurrently with the print trade for the entire handpress era.<fnref n="74" /> In the worlds of scholarship, moreover, copying by hand was done not only with practical reasons in mind (to own a copy of a book), but the act itself held a pedagogical, even devotional value. Many were those who actually advised not to delegate copying and excerpting from printed books to secretaries and professional amanuenses, but to do it rather by oneself for reasons both mnemonic and spiritual.<fnref n="75" /> Mid-eighteenth-century developments, however, such as the increasing importance accorded to the distinction between originals and copies in the worlds of art and the emerging figure of the author, have obscured these practices.<fnref n="76" />

The analysis of Plumier’s printed images, a luxury commodity after all, also allows us to reassess the manuscript corpus by pointing out the specific space occupied by natural history—and natural historical productions—in the social and cultural cartography of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France. Drawings, paintings, books, herbaria, and collections of exotic plants and animals—dead or alive—were objects of both

<footnote n="73">⁷³ The proof is that few works have addressed this question directly, with the exception of Michael D. Reeve, “Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” in *Manuscripts and Methods: Essays on Editing and Transmission* (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2001), 175-83, and more recently Ann Blair, “Reflections on Technological Continuities: Manuscripts Copied from Printed Books,” *Bulletin of the John Rylands Library* 91, no. 1 (2015), 7-33.</footnote>

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ McKenzie, “Speech—Manuscript—Print,” in *Making Meaning, 237-58*; Harold Love, *The Culture and Commerce of Texts: Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England* (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998 [1993], and Fernando Bouza, *Corre manuscrito: Una historia cultural del Siglo de Oro* (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2001). For Love, “scribal publication . . . [was] an accepted and important medium for the transmission of texts during the seventeenth century, quite equal in terms of status to transmission in printed form” [Love, “Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England,” *Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society* 9 (1987), 147, quoted in McKenzie, “Speech—Manuscript—Print,” 244].</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Blair, “Technological Continuities”; *Too Much to Know*, 108-10 and 175-6, and especially “Early Modern Attitudes toward the Delegation of Copying and Note-Taking,” in *Forgetting Machines: Knowledge Management Evolution in Early Modern Europe*, ed. Alberto Cevolini (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 265-85.</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Charlotte Guichard, “La main et le geste. Signature et autographie au XVIIIᵉ siècle,” in *De l’authenticité. Une histoire des valeurs d’art (XVT-XXᵉ siècle)*, ed. Charlotte Guichard (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2014), 64-77, and Roger Chartier, “Figures of the Author,” in *The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and the Eighteenth Centuries* (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994 [1992]), 25-59.</footnote>
aesthetic and epistemic appropriations and uses. Chapters 2 and 5 in particular deal with this issue. In Louis XIV's absolutist France, naturalists like Plumier—and scientific practitioners by and large—appear as more or less skilled courtiers or, at the very least, contrived navigators of the refined worlds of polite and genteel interest in the exotic in which the natural history of the Americas needs to be located.<fnref n="77" /> This was a Parisian world to a large extent, one in which natural knowledge often had to flow through the channels carved by the social and political dynamics of the city.

“Nature in Draft” aims at offering the first comprehensive account of a virtually untapped corpus of natural historical images by a rather obscure scholar. But, in doing so from the standpoint of practices of inscription and visual representations’ materiality, it also aspires to explore the modes of knowledge production at play in the making of natural history in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France. Wielding the quill and setting out to draw plants and animals over hundreds of pages, to craft lists and catalogs, to accompany the act of passive or active observation on paper, and to heap drawings and texts equated to specific forms of intellectual engagement and concrete ways of knowing the natural world. Here, I aim at studying the “arts of making” by which Plumier’s corpus was composed and brought to us, or, in other words, the working methods and intellectual technologies within which his images made sense.<fnref n="78" />

## Chapter outline

Each chapter of this dissertation foregrounds a different aspect of Plumier's iconographic corpus. The first two chapters explore the intellectual and political dimensions of Plumier's images, respectively. Chapter 1 explores the place of visual representation in the intellectual project of overseas natural history, and does so by drawing comparisons with another sort of *historia*: that made by antiquarians. It moves then to consider the essential tension in late seventeenth-century French natural history between observational practices and erudite culture. Chapter 2 interrogates the brokered royal patronage that sustained Plumier's naturalist enterprise and the role that images

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ On natural history in early modern France, see especially Salomon-Bayet, *L'institution de la science*, Alice Stroup, *A Company of Scientists: Botany, Patronage, and Community at the Seventeenth-Century Parisian Royal Academy of Sciences* (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990); E. C. Spary, *Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000); Van Damme, *Paris, capitale philosophique*, 173-90, and Terrall, *Catching Nature in the Act*.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ The notion of “arts de faire” comes from Michel de Certeau: see *The Practice of Everyday Life*, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984 [1980]), esp. xv-xxii, but also *The Writing of History*, 5-6, 20-1, 69-86. On the “arts de faire” in the history of science, see Stéphane Van Damme, “Un ancien régime des sciences et des savoirs,” in Van Damme, *De la Renaissance aux Lumières*, 26-30.</footnote>
played in securing it. While challenging any strong or coherent link between enterprises
of natural exploration overseas and state imperial projects, it shows that images played a
crucial part in creating the conditions of possibility for Plumier's travels.

