that of “essays” or “memoirs” (*mémoires*)—which gave title to their volume on the
anatomy of animals. This history of particulars was not without pitfalls, but the benefits
in his view far exceeded the limits: “although [the second typology of history] does not
contain but the parts, or the elements that compose the body of History, & has not the
majesty of a general history, it has nonetheless the advantage of Certitude & Truth [la
Certitude & la Vérité], which are the most commendable virtues of History, provided that
the one who writes is exact, & honest [exact, & de bonne foy].” But exactitude and honesty,
Perrault warned the reader, “is not enough for the general Historian, who often may not
be veritable, however passionate he is about truth, & regardless of the care he employs to
discover it, for he is always in danger of being misled by the testimonies he works with.”<fnref n="29" />

A remark needs to be made here. History indeed was a word and a mode of inquiry
that, at that time and place, applied to both the natural world and the human past.
Plumier consistently referred to his work as a “history of plants” or a “natural history of
animals.”<fnref n="30" /> Similarly, “natural history” was not the object of an independent entry in
contemporary dictionaries, but it was rather integrated into that of “history” at large.

What was history, then? The *Dictionnaire universel* (1690) by Antoine Furetière, for
instance, defined it as a “description, narration of *things as they are*, or of the actions as
they happened or could have happened.” Furetière continued as follows: “in the first
meaning [a ‘narration of things as they are’], it is said of the *description of natural things*, of
animals, vegetables, minerals &c. . . . With regards to actions, it is said of the real
narration, coherent and continuous, of several memorable events that happened in one
or several nations, in one or several countries.” At a more basic level, history “also means
the exposition of things of which we have been the spectators. For [the Greek word]
*Historein* means precisely to know something as a result of having seen it. It is true,”

<footnote n="29">²⁹ [Perrault,] “Préface,” in *Histoire des animaux* (1671), sig. a¹: “L’Histoire, de quelque nature qu’elle soit, s’écrit en deux manières. En l’une on rapporte toutes les choses qui ont esté recueillies en plusieurs temps, & qui appartiennent au sujet qu’elle traite: en l’autre on se renferme dans la narration des faits particuliers, dont celui qui écrit a une connaissance certaine. Cette dernière manière, que les Romains appelloint Commentaires, & que nous nommons Memoires, bien qu’elle ne contienne que les parties, & comme les élemens qui composent le corps de l’Histoire, & qu’elle n’ait pas la majesté qui se trouve dans celle qui est générale, a néanmoins cét avantage, que la Certitude & Vérité, qui sont les qualitez les plus recommandables de l’Histoire, ne lui sçauroient manquer, pourvû que celui qui écrit soit exact, & de bonne foy; ce qui ne suffit pas à l’Historien general, qui souvent peut n’estre pas veritable, quelque passion qu’il ait pour la verité, & quelque soint qu’il emploie pour la découvrir; parce qu’il est toûjours en danger d’estre trompé par les memoires sur lesquels il travaille.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="30">³⁰ E.g., Charles Plumier, *Traité des fougères de l’Amérique* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1705), ii (“celles [plantes] dont je pretends faire l’Histoire”) and vii (“les plantes . . . dont je fais ici l’Histoire”); or the “mémoires pour l’histoire naturelle du crocodile appelé vulgairement cayman, dans l’isle de St. Domingo,” in BCMNHN MS 33 “Notes diverses du P. Plumier,” unpaginated.</footnote>
Furetière nuanced, “that the signification of this word became afterwards larger, & means [also] a narration of several memorable things, even if we do not know them but by the report of others.”<fnref n="31" />

The essential tension evinced by Furetière in his *Dictionnaire* between direct and mediated experience was the one at the core the discussion in the preface of the *Histoire des animaux*. The problem was for Perrault one of credit and distance. Many histories of animals of both types existed at the time, he tells us: not only were there “the great & magnificent Works that Aristotle, Pliny, Solinus, & Aelianus composed by drawing from other Authors or from those who made the observations themselves,” but also “particular accounts that Travellers have written on a number of Animals that can only be seen in the Countries in which they journeyed.” Yet “we do not see any certitude neither in those Histories nor in those Accounts.” The difficulty was twofold. On the one hand, the writers of “general Histories of Animals” had been concerned about putting order into their narratives, which they wrote using the testimonies of those “who made the descriptions of the Animals on the scene.” However (and this was crucially important), those concerned by a general history had no way to be assured of “the exactitude and fidelity [of these descriptions].” In other words, those general histories were “laid upon poor foundations, and all the great building erected on them with such a beautiful symmetry has no real solidity.”<fnref n="32" />

<footnote n="31">³¹ Antoine Furetière, *Dictionnaire universel, contenant généralement tous les mots français, tant vieux que modernes, & les termes de toutes les sciences et les arts*, 3 vols. (The Hague and Rotterdam: chez Arnout & Reinier Leers, 1690), vol. 2, 262-3: “Histoire. s. f. Description, narration des choses comme elles sont, ou des actions comme elles se sont passés, ou comme elles se pouvoient passer. . . . Il signifie aussi l’exposition des choses dont nous avons esté les spectateurs. Car *Histoire* signifie précisément connoistre, sçavoir une chose comme l’ayant veuë. Il est vray que la signification de ce nom devient ensuitte bien plus étendue, & signifie une narration de plusieurs choses memorables, quand bien même nous ne les sçaurions qu’au rapport des autres. . . . Au premier sens il se dit de la description des choses naturelles, des animaux, vegetaux, mineraux, &c. . . . à l’égard des actions, se dit de cette narration veritable suivie & enchaînée de plusieurs évenemens memorables qui sont arrivez en une ou en plusieurs nations, en une ou en plusieurs siècles.” My emphasis. See 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).</footnote>

<footnote n="32">³² [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. [a-r-v]: “Nous avons assez d’Histoires des Animaux de l’une & de l’autre de ces manières. Car outre les grands & magnifiques Ouvrages qu’Aristote, Pline, Solin, & Elian ont composez de tout ce qu’ils ont pris dans d’autres Auteurs, ou qu’ils ont appris de ceux qui avoient fait eux-mesmes des observations; nous avons encore des relations particulières que les Voiageurs ont écrites de quantité d’Animaux, qui ne se voient que dans les Païs où ils sont passes. . . Mais on peut dire qu’on ne voit aucune certitude ni en ces Histoires, ni en ces Relations. Ceux qui ont écrit l’Histoire générale des Animaux . . . [ont utilisé des témoignages de] ceux qui avoient fait les descriptions des Animaux sur les lieux, & dont l’exactitude & la fidélité ne leur pouvoit estre assez connuë pour en répondre. . . . [Ces histoires étant] posées sur des mauvais fondemens, il est vrai de dire que tout le grand édifice qu’ils ont élevé en suite dessus avec une si belle simmetrie, n’a point de veritable solidité.”</footnote>
On the other hand, those who traveled and observed by themselves the animals they described mostly were not scholars, and thus lacked the qualities required for “exact research”: “it does not seem likely that Merchants & Soldiers were endowed with the *esprit* of Philosophy & the patience that are necessary for observing all the particularities of so many different Animals.” Perrault argued that the accounts of this kind of traveler were of little fidelity, for “to what they have seen they usually add what they could have seen, & . . . read in the Authors.” The lack of the necessary “qualities in most of those who have written particular accounts makes their work irrelevant, and their testimony very suspect.” So what are for Perrault those necessary qualities that a traveler should have, and most of them actually missed? The model in his view was that of Petrus Gyllius (1490-1555), a scholar and traveler under the aegis of Francis I of France, who not only was a “very judicious, and very knowledgeable man,” but also was “instructed by the reading of all the Authors who wrote about this topic.”<fnref n="33" />

This seemingly schizophrenic relationship to textual tradition is distinctive of natural historical writing at the turn of the eighteenth century. The reading of “the Authors” was both a site for the training of the scholar’s eye and a source of corruption for firsthand observational accounts: those less trained among books were purportedly all the more prone to be deceived by them. The resulting twofold problem was the one still echoed by Fontenelle thirty years later: “Philosophers do hardly roam the world, & those who do are not ordinarily Philosophers.” Perrault’s remarks bear evident traces of the hesitant configuration of natural history around 1700 and of the undecided attempts to cope with the problem of far-off natural observations.

What, then, were the solutions proposed by the Academy’s *physiciens* for overcoming this twofold predicament? With a calculated caution, Perrault traced a clear line between bookish and firsthand experience and warned against any “blind veneration of the works & opinions of the Ancients” in particular. The alleged exactitude of his and his circle’s descriptions was founded upon the fact that “we do not propose anything that we have not seen.” The *Histoire des animaux* was thus presented as a “selection of all that we found

<footnote n="33">³³ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. [a v -ef]: “[Petrus Gyllius] étoit un homme tres-judicieux & tres-éclairé; qui estoit instruit par la lecture de tous les Auteurs qui ont écrit sur ce sujet. . . . Le défaut de ces qualitez dans la pluspart de ceux qui ont fait des relations particulières & des memoires, rend leur travail peu considerable, & leur témoignage fort suspect: n’y aiant gueres d’apparence que des Marchands & des Soldats soient pourvus de l’esprit de la Philosophie & de la patience, qui sont necessaires pour observer toutes les particularitez de tant de differens Animaux. . . . Mais ce qui doit davantage diminuer l’estime qu’on peut faire de ces sortes de Memoires, c’est le peu de fidélité dont les Voiageurs usent d’ordinaire en leurs Relations; qui ajoutent Presque toujours aux choses qu’ils ont vuës, celles qu’ils pouvoient voir, & . . . rapportent ce qu’ils ont leu dans des Auteurs.”</footnote>
& carefully noted in the Animals we could examine.” This amounted to a clear epistemic
choice in favor of a history of “particulars,” rather than a “general History”: “we have
limited ourselves to such a description, to such a naïve painting, & we have no other
intention than to show things as we have seen them [de faire voir les choses telles que nous les avons
veuës], like a mirror, which adds nothing, and represents only what is presented to it.”
Much was at stake: “in contrast to the Ancients & most of the Moderns, who treat the
knowledge of Animals as if it were a Science—that is, by speaking always generally—we
do not present things but as being particular.” Lest the point was not clear enough,
Perrault offered an example: “instead of claiming . . . that Bears have fifty-two kidneys on
each side, we only state that the Bear we dissected had such a particular constitution; and
if we seem surprised that those other authors having made the anatomy of these animals
do not conform, it is just because we assume that Nature . . . made the kidneys of all other
bears in the same way that we found in our case.”<fnref n="34" />

What Perrault is saying is dramatically important. He is explicitly articulating the two
central components of a specific way of making natural history that came to prevail at the
turn of the eighteenth century—particularly among those scholars who, like Plumier, saw
visual representations as a reliable means for fixing and circulating the observation of far-
distant natural particulars. The two central elements formulated by Perrault are the
simultaneous presence of subject and object of observation and the non-representative
nature of the knowledge thus acquired.<fnref n="35" /> This approach to nature was an imperfect and
“naïve painting” because it did not aspire to establish generalities (which was the aim of a

<footnote n="34">³⁴ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. [e·v-o·f]: “[L]’on a voulu que ce Recueil fust un choix de tout ce qui a esté trouvé & remarqué soigneusement dans les Animaux qu’on a pu examiner. . . . [O]n ne se soit pas arresté qu’à cette description, & à cette peinture naïve, que nous avons tâché de faire avec simplicité, & sans ornement, & qu’on n’ait point eû d’autre intention que de faire voir les choses telles que nous les avons veuës, & de mesme qu’un miroir, qui ne met rien du sien, & qui ne représente que ce qui lui a esté présenté. . . . Nous estimons que ceux qui seront capables de ces refléxions, n’auront pas la malignité de se prévaloir de l’autorité qu’on donne au grand nombre de ceux, qui n’en estant pas capables, veulent que l’on ait comme eux une venération aveugle pour les ouvrages & pour les sentimens des Ancients. . . . [N]ous nous sommes donnée [la liberté], de dire que nos Descriptions sont exactes, parce que nous ne proposons rien que ce que nous avons vû. . . . C’est pourquoi nous avons choisi une manière de faire nos Descriptions toute particulière. Car au lieu que les Anciens & la pluspart des Modernes traitent la doctrine des Animaux comme celle des Sciences, parlant toûjours généralement, nous n’exposons les choses que comme estant singulières : & au lieu d’assurer, par exemple, que l’Ours a cinquante-deux Reins de chaque costé, nous disons seulement qu’un Ours que nous avons disqué avoit la conformation tout-à-fait particulière, & en la décrivant, si nous témoignons estre estonnez que personne n’ait fait cette remarque, & que mesme ceux qui ont fait l’Anatomie de ces Animaux n’en ayent rien dit, c’est parce que nous supposons que la Nature, qui se jouë rarement dans la conformation des parties principales, a formé les Reins des autres Ours de la mesme façon que nous les avons trouvez en nostre sujet.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="35">³⁵ The copresence of image maker and object represented and the individuality of representation are the two principal components of the visual regime “de la chose vue” identified by Charlotte Guichard at the very same period: see Guichard, “‘D’après nature’ ou ‘chose vue,’” esp. 39 for her identification of these two conditions in Perrault’s text.</footnote>
"Science"), but particularities: "general propositions," continued the anatomist, "need to be founded upon the knowledge of all the particularities, of which universal notions are composed." Consequently, "we vouch for nothing except what we advance ourselves, and . . . these facts are our only assistance against the authority of the great Personages who wrote before us."<fnref n="36" /> The term "facts" (faits) is not random in Perrault's writing. In 1668, he produced a manuscript, "Projet pour les expériences et observations anatomiques" (Projet for anatomical experiences and observations), in which he distinguished between truths "of fact" (de faict) and truths of law (de droict) in anatomy: the former referred to the "knowledge of the structure of organs," while the latter named "the discovery of their use and actions."<fnref n="37" /> It is worth keeping this distinction in mind, for it mirrors that in botany, discussed below, between the observation, description, and enumeration of plants, on the one hand, and the study of their virtues and medical properties, on the other.