The following two chapters move towards an in-depth analysis of Plumier’s iconographic archive as a tool for the storing and management of natural historical information. Chapter 3 deals with Plumier’s manuscript images and texts as observational inscriptions, and attempts to relocate traveling records (whether written or graphic) within the broader context of manuscript practices in the work of the naturalist. To do so, it turns, in the last section, to Plumier’s *enchiridia*: notebooks in which he copied and abridged from printed images and texts. Note-taking appears, then, as mediating two as deceptively opposed learned activity as observation and reading. Chapter 4 aims at embracing Plumier’s collection of images as a whole, and tackles material practices of information management such as the making of graphic series and written inventories. It argues that the sort of order with which naturalists were concerned at the time was not so much that of nature itself, but rather that of their own knowledge.

The final chapters of the dissertation deal with the transmission and reception of
Plumier's archive. Chapter 5 studies Plumier's printed plates: by tracing the naturalist's
struggles and negotiations to have his pictures printed, it argues that the local conditions
of print production affected the formal characteristics of his books to the most minute
details of his copperplates. Chapter 6 deals with the afterlives of Plumier's images: it
follows how they were edited, copied, plagiarized, or simply relocated after the death of
their author, and the ways in which, along with these transits, new meanings were given
to them.
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>
1. “Ce qui peut tomber sous les yeux”

Images and Learned Empiricism in the Work of
Natural History

Plumier’s bunch of drawn papers was not the only collection of images that brought to Europe far-off natures in draft. Plumier belonged to a generation of French naturalists for whom images and exotic natures were two central, closely intertwined components of their work. Some examples can help illustrate this point. The first is a well-known one: it involves the sedentary *physiciens* (i.e. botanists, chemists, and anatomists) at the newly founded, but still unchartered, Paris Royal Academy of Sciences during the 1670s and the 1680s. Images became particularly important in the series of researches into the anatomy of exotic animals shepherded by Claude Perrault (1616-1688), an architect and anatomist, brother of the better-known Charles, and one of the first members of the exclusive association. The early members of the Academy began to meet on an almost informal basis in 1666 upon the instigation of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the project of Perrault’s group was part of the learned assembly from the outset. During the first two decades of their existence, Perrault’s anatomists focused on dissecting, describing, and drawing exotic animals at their quarters in the Bibliothèque du roi in rue Vivienne. The animals, most of which were provided by the royal menageries in Versailles and Vincennes, included beasts as alluring as a shark, a lion, a dromedary, a couple of ostriches, a chameleon, a beaver, and an Asian elephant.<fnref n="1" />

Artists were a crucial part of the project: as an architect, Perrault himself was a reasonably skilled draftsman, and others like Philippe de la Hire (1640-1718) later joined the company. The beasts were sketched before and during the dissections, and some of these drawings found their way into print through the ambitious editorial project of the *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux* (Essays for a natural history of animals), whose first two massive volumes, issued by the Imprimerie royale in 1671 and 1676 respectively, each boasted about fifteen full-page intaglio engravings cut by some of the

<footnote n="1">¹ The most recent and comprehensive account of the Paris Academy of Sciences' project on the anatomy of animals is Anita Guerrini, *The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), esp. 92-164. On the royal menageries, see Matthew Senior, “The Ménagerie and the Labyrinth: Animals at Versailles, 1662-1792,” in *Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures*, ed. Erica Fudge (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 20-32.</footnote>
trendiest artisans of the time. Some of the original drawings and red-chalk preparatory sketches are extant (fig. 1.1): along with the plates, they provide a stunning example of collaboration between naturalists and artists.<fnref n="2" />

Despite the exoticism of the animals they usually inspected, the Academy's anatomists were scholars reluctant to abandon the comforts of Parisian life. There was one notable exception: the journey of La Hire with the anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney (1648-1730) along the French West coast to dissect and draw fishes. Colbert himself had entrusted them to do so. La Hire's and Duverney's work on fishes did not thrive as that of Perrault's circle, however: they presented parts of it to the Academy several times between 1680 and 1682, a few observations on the circulation of blood and on the respiratory and auditory system of fishes were read by Duverney in the society, and the drawings made by La Hire were given to Perrault with the hope that a fourth volume of the *Histoire des animaux* would ensue, but this never came to fruition. The case confirms nonetheless the close link that existed, in late seventeenth-century France, between the world of ministers and that of scholars, between natural historical undertakings and visual representation.<fnref n="3" />

Overseas, Plumier was also not the only naturalist who took pains in registering his observations in the form of visual depictions. Another major crown-funded journey of natural historical research—one in which images also played a central part—was undertaken between 1700 and 1702 by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708), one of the first pensioned members of the Academy of Sciences and *demonstrateur* of botany at the Jardin du roi. At the peak of his career and while his major publication was being printed at the Imprimerie royale (the *Institutiones rei herbariae*, in which he laid the foundations of his system of natural classification), Tournefort departed to explore the flora and, to a lesser degree, the fauna of several Eastern Mediterranean countries, from Greece, Crete, and the Aegean islands to the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Persia. Unlike