The abandonment of the textual tradition was not as radical as it was trumpeted, however: on the contrary, the dialog with it was constant—an aspect to be discussed below. But before we turn in detail to this question, let us consider the fact that Perrault’s Baconian program did not solve the problem of certainty hanging over the collection of natural particulars overseas. The academician’s injunctions for making exact observations were largely based on the collective organization of their own work: their essays on the anatomy of animals were confidently presented as not being “the work of an individual, who can be influenced by his own opinion.” In fact, the soundness of their observations was grounded on the fact that they “do not contain but what has been verified by an entire Company composed of individuals whose eyes are made to see this sort of thing, unlike most people, and have hands to find them with more dexterity and success.” Collective empiricism, announced by Perrault’s circle as the (convenient) foundation for the making of any “truth of fact” about the natural world, turned out to be more complicated across a distance.<fnref n="38" />

<footnote n="36">³⁶ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. i': “[Les propositions générales] doivent estre fondées sur la connaissance de toutes les choses particulières, dont les notions universelles sont composées. . . . [N]ous ne prétendons répondre que des faits que nous avançons, & que ces faits sont les seules forces dont nous voulons nous prévaloir contre l’autorité des grands Personnages qui ont écrit avant nous.” My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="37">³⁷ Claude Perrault, “Projet pour les Experiences et observations Anatomiques,” in AAS, *Procès verbaux de l’Académie royale des sciences*, vol. 1: “Registres de physique: 22 décembre 1666-avril 1668,” fol. 22-30. On the notion of “fact” in early modern history and law, see Barbara J. Shapiro, *A Culture of Fact: England, 1550-1720* (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).</footnote>

<footnote n="38">³⁸ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. e': “[Ces Memoires] ne sont point le travail d’un particulier, qui peut se laisser prévenir de sa propre opinion. . . . Mais ces inconvenients ne se peuvent pas rencontrer en nos</footnote>
## “To take an exact account”

Perrault's preface and the Academy's project in the 1660s and 1670s set the tone for French projects on natural history to come. The anatomist's exhortations bear witness of the tensions that lay at the core of the naturalist project, a wavering terrain of knowledge made out of longings and frailties. The most apparent of these were related to text and distance. He formulated a general aspiration to draw a sharp separation between an empiricist program, on the one hand, and the inherited textual tradition, on the other, even if (or precisely because) the latter still weighed heavily on the objects and questions of their natural research—as we will see in more detail below. Moreover, Perrault explicitly articulated the problem of making natural facts circulate across a distance, but had to leave it unresolved in his preface: neither could the key of collective observation easily be applied across oceans, nor could the whole exotic flora and fauna of the world be brought to Paris so as to be comfortably examined by the Academy's gentlemen on the premises of the Bibliothèque du roi in rue Vivienne.

This last issue is the topic of this section. Tournefort's and Fontenelle's open (and Plumier's mostly tacit) vindication that the naturalist ought to be a traveler, a scholar enduring the fatigues of long journeys in exotic lands, needs to be placed in this intellectual context. The self-fashioning of naturalists as scholars resigned to strenuous voyages does not, however, tell us much about how the “books sprinkled over the surface of the whole Earth” were to be sought and gathered. The use of visual representations for mobilizing far-distant flora and fauna is not self-evident, not even for those whose approach to the natural world developed along the lines advanced by Perrault.

Were there any explicit directives for observing and making descriptions overseas? To answer this question, one might turn to the instructions for travelers that mushroomed at that time. This sort of normative text blossomed as a genre in its own right during the early modern period.<fnref n="39" /> Particularly well-known are the “Directions for

<footnote>Memoires, qui ne contiennent point de faits qui n'aient pas esté verifiez part toute une Compagnie, composée de gens qui ont des yeux pour voir ces sortes de choses, autrement que la pluspart du reste du monde, de mesme qu'ils ont des mains pour les chercher avec plus de dexterité & de succèsés.” On collective empiricism, see Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck, eds., *Histories of Scientific Observation* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), esp. Gianna Pomata, “Observation Rising: Birth of an Epistemic Genre, 1500-1650” (45-80) and Daston, “The Empire of Observation, 1600-1800” (81-113), as well as the introduction and contributions in part 5, “Observing Together: Communities” (369-444).</footnote>

<footnote n="39">³⁹ On instructions for travelers in general, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Instructions for Travellers: Teaching the Eye to See,” *History and Anthropology* 9, nos. 2-3 (1996), 139-90; Maurizio Bossi and Claudio Greppi, eds., *Viaggi e scienza: Le instruzioni scientifiche per i viaggiatori nei secoli XVII-XIX* (Florence: Leo S. Olschki,</footnote>
Sea-men, bound for far Voyages” published by the London Royal Society in the first issue of the *Philosophical Transactions* (1665); they were translated into French and printed in the *Journal des Scavans* the year after.<fnref n="40" /> Seemingly penned by Lawrence Rooke (1622-1662), Professor of Geometry at Gresham College and one of the founders of the Society, the “Directions” adopted a clearly institutional tone and, therefore, the Baconian vantage point on the progress and accumulation of knowledge of far-distance natures: “it being the Design of the R. Society . . . to study Nature rather than Books,” and to “compose a History of Her, as may hereafter serve to build a Solid and Useful Philosophy upon.”<fnref n="41" /> The general tenor is not far from that of their Parisian counterpart (which may explain why the “Directions” were so rapidly translated and published in French), apropos not only of the literary corpus but also of the agents involved in the gathering and circulation of natural facts. The instructions were addressed to “Sea-Men” and “Navigators,” who, like Perrault’s “Merchants & Soldiers,” were unfamiliar with the manners in which “*Inquiries of things Observable*” should be carried “in forrain Countries.” No reference was made to visual depictions apart from making “Plotts and Draughts of prospect of Coasts, Promontories, Islands and Ports,” but instructions were given to “keep an exact *Diary*” of observations, a copy of which ought to be delivered to the Lord High Admiral of England (the head of the navy) and the Royal Society.<fnref n="42" />

<footnote n="2005">2005), and María Eugenia Constantino and Juan Pimentel, “Cómo inventariar el (Nuevo) Mundo. Las instrucciones como instrumentos para obsevar y coleccionar objetos naturales,” in *Circulación de saberes: Instrumentos y colecciones en la historia*, ed. Laura Cházaro, Achim Miruna, and Nuria Valverde (México: CINVESTAV, UNAM, CONACYT, in press). I thank Juan Pimentel for allowing me to read this paper before its publication.</footnote>

<footnote n="40">⁴⁰ “Directions for Sea-Men, Bound for Far Voyages,” *Philosophical Transactions* 1 (1665-1666), 140-3, translated into French as “Extrait du journal d’Angleterre, contenant des instructions pour ceux qui ont à faire de long voyages sur mer,” *Journal des scavans* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie de Jean Cusson, 1666), 193-6.</footnote>

<footnote n="41">⁴¹ “Directions for Sea-Men,” 140-1.</footnote>

<footnote n="42">⁴² Far from disappearing, instructions for the collection of natural historical observations by travelers continued to mushroom in England during the following decades. Two good examples during Plumier’s lifetime are Robert Boyle, “General Heads for a Natural History of a Countrey, Great or small, imparted likewise by Mr. Boyle,” *Philosophical Transactions* 1 (1665), 186-9, and that of John Woodward (1665-1728), a London naturalist and a contentious Fellow of the Royal Society who had his *Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of the World* printed in 1696. In the form of a booklet, Woodward’s text was primarily concerned with the author’s preferred aspect of the study of nature: namely, shells, stones, and fossils (he would found by bequest a professorship “of Fossils” at Cambridge), although they globally reflected the encyclopedic, inventorial ambitions of the natural history of the time. Although a long appendix enumerating “Directions for the Collecting, preserving, and Sending over natural things, from Foreign Countries” was added, his *Instructions* gave only a vague advice—if any at all—on how to register observations (“observe,” “let there be an account taken,” “take an exact account”). Woodward made scarce references to record keeping: he hastily noted at the beginning of the work the interest of keeping a nautical logbook (“keep a *Journal* of the *Ship’s Course*”), and the sole reference to paper regarded the one used in packing the items to be sent.</footnote>
In the early 1660s, pride of place was already given to overseas journeys in the early projects for the foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences: they stated the need of “send[ing] intelligent people with the purpose of observing all the curious things of the new Lands,” but gave no specific instructions on the making of records themselves. In France, printed instructions for travelers were less common during Plumier’s lifetime, but became increasingly numerous and detailed as the eighteenth century progressed.<fnref n="43" /> During the Régence, for example, Réumur and the abbé Bignon wrote a list of “researches . . . to carry out in foreign countries”: addressed to “Frenchmen who travel,” it highlighted the need to “draw up exact reports [*mémoires*] and to send them . . . along with specimens.”<fnref n="44" /> Instructions specifically devoted to natural history elaborated on to what travelers should pay attention (and they could be exasperatingly comprehensive in this regard), but not to *how* they should register their observations onto paper.

Travel and the compilation of observations in the form of written and graphic notes were far from being the preserve of natural historians. A Parisian antiquarian, Charles César Baudelot de Dairval (1648-1722), wrote along similar lines in a remarkable work on travel and antiquities: *De l'utilité des voyages et de l'avantage que la recherche des antiquitez procure aux scavans* (On the utility of travels and the advantages that the research of antiquities presents to scholars), printed in 1686. For Baudelot de Dairval traveling to "foreign climates" (*les climats étranges*) made men better: it allowed them to acquire new talents, to strengthen those they already have, and to correct their faults.<fnref n="45" /> But in order not to travel vainly (*pour ne pas voyager inutilement*), the scholar should deftly gather and store the memory of his experiences:

<footnote n="43">⁴³ As pointed out by Silvia Collini and Antonella Vannoni in “I testi di instruzioni scientifiche per i viaggiatori: aspetti di un genere dal seicento al novencento,” in *Viaggi et scienza: Le instruzioni scientifiche per i viaggiatori nei secoli XVII-XIX*, ed. Maurizio Bossi and Claudio Greppi (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2005), xxiv-v. Instructions for travelers multiplied in France during the mid- and, especially, the late eighteenth century: on these, see Lorelaï Kury, “Les instructions de voyage dans les expéditions scientifiques françaises (1750-1830),” *Revue d'histoire des sciences* 51, no. 1 (1998), 65-91, and Silvia Collini, “Conseils pratiques et orientations théoriques dans les instructions pour les voyageurs (XVIIIe siècle),” in *Le terrain des sciences humaines (XVIIIe-XXe siècle)*, ed. Claude Blanckaert (Paris: L'Harmattan, 1996), 57-72. For the case of the West Indies in particular, see François Regourd, “Diffusion et assimilation des techniques académiques de collecte et d’expertise dans l’espace caraïbe français (XVIIe-XVIIIe s.),” in *Techniques et colonies (XVIIe-XXe siècles)*, ed. Philippe Hrodej and Sylvanie Llinares (Paris: Publications de la Société Française d’Histoire d’Outre-Mer, 2005), 33-47.</footnote>

<footnote n="44">⁴⁴ “Project de la Compagnie des Sciences et des Arts,” in Christian Huygens, *Oeuvres complètes* (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1891), vol. 4, 326, and “Recherches proposées par l’Académie des sciences, à faire dans les pays étrangers,” 1716, both quoted in Marie-Noëlle Bourguet, “La collecte du monde: voyage et histoire naturelle (fin XVIIe siècle-début XIXe siècle),” in *Le Muséum au premier siècle de son histoire*, ed. Claude Blanckaert et al. (Paris: Muséum nationale d’histoire naturelle, 1997), 168-9.</footnote>

<footnote n="45">⁴⁵ Charles César Baudelot de Dairval, *De l'utilité des voyages et de l'avantage que la recherche des antiquitez procure aux scavans*, 2 vols. (Paris: Pierre Ausoïn and Pierre Emery, 1696), 16.</footnote>
What you have to do for this research . . . is to visit the Palaces, the public and private Libraries, the Cabinets . . . for in these places one can always discover and collect an infinity of things that you have to describe and gather exactly. Do not mind about the order at this stage. Write immediately, and do not miss anything. Once you are back at home, you will be able to organize it. . . . Find who are the scholars and curious people in every place . . . for they will allow you to copy their Manuscripts, or to draw the rarest things they have.<fnref n="46" />

Baudelot de Dairval’s traveling scholar was an obstinate compiler not only of objects, but also (and mostly) of notes and drawings: in his quest for the remains of the past, he ought to draw the ancient medals and coins (particularly if they were Greek) and, in the case he fell short of time and enthusiasm to copy them, the author gave a couple of tricks to easily take their imprints.<fnref n="47" /> The cultivated man by and large equally had an interest in carefully observing and recording during his wanderings. He was to measure the elevation of the pole and to not neglect being provided with instruments such as astrolabes or magnetic compasses (“we recently make small thermometers, excellent and practical to transport in a leather case”). He should note (*remarquer*) and describe (*décrire*) the mountains and the rivers, the customs of the people, the commodities and dangers of the journey, particularly during sea travels, where observations are infinite.<fnref n="48" />

Unfortunately, Baudelot de Dairval never reflected explicitly on the materiality of note-taking: how and where to write or draw, which materials and instruments had to be employed, or how to transport all these papers. Advice for travel by naturalists being equally silent at that time on the specifics of making and (more importantly) shipping natural observations, one may turn to the instructions proposed by contemporaries of Plumier that were not devoted to the study of nature. Consider those made by precisely one of the most famous image-makers of the time, the Franciscan friar and famous cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli (1650-1718), who opened his *Viaggio d’Italia in Inghilterra* (Journey from Italy to England [1697]) with praise for travel and “twenty precepts for the

<footnote n="46">⁴⁶ Baudelot de Dairval, *Utilité des voyages*, 524-5: “Ce que vous devez faire pour cette recherche . . . c’est de visiter, les Palais, les Bibliothèques publiques & particulières, les Cabinets, les thresors d’Églises, de Monastères, de Temples, de Palais, & des autres monuments publics; car dans tout cela, on ne laisse pas de découvrir & de ramasser une infinité de choses que vous devez décrire & recuellir exactement. Ne vous embarrassez d’abord de l’ordre que vous y mettrés. Ecrivés tout de suite, & ne laissez rien échapper. Quand vous seres de retour, vous y remettrez la main, & vous retailerez ce Jardin pour luy donner une symmetrie plus réguliere. Enquêtez-vous en chaque lieu qui sont les savans ou les gens curieux qui y demeurent . . . car ils vous permettront ou de copier leurs Manuscrits, ou de designer ce qu’ils auront de plus rare.”</footnote>

<footnote n="47">⁴⁷ Baudelot de Dairval, *Utilité des voyages*, 74, 644-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="48">⁴⁸ Baudelot de Dairval, “Mémoires, de quelques observations generales qu’on peut faire, pour ne pas voyager inutilement,” in *Utilité des voyages*, 695-732.</footnote>
young people who undertake it.”<fnref n="49" /> Among Father Coronelli’s commandments were reading “attentively many Authors” writing on the topic of travels and the regions to be visited before departure (for, as Perrault would say, it trains the eye). Coronelli also urged his readers to be generous with those who provide accommodation, and to be ready to endure the pains of the journey. His advice for travelers were full of references to the literary tradition, from Moses to Pythagoras, and of moral guidance for conducting oneself during the journey. His directions for the collection of information did not usually involve natural specimens or observations, but were mainly confined to the realm of antiquarianism: he recommended to learn about medals (medaglie) before leaving, because it was mostly in gathering them that the scholar would learn about the history of the region (raccoglierà il nome de’ molti Prencipi . . . [e] la Cronologia del loro Regno). In the most probable case that the scholar was not able to take the medals with him, he should “try to have their imprint, either with parchment glue or with wax, paper, plaster or still another way.” He should also “copy exactly their legends” in the same position as they occupy in the medals: “it becomes easier in this way to grasp their meaning, which serves to denote the Epochs of the Reign, of the Prince, of the City, and their durations.”<fnref n="50" /> Likewise, “the erudite Traveler should take copies with the same attention” of inscriptions, “representing the marble, stone or metal on which they are sculpted. When copying them, you will reflect the same order in their location, letters, words, lines, even the corrections, for all of these will become useful.” And Coronelli warned the unpersuaded reader: “you must know that so many ancient and modern men undertook long Travels for this purpose. You can be convinced of the advantages of imitating them, all the more so given that History often requires the support of such proofs [tali prove].”<fnref n="51" />