<footnote n="2">² [Claude Perrault, ed., *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1671), and *Suite des mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1676). Some of the extant drawings made by Perrault's group are kept at the AAS (e.g., Dossier Claude Perrault, Pochette des séances for 1667, and Cartons 1666-1793).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ 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: Imprimerie impériale, 1868), 403-4. Some of the drawings are conserved at BCMNHN MS 244 "Dissections de divers poissons faites sur les costes de France pendant les années 1679 et 1680." See 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>
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.1. (top left) Black chalk drawing of a lion's paw, from the project on the natural history of animals by Claude Perrault's circle of anatomists at the Paris Academy of Sciences. (Archives de l'Académie des Sciences, Paris.) (top right) One of the engravings in Tournefort's *Relation d'un voyage au Levant* (1717). (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.) (bottom) Drawing of a sea sponge sent by Augustin Lippi from his journey along the Nile. (Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
Plumier, however, Tournefort did not travel alone: he brought along “two trustworthy men who were in the mood to share with me the pains of a long journey”: one was the German and “excellent physician” Andreas von Gundelsheimer (ca. 1668-1715), for “there is nothing sadder than getting sick in an unfamiliar country where medicine is little known”; the other was the “skillful painter” Claude Aubriet (1665-1742), just appointed as peintre ordinaire at the Jardin du roi and joining the team because “it is also distressing to see beautiful things and be unable to draw them.” For Tournefort, the assistance of an artist was crucial to a journey of botanical exploration overseas, all the more so given that “without this instrument [drawing] it would be impossible to make any intelligible account” of such distant marvels. Thus the party returned to France with a sheer number of paper materials besides those, especially letters, sent along the journey to friends, family, and patrons. Tournefort and his men set foot in France with catalogs of the specimens observed, dried plants, some “botanical diaries” (journaulx de botanique), and several hundred drawings and paintings skillfully crafted by Aubriet and depicting mostly plants, but also landscapes, antiquities, architecture, animals, and the peoples they encountered en route. Some of these pictures were engraved and published in the two volumes of Tournefort’s posthumous Relation d’un voyage du Levant (Account of a voyage to the Levant, 1717).<fnref n="4" />

Less well-known enterprises of natural history overseas go along similar lines. Such is the case of the ill-fated Augustin (or Agostino) Lippi (1678-1705). A Parisian-born physician of Italian origins, Lippi believed it to be his life's chance when he was proposed in 1704 to join the diplomatic mission of Lenoir du Roule, vice-consul in Tripoli, to the Negus of Abyssinia. Things eventually turned out badly, for the entire expedition was massacred mercilessly before even reaching their aim; still, some letters, boxes of specimens, and drawings by Lippi reached Paris beforehand. Only sixteen of these pictures survive: they present the specimens (mostly seaweeds and corals) elegantly

<footnote n="4">⁴ Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, *Relation d'un voyage du Levant fait par ordre du roy* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1717), vol. 1, 2: "J'avais besoin de deux hommes de confiance, qui fussent d'humeur à partager avec moi les peines inséparables des grands voyages. Il n'y a rien de si triste que de tomber malade dans des pays où l'on ne connoit personne, & où l'on ignore la medecine. Il est fort chagrinant aussi de voir de belles choses sans les pouvoir faire dessiner, & sans ce recours l'on ne sçauroit rendre une relation bien intelligible." See also Pierre Guiral, "Tournefort et son voyage au Levant," in G. Becker et al., *Tournefort* (Paris: Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, 1957), 77-96. For some of Aubriet's extant drawings and paintings made during the journey to the Levant, see BCMNHN MS 78 "Voyages de Tournefort. Dessins de plantes et d'animaux par Aubriet"; MS 185 "Dessins d'Aubriet pour le voyage de Tournefort dans le Levant"; MS 675 "Dessins de plantes du Levant et d'Espagne, observées par Tournefort et dessinées par Aubriet," and MS 998 "Journal de botanique du Levant, par Tournefort," fol. 461 ("Catalogue des plantes que M. Aubriet a dessinées dans son voyage du Levant, commencé en 1700").</footnote>
colored and carefully labeled, one per page within an ink frame, thus highlighting their factuality, as if they were items of a collection.<fnref n="5" />

The case of our Minim friar is certainly exceptional in the size of the paper materials collected (whether or not they were entirely made in the West Indies) and in that, unlike Perrault's circle and Tournefort, he presumably worked alone or, at most, with a young black helper—perhaps a slave—whose traces have almost completely disappeared from the record.<fnref n="6" /> But as in the cases mentioned above, visual representations, along with written materials, were the cornerstone of the making, transmission, and reception of Plumier's work as a naturalist on the West Indian flora and fauna, from his fieldwork (in which graphic and textual inscriptions mediated the act of observation, as we shall see in chapter 3) to his printed books (a question further evinced in chapter 5). The Minim friar belongs to a generation of scholars (natural historians, yes, but not only) for whom visual representations served their epistemic purposes well—or so went usually their justification for working with images or attempting to include costly copperplates (and less often woodcuts) in their publications. The preface of Plumier's *Description des plantes de l'Amérique* (1693), a folio volume with more than one hundred full-page engravings, placed image-making at the center of his natural historical practice and as the sine qua non of the comprehension of a far-off flora: “I have been around two years [in the West Indies] through the two journeys I made &, during that time, I drew & described towards six hundred different plants, of which I offer a part in this volume; & since I know by my own experience that it is very difficult to know a plant well through a small figure, I wanted to draw them in their natural size; if not entirely, at least a part of them.”<fnref n="7" />

My aim in the following pages is to explore some of the themes evoked by the examples mentioned above, which are both distinctive of the culture of natural history around 1700 and crucial to understanding Plumier's engagement with the graphic medium. The chapter proceeds in three parts. First, it considers the new place that travel was given in the work of the naturalist at the turn of the century. A specific sort of legitimacy underpins the images of West Indian nature by the Minim friar: that of the

<footnote n="5">⁵ BCMNHN MS 1299 (2) “Description des plantes observées en Aegypte par Mr Lippi depuis le 22ᵉ du mois d’Avril jusqu’au 18ᵉ de juillet 1704 avant son départ du Caire pour l’Ethiopie. Plus la description de celles qu’il a observées dans la haute Aegypte depuis le 18ᵉ juillet jusqu’au 5ᵉ septembre de la même année.”</footnote>

<footnote n="6">⁶ On the young Black helper, see below, 153n1.</footnote>

<footnote n="7">⁷ Charles Plumier, *Description des plantes de l’Amérique, avec leurs figures* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1693), sig. [a3v]: “J’y ay resté environ deux ans, en deux voyages que j’y ay faits, & pendant ce tems-là, j’y ay dessiné, & décrit près de six cens plantes différentes, dont je donne une partie dans ce volumen; & comme je sçavois par ma propre experience, qu’il est tres-difficile de bien connoistre une plante par des figures en petit, j’ay voulu les dessiner dans leur grandeur naturelle; si non en tout, au moins en partie.”</footnote>
traveling scholar and of the topos, pivotal at that time, of firsthand observation by a
trained eye. The role of visual representations in this sort of scholarly undertakings
overseas was, I argue, the result of a newly redefined relationship of the (natural)
historian to his (exceptionally her) sources at that time. The hypothetical utility of images
for the study of flora and fauna was largely left unsaid by the practitioners of what was
still a discipline-to-be—and most particularly by Plumier himself. An instructive
comparison is provided by another sort of historical inquiry, namely antiquarianism,
which came to rest on very similar epistemic (but also social) grounds.<fnref n="8" /> Not only did
Plumier’s lifetime coincide with the early development of archeological research, but his
work with images did not differ wildly from that of contemporary antiquarians like Dom
Bernard de Montfaucon. Finally, I challenge the assumption that travel and firsthand
observation were in any way opposed to the commerce of texts and written culture by
and large. To do so, I consider the erudite foundations of Plumier’s images: the bookish
references in relation to which his observations and depictions were made, as well as the
nature of this relationship and the way in which both “worlds”—that of books and of
what was seen—interacted in the graphic space and beyond.

Fatiguing scholarship

At the turn of the eighteenth century, French traveling naturalists were fatigued
scholars. Unlike most men of letters of the time, the students of the natural world came
to believe that the sources of their knowledge should be sought in recondite, distant
places of the globe.<fnref n="9" /> This was obviously not new, but the persistent emphasis that a good
number of botanists were placing on the necessity of distant travel probably was. In late
seventeenth-century France, many were the botanists who presented themselves as

<footnote n="8">⁸ As Charlotte Guichard pointed out in relation to the status of images in the making of knowledge around 1700, the comparison can be extended not only to antiquarianism, but also to art history (and the theory of portraiture in particular), for they both (along with natural history) were then fields based on description and observation: Charlotte Guichard, “‘D’après nature’ ou ‘chose vue’? Autorité et vérité de l’image scientifique au XVIIIᵉ siècle,” in *À perte de vue: les nouveaux paradigmes du visuel*, ed. Daniel Debuisson and Sophie Raux (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2015), 35-51. I will nevertheless limit my comparison to natural history and antiquarianism, for my principal concern here is not so much the status of images in general terms as the role that these could play for practitioners in the making of their respective fields of knowledge. Moreover, both antiquarianism and natural history were “historically” oriented sciences, based not only on description, but also on the accumulation of data. They are also comparable from an epistemic point of view at this precise period of time, for they came to develop a “documentary paradigm.”</footnote>

<footnote n="9">⁹ Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “La collecte du monde: voyages et histoire naturelle (fin XVIIᵉ-début XIXᵉ siècle),” in *Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire*, ed. Claude Blanckaert (Paris: Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 1997), 163-96. See also Yves Laissus, “Les voyageurs naturalistes du Jardin du Roi et du Muséum d’histoire naturelle: un essai de portrait-robot,” *Revue d’histoire des sciences* 34, no. 3-4 (1981), 259-317, and Bourguet, “L’explorateur,” in *L’homme des Lumières*, ed. Michel Vovelle (Paris: Le Seuil, 1996), 285-345.</footnote>
pioneers of what was in their view a crucial, much-needed turn in the way in which the
natural world was known, one that entailed abandoning the comfort of their cities'
countryside for the perils of the high seas. The examples in the correspondence of
traveling naturalists with their patrons are numerous. During his herborizations along the
Nile during 1705, the abovementioned Augustin Lippi often narrated the dangers to
which he and his party were exposed on sea and land (such as the "immense fatigues of
the desert") in his correspondence with the intendant of the Jardin du roi, Guy-Crescent
Fagon (1638-1718).<fnref n="10" /> We have seen, however, that Lippi did not exaggerate his account
in the least, for his adventure was dramatically interrupted when he and his entire party
was slaughtered in the Sudanese city of Sennar.