Coronelli gave similar advice regarding other objects from ancient times and from nature: when confronted with statues, precious stones, talismans, and “other curious

<footnote n="49">⁴⁹ Vincenzo Coronelli, “Dell’Utilità de’ Viaggi, e XX. Precetti per i Giovini, che gli entraprendono,” in *Viaggi del P. Coronelli, Parte Prima* (Venice: per Giovan Battista Tramontino, 1697), 1-16.</footnote>

<footnote n="50">⁵⁰ Coronelli, “Dell’Utilità de’ Viaggi,” 9: “Copierà esattamente la legenda, benche non si rilevassero, che una, ò due lettere nel principio, ò nel fine, e non ometterà di ponervi la medesima situatione, c’hanno nelle Medaglie. In tal modo indovinasi più facilmente il sense, il quale serve à denotare l’Epoche del Regno, del Prencipe, della Città, e loro duratione.”</footnote>

<footnote n="51">⁵¹ Coronelli, “Dell’Utilità de’ Viaggi,” 9: “Vi sono parimenti alcune Iscrittioni, delle qualli il Viaggiatore erudito deve prender copia colla medesima attentione, disegnando il marmo, la pietra, ò il metallo, sopra di cui sono scolpite. Nel copiarle oserverà lo stesso ordine nella situatione, nelle lettere, nelle parole, nelle linee, fino nelle cassature, poiche da ogni una di queste osservationi riporterà profitto. Sappia, che tanti huomini antichi, e moderni, hanno intrapreso lunghi Viaggi per questo fine. Onde può promettersi qualche vantaggio con imitarli; tanto più che l’historia ha sovente bisogno de’ socorsi di tali prove.” My emphasis. Coronelli’s arguments reiterated those of some humanists a century before: see Peter Burke, “Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” *Journal of the History of Ideas* 64, no. 2 (2003), 276-7.</footnote>
rather than objects was concomitant to scholarly travel and, more importantly, that these
texts and images substituting for absent or distant realities could constitute adequate
sources for a historical form of knowledge (tanto più che l'historia hà sovente bisogno de' socorsi
di tali prove).

A comparable reliance on inscriptions can also be found among other contemporary
scholars, especially antiquarians: prominent French students of the past like Bernard de
Montfaucon were convinced travelers and paper record stockpilers. Moreover, they
explicitly elaborated on the use of visual representations, in particular for coping
effectively with epistemic problems of their discipline that echoed those of natural
history. By turning to French antiquarians in the next section, my aim is to contextualize
Plumier outside the realm of natural history. My reasons to do so are not only that
antiquarianism and natural history were two of the forms that the epistemic genre of
history could take during that period, but also the fact that scholars like Montfaucon
articulated explicitly an approach to visual representation that is the one, I believe,
sustaining the epistemic economy in which we need to understand Plumier's
iconographic work and the role of images in the study of nature in France by 1700.

A knowledge of what “may be represented in Figures”

What Coronelli was saying apropos the study of antiquities can help us better
understand natural historical undertakings in the same period, especially when carried out
overseas. If visual representations were deemed by naturalists to effectively guide,
capture, and convey observations and, consequently, to assist in fabricating *facts* on which
a “historical” writing of nature could be based, they fell short of overtly formulated
reasons for doing this. Let us remember that Perrault, for all his elaborate dictates about
how to reach a “certain & recognized truth” in the knowledge of nature, did not clearly
connect the visual form with the minutely verified observations of natural particulars by
him advocated. He only discussed the plates of the *Histoire des animaux* in the penultimate
paragraph of the preface, and images were presented there as mere accompaniments to
the exact written descriptions provided in the book. And yet for Perrault, the same rules
guiding the act of observation should shepherd the making of images: first, the
simultaneous presence of the author and the object of representation at the time of its
making and, second, collective verification.

This extremely precise exactitude in reporting all the particularities that we remark is
accompanied by an equal care in making the Figures of both the entire Animals and their
external & internal parts. After being considered & examined . . . these parts are drawn there and then [sur le champ] by one of those to whom the Company charged with the written Descriptions; & they have not been engraved until all those who present in the Dissections confirmed that they were consistent with what they have seen. We considered that it was good, for the perfection of these Figures, that they were made by a hand guided by a knowledge other than that of Painting, which is not sufficient, because what is important here is not so much to represent well what we see, but to see well what we want to represent.<fnref n="55" />

If images were but mere illustrations of written descriptions of nature, then why take such pains in crafting them? True, the work of Perrault's circle of anatomists was, after all, part of a luxurious editorial project whose images' force resided as much in their being glorifications of Louis XIV's monarchy as in their representations of the virtually unknown anatomy of exotic animals. And there was a bit of this, too, in Plumier's images, as we will see in chapters 2 and 5. How, then, can we explain the efforts of Plumier, Tournefort, Lippi, and Perrault's academicians in producing their astonishing visual archives of distant natures? I think part of the answer is to be sought in the epistemic mechanisms at the basis of natural history, as it was practiced there and then. In the context of the epistemic crisis, so to speak, described by Perrault and related to the problem of certainty in the making of natural historical observations (a question all the thornier when faraway and unfamiliar floras and faunas were involved), visual representations such as Plumier's provide an interesting entry point into a new relationship to sources that historians (of nature or otherwise) were elaborating in late seventeenth-century France. Parallel developments (if not simply the same) were taking place in the world of antiquarianism, a sort of "material turn": a new reliance on objects—objects to be dully and meticulously registered onto paper records, graphic or verbal—was believed to offer a solid foundation for a form of descriptive knowledge devoid of controversies.

<footnote n="55">⁵⁵ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. [ov]: “Cette exactitude si précise à rapporter toutes les particularitez que nous remarquons, est accompagnée d’un pareil soin, pour bien faire les figures tant des Animaux entiers, que de leurs parties externes, & de toutes celles qui sont cachées au dedans. Ces parties, après avoir esté considerées, & examinées avec les yeux aidez du secours des Microscopes, quand il en est besoin, sont dessinées sur le champ par un de ceux-là même, à qui la Compagnie a donné la charge de faire les Descriptions par écrit; & elles n’ont point esté gravées, que tous ceux qui ont esté presens aux Dissections n’ayent trouvé qu’elles estoient tout-à-fait conformes à ce qu’ils ont veû. On a jugé que c’estoit une chose bien avantageuse pour la perfection de ces Figures, d’estre faites d’une main qui fust conduite par d’autres connoissances que par celles de la Peinture, lesquelles ne sont pas toutes seules suffisantes, parce que l’importance en ceci n’est pas tant de bien representer ce que l’on voit, que de bien voir comme il faut ce que l’on veut representer.”</footnote>
This is one of several substantial ways in which the study of antiquities and that of nature coincided around the end of the seventeenth century and beginning of the eighteenth century. To start with, both embraced a wide, loosely defined, conception of their objects of inquiry. Just as antiquarians aimed at embracing the "wholeness of history," natural history (as practiced by Plumier and reflected in his drawings) comprised plants and animals of any kind, from trees and fishes to mushrooms and mollusk shells, but also landscapes and occasionally humans—and excitingly exotic non-European humans in particular.<fnref n="56" />

Moreover, antiquarians' and naturalists' respective approaches to the world of the past and the world of nature were both marked at that time by a fiercely proclaimed material dimension. At the turn of the eighteenth century, the rhetorical shift from bookish learning to a "materialist" approach or *sola autopsia*—meaning "by firsthand observation alone," a turn traditionally associated with modernity in both the natural and archeological sciences—affected both groups of scholars equally.<fnref n="57" /> The "revolution in historical method" brilliantly diagnosed by Arnaldo Momigliano in early eighteenth-century ancient history ("the Age of Antiquarians") had its equivalent in natural history, for although each field targeted different objects of research, both shared a "historical" way of proceeding.<fnref n="58" /> Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the metaphor of the "book of nature" or the legibility of the natural world (as expressed in Fontenelle's "books sprinkled over the surface of the whole Earth," for instance), found its counterpart in the realm of antiquarianism around the same time. In a study of the antiquities of Lyon, the Protestant scholar Jacob Spon (1647-1685) posed the problem of the difference between factual and bookish sources ("one may ask why we should research ancient History on broken marbles, or half-faded stones, if we can learn it by means of Books") and unsurprisingly swung the balance in favor of the latter ("how many contrarieties & falsities there are in the Authors of Roman History that can only be resolved by turning to ancient monuments!"). Mirroring the longstanding metaphor of the legibility of nature, Spon proposed that "Antiques are nothing else than Books, whose stone & Marble pages

<footnote n="56">56 The expression "wholeness of nature" (*historiae integritatem*) comes from Ezechiel Spanheim, *Dissertatio de praestentia et usu numismatum antiquorum* (Rome: apud Blasium Deversin, & Felicem Cesarettum, typis Fabii de Falcho, 1667), 97, as quoted in and translated by Burke, "Images as Evidence," 273.</footnote>

<footnote n="57">57 *Sola autopsia* echoes the Protestant *sola scriptura*, as pointed out by Lorraine Daston, "The Sciences of the Archive," *Osiris* 27 (2012), 163. The expression of a "materialist" approach for defining this shift in antiquarianism and early archeological science is from Burke, "Images as evidence," 277.</footnote>

<footnote n="58">58 Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," *Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes* 13, nos. 3-4 (1950), 286. I follow Momigliano's authoritative account in the next paragraphs.</footnote>
have been written with Iron & chisel.”<fnref n="59" /> Such a purported neglect of literary sources was reflected in the use not of images themselves, but of a certain type of graphic and written descriptions. Tournefort’s praise of botanical travel and Perrault’s determined defense of the “narration of particular facts” can indeed be seen as manifestations of an emphasis on the value of direct observation. It can also—and perhaps more accurately—be seen as a sign of the new status of objects (whether natural specimens or antiquities) as evidence for the making of “historical” (i.e. descriptive) forms of knowledge.

One of the most revealing examples of the role that visual representations were given within this economy of antiquarian knowledge is the work of the abovementioned French Benedictine monk of the Congregation of St. Maur Dom Bernard de Montfaucon.<fnref n="60" /> The case of Montfaucon offers a good comparison for nuancing the role of images in natural history around 1700. A disciple of Dom Jean Mabillon at the Parisian abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Montfaucon came from an aristocratic family: he had been a soldier before taking his vows and was well-connected within the French court—he was to become the confessor of the elderly Louis XIV. In 1719, he published the first volume of his *L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures* (Antiquity explained and represented in figures), a colossal editorial enterprise by subscription composed of ten volumes plus five of supplements.<fnref n="61" />

<footnote n="59">⁵⁹ [Jacob Spon,] Recherche des Antiquités et curiosités de la ville de Lyon, ancienne colonie des Romains & capitale de la Gaule Celtique. Avec un mémoire des principaux antiquaires & curieux de l'Europe (Lyon: de l'Imprimerie de Jacques Faeton, 1673), unpaginated preface: "Mais quelqu'un me dira, porquoy tant de peine à rechercher l'Histoire ancienne sur des Marbres rompus, ou des pierres à demy effacées, si nous pouvons l'apprendre par le moyen des Livres, que nous avons dans nos Cabinets. . . . Combien y a t'il, par exemple, de contrarietés & de faussetés dans les Autheurs de l'Histoire Romaine, qui ne peuvent être aisement terminées, que par ces monuments antiques? . . . Disons que nos Antiques ne sont pas autre chose, que des Livres, dont les pages de pierre & de Marbre ont été écrites avec le Fer & le Ciseau."</footnote>

<footnote n="60">⁶⁰ On Bernard de Montfaucon and late seventeenth-century Maurist scholarship by and large, see Bruno Neveu, *Érudition et religion aux XVIIᵉ et XVIIIᵉ siècles* (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994), esp. “La vie érudite à Paris à la fin du XVIIᵉ siècle,” 25-92, and “Mabillon et l'historiographie gallicane,” 105-74, and the indispensable work by Daniel-Odon Hurel, especially Hurel and Raymon Roge, eds., *Dom Bernard de Montfaucon* (Saint-Wandrille: Éditions de Fontenelle, 1998); Hurel, “Les Bénédictins de Saint-Maur et l'histoire au XVIIᵉ siècle,” *Littératures classiques* 30 (1997), 33-50; and Hurel, ed., *Érudition et commerce épistolaire: Jean Mabillon et la tradition monastique* (Paris: Vrin, 2003), esp. Hurel, “Introduction générale,” 7-11, and Jean-Dominique Mellot, “Les Mauristes et l'édition érudite: un gallicanisme éditorial?” 73-88.</footnote>

<footnote n="61">⁶¹ Bernard de Montfaucon, *L'antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures*, vol. 1 (Paris: chez Florentin Delaulne, Hilaire Foucault, Michel Clousier, Jean-Geoffroy Nyon, Etienne Ganeau, Nicolas Gosselin, et Pierre-François Giffart, 1719). On the *Antiquité expliquée*, see James Westfall Thompson, “The Age of Mabillon and Montfaucon,” *The American Historical Review* 47, no. 2 (1942), 225-44, and Francis Haskell, *History and Its Images: Art and Interpretation of the Past* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 131-44. I will occasionally use the 1721 English translation by David Humphreys: *Antiquity explained, and represented in sculptures, by the learned father Montfaucon*, vol. 1 (London: printed by J. Tonson and J. Watts, 1721). When using Humphreys’s translation, I shall still give the French original of 1719 in the footnotes. I will give my own translation in cases in which I think Humphreys’s version does not capture the French original accurately enough. Montfaucon’s project in the *Antiquité expliquée* was followed by an equally cyclopean</footnote>
A striking symmetry exists between this work and contemporary natural history books like Plumier’s, not only from a formal point of view, but also in the epistemological purposes at which they aimed. To start with, Montfaucon’s massive work revolved around images: “It treats of All Antiquity, every Part is considered and illustrated with a great Number of Figures; and these Figures explained with all the Accuracy I was capable of.”<fnref n="62" /> The fifteen volumes of the *Antiquité expliquée* boasted indeed over 1,100 large copperplates on which the author reproduced and methodically organized ancient monuments and antiquities: “These plates contain around thirty or forty thousand figures. . . . This large number has disconcerted several people: how can the work contain so many figures; if they are of a fair size, as it is promised; can they be made large enough so as to notice distinctly all their parts, if there are up to thirty per plate? . . . You will see that the figures are even larger than I initially planned, for I understood the importance of making them of a good size so as to be able to distinguish all their parts, and that they strike our imagination more powerfully” (fig. 1.2).<fnref n="63" />

Like Plumier in the preface of his *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*, Montfaucon claimed the need of large intaglio plates so as to appreciate all the parts of the figures—an alleged necessity that the book market would not always be able to fulfill. Yet this transmits the perception that naturalists and antiquarians had at the time of the double function of images for their work: both as a tool of knowledge and an object of distinction and aesthetic appreciation (*qu'elles frappent davantage l'imagination*). The books of the *Antiquité expliquée*, just like Plumier’s botanical books printed at the Imprimerie royale, were folio volumes with full-page intaglio engravings and (in line with the Minim’s *Traité des fougères de l'Amérique*, 1705) in both French and Latin “in the favor of foreign people.”<fnref n="64" /> Montfaucon also expressed his aspiration to reach an audience beyond

<footnote>editorial project: *Les monuments de la monarchie française*, 5 vols. (Paris: chez Julien-Michel Gandouin and Pierre-François Giffart, 1729-33).</footnote>

<footnote n="62">⁶² Montaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1’]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, i: “Il s’agit ici de toute l’antiquité: on en rapporte toutes les parties, on donne sur chacune un grand nombre de figures: ces figures sont expliquées avec toute l’exactitude & toute la précision dont j’ai été capable.”</footnote>

<footnote n="63">⁶³ This paragraph on the number and purpose of the figures was not included in Humphreys’s translation: Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, xi: “Ces planches renferment environ trente ou quarante mille figures, comme nous avons dit dans le Programme. Ce grand nombre a embarrassé plusieurs personnes: comme l’ouvrage contiendra-t-il tant de figures, si elles sont d’une juste grandeur, comme l’on promet, pourra-t-on les faire assez grandes pour qu’on en puisse remarquer distinctement toutes les parties, si l’on en met jusqu’à trente dans une planche? . . . on y verra les figures plus grandes même que j’avais projetté d’abord, parceque j’ai compris combien il étoit important de les faire de belle grandeur, afin qu’on en puisse mieux remarquer toues les parties, & qu’elles frappent davantage l’immagination.”</footnote>

<footnote n="64">⁶⁴ The Latin translation occupied the lower part of the pages of the preface. Montfaucon gave a detailed explanation of his choice in a paragraph that was omitted from Humphreys’s English translation: see Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, xiii-xiv.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.2. Antique medals and sculptures representing the Roman god Jupiter on one of the numerous plates included in Bernard de Montfaucon’s *L’antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures*. Montfaucon’s use of images reflects a material and documentary approach to the study of the past and its remains that can be compared with naturalists’ contemporary reliance on visual representations and specimens. Both natural history and antiquarianism (the equivalent of modern archeology) were, after all, fields of “history” as it was understood in the seventeenth century: that is, forms of knowledge devoted to the description of particulars and the collection of incontrovertible facts (be they about nature or about antiquity). (Universitätsbibliothek Heidelberg.)</figcaption></figure>

the circle of specialists; he opened the preface to the first volume with such a declaration of intentions: “It would be desirable that this work was executed well enough so that it interests *the public*.”<fnref n="65" /> Utility and curiosity were entangled, as they were in contemporary natural historical pursuits—an aspect which is the subject of the next chapter. Montfaucon, like most scholars who aspired to conquer the book market, hoped that “the Figures joined to the Explanations will be very useful. Instruction will be convey’d with Ease to the Reader, and he will find the Agreeable mix’d with the Profitable, according to Horace’s Advice.”<fnref n="66" />

<footnote n="65">⁶⁵ Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, i: “Il seroit à souhaitter que cet ouvrage fût aussi-bien executé, qu’il est intéressant pour le public.” Humphreys gives a slightly modified translation: “It were to be wished that a Work of such Use and Advantage to the Publick as this is, was executed in the best manner possible” (Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1⁴]).</footnote>

<footnote n="66">⁶⁶ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [c1⁴]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, x: “Ces figures jointes aux explications seront d’une utilité merveilleuse; on s’instruira là à peu de frais, & l’on joindra l’agreable à l’utile selon le precepte d’Horace.”</footnote>
From a formal point of view, images were indeed the cornerstone of Montfaucon’s *Antiquité expliquée*, just as they were of Plumier’s *Description and Traité des fougères*: each of the volumes was organized into books devoted to topics of antiquity as represented in objects (e.g., groups of deities figured in sculptures and reliefs, temples and sacred instruments, costumes, weapons, and so forth). Along the text, some sections were entirely devoted to the explanation of the figures, with a marginal reference to the plate in question and superscript numbers within the text indicating the particular figure that was being discussed. The Benedictine monk frequently used the evidence of the images to compare, or correct, that of chronicles, just like Tournefort adviced naturalists to do.<fnref n="67" />

Beyond these formal analogies, the *Antiquité expliquée* articulates another much more salient aspect that allows for further comparison between the fields of antiquarianism and natural history: that is, the material turn of the “historical” approach (to nature or to the past) around 1700.<fnref n="68" /> The origins of Montfaucon’s gargantuan visual project lay in his dissatisfaction with a purely philological work: all began thirty-four years earlier, as he relates in the preface, when his superiors at Saint-Germain-des-Prés assigned him the task of undertaking an edition of the Church fathers. He then realized the need of profane history for such a pious work: this was a thorny enterprise, however, given that “Antiquity hath been treated of by a great Number of skillful Writers . . . but the greater Number of the Moderns have run into an excessive length on this Subject.”<fnref n="69" /> The rationale behind the Maurist’s massive project runs, paradoxically, along the lines of a double information overload in the work of learning: not only that of the object of study itself, “this vast sea of antiquity” (*cette vaste mer de l’antiquité*), but also that of the whopping literary corpus dealing with it: “[the study of antiquity has] produced almost an infinite Number of Books,” Montfaucon complained, “and many of them large, and difficult to be procured; and when got, can scarce be read over in a Man’s Life.”<fnref n="70" /> The large quantity of writings on the ancient world by Greek and Latin profane authors, but especially by

<footnote n="67">⁶⁷ See Burke, “Images as Evidence,” 291.</footnote>

<footnote n="68">⁶⁸ This is close to Stephanie Moser’s thesis, for whom “the production of conventionalized drawings of antiquities during this period represents a fundamental shift in the approach to ancient material culture, signifying the recognition of objects as evidence”: Moser, “Making Expert Knowledge through the Image: Connections between Antiquarianism and Early Modern Scientific Illustration,” *Isis* 105 (2014), 58.</footnote>

<footnote n="69">⁶⁹ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1r-v]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, iii: “L’antiquité a été ci-devant traitée par un grand nombre d’habiles gens . . . mais la plûpart de ces livres modernes penchant par une trop grand longeur.”</footnote>

<footnote n="70">⁷⁰ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1v]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, v: “Tout cela nous a produit un nombre presque infini de livres, & souvent de gros livres, qu’il est très difficile de rassembler; & quand on les a rassemblez, la vie d’un homme suffit à peine pour en faire la lecture.”</footnote>
modern antiquarians, was a source of confusion rather than clarification: “when two
[authors] have wrote [sic] on the same Subject, they seldom agreed. The later Writers have
frequently refuted the foregoing. Some who have been wrote [sic] against by their
Contemporaries have replied. Nay, some who have seen they were justly opposed, would
not own their Mistake, but have endeavoured to raise a Dust, in order to retreat [all] the
better in the Cloud.”<fnref n="71" />

There exists a significant symmetry between Montfaucon’s complaints for the field
of antiquarianism and Perrault’s for the natural history of animals: the reasons articulated
by the Benedictine monk for composing his fifteen volumes of figures and explanations
of antiquities mirrored those by the academician a decade earlier. “There are a great many
things in Antiquity which the Antiquaries are not agreed about,” lamented Montfaucon:
those who aspired, therefore, “to inform themselves right” about the topic “must
separate what is true from what is false.”<fnref n="72" /> The monk presented his *Antiquité expliquée* as a
convenient tool to circumvent this endless task by offering a (colossal) abridgment of
facts, rather than opinions:

> Everyone will allow the Necessity of abridging a Study which the Multitude of Books has
> made so difficult. This is the Design of the following Work. I have reduced into one Body
> all Antiquity. By the Word *Antiquity* I mean only what may be the Object of the Sight [*ce que
> peut tomber sous les yeux*], and may be represented by Figures; and this alone is of a vast
> Extent.<fnref n="73" />

In other words, Montfaucon explicitly formulates an idea that seems to sustain
contemporary visual enterprises of natural history, too: that images could function as
legitimate sources for an historical knowledge—be it of an antiquity distant in time or of
a flora and fauna distant in space—whose epistemic foundations at the time were

<footnote n="71">⁷¹ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1v], and Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, iii: “Quand plusieurs on écrit sur le même sujet, il est rare qu’ils s’accordent ensemble. Ceux qui sont venus après on souvent refuté les auteurs qui les avoient précedez. Quelques-uns qui ont été contredits de leur vivant, on fait des repliques pour soutenir leur opinion, & repousser leurs adversaires. . . . Il y en a même qui se voient repris avec raison, & ne voulant pas avouer leur erreur, ont tâché de jetter de l’obscurité dans la matiere, pour se tirer comme ils pouvoient d’un mauvais pas.”</footnote>

<footnote n="72">⁷² Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b2r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, vi: “De plus, comme il y a beaucoup de choses dans l’antiquité dont les Antiquaires ne conviennent pas entre eux; ceux qui veulent s’instruire ont à démêler le vrai d’avec le faux.”</footnote>

<footnote n="73">⁷³ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b2r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, vi: “il n’est personne qui ne comprenne la nécessité d’abreger une étude que ce trop grand nombre de livres rend presque impracticable, quand on veut étendre ses connoissances sur toutes ses parties. C’est ce que je tâche de faire ici; je reduis dans un corps d’ouvrage toute l’antiquité: par ce terme d’antiquité j’entens seulement ce qui peut tomber sous les yeux, & ce qui se peut représenter dans des images; cela ne laisse pas d’être d’une très-vaste étendue.”</footnote>
grounded on a pragmatic and material approach. Objects functioned as evidence that
could be reproduced and described in writing and images, stockpiled, and arranged. More
important, they allowed a certain form of knowledge: “my Method is,” he announced,
“not to say any thing but what was certain or very probable.”<fnref n="74" />

Despite the extent of the work itself, Montfaucon optimistically claimed that, with it,
"two Years will be enough for the Study of Antiquity." The monk called upon the
patience of the reader to "carefully consider the images, to compare them with each
other, to relate them to the explanations: perhaps he will discover things that escaped
me."<fnref n="75" /> Images functioned for Montfaucon as substitutes of the traces of the past on
which the knowledge of antiquity ought to be based, rather than on the writings of
modern and ancient authors. The reader, Montfaucon tells us, "will find in these Images
mute Histories, which Authors do not mention."<fnref n="76" /> The production and accumulation of
these images (and that of their written explanations) amounted to the constitution of
sources—a practice that became central to the work of the erudite at the turn of the
eighteenth century.<fnref n="77" /> By presenting the visual representations and unpassionate textual
descriptions collected in the *Antiquité expliquée* as materials beyond the conflating and
often dissenting opinions and interpretations of the authors, Montfaucon was drawing a
distinction between original and derivative authorities or, in Arnaldo Momigliano's wise
words, "the difference between collecting facts and interpreting facts"—something that
"became the common patrimony of historical research only in the late seventeenth
century."<fnref n="78" />

Indeed, Montfaucon's images were imbued with a specific legitimacy: that of a direct
contact between the author and the object represented. The Maurist took care to
contextualize the production of his representations and to sustain in this way their
veracity: "All the Images are taken from ancient Monuments, excepting only about three

<footnote n="74">⁷⁴ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b2r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, vi: "Ma maxime est de ne dire sur chaque chose en particulier que ce qu'on en peut savoir de sûr ou de fort probable."</footnote>

<footnote n="75">⁷⁵ Humphreys omits most of this sentence in his translation: Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, vi-vii: “je conseille au lecteur de ne point courir en lisant, de se donner le loisir de bien considerer les images, de les comparer entre elles, de les rapporter aux explications: il y découvrira peut-être des choses qui m’auront échappé.”</footnote>

<footnote n="76">⁷⁶ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [c1r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, x: “On trouvera souvent dans les images des histoires muettes que les anciens auteurs n’apprennent pas.”</footnote>

<footnote n="77">⁷⁷ Stéphane Van Damme, “Les livres du P. Claude-François Ménestrier (1631-1705) et leur cheminement,” *Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine* 42, no. 1 (1995), 9.</footnote>

<footnote n="78">⁷⁸ Arnaldo Momigliano, “Ancient History and the Antiquarian,” *Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes* 13, no. 3-4 (1950), 286.</footnote>
or four, which were made upon the Descriptions of Authors, which is mention'd in its
proper place."<fnref n="79" />

If we are to believe Montfaucon, the 30,000 to 40,000 figures he claims to have included in the *Antiquité expliquée* were not initially gathered with publication in view, but for the sole sake of documenting, or creating a visual archive of, antiquity. Unsatisfied as he initially was with how much both profane authors and modern antiquarians had to say about the ancient world, Montfaucon “began to make a Collection of Drawings and antique Pieces about six and twenty Years ago.” His time was shared, he tells us, between the work with texts and that with objects, “between the Study of the Holy Scriptures and the Fathers, and that of Antiquity.” The monk began then complementing the study of texts with that of the remaining traces left by the past. A previous step for the writing of a history of the ancient world was, therefore, the gathering of antiquities (either literally or by means of images) and the constitution of a documentary collection—defined by Montfaucon as *recueils*, a common term also used by antiquarians and naturalists alike (including Plumier), especially when they referred to compilations of images. “From this time,” Montfaucon continues, “my Collection [*recueils*] continued to increase.”<fnref n="80" />

Moreover (and along lines similar to those of contemporary projects of natural history), the Maurist related the constitution of a documentary archive to the practice of travel: partly following in Mabillon's footsteps, Montfaucon undertook a three-year journey to Italy (from 1698 to 1701), in which “I spent the most part of the time going to see ancient Monuments, and Cabinets, in increasing my Collection [*mes recueils*], and gaining more Light in the vast Study of Antiquity.”<fnref n="81" /> The observations, notes, and gatherings of his journey to Italy resulted in a volume published shortly after his return

<footnote n="79">⁷⁹ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [c1r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, x: “À trois ou quatre figures près qui ont été faites sur la description des auteurs, comme j’en avertis en son lieu, toutes les images sont tirées d’anciens monuments.” On this question see Guichard, “‘D’après nature’ ou ‘chose vue.’”</footnote>