Plumier’s destiny was not this tragic, but he repeatedly insisted on the perils and
discomforts of distant voyages. The friar once described the health problems he endured
as a result of the “fatigue of the journey” during his first trip to Martinique. He related
on another occasion a dangerous adventure, from which he finally escaped, to his fellow
Minim friars and to his friend Tournefort, who wished that Plumier “could continue to
make such beautiful discoveries without having to risk his life so often.”<fnref n="11" /> This event in
particular took place at the end of 1695, in the middle of the Nine Years’ War
confronting, both in Europe and the colonies, the French with the Anglo-Dutch and
Spanish forces. Plumier’s misadventure became known in certain Parisian circles because
it mobilized considerable resources from the crown. In a report on the evolution of the
war, the governor of Martinique informed the “governor-general of the isles of America”
that the fishing ship in which Plumier was traveling had been captured while returning
from the Grenadines, and that the friar was made prisoner and transferred to Barbados.<fnref n="12" />
In a letter dated some days before, the governor of Saint-Domingue informed the
minister of the navy that “Father Plumier, Minim, arborist of the King” was safe and
sound: “he went from the Martinique to the Grenade on a boat that ran aground until
here. It was a miracle that neither the crew nor Plumier died, since they were more than

<footnote n="10">¹⁰ Augustin Lippi to Guy-Crescent Fagon, Korti, March 8, 1705, in BCMNHN MS 1299, vii.</footnote>

<footnote n="11">¹¹ Ars. MS 2875 “Descriptions des plantes de l’Amérique” (this was one of Plumier’s unpublished drafts for the *Description*), fol. 108v: “une chaleur de poitrine . . . m’estant survenue par la fatigue des chemins dans mon premier voyage à la Martinique”; BNF Est. Réserve Ye-27 Fol, fol. 3: “Lettre d’un religieux minime de Paris, en datte du 22 avril 1695, par laquelle il le félicite sur les dangers dont le P. Plumier s’est tiré pendant sa traversée.”</footnote>

<footnote n="12">¹² Nicolas de Gabaret to Charles de Courbon, Count of Blénac, n.p., November 19, 1695, in ANOM C8A 9 F°, fol. 151v: “Depuis trois ans deux vaisseaux anglois de 50: pièces ont paru deux fois devant cette Rade, et ny ont pris qu’une petite Barque venant de la Pesche des Grenadins, dans laquelle il [y avait] le père Plumier Minisme qu’ils ont transferez à la bar[bade] au rapport de quelques prisonniers.”</footnote>
fifteen days drinking but two glasses of water per day, and eight entire days without drinking a drop. They were in agony when a ship from this coast found them. He was researching on plants and trees, and I take as much care of him as I can."<fnref n="13" /> About a year later, Secretary of State of the Navy Pontchartrain himself wrote to the governor of the American islands on the tribulations of the botanist, for it came to his notice that an "enemy privateer has taken Father Plumier, Minim friar who has been entrusted by the King to travel through the French islands of America in order to finish to take knowledge of the simples that grow there, and that was brought to Tobago. I briefed His Majesty, and he orders me to inform you that his intention is that you free him as soon as possible, by exchanging one of the enemy prisoners that are in Martinique for him, if he was taken by the English; by claiming him in the terms of the cartel, if it was the Dutch; and that you ensure that he will soon be able to continue his destination."<fnref n="14" /> This time it was a false alarm: soon afterwards Plumier thanked the minister for his intercession to have him rescued from the enemies, "believing that I have been taken": "I hope, Monseigneur, that you will have the same kindness in the case of a real accident, to which I am so often exposed for the continuation of my small work."<fnref n="15" />

The hazardousness of the journey to, and life in, the Caribbean islands during the 1680s was well-known among French elites: Michel Bégon, perhaps Plumier's most consequential patron, did not receive with much enthusiasm his appointment as intendant of the West Indies due to the "fatigues of crossing 20,000 *lieues*, [and] the air of a clime that was called at the time the cemetery of Frenchmen."<fnref n="16" />

<footnote n="13">¹³ Jean-Baptiste du Casse to Louis Phélypeaux, comte de Pontchartrain, Léogâne, November 8, 1695, in ANOM C⁹A 3, fol. 176v, quoted in Odile Krakovitch, "La vie intellectuelle dans les trois couvents minimes de la place Royale, de Nigeon et de Vincennes," *Bulletin de la Société d'histoire de Paris et d'Ile-de-France* 109 (1982), 115: "Le père Plumier, minime, arboliste [si] du Roy, estant allé de la Martinique à la Grenade dans une barque qui s'est effloquée jusques icy, il y a du miracle comme cet équipage ne soit pas mort, ny luy non plus, ayant esté plus de quinze jours à ne boire que demy verre d'eau par jour, et huit jours entiers sans boire une goute. Ils estoient à l'agonie, lorsqu'un vaisseau de cette coste les rencontra; il travaille à la recherche des plantes et des arbres curieux; et j'en prens tout le soin possible."</footnote>

<footnote n="14">¹⁴ Pontchartrain to Blénac, Versailles, March 21, 1696, in ANOM B¹⁸, fol. 270v, quoted in Krakovitch, "La vie intellectuelle," 116: "J'ai esté informé que le père Plumier, religieux minime auquel le Roy a donné ordre de repasser aux isles françaises de l'Amérique pour achever d'y prendre des connoissances des simples qui y croissant, a esté pris par un corsaire ennemi et mené à Tabago. J'en ay rendu compte à Sa Majesté, et elle m'a ordonné de vous dire que son intention est que vous l'en retiriez le plus tost possible, en l'eschangeant avec quelqu'un des prisoniers ennemis qui se trouvent à présent à la Martinique, s'il a esté pris par un Anglois; en le réclamant suivant le cartel, si c'est un Hollandais; et que vous fassiez en sorte qu'il puisse bientost suivre sa destination."</footnote>