<footnote n="80">⁸⁰ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, ii: “je lûs les auteurs profanes tant grecs que latins; & non content de ce qu’ils nous apprennent sur la fable & sur l’histoire, je commençais il y a environ vingt-six ans, à ramasser des desseins & des pieces antiques. . . . Je partageois le tems de ma journée entre l’étude de l’Écriture sainte & des Peres, & celle de l’antiquité. Depuis ce tems-là mes recueils ont toujours grossi.”</footnote>

<footnote n="81">⁸¹ Montfaucon, *Antiquity explained*, trans. Humphreys, sig. [b1r]; Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, ii: “La meilleure partie de ce tems fut emploiée à visiter les monumens antiques & les cabinets qui s’y trouvent en grand nombre, à augmenter mes recueils, & à acquerir de nouvelles connoissances sur cette vaste mere de l’antiquité.”</footnote>
by Jean Anisson (the printer of Plumier's *Nova plantarum Americanarum genera*, 1703) and illustrated with woodcuts.<fnref n="82" />

Naturalists, therefore, were not the only sort of historians whose work began to rely on a culture of mobility based on the making and accumulation of firsthand observations. Jean Mabillon offers a telling comparison when considering contemporary traveling naturalists: his journey through Italy and Germany during the 1680s aimed at the search of manuscripts and rare books for the royal library. Under the actual patronage of Colbert, both of Mabillon's travels were announced to be made "on the orders and at the expenses of His Majesty" (a pervasive formula also in naturalists' travel accounts, as we will see in chapter 2). His fellow Benedictine monk and biographer, Dom Thierry Ruinard (1657-1709), reported on how the master gathered and copied manuscripts and described monuments and antiquities during his peregrinations through cabinets, churches, and monasteries across the Holy Roman Empire and the Italian Peninsula.<fnref n="83" />

Like Mabillon's, Montfaucon's *recueils* brought together objects of the past and drawings of those he could not possess. Most of the engravings in the *Antiquité expliquée*, therefore, represented monuments and objects conserved in cabinets to which he (or his assistants) had direct access, but the claim of firsthand observation did not exclude witnessing delegated to a network of correspondents spread across Europe: a good number of pages at the end of the preface was precisely devoted to acknowledging those "who have communicated to me ancient pieces for their inclusion in this work." Scholars and educated collectors sent him drawings of the objects in their cabinets (occasionally the objects themselves) or copies of engravings and manuscript pictures they kept in their libraries.<fnref n="84" /> Montfaucon's collection can be seen as a "paper museum," but one that (unlike Cassiano del Pozzo's or most of Plumier's) found its way into print.

The work of Montfaucon illustrates the centrality of the accumulation and managing of visual (and textual) information in the work of the seventeenth-century historian. The production and organization of sources (that is, documents standing for the objects themselves and consequently impervious to controversies) was at the core of history's descriptive endeavor (whether that of the antiquarian or that of the naturalist).

<footnote n="82">⁸² Diarium italicum. Sive monumentorum veterum, bibliothecarum, musaeorum, &c. Notitiae singulares in itinerario collectae, additis schematibus ac figuris (Paris: apud Joannem Anisson Typographiae Regiae Praefectum, 1702).</footnote>

<footnote n="83">⁸³ Thompson, "Mabillon and Montfaucon," 236; Thierry Ruinart, *Abrégé de la vie de dom Jean Mabillon* (Paris: chez la veuve François Muguet et Charles Robustel, 1709), 95-146.</footnote>

<footnote n="84">⁸⁴ Montfaucon, *Antiquité expliquée*, xviii-xxiv.</footnote>
For all the obvious differences between them, some underlying convictions seem to underpin Tournefort’s “need to seek the plants in the highest mountains,” Fontenelle’s flamboyant narration of a foundational turn of botany towards the “books sprinkled over the surface of the whole Earth,” Plumier’s own self-congratulatory praise of the value of travel, Coronelli’s exhortation in favor of the gathering of those “proofs” (*tali prove*) required by history, and Montfaucon’s restriction to “what may be the Object of the Sight.” In the first place, they reflect a concern for the kind of evidence used in the making of their respective histories, by which they drew a sharp distinction between literary and non-literary sources—with a clear preference for the latter and a generally rhetorical disfavor of the former. In his study on antiquarianism, Momigliano argued that Montfaucon and the antiquarians of his time laid the distinction (foundational for the modern historical method) between “collecting facts and interpreting facts” as the essential premise for the study of the past. For Momigliano, “non-literary evidence became especially authoritative in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.”

In the second place, the relationship between non-literary and literary sources was laid on similar—if not plainly equal—terms. For both antiquarians like Momigliano and naturalists like Perrault, Tournefort, and Plumier, learned empiricism took the form of a verification of the literary tradition via the making and collection of firsthand observations. Neither antiquarians nor naturalists were banning literary sources altogether from their respective forms of historical knowledge, but rather introducing the “method of checking literary by non-literary evidence,” as Momigliano wrote for the case of antiquarians. This methodological principle is strikingly analogous to that articulated in the realm of natural history: as we will see below, Tournefort staed that one of the principal aims of the botanist should be the verification and amendment of previous authors’ descriptions through a direct contact with the flora.

In the third place, the ideal of collection (and consequent classification) was also common to both natural and antiquarian history: as noted by Burke for antiquarianism, the “concern for system and method was associated with a concern for evidence”— which I shall analyze, for the cases of natural history, in chapter 4.<fnref n="85" />

For Momigliano, the emphasis on the value of non-literary evidence was an answer to the generalized controversy on the value of historical evidence during the seventeenth century: “bias was easily scented everywhere.” Responses to this situation were varied,

<footnote n="85">⁸⁵ Burke, “Images as Evidence,” 275.</footnote>
from a pessimistic skepticism to attempts (like Montfaucon's) "to put historical knowledge on a safer basis by analyzing the sources thoroughly and drawing, if possible, upon other evidence than that provided by past historians." In the realm of ancient history, members of religious orders in particular—such as the Maurists—actively participated in this quest for a "sound historical knowledge." The use of images in projects of historical inquiry (from Montfaucon's to Plumier's) needs to be understood in relation to this attempt to provide a basis firmer than literary evidence. Momigliano gives the example of the Italian historian and astronomer Francesco Bianchini (1662-1729), who produced in 1697 *La istoria universal provata con monumenti, e figurata con simboli de gli antichi* (Universal history based on the evidence of monuments and represented in symbols from the ancients). Bianchini's title in a way echoes that of Montfaucon, and— like this—it says a lot about the approach of the author; for Bianchini, "the *figures of the facts*, drawn from extant ancient monuments, are in my view symbols and proofs of history" (*le figure dei fatti, ricavate da monumenti d'antichità oggidì conservate, mi sono sembrate simboli insieme e pruove dell'istoria*).<fnref n="86" /> Images served them well for this purpose. Monuments were proofs for the writing of history, and images an adequate medium to collect those facts.<fnref n="87" />

By bringing up the debates in the making of antiquarian knowledge in this study of a traveling naturalist's iconographic work, I aim at stressing that much necessary light can be shed on the role of images in natural history if we consider the parallel developments in the field of antiquarianism. The new importance attributed to images by naturalists can only be understood against the background of the transformations of the natural historical method which took place in reaction to the perceived overload of natural information, mostly from overseas. Plumier's corpus of images was an attempt to grapple with this intellectual context of generalized distrust (however rhetorical it might have been) on literary sources. In other words, it is not that natural history experienced a "visual turn" at the time, a shift towards a visual epistemology of firsthand observations that could be exclusively fixed and mobilized through images. It was rather that materials

<footnote n="86">⁸⁶ Francesco Bianchini, *La istoria universale provata con monumenti, e figurata con simboli degli antichi* (Rome: stampata à spese dell'Autore nella Stamperia di Antonio di Rossi, 1697), 10, quoted in Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," 299. My emphasis.</footnote>

<footnote n="87">⁸⁷ Momigliano refers to the "history of the attempts to create a scientific iconography from, say, Jacques Spon, *Miscellanea Eruditae Antiquitatis* (1679) to J. Spence, *Polymetis* (1747), passing through L'Antiquité expliquée* by Montfaucon (1718): Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian," 304. Burke argues that it was precisely this emphasis on visual evidence at the turn of the eighteenth century that allowed a history of "barbarians" (as peoples producing scarce texts) to consolidate: Burke, "Images as Evidence."</footnote>
(natural specimens and remains of the past) came to have an equally fundamental evidentiary power in these two descriptive forms of knowledge.

We have passed from the dissected bodies of far-flung animals to the artifacts of a far-flung past, from the adventurous Plumier and Tournefort to the erudite Montfaucon, and yet we still encounter very similar methods and principles at work. It is now time to specify the relation of late seventeenth-century naturalists with the literary sources they so vehemently claimed to abandon.

## Natural books and the Book of Nature

Despite Perrault's passionate exhortation in favor of a natural history made out of “certitude & truth” by means of a direct experience of the natural world, his and his circle's work continued to be carried out in light of the textual tradition. He acknowledged this in his preface: “we could not avoid straying from the path we initially sought to follow, and found it necessary to take part in the controversies of Naturalists on the problem of knowing if some of the Animals we study are those mentioned by the Ancients.”<fnref n="88" /> This tension between the seen and the read is a paramount component of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century natural history, and a pervasive feature in Plumier's iconographic work. Along the lines set out by Perrault, references to ancient and modern authors were made in terms of a comparison between what authors said and what could be observed in nature—or a verification of the former by the latter, as stated by Momigliano. The leader of the botanical equivalent of Perrault's project in the Paris Academy of Sciences, Denis Dodart (1634-1707), followed along these lines in his *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes* (Essays for the history of plants [1676]): “In order to arrange these Memoirs, & to prepare them to be printed, the Company decided that the People who were charged with this work had to read for each plant all the ancient and modern Authors of whom they had some knowledge, so as to confront their descriptions to ours and to excerpt those facts that we could consider worth being reported, & verified.”<fnref n="89" />

<footnote n="88">⁸⁸ [Perrault,] “Préface,” sig. [e⁷]: “Nous n’avons pu aussi nous empêcher quelquefois de nous écarter de ce chemin si droit & si serré, que nous nous sommes proposez de suivre, & nous avons cru estre obligez d’entrer dans les controverses qui sont entre les Naturalistes, touchant la difficulté qu’il y a de sçavoir, si quelques-uns des Animaux que nous avons, sont précisément ceux dont les Anciens ont parlé.”</footnote>

<footnote n="89">⁸⁹ Denis Dodart, ed., *Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire des plantes* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1676), 51: “Pour disposer ces Memoirs, & les mettre en stat de paroistre, la Compagnie a resolu que les Personnes qu'elle a particulierement chargées de ce travail, liront sur chaque Plante tous les Autheurs anciens & modernes, dont il pourroient avoir quelque connaissance, tant pour confronter leurs descriptions aux nostres, que pour faire l'extrait des faits que l'on jugera dignes d'estre rapportez, & d'estre verifiez.”</footnote>
This is not far from Tournefort’s considerations of the aims of natural history in his *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris* (History of the plants growing around Paris [1698]). In the introduction to this study on the capital’s regional flora, Tournefort listed three main goals of his history of plants: “1. The enumeration (*dénombrement*) of the plants growing around Paris; 2. The critique of the authors that have written about these plants, & whose descriptions are not consistent with the natural (*ne sont pas conformes au naturel*); 3. The choice of the virtues & usages that the best Physicians have proposed.”<fnref n="90" /> While the inventorial component of natural history around 1700 will be further evinced in chapter 4, we must focus here on the erudite dimension of natural history hinted at by Tournefort. Enumeration and “the critique of the authors” were two closely related tasks after all, for they constituted what he called “the knowledge of plants” (*la connaissance des plantes*) based on grasping the names given to them by previous authors. The work on naming, which is the subject of chapter 4, allowed the botanist to collate the different denominations that various authors had previously given to the same plant; to compare those names (which are, for Tournefort, “like definitions”) with the living plants; to draw, finally, a comprehensive inventory on which the work of classification into genera and classes could be based. The “knowledge of plants” and their names was a preliminary—yet unavoidable—step to that of their medical virtues, which was indisputably, Tournefort reluctantly acknowledged, the most useful part of botany.<fnref n="91" />

For all the vociferous disapprovals to wordy books, French natural history by 1700 was still far from having lost altogether the textual criticism component of its Renaissance days, as naturalists loudly claimed. Perusing the “book of nature” and poring over the books of men were still two sides of the same coin.<fnref n="92" /> Botany, as Tournefort conceived it, aimed not only at acquiring new knowledge on both familiar and exotic plants, but also (and crucially) at surveying and arranging what was already known and at confirming the exactitude of the existing mass of knowledge by comparing it with reality. Or, putting it another way, for naturalists like Tournefort (but also Perrault and Plumier)

<footnote n="90">⁹⁰ Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, *Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris* (Paris: de l'Imprimerie royale, 1698), sig. a4r: “On s'est proposé trois choses dans cet Ouvrage: 1. le dénombrement des plantes qui naissent aux environs de Paris: 2. la critique des auteurs qui ont parlé de ces plantes, & dont les descriptions ne sont pas conformes au naturel: 3. le choix des vertus & des usages que les plus habiles Medecins ont proposez.”</footnote>

<footnote n="91">⁹¹ Tournefort, *Élémens*, vol. 1, 1-2.</footnote>

<footnote n="92">⁹² For an analysis of the role that books played in overseas natural expeditions during the late eighteenth century, see Daniela Bleichmar, *Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Culture in the Hispanic Enlightenment* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2012), esp. 54-66.</footnote>
the “study of the observable parts of plants” (*l'examen des parties sensibles des plantes*) ought
to be coupled with bookish inquiries.

This central aspect of the culture of natural history was far from being one more of
the Frenchmen's many peculiarities. Take as an example one of the most influential
naturalists on the other side of the Channel: Plumier's contemporary John Ray was
preparing the third and last volume of his massive *Historia plantarum* (History of plants
[1686-1704])—whose publication seemed imminent to him but was not to be printed
until 1704. Although he insistently praised the direct observation of the specimens, his
correspondence bears witness to the central role that the management of information
played in his daily work. In 1698, for instance, he announced to the influential physician
and collector Hans Sloane (1660-1735) what were for him the two main and
complementary merits of the third volume of his *Historia*: on the one hand, it digested
most of the botanical information so far published by other authors (“It takes a great
deal. The last six volumes of the ‘Hort. Malab.’ entire; all Father Plumier’s work; all Dr.
Plukenet’s; Dr. Herman’s ‘Paradisus Batavus’; Sig. Boccone’s ‘Museum Plantarum’;
Commelin’s more Rare Plants of the Amsterdam Garden; besides collections out of
many other books, and descriptions of dried plants”); on the other hand, it treated a
“multitude of rare plants not yet described by any[one else].”<fnref n="93" />

The work of the naturalist thus conceived was doubly linked to book (or paper)
culture. The first connection regards the figure of the naturalist as an author and his
relation with the production and commerce of his own volumes—an aspect that I shall
discuss further in chapter 5 for the case of Plumier. The second connection has to do
with the naturalist as an almost obsessive compiler and manager of textual and graphic
information. To duly digest the little books of men came to be an enterprise of almost as
gargantuan in proportion as reading the book of nature. In the very same letter to Sloane,
Ray claimed that his supplement was not still ready, for “your collection of Maryland
plants I am desirous to add to this work,” and “I shall add [too] Herman’s ‘Parad. Bat.,’
and Boccone’s ‘Museum Rariorum,’ which I have already almost transcribed into papers,
to lie in their proper places inserted into my Supplement.”<fnref n="94" /> For Ray too, the firsthand
inspection of nature went hand in hand with textual management, as reflected in his
praise of Sloane’s work on Jamaican plants: “I cannot but admire your industry and

<footnote n="93">⁹³ John Ray to Hans Sloane, Black Notley, March 1, 1698, in *The Correspondence of John Ray*, ed. Edwin Lankester (London: printed for the Ray Society, 1848), 336.</footnote>

<footnote n="94">⁹⁴ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, March 1, 1698, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 336-7.</footnote>
patience in reading and comparing such a multitude of relations and accounts of voyages.