<footnote n="15">¹⁵ Plumier to Pontchartrain, Martinique, July 20, 1696, in ANOM C⁸B 2 N°, fol. 32: "J'espere Monseigneur que vous aurez toujours la meme bonté en cas qu'il m'arrivast quelque accident ou je suis assez souvent exposé pour la continuation de mon petit ouvrage."</footnote>

<footnote n="16">¹⁶ Andrée Freiche, "Michel Bégon, Intendant de Louis XIV à Rochefort ville nouvelle du XVIIᵉ siècle" (PhD diss., École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 2004), 29-30.</footnote>
For naturalists like Plumier, however, the dangers of the journey seemed to be useful sources of legitimacy in the making of natural knowledge. In his few extant letters, the Minim friar often delighted in narrating the distressing episodes of his trips, as when an obscure physician of La Rochelle inquired to him about the supposed cold blood of amphibians:

> I can assure you that [the sea turtle's blood] is as cold as running water. I went about two months fishing this kind of animal across the Grenadines with some buccaneers from Martinique. The fishing was quite favorable, we were returning with the boat full of salted meat, as well as twelve big [turtles] alive. [But] the weather was so adverse . . . that after several days drifting in all directions with no possibility of landing . . . we used all our Water up . . . and we decided to drink the blood of the only turtle that was still left alive out of the twelve we had. . . . We were sixteen [people] and we shared it, as it is commonly said, like good brothers. I found this blood as cold as running water from the river (*experto crede Roberto*).<fnref n="17" />

Plumier also elaborated on this rhetoric of a laboriously-gained experience and the strenuousness of botanical travel in the preface of an unpublished work, the “Solum, salum, coelum Americanum” (American land, sea, and sky). The manuscript consisted of nearly one hundred pages of text, including the preface and descriptions and two hundred leaves of images, from simple pencil sketches to ink-and-watercolor drawings. The subtitle announced the heterogeneous contents of the work: “descriptions and images [made] from the living plants, fishes, and birds of the islands of the West Indies and Santo Domingo.” In the preface, addressed to “botanists and curious people” (*Botanicis Et Curiosis*) and filled with extracts borrowed from Horace, Seneca, and Virgil, the friar went into flowery self-congratulatory praise of his enterprise, undertaken for the sake of natural knowledge:

<footnote n="17">¹⁷ Plumier to Isaac Baulot, copied in a letter from Plumier to Bégon, March 6, 1703, in MMC MS 867, fol. 148r-150v: “Quant à la froideur du sang des tortuës, je puis vous assurer qu’il est aussi froid que de l’eau commune. Je fus environ deux mois à la pesche de ces animaux dans les Grenadins avec quelques flibustiers de la Martinique. La Pesche fut assez heureuse, nous nous en retournions la barque bien chargée de la viande salée et outre ce de douze grandes en vie. Le temps nous fut si contraire . . . qu’après avoir couru plusieurs jours par touts les rhombs des vents sans jamais pouvoir prendre terre, ny à la Grenade, ni à Tabago, ni meme en terre ferme ou le mauvais temps nous avoit mené, nostre Eau nous manqua entierement, et quantité d’une chopine d’Eau chacun, nous nous avisâmes de boir le sang d’une tortuë qui nous restoit encore en vie des douze. . . . Nous etions seize et nous nous partageames comme l’on dit en bons frères. Je trouvay ce sang aussi froid que l’eau commune des rivières (*experto crede Roberto*).” On this certain Isaac Baulot (1658-1712), I have only found a short manuscript biographical note in MMC MS 335, fol. 77r. The Latin motto “*experto crede Roberto*” means “something I can speak out of experience,” as Robert Burton explained in *The Anatomy of Melancholy*, vol. 1 (New York: Sheldon & Co., 1862), 34.</footnote>
It is fair to say that not few of the sagacious researchers of the natural things have endured similar efforts and invested as much as I did in their work, but among those who entered the world of study, I did not fear (despite being weak) to expose myself to the wild open seas, to cross mountains, to journey through American valleys and jungles, so as to thoroughly examine the marvelous forms of both animals and plants that inhabit them and, since they are worth being observed, to show them to everybody's eyes [*spectandasque oculis omnium exhiberem*].<fnref n="18" />

In the same preface, Plumier justified the need for long-distance travel in botany as a way of confronting novelty: “It seems to me that, as Lucius Anneus Seneca would say if he could give his opinion, those who preceded us have not exhausted what can be said, but have only opened the way. Knowledge grows day after day [*crescit enim in dies materia*], and what has already been discovered does not prevent further discoveries.”<fnref n="19" />

Plumier was not the only naturalist to portray himself as a resigned and adventurous traveler: Tournefort did so, too, and no doubt more successfully when it came to self-fashioning himself before the Parisian elite. Although in a comfortable position at both the Jardin du roi and the Paris Academy of Sciences, Tournefort refused to present himself as an armchair scholar. He certainly had an early thirst for adventure. At twenty-two years old, he undertook his first herborizations through the mountains of the Dauphiné and Savoy and some time later, while a medical student at the university of Montpellier, across the area around that city. In 1681, he traveled through the mountains of Catalonia and the Pyrenees. After being appointed *demonstrateur* at the Jardin du roi in 1683, Tournefort went back to the Iberian Peninsula to herborize across Spain and Portugal and a few years later visited both the main university cities and the wildernesses

<footnote n="18">¹⁸ Plumier, “Solum, salum, coelum Americanum, seu plantarum, piscium, volucrumque insulis Antillanis et Sandominicana naturalium icones et descriptiones,” BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 1-2: “Eosdem licet exanclauerint labores, iisdemque insudauerint operibus no[n] pauci rerum naturalium perscrutatores sagacissimi, eorum tamen accesus studiis, me fragilem truci committere pelago, montes adire, ualles, siluasque americanas peragrare non horrui.. ut in iis enascentium tum plantarum tum animalium mirabiles formas perlustrarem, spectandasque oculis omnium exhiberem..” The reference to his fragility against the wild open sea is borrowed from Horace, Ode 1.3.10-12: “qui fragilem truci / conmisit pelago ratem / primus.”</footnote>

<footnote n="19">¹⁹ Plumier, “Solum, salum, coelum Americanum,” BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 2: “Quid tum, ipsius Lucii Annai Seneca sententiam effari liceat, qui praecesserunt non mihi praeripuisse videtur quae dici poterant, sed apervisse.. Crescit enim in dies materia, et inventuris inventa non obstant.” This impinges upon the contemporary developments of the so-called Quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns in France: on the quarrel, see two classics: Joan de Jean, *Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1997) and Marc Fumaroli, “Les abeilles et les araignées,” in *La Querelle des Anciens et des Moderns (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles)*, ed. Anne-Marie Lecoq (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 7-218, and compare both with Larry F. Norman, *The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. 1-8, and Paddy Bullard and Alexis Tadié, eds., *Ancients and Moderns in Europe: Comparative Perspectives* (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2016).</footnote>
of the Low Countries and England.<fnref n="20" /> In 1700, when he was already a very influential member of the Parisian intellectual milieu, Tournefort undertook his well-known journey to the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean, from which he narrated in a lively manner to ministers and socialites the many dangers he and his team survived when crossing seas filled with “bandits” and “crooks.”<fnref n="21" />

A specific definition of natural history was at stake in Tournefort’s self-fashioning as an intrepid botanist: the sort of knowledge he aimed at producing was to be sought in the field, however recondite this might be. When explaining his method for the classification of the vegetable world (which he boasted was the simplest a curious mind could find among authors) the professor insisted that, if there was any difficulty in the practice of botany, this was not—against the common belief—the diversity and ordering of species but their observation at first hand:

> If there is any fatigue in herborizing, it is because very often we need to seek the plants in the highest mountains, or in dreadful precipices; whereas we can learn the other sciences at school, & in the cabinet: but we are quite rewarded for this exertion with the pleasure we get from seeing a part of the most beautiful things that there are in nature.<fnref n="22" />

The image of Tournefort as an “outdoor” botanist was famously consecrated by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle (1657-1757), the Paris Academy of Sciences’ perpetual secretary (and consequently prolific eulogy-writer): in his “Éloge de M. Tournefort,” Fontenelle related how the naturalist nearly died of starvation and cold in the Pyrenees in 1680; how, the following year, he remained buried for two hours when the tumbledown cabin in which he was sheltering close to Perpignan collapsed in the middle of the night; and how he was robbed so many times by the militias of Miquelets in the Catalan mountains that he eventually included 15 *livres* and 14 *sols* “to the highwayman” among

<footnote n="20">²⁰ 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), 143-54.</footnote>

<footnote n="21">²¹ His letters with Pontchartrain were published posthumously as Tournefort, *Voyage au Levant*. His reference to the “bandits” and “crooks” that filled the seas of the Greek archipelago is in Tournefort to Fagon, Mykonos, December 26, 1700, in BCMNHN MS 998, fol. 428.</footnote>

<footnote n="22">²² Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, *Éléments de botanique ou méthode pour connoître les plantes*, 2 vols. (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1694), vol. 1, 4: “S’il y a de la fatigue à herboriser, c’est parce qu’il faut aller bien souvent chercher des plantes dans les plus hautes montagnes, ou dans des précipices affreux; au lieu que l’on peut apprendre les autres sciences dans l’école, & dans le cabinet: mais on est assez recompensé de cette peine par le plaisir qu’on a de voir une partie de ce qu’il y a de plus beau dans la nature.”</footnote>
the entries of the accounts book of his journey in 1687 to Spain.<fnref n="23" /> For Fontenelle (a comfortably settled *philosophe* himself), this inclination for travel was a rare virtue among scholars: “Philosophers do hardly roam the world, & those who do are not ordinarily Philosophers, & thus a journey by a Philosopher is extremely precious.”<fnref n="24" /> This was particularly true of botany, Fontenelle said:

> Botany is not a sedentary & lazy science that can be acquired in the calm & shadows of a Cabinet, like Geometry or History, or one such as Chemistry, Anatomy, & Astronomy, which demand operations of little movement. [The botanist] is required to run through Mountains & Forests, to climb steep crags, to expose himself on the edge of cliffs. *The only Books that can instruct him in depth on this subject have been sprinkled over the surface of the whole Earth, & one has to accept the fatigue & danger of seeking & gathering them.*<fnref n="25" />