... You have done botanists a great service in distributing or reducing the confused heap of names, and contracting the number of species. But who is able to do the like? No man but who is alike qualified, and hath seen the things growing in their natural places.<fnref n="95" /> The Englishman lamented in this respect that he barely had access to living specimens: “Did I live in London, and had I opportunity frequently to visit the physic gardens thereabouts, and to observe and describe the new species, I might make a better Supplement to my History than now I shall do.”<fnref n="96" />

That the direct observation and exact description of the natural world interlocked
with the manipulation and collation of texts and images becomes particularly evident in
Plumier's manuscript and printed images. The depictions by the Minim friar of the West
Indian flora and fauna were a site of the dissemination and reemergence of written
culture—usually in a literal sense, as texts were scattered across the graphic space of the
depictions. This was the case of both printed and manuscript images. The plates of
Plumier's *Description des plantes de l'Amérique* and *Traité des fougères de l'Amérique* always bore
the name of the plant and often Plumier's signature; detailed bookish references were
usually made, too, in the accompanying texts.<fnref n="97" /> His multifarious manuscript drawings
were virtually never signed, but they usually presented other sorts of textual information:
names, descriptive notes, and (more importantly) numerous references to authors who
had previously treated and pictured the plant or animal in question. The literary tradition
that shaped late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century naturalists crops up within
Plumier's images in two ways: either by means of lettering (letters sprinkled over the
images that connected specific parts of them with marginal notes or the text
accompanying them), or by references to authors directly annotated on or next to the
depictions.

The vast majority of Plumier's images, printed or manuscript, were in all likelihood
made out of the living specimens observed by the friar in the West Indies, but that does
not mean that the bookish tradition did not often weigh heavily on both how and what
to observe and depict in the field. A good example is the drawing of the remora among
Plumier's "notes diverses," a folder of various sorts of graphic and textual notes taken
during his fieldwork in the Caribbean islands. The remora, a kind of fish with a

<footnote n="95">⁹⁵ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, June 23, 1696, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 295.</footnote>

<footnote n="96">⁹⁶ Ray to Sloane, Black Notley, June 23, 1696, in *Correspondence of John Ray*, 295.</footnote>

<footnote n="97">⁹⁷ See below, chap. 5.</footnote>
distinctive oval sucker-like organ used to attach itself to large marine animals, was a beast resonant with meaning in the Western tradition. It had for a long time been associated with a mythical creature described by Pliny the Elder and subsequently by medieval bestiaries and Renaissance alchemical texts. Reputed for its coldness, the *echeneis* (from the Greek ἔχειν, to hold, and ναῦς, ship) was believed to attach itself to ships and hold them back despite its small size. Well into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the remora continued to bewilder authors and naturalists equally: it was one of the exotic animals that the humanist Thomas Platter (1599-1682) reported to have seen in a cabinet of curiosities in Montpellier (along with a chameleon, a crocodile, and a pelican), and Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655) narrated, in his *Les États et Empires du Soleil*, the fabled battle between a hot salamander and an icy remora (l'animal glaçon), cold “in so an eminent degree, that passing under a Ship the Vessel is seized with Cold, and struck with such a Numens, that it cannot wag out of the place.”<fnref n="98" /> The fame of the ship-stopping fish went well beyond the confines of literature and lent itself to inflamed scholarly debates, from the Polish physician Jan Jonston to Cardano and Scaliger.<fnref n="99" />

The remora appears among Plumier’s papers on several occasions (fig. 1.3). In one of them, two detailed ink drawings reproduced an upper and a lower view of the *echeneis* (the former displaying its characteristic sucker) and related the animal to Marcgraf’s “pira quiba” and to its vernacular name, “grand succet.”<fnref n="100" /> Another version of the same drawings, also in ink, had its lines marked in dots with a needle (a technique to copy pictures from one leaf to another) and some marginal notes gave a detailed account of the colors of the fish, missing in the drawing (“the whole in pinkish-grey, the belly in white,” and so forth).<fnref n="101" /> Some other pencil drawings of the remora, perhaps the sketches on which the ink ones were based, appear on another loose, unnumbered sheet filled on

<footnote n="98">⁹⁸ Thomas Platter, *Journal of a Younger Brother*, quoted in 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), 286; Savinien de Cyrano de Bergerac, *The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Worlds of the Moon and Sun*, trans. A. Lovell (London: Henry Rhodes, 1687), 160-69. On Cyrano’s science-fiction novel, see Frédérique Ait-Touati, *Fictions of the Cosmos: Science and Literature in the Seventeenth Century* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 63-71.</footnote>

<footnote n="99">⁹⁹ Brian P. Copenhaver, “A Tale of Two Fishes: Magical Objects in Natural History from Antiquity through the Scientific Revolution,” *Journal of the History of Ideas* 52, no. 3 (1991), 372-98, and *Magic in Western Culture from Antiquity to the Enlightenment* (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), esp. 127-54.</footnote>

<footnote n="100">¹⁰⁰ BCMNHN MS 24 “Poissons, oiseaux, lezards, serpens et insectes. Dessinés par le Pere Plumier,” fol. 82: “Pira Quiba Marcg. L.[iber] IV C.[aput] XVIII. Vulgo grand succet.” Georg Marcgraf, “Historiae rerum naturalium Brasiliae libri octo,” in Marcgraf and Willem Piso, *Historia naturalis Brasiliae, auspicio et beneficio illustriss. I. Mauritii Com. Vassau illus provincie et maris summi praefecti adornata in qua non tantum plantae et Animalia, sed et in digenarum morbi, ingenia et mores describiuntur et iconibus supra quingentas illustrantur* (Leiden: apud Franciscum Hackium; and Amsterdam: apud Lud. Elzevium, 1648), 180.</footnote>

<footnote n="101">¹⁰¹ BCMNHN MS 31 “Poissons et coquilles dessinés par le père Plumier Minime,” fol. 27.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_19.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.3. (top) Drawing of the mythical remora or *echeneis* by Plumier. (bottom left) Pencil drawing of the remora among Plumier's *papiers divers*. Note that the four drawings show different sides of the fish, as if it was "turning" on its own axis—a technique he also used for other natural objects such as a pelican's skull or shells. (Muséum national d'histoire naturelle, Paris.) (bottom right) Depiction of the remora and other fishes in one of the plates of Jean-Baptiste du Tertre's *Histoire des Antilles*. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.)</figcaption></figure>
both sides with scattered entries of his travel log and with a sketch of the coastal
landscape of Martinique on the back. There were four aligned images of the remora, each
displaying a different view of it: profile, upper view, lower view and a tilted view—as if
the fish was turning on its own axis. In some marginal notes in ink the author described
it as “piscis peltatus” (“shield-bearing” fish), commonly known in French as *succet*.
Plumier also identified it with “la remore du Père du Tertre” and, once again, Marcgraf’s
“iperuquiba” or “piraquiba.” In the abovementioned second volume of his *Histoire
générale des Antilles* (1657), the French Dominican Jean-Baptiste du Tertre devoted a
section to this sort of fish: after a page-long description of the appearance of the remora,
Father Du Tertre declared himself hesitant about what “some Authors affirm about the
Remora, that it stops ships altogether,” but he ended up attributing the myth to the fact
that these animals were found in the hull of ships run aground. In Marcgraf’s text, the
fish was described formally, but no reference was made to the legend of its ship-staying
powers.<fnref n="102" />

Out of Plumier’s hundreds of variegated drawings of Caribbean fishes, those of the
remora are among the very few depicting a marine animal so methodically and
comprising such a number of bookish references. The legendary weight of the creature
prompted a much more thorough comparison of the authors with the real beast along
the lines explicitly laid down by Tournefort in his listing of the aims of natural history—
to verify previous descriptions vis-à-vis the natural (*le naturel*). The anatomy of the remora
seemed all the more necessary given its attributed wondrous capacities.

The comparison of specific plants and animals with the literary corpus by which they
had previously become known in Europe was on occasion done in a particularly
meticulous way. Plumier’s astonishing manuscript drawings of an American crocodile,
with which we shall deal further in chapter 3, offer a good example of how the naturalist
nimbly scurried back and forth between the books of men and the book of nature. The
drawings of the crocodile, a set of about twenty sheets, purportedly depicted the steps by
which the friar dissected the creature. Despite (or precisely because of) its frequent
presence in cabinets of curiosities and visual representations throughout the early
modern period, the crocodile continued to carry a considerable symbolic significance by

<footnote n="102">102 BCMNHN MS 33 “Notes diverses,” unpaginated folio. Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, *Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François* (Paris: chez Thomas Iolly, 1667), vol. 2, 222–23.</footnote>
the turn of the eighteenth century among naturalists and curious people.<fnref n="103" /> Only fifteen years before Plumier was examining the entrails of an specimen in Martinique, Nehemiah Grew (1641-1712), the pioneer of vegetable anatomy, produced a richly illustrated catalog of the “natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society and preserved in Gresham College,” London. Among oddities such as the skull of a hippopotamus, a fragment of rhinoceros skin, numerous shells, and several tortoise carapaces (the selection is interesting when compared to Plumier’s own objects of interest in his corpus), the collection comprised three stuffed crocodiles, the windpipe of a fourth, and the skeleton of a fifth. The latter was described in detail and pictured on a double-page copperplate (fig. 1.4). A similarly lavish catalog on the Parisian cabinet at the library Saint-Geneviève, about half a mile from the Jardin du roi, appeared soon after. Its author, Père Claude du Molinet (1620-1687), the keeper of the collection, described and depicted a “petit crocodile” among the “most singular animals.” He noted that the creature is “currently well-known in France, due to the quantity brought from Egypt and other places”—one had been famously kept at Versailles in the previous years. Du Molinet also confirmed information that had been circulating about the beast for a long time, such as that it only moved the upper jaw—an idea that Plumier was to analyze in detail in his anatomical drawings and a letter printed in the *Journal de Trévoux*.<fnref n="104" />

Plumier’s own anatomical drawings of the crocodile were filled with textual notes and frequent references to one author in particular, the Danish scholar Ole Borch (1626-1690). Also know by the Latinized version Olaus Borrichius, Borch epitomized the figure of the early modern polyhistor: educated in medicine and physician of Frederik II and Christian V of Denmark, he held the first chair of chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, of which he would later become the rector, and also taught philology, poetry, and botany. He is especially known in our times for his works on chemistry, for his mentoring of the famous anatomist and geologist Nicolas Steno (1638-1686), and for his six-year journey through Europe (1660-66), in which he met personalities like Comenius in Amsterdam, Boyle in London, Melchisédech Thévenot in Paris, and Queen Christina of Sweden in Rome. In his notes and drawings on the American crocodile,

<footnote n="103">¹⁰³ Spencer J. Weinreich, “Thinking with Crocodiles: An Iconic Animal at the Intersection of Early-Modern Religion and Natural Philosophy,” *Early Science and Medicine* 20 (2015), 209-40.</footnote>

<footnote n="104">¹⁰⁴ Nehemiah Grew, *Musaeum Regalis Societatis. Or A Catalogue & Description of the Natural and Artificial Rarities Belonging to the Royal Society* (London: printed by W. Rawlins, for the Author, 1681), 41-5, pl. 4; Claude du Molinet, *Le cabinet de la bibliothèque de Sainte Geneviève* (Paris: chez Antoine Dezallier, 1692), 199-200, pl. 41; Plumier, “Réponse du R. P. Plumier à diverses questions d’un Curieux sur le Crocodile, sur le Colubri, & sur la Tortuë,” *Mémoires de Trévoux* 4 (1703), 165-75.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_20.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.4. Skeleton of a crocodile, one of the “natural and artificial rarities belonging to the Royal Society” in London, from Nehamiah Grew’s *Musaeum Regalis Societatis*. (Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee.) (right) “Petit crocodile,” one of the “most singular animals” in the cabinet of the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, curated by Claude du Molinet. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.) During his journeys on the Caribbean islands, much of Plumier’s attention went to those natural phenomena, such as the crocodile, that most captivated his contemporaries.</figcaption></figure>
Plumier referred to one of Borch's publications, the *Hermetis, Aegyptiorum, et chemicorum sapientia vindicata* (The wisdom of Hermes, the Egyptians, and the chemists vindicated). Published in 1674, the book was a passionate defense of the enduring Paracelsian chemical and medical tradition, which extended its roots as far as ancient Egypt and the mythical figure of Hermes Trimegistus.<fnref n="105" /> The *Hermetis sapientia* was an endorsement of experimental chemistry and, at the same time, its supposed millenary and Hermetic genealogy—two non-conflicting aspects of Borch's intellectual project. Borch's treatise epitomizes, in this sense, the fluid interconnections between natural philosophy, experimentalism, and erudition in late seventeenth-century Europe.

The use that Plumier made of Borch's book, however, did not regard the Hermetic tradition: his references across the drawings were limited to the tenth chapter, “De Aristotele” (On Aristotle), discussing the Stagirite's history of animals: Borch devoted about fifteen pages to the Egyptian crocodile (the best known typology at the time) and its anatomy. <fnref n="106" /> The Minim friar connected very specific parts of the anatomy of the beast to Borch's text. <fnref n="107" /> In a leaf devoted to the thoracic cage he remarked that he could not find the “bony tuber” described by the Danish scholar. In another sheet the symbol “+” sent the reader from the main text, dealing with the spinal column of the crocodile, to a small box in the corner in which Plumier remarked the implausibility of one of Borch's hypotheses on the growth of the animal based on his own observations of the vertebrae. Another symbol “+” connected the pictures of the two kidneys in one of the drawings presenting the animal lying on its back to a marginal note speaking for the image: “brownish red and made of a very tender vermiform substance. . . . I think this is what Olaus Borrichius calls *rennes*. Page. 276.” Finally, one of the numbers spread across the drawing of the beast's mouth referred a part in the inside of the jaws to a marginal note

<footnote n="105">¹⁰⁵ Ole Borch, *Hermetis, Aegyptiorum, et chemicorum sapientia ab Hermanni Conringii animadversionibus vindicata* (Copenhagen: sumptibus Petri Hauboldi, 1674). On the author, see H. D. Schepelern's introduction to Olai Borrichii Itinerarium 1660-1665: *The Journal of the Danish polyhistor Ole Borch* (Copenhagen: The Danish Society of Language and Literature, 1983), vol. 1, i-xlviii, and Toshihiro Yamada, “Hooke-Steno relations reconsidered: Reassessing the roles of Ole Borch and Robert Boyle,” in *The Revolution in Geology from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment*, ed. Gary D. Rosenberg, Memoir 203 (Boulder, CO: The Geological Society of America, 2009), 107-126. On his endorsement of the Paracelsian tradition in chemistry, see Ferdinando Abbri, “Alchemy and Chemistry: Chemical Discourses in the Seventeenth Century,” *Early Science and Medicine* 5, no. 2 (2000), 214-226; Nancy G. Siraisi, *History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning* (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2007), chap. 7: “Beyond Europe,” 225-60.</footnote>

<footnote n="106">¹⁰⁶ Borch, *Hermetis sapientia*, 235-78 (esp. 268-78 on the crocodile).</footnote>

<footnote n="107">¹⁰⁷ Plumier also referred to Borch's pages on the anatomy of the crocodile in one of his letters to Baulot in La Rochelle: MMC MS 867, fol. 148r-v, subsequently published in the *Journal de Trévoux* (1704), 164-74.</footnote>
identifying it as a “scutiform cartilage. This is perhaps what Borrichius calls epiglottis, libro hermetis sapientia pag. 275, numero IV.”<fnref n="108" />

Firsthand observation was, therefore, not in contradiction to an erudite work in embracing the rich textual tradition which Plumier and his contemporaries inherited and in which they had been trained. This corpus of natural historical texts and images circulated and was transmitted in sometimes convoluted ways. Take the example of the *Bois de couleuvre* or *Lignum colubrinum* (perhaps our snakeroot): Plumier described it and pictured it twice in his *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*. He gave to this plant the name *Arum hederaceum*, *ampliis foliis perforatis* (climber with wide pierced leaves), and identified it with the plants described by three other authors: Jean-Baptiste du Tertre's *bois de couleuvre* (in the second volume of his *Histoire générale des Antilles* [1657], devoted to natural history, "traité 3. chap. 3. parag. 13"); Gaspard Bauhin's *Clematis Malabarensis, foliis vitis, colore dracunculi* (in his *Pinax theatri botanici* [1623]), and the *lignum colubrinum primum* by "Christophorus Acosta," to whose work Plumier referred only as "Lugd. lib. 18. cap. 140."<fnref n="109" /> His use of this latter work illustrates well the extent to which the study of nature—even as practiced by a scholar as well traveled as the Minim friar—relied on bookish practices. Cristóvão da Costa (ca. 1525-1593) was a Portuguese physician and naval surgeon who published a treatise in Spanish in 1578 on Asian plants, the *Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al biuo por Christoval Acosta medico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente* (Treatise of the drugs and medicines of the East Indies, with the plants drawn from life by Cristóvão da Costa, physician and surgeon who saw them “ocularly”). Cristóvão da Costa’s treatise drew extensively from a previous one: the *Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas mediçinais da India* (1563) by the Portuguese Jewish physician Garcia da Orta (1500-1568). The *Tractado* was the object of several editions, translations, and adaptations over the following century (e.g., one of the most used versions was the Latin translation by Clusius, who published it under the title “Aromatum et medicamentorum in Orientali India nascentium historia” as the ninth book of his *Exoticorum liber decem*, printed at Plantin's Leiden workshop in 1605).<fnref n="110" />

<footnote n="108">¹⁰⁸ BCMNHN MS 30, fol. 18, 20, 23, 25.</footnote>

<footnote n="109">¹⁰⁹ Plumier, *Description*, 40-1 and plates 56-7.</footnote>

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Cristóvão da Costa, *Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias orientales, con sus plantas debuxadas al biuo por Christoval Acosta medico y cirujano que las vio ocularmente* (Burgos: por Martín de Victoria, 1578), and Garcia da Orta, *Colóquios dos simples e drogas e cousas mediçinais da India* (Goa: por Ioannes de Endem, 1563). The bibliography on Garcia da Orta is vast: among the works I found most useful, see C. R. Boxer's classic *Two Pioneers of Tropical Medicine: Garcia d'Orta and Nicolás Monardes* (London: Wellcome Historical Medical Library, 1963), as well as the recent articles by Juan Pimentel and Isabel Soler: "Painting Naked Truth: The</footnote>
However, Plumier’s mysterious quotation of Cristóvão da Costa (“Lugd. lib. 18. cap. 140”) does not correspond to any of the works mentioned. On the contrary, Plumier probably used, not a direct translation or edition of Cristóvão da Costa’s treatise, but a completely different work: the *Historia generalis plantarum* in two volumes by the French botanist and physician Jacques Dalechamps (1513-1588), also known as the Lyon herbal. Plumier knew and admired the work of Dalechamps enough to honor him with the genus *Dalechampia* in his *Nova genera*. Dalechamps’s *Historia* was published for the first time in 1586 in Lyon (“Lugd.[uni]”) and was often referred to as *Historia plantarum Lugdunensis* because a part of it addressed the flora around that city. The book, actually one of the largest herbals to date, compiled and abridged both textual information and images from previous botanical treatises like Pierandrea Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides or André Thevet’s natural history of the Americas. The eighteenth book mentioned by Plumier dealt with foreign plants (“plantis peregrinis”) and chapter 140 with the *lignum colubrinum*, where Dalechamps copied the woodcuts and written descriptions of the snakeroot in Cristóvão da Costa’s *Tractado* (fig. 1.5).<fnref n="111" />

In other words, Plumier pictured and renamed a species of snakeroot in his *Description*, but not because it was an unknown species at the time. Quite the contrary, he was publishing his drawings of the plant precisely because images and descriptions of it had been circulating extensively through book after book since the sixteenth century—not to mention that Cristóvão da Costa’s figure of the snakeroot had been recycled and copied widely by scholars like Daléchamps. There was quite a lot at stake in Plumier’s deceptively neutral gesture of giving a new image and a new name to the snakeroot, while listing the authors who had hitherto described and named it. To begin with, because this is a case in point of how Plumier and his contemporaries pondered the novelty of the New World’s nature against the background of the Old one and its bookish tradition. But also because, in a way, he was casting doubt on previous descriptions by scholars who either were not travelers themselves or else whose images could be branded as doubtful precisely because they had been reprinted and recycled a good number of times. But, at the very same time, Plumier was here attempting to assert his own authority as a firsthand observer through the very same printed medium. Even for a generation of

<footnote>Colóquios of Garcia da Orta (1563)” *Journal of Early Modern History* 18 (2014), 101-20 and “Garcia de Orta: notas sobre las fronteras de la ciencia renacentista,” in *Traducción y representaciones del conflicto desde España y América. Una perspectiva interdisciplinar* (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2015), 90-105.</footnote>

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ Costa, *Tractado*, 337-42, and Jacques Daléchamps, *Historia generalis plantarum* (Lyon: apud Guglielmum Rovillium, 1586), 1749-922 (for the *lignum colubrinum*, 1911-2).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_21.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.5. (top) Plates of the *Lignum colubrinum* from Plumier's *Description des plantes de l'Amérique*. (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis.) (bottom left) Woodcut of the *Lignum colubrinum* from Da Costa's *Tractado de las drogas*, in which the plant is called "palo de culebra." (Biblioteca nacional de Portugal.) (bottom right) Woodcuts of the same plant in Daléchamps's *Historia generalis plantarum*. Daléchamps translated Da Costa's work into Latin, and reused the original woodcuts in Da Costa's. (Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid.) The reemployment of images from one book to another was very common in the period, so much so that Plumier paid particular attention to those plants and animals that were well-known in the literature, but whose exact description was not assured precisely because information on them had been circulating from book to book.</figcaption></figure>
naturalists as convinced as Plumier and his contemporaries were of the need to depart
from the literary corpus as the only means to found a sound knowledge of nature, print
remained not only the unavoidable reference (as we have been seeing in this chapter), but
also the main arena for establishing one's scholarly authority (a question further explored
in chapter 5)—an authority they based, paradoxically, on their direct experience with the
reality they spoke for and about.

Plumier's minutely built bridges between authors and the world before his eyes is
symptomatic of the work of the traveling naturalist in France around 1700. For all the
discredit cast upon textual learning and the triumphantly announced empirical approach
to nature, observation was primarily an operation of comparison and verification
between the sphere of learning and realm of the natural world: both Perrault and
Tournefort suggested it, sometimes explicitly, in their expositions about how natural
pursuits should be carried out. Plumier's drawings reflect in their own materiality this
interlocking of erudite and observational practices.

The sources of Plumier’s visual natural history of the Americas

Like most scholars, Plumier started not from his sole observations and thoughts, but
from that of others. Some of the stunning material practices by which Plumier received,
appropriated, and made use of other naturalist’s written and iconographic world (such as
copying, abridging, collating, and excerpting from both texts and images) will be dealt
with in the last section of chapter 3. What should retain our attention in this section is
the role that books (and especially some specific illustrated printed works on the nature
of the Americas) played in the work of late seventeenth-century naturalists and in
Plumier’s iconographic enterprise in particular.

When considering the erudite component of natural history at the turn of the
eighteenth century, a further element of comparison between Plumier and antiquarians
emerges: the library as a space of knowledge in the Parisian scene.<fnref n="112" /> The Minim friar, for
all his passionate wonderings across islands and seas, remained a man of books. Besides,
the time he spent traveling though the West Indies amounted to seven years in total: for
the rest, Plumier resided (at least from 1689) in the convent of the Minims at Place

<footnote n="112">¹¹² For libraries as spaces of knowledge-making in the early modern period, see Anthony Grafton, “Libraries and Lecture Halls,” in Park and Daston, *Early Modern Science*, 238-50. Lorraine Daston has recently relocated this question (“*Pace* stereotypes, the library has never ceased to be a site of scientific knowledge, alongside the laboratory and the observatory—often literally alongside, as arquitectural plans of research institutions from the seventeenth century to the present reveal”) within a broarder perspective on the memory-keeping practices within the natural sciences: Daston, “Sciences of the Archive,” 162.</footnote>
Royale in Paris.<fnref n="113" /> The Parisian congregation, founded around 1606 in the heart of the city, was a salient hub in the intellectual cartography of the city, not only because of the figures of Mersenne and, to a lesser degree, those of Nicéron or Plumier himself, but also because of its library. The seventeenth century and the first decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the height of ecclesiastical libraries, whatever their size.<fnref n="114" /> Of the book collection of the Minims at Place Royale, in particular, the French author Germain Brice (ca. 1653-1727) said that it was “not large, but was composed of excellent books,” besides “optical pieces invented by Father Jean-François Nicéron”—a usual situation in the Old Regime period, when libraries were spaces that welcomed not only manuscripts and prints, but also natural specimens, artifacts, and scientific instruments. More importantly, they were sites of scholarly exchange and knowledge production—and, particularly in the case of religious congregations, of collaborative work (fig. 1.6). The polymath Samuel Hartlib, for instance, envied Marin Mersenne’s adscription to a religious congregation, because “the whole Cloister [was] maintaining the charges”—in other words, assisting him with his research. It is difficult to know if Plumier benefited from any assistance by fellow friars in his erudite work, but he likely read, wrote, drew, and painted (alone or not) in his cell or the well-provisioned library of the convent.<fnref n="115" />

Brice's estimation, however, seems to have belittled the size of the Minims' library, which reached its apogee in the seventeenth century with around 15,000 to 20,000 volumes, maintained until soon after the Revolution; the average in the capital's large libraries stood at the time at around 10,000 volumes.<fnref n="116" /> But in early modern libraries, especially when they were part of religious congregations, books were everywhere, from the monks' cells to those spaces properly called “library,” far from our modern conception of a single space exclusively devoted to the storage of books. In the case of

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ According to the registers of the convent's chapter, Plumier officially became a member of the community of Place Royale on May 15, 1689, by direct order of the superior general of the Minims. Two days after, another order by the superior general was read before the chapter of the Parisian convent according to which Plumier was sent to the West Indies on the orders of the French king: AN LL 1566, “Registre capitulaire des Minimes de la Place royale,” fol. 23v-24r.</footnote>

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ Claude Jolly, “Unité et diversité des collections religieuses,” in *Histoire des bibliothèques françaises*, ed. Claude Jolly (Paris: Promodis and Éditions du Cercle de la Librairie, 1988), 11-28.</footnote>

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Germain Brice, *Description nouvelle de la ville de Paris, ou recherche curieuse des choses les plus singulieres & les plus remarquables qui se trouvent à present dans cette grande ville* (Paris: chez Nicolas Le Gras, Nicolas Le Clerc, and Barthelemy Girin, 1698), 336: “La Bibliothèque de cette Maison n’est pas nombreuse, mais cependant elle est composée d’excellens livres; on y montre quelques pieces d’optique de l’invention du Père Jean François Nicéron Parisien.” Samuel Hartlib, *Ephemerides* (1639), Hartlib Papers 30/4/7A.</footnote>

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ Jolly, “Unité et diversité,” and Krakovitch, “La vie intellectuelle,” 23-175. Estimates vary greatly (from 8,000 in 1725 to 24,000 around the same time), but most authors conclude that the dimensions of the library were considerable for the time.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_22.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.6. Minim friars busy at work in the library of their convent in Marseille: one studies a globe, another measures distances on a map with a compass, and the rest peruse books or write. Unlike the Maurists, the Minims did not develop sustained forms of collective scholarly work: the library remained a central space in the life of the congregation nonetheless. Libraries and the work with books were equally central to the work of naturalists as inclined towards travel and firsthand observation as Plumier. (Bibliothèque municipale de Marseille.)</figcaption></figure>
the convent at Place Royale, the library consisted of three galleries or corridors distributed through the convent: next to the cloister, next to the infirmary, and above Saint-Francis's chapel. The library became, in any case, one of the cornerstones of the community's identity (it kept, among other things, Mersenne's rich correspondence with personalities of the early seventeenth-century European Republic of Letters).