To be a naturalist was to seek and gather the “books sprinkled over the surface of the whole Earth.” The metaphor was a powerful one, an example of the longstanding ideal according to which the origins of modern science are to be found in a turn of attention from the “little books of men” to the “big Book of Nature.”<fnref n="26" /> Fontenelle continued with the analogy: “those dreadful & almost inaccessible Boulders, surrounding him [Tournefort] everywhere, had turned for him into a magnificent Library, where he

<footnote n="23">²³ Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” 145-6. On Fontenelle, see Simone Mazauric, *Fontenelle et l'invention de l'histoire des sciences à l'aque des Lumières* (Paris: Fayard, 2007), esp. 85-102 for the “éloges,” and the witty review of this book by J. B. Shank on *H-France Review* 9, no. 72 (2009), 288-96.</footnote>

<footnote n="24">²⁴ Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” 151-2: “Les Philosophes ne courent guere le monde, & ceux qui le courent ne sont ordinairement guere Philosophes, & par-là un voyage d’un Philosophpe est extrêmement précieux.”</footnote>

<footnote n="25">²⁵ Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” 144: “La Botanique n’est pas une science sedentaire & pareseuse, qui se puisse acquerir dans le repos & dans l’ombre d’un Cabinet, comme le Geometrie, & l’Histoire, ou qui tout au plus, comme la Chimie, l’Anatomie, & l’Astronomie, ne demande que des operations d’assez peu de mouvement. Elle veut que l’on coure les Montagnes & les Forêts, que l’on gravisse contre des Rochers escarpez, que l’on s’expose aux bords des Précipices. Les seuls Livres qui peuvent nous instruire à fond dans cette matiere, ont été jettez au hazard sur toute la surface de la Terre, & il faut se résoudre à la fatigue & au peril de les chercher & de les ramasser.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="26">²⁶ The history of the book has long dismantled the ideal turn, constructed by early modern savants themselves, from the little books of men to the big book of nature. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, for instance, made of this critique one of the foundations of her classic *The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe*, 2 vols. in 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005 [1979]), 455, in which she rightly announced that “the long-lived metaphorical image of by-passing other books in order to read in the book of nature, ‘that universal and publick manuscript that lies expans’d unto the Eyes of all,’ is a source of deception which needs further analysis.” Eisenstein finds this particularly clear in the realm of early modern anatomy: in Leonardo da Vinci, for example, an “eagle-eyed observation (even when combined with masterful drawing and dissection) was not in itself sufficient to set the study of anatomy on a new course. Familiarity with books as well as bodies was required” (269).</footnote>
had the pleasure of finding all that his curiosity was demanding.”<fnref n="27" /> Tournefort effectively associated his work and own persona with an idea of botany built upon new foundations: a review of his *Institutiones rei herbariae* (1700) fostered this view of botany as a science of unmediated observation as if it were an innovation. In the fifteenth century, naturalists “did not look for plants but in the Books of the Greek & the Latin,” wrote the anonymous reviewer (perhaps Fontenelle again), but “eventually reason came with the Sciences. Nature began to be studied as much as Books, and we dared to seek Plants in the countryside.”<fnref n="28" />

To understand this revived rhetoric of firsthand observation in the generation of French naturalists to which Plumier belonged, we need to turn our attention to the way in which the unstable field of natural history was being defined among them at the time.

## Histories

This insistence that the naturalist ought to endure the fatigues of long journeys in exotic lands for the sake of the natural historical enterprise needs to be placed in the larger context of its practitioners' contemporary ideals and attitudes towards the sort of knowledge they aimed at producing. Consider once again the Academy's project for the natural history of animals. The unsigned preface to the 1671 volume of the *Histoire des animaux*, written in fact by Claude Perrault, provides an explicit articulation of the principles they sought to apply to their intellectual project. What they aspired to create in stabbing dead exotic animals and drawing their entrails had a name: history. The author distinguished between two types of historical writing: in the first, he said, the historian gathers what has been written at different times and by different authors on the topic he treats; in the second, in contrast, the historian “confines himself in the narration of particular facts, on which he who writes has a positive knowledge [une connaissance certaine].” We may call the first typology a general history, made out of testimonies, and the second, a history of particulars. To this second typology, Perrault continued, Romans referred with the term “commentaries,” and he and his circle of academicians-anatomists with

<footnote n="27">²⁷ Fontenelle, “Éloge de M. de Tournefort,” 145: “ces Rochers affreux & presque inaccessibles, qui l’environnoient de toutes parts, s’étoient changez pour lui en une magnifique Bibliothèque, où il avoit le plaisir de trouver tout ce que sa curiosité demandoit.”</footnote>

<footnote n="28">²⁸ *Histoire de l'Académie royale des sciences, année 1700. Avec les Memoires de Mathematiques & de Physique, pour la même année. Tirés des Registres de cette Academie* (Paris: chez Jean Boudot, 1703), 71: “alors qu’on ne songea qu’à entendre les Anciens pour en tirer les lumieres, qui avoient été si long-tems ensevelies, les Botanistes ne chercherent les Plantes que dans les Livres des Grecs & des Latins. . . . 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.”</footnote>