Plumier gathered a fine collection of books: a good number of the extant volumes bearing Plumier's name by his own hand include the formula “ad usum” (e.g., “ad usum F. Caroli Plumier Minimus Botan. Reg.”).117 It is difficult to be sure, but those books may well been of his own, despite his membership to a religious community—they sometimes indicate that they belonged to the friar by “superiorum permissu,” by permission of his superiors.118 What is clear is that these books passed to the convent's library at some point, probably after the Minim's death: Plumier's inscribed name has usually been crossed out from the title pages and the convent (“ex biblioteca minimorum parisiensi”) was identified instead.119

Reconstructing Plumier's library is an impossible task, although I have been able to identify a dozen volumes through libraries in Paris and Madrid bearing the friar's signature in their title pages.120 Another interesting way of tracing Plumier's textual and iconographic influences can be found in the frequent references he makes to authors in his manuscript and printed materials. References to authorities in the manuscripts and printed books by Plumier adopted several of the usual forms for the early modern period. Most of the time, these consisted of citations within the text, on the images or in their margins, and usually they included leads to both the works and the passages that were used. Of these modes of reference to authorities, two deserve particular attention: those on the images, whether engravings in his books or drawings on loose sheets, as

<footnote n="117">117 For a survey of the books owned by Plumier and bearing his signature as a mark of property, see appendix 3, pp. 426-7. The “avertissement” to the 1722 *Catalogue alphabétique pour la bibliothèque des RR.PP. Minimes de la Place Royale* noted, in its fourth point, that there were in the catalogue some entries indicating the author and the title of the codex in question, but not the signature because “étant à des Religieux qui en ont l’usage, les ont destinez pour la Bibliothèque.” Maz. MS 4147, fol. 1v.</footnote>

<footnote n="118">118 P. J. S. Whitmore remarked upon the fact that Minims, frequently transferred from one house to another, seemed to have been taking with them books from the convents' libraries, which brought the Provincial of Lorraine to order, in 1693, an inventory of the library to search for books missing or belonging to other convents. Whitmore also states that “there is evidence to show that these men were allowed to possess books of their own, although he does not provide us with this evidence. P. J. S. Whitmore, *The Order of Minims in Seventeenth-Century France* (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967), 122.</footnote>

<footnote n="119">119 One example is Plumier's copy of Agostino Scilla, *La vana speculazione disingannata dal senso* (1670), in BHMV BH MED 2584.</footnote>

<footnote n="120">120 See below, pp. 426-7.</footnote>
they have been analyzed above, and those in the form of a list.<fnref n="121" /> Only on one occasion references to authors in Plumier’s work took the form of a list of authorities, which appeared in the front matter of his 1693 *Description des plantes de l’Amérique*. Later books (namely the *Traité des fougères* and the *Nova genera*) did not include a list as such at the beginning of the volume, although it was not uncommon for books of botany at the time. Tournefort, for instance, added an impressive list of about ninety entries in the front matter of his *Élémens de botanique* (1694) with mostly modern authors (from Leonhart Fuchs to Plumier himself), but he gave to it the form of a list of abbreviations.<fnref n="122" /> In the case of the *Minim friar*, the list comprised in the *Description* (“Auteurs citez dans ce volume,” or “Authors quoted in this volume”), Plumier inventoried eleven books or parts of books.<fnref n="123" /> Only the name of the authors and the title of the works were listed, with no indication to the editions or the passages used—books, chapters, or sections were marked when only those parts, and not the entire volume, were employed.

As Ann Blair has indicated in reference to compilations and repositories in the early modern period, these sorts of lists of authorities “were not finding devices but a form of advertisement for the quality of the work.”<fnref n="124" /> Likewise, Plumier’s list of “cited authors” in the front matter of the *Description* constituted a visible, public display of the location he intended to occupy in the scholarly tradition on the natural history of the Americas—in line with the names of hitherto unknown botanical genera that he dedicated to past and present naturalists and which is described in chapter 4. The eleven works cited in the paratext of the *Description* dealt, entirely or in part, with the flora on the other shore of the Atlantic and were authored by modern scholars from the sixteenth century to his own time.<fnref n="125" /> The large majority of them, moreover, were illustrated accounts, the only exception being works on botanical classification. Plumier’s enumeration of authorities

<footnote n="121">¹²¹ On lists of authorities in early modern reference genres, see Ann Blair, *Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age* (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 133-5.</footnote>

<footnote n="122">¹²² Tournefort, *Élémens*, sig. [e5v-e7v]: “Explication des noms abregez des auteurs citez dans ce livre.”</footnote>

<footnote n="123">¹²³ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a4v].</footnote>

<footnote n="124">¹²⁴ Blair, *Too Much to Know*, 134.</footnote>

<footnote n="125">¹²⁵ Plumier, *Description*, sig. [a4v]: “Autheurs citez dans ce volume. / Gonzales Oviedo, della naturale & generale Historia d’elle Indie. Lib. VIII. / Nardus Antonius Rechus, ex Francisco Hernandes, rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae. / Carolus Clusius. Historia plantarum Exoticarum. / Guillelmus Piso. Historia naturalis Brasiliae. Lib. IV. / Georgius Marcgravius. Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae. Lib. I. II. III. /Le Reverend Pere Jean Baptiste du Tertre de l’Ordre des FF. Prescheurs. Histoire generale des Antilles Tome II. / Christophorus Acosta. ex Hist. Lugd. Lib. XVIII. /G. Bauhinus. pinax Theatri Botanici. / Breynius. Centuria prima plantarum exoticarum. / Paulus Hermanus. paradisi Batavi prodromus. / Mentzelius. Pugillus rariorum plantarum.”</footnote>
can serve as a useful guide to explore the contours of the visual culture of the American
natural world inherited by European scholars in the late seventeenth century.

The Renaissance classics: Oviedo, Hernández, Clusius, Da Costa

Four of the works listed by Plumier were by sixteenth-century authors and well-established classics of the natural history of the Americas during the late seventeenth century. Probably one of the most canonical was the *Historia general y natural de las Indias* (General and Natural History of the Indies) by the Spanish notary Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557).126 The book had a complex editorial life: *De la natural hystoria de las Indias* (later known as *Sumario*) was printed in 1526 in Toledo by Ramón de Petras. Oviedo seemingly conceived the *Historia general de las Indias* as a spin-off of the *Sumario*, and its first part was printed in Seville in 1535; a new edition of the same appeared in Salamanca in 1547.127 Both the *Sumario* and the first part of the *Historia* enjoyed a considerable editorial success. Oviedo planned two more parts to the work but, due to various misfortunes and despite his multiple attempts, their publication did not come to fruition until three centuries after his death.128 Although a French translation by Jean Poleur appeared in Paris in 1555, Plumier seems to be quoting an Italian translation (“Gonzales de Oviedo, della naturalle & generale Historia delle Indie. Lib. VIII”), most likely the one included in the third part of the famous collection by Giambattista Ramusio, *Delle Navigationi et viaggi* (1556), and preceded by Oviedo’s own *Sumario*.129

<footnote n="126">126 On Fernández de Oviedo, see Antonello Gerbi, *La natura delle Indie Nove. Da Cristoforo Colombo a Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo* (Milan: Riccardo Ricciardi Editore, 1975), 165-561; Jesús Carrillo Castillo, “Naming Difference: The Politics of Naming in Fernández de Oviedo’s *Historia general y natural de las Indias*,” *Science in Context* 16, no. 4 (2003), 489-504; Carrillo Castillo, *Naturaleza e imperio. La representación del mundo natural en la “Historia general y natural de las Indias” de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo* (Madrid: Doce Calles, 2005); Carrillo Castillo, “The Eyes of the New Pliny: The Use of Images in Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo’s *Historia general y natural de las Indias*,” in *The Art of Natural History: Illustrated Treatises and Botanical Paintings, 1400-1850*, ed. Therese O’Malley and Amy R. W. Meyers (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2008), 108-25; Kathleen Ann Myers, *Fernández de Oviedo’s Chronicle of America: A New History for a New World* (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007); Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, *Historia y ficción: La escritura de la “Historia general y natural de las Indias” de Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés (1578[sic]-1557)* (Valencia: Publicacions de la Universitat de Valencia, 2012).</footnote>

<footnote n="127">127 *La Historia general de las Indias con privilegio real* [Seville: Juan Cromberger, 1535], and *Coronica de las Indias*. *La Historia general de las Indias agora nuevamente impressa corregida y emendada. Y con la Conquista del Perú* [Salamanca: Juan de Junta, 1547]. On the printing history of the *Historia general y natural de las Indias*: Carrillo Castillo, *Naturaleza e Imperio*, 107-42.</footnote>

<footnote n="128">128 *Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra firme del mar océano, por el capitán Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, primer cronista del Nuevo Mundo*, ed. José Amador de los Ríos, 4 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia, 1851-55). Only one book of the second part, the twentieth, was eventually printed in Valladolid by Francisco Fernández de Córdoba in 1557.</footnote>

<footnote n="129">129 Giambattista Ramusio, *Delle Navigationi et viaggi* (Venice: nella stamperia de Giunti, 1556): it included the Italian translation of both *Sumario* (“Sommario della naturale, et generale historia dell’indie occidentali,” 37-60) and *Historia* (“Della naturale, et generale historia dell’indie à tempi nostril ritrovate,” 61-186).</footnote>
Oviedo's *Historia* is one of the very first accounts offering a general description—historical both in its civil and natural sense—of the New World. In his list of authorities, Plumier specifically referred to the eighth book, devoted to fruit trees.<fnref n="130" />

As noted by Jesús Carrillo Castillo, the woodcuts of the *Historia general y natural de las Indias* had the lure of novelty: the book was the first illustrated natural history ever printed in Spain, and probably the first set of images printed in Europe explicitly devoted to the American flora and fauna.<fnref n="131" /> Ramusio’s edition, however, also readapted the images, and “whereas Oviedo’s pictures were conceived as a schematic visual support of a vivid verbal description . . . the illustrations of the Italian translation represented an American landscape where the Indians . . . were operating with the object or species described.”<fnref n="132" /> Through reeditions, copies, and adaptations such as Ramusio’s, Oviedo’s woodcuts of the New World became canonical visions of the plants and animals they represented through most of the early modern period: they had an enduring influence on how the European public was to think about American nature and what they were to expect from it. It is not a surprise, for instance, that Plumier’s most accomplished set of drawings, a series of more than two dozen exquisitely drawn and colored images probably addressed to a selected courtly audience, depicted fruit plants that were found in Oviedo’s *Historia* (fig. 1.7), such as the pineapple and the sugar-apple tree. Like many Renaissance authoritative (illustrated) accounts of the New World’s nature, Oviedo’s largely dictated, well into the late seventeenth century, European readers’ expectations of American flora and fauna.

Plumier listed three other sixteenth-century illustrated works which still influenced the visual representation of American plants in the late seventeenth century. One was Cristóvão da Costa’s abovementioned *Tractado de las drogas, y medicinas de las Indias orientales* (1578), probably in Jacques Daléchamps’s version in his *Historia generalis plantarum* (1586), which copied Cristóvão da Costa’s text and images on East Indian plants in some parts

<footnote n="130">¹³⁰ In Ramusio’s translation, pp. 113-20 (“dove si tratta de gli alberi fruttiferi”). There were at least eight other books on the flora and fauna of the Americas: the seventh book was about agriculture; the ninth, about wild trees (“alberi selvaggi”); the tenth, about simples and medicinal plants; the eleventh, about plants brought to Hispaniola from Spain, and the twelfth to the fifteenth, about the animals of the island (terrestrial, aquatic, birds, and insects respectively).</footnote>

<footnote n="131">¹³¹ On the images of the *Historia general y natural de las Indias*, see José Pardo Tomás, “Le immagini delle piante americane nell’opera di Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo (1478-1557),” in *Natura-cultura: l’interpretazione del mondo fisico nei testi e nelle immagini*, ed. Giuseppe Olmi, Lucia Tongiorgi-Tomasi, and Attilio Zanca (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2000), 133-51; Jesús Carrillo Castillo, “Taming the Visible: Word and Image in Oviedo’s *Historia General y Natural de las Indias*,” *Viator* 31 (2000), 399-431; Carrillo Castillo, *Naturaleza e imperio*, 243-334, and Myer’s *Oviedo’s Chronicle*, 63-81.</footnote>

<footnote n="132">¹³² Carrillo Castillo, “Taming the visible,” 403.</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_23.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 1.7. Woodcuts from Oviedo's *Historia general y natural de las indias*. The images in the *Historia* were among the very first printed visual representations of the American flora, fauna, and peoples. They had an enduring impact on European imagination and expectations well into Plumier's time. The pineapple and the canoe made of one-piece tree trunks, for instance, became recurrent themes: they can actually be found in a collection of luxurious images that Plumier probably made for the eyes of courtly partons (see fig. 2.4). (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis.)</figcaption></figure>

<figure><img src="image_24.png" /></figure>

of book XVIII—Plumier quoted specifically the chapter 140 on the “palo de culebra” analyzed above. The other were the materials collected in New Spain during the 1570s by the Spanish physician Francisco Hernández (1514-1587). Sent to the Americas as *Protomedico Mayor de las Indias* by Philip II of Spain, Hernández compiled a massive amount of textual and graphic material on the nature of the New World, and on the flora in particular. Once back in Europe, Hernández’s papers were eventually deposited in the library of the palace of El Escorial, where they perished in a fire a century after their production, in 1671; before that, several copies were made and traveled through the continent, and some editions of the text and images went into print. Plumier used and listed the famous one by the Neapolitan physician Nardo Antonio Recchi (1540-1595): “Nardus Antonius Rechus, ex Francisco Hernandes, rerum medicarum novae Hispaniae.” Recchi’s was surely neither the only nor the first selective edition of Hernández’s materials, but it certainly was the most diffused. Having succeeded Hernández as Philip II’s personal physician, Recchi was charged with a crucial task for every naturalist, one often forgotten: paperwork. At the end of his life, Recchi’s copies and excerpts from Hernández’s textual and graphic materials (including about six hundred illustrations) ended up in his native Naples, where they later passed into the hands of Prince Federico Cesi, the founder of the *Accademia dei Lincei*. The Linceans
envisaged a publication, almost as ill-fated as Hernández's papers themselves: when the definitive edition came out in 1651, most of those initially involved in the edition had died, including Cesi.<fnref n="133" />

What Plumier had in front of his eyes, probably in the library of his convent, was the Linceans' edition of Recchi's copies of Hernández papers, published as *Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus*, and better known as the "Tesoro Messicano."<fnref n="134" /> Plumier's corpus recalls Hernández's materials in that it also instances the fragile materiality of paper stuff, and the convoluted story of their production and transmission. This is perhaps the reason why the Minim friar referred sparingly to the descriptions and depictions in the Mexican Treasury, while acknowledging the celebrity of Hernández in the late seventeenth century and that of his recently lost papers of the name, *Hernandia*, of one of the botanical genera of the West Indies.

The last Renaissance authority listed by Plumier was Carolus Clusius, or Charles de l'Écluse, a renowned naturalist who was the prefect of the University of Leiden's botanical garden. The friar listed a "Historia plantarum Exoticarum," in reference to his *Rariorum plantarum historia* (1601) or the *Exoticorum libri decem* (1605)—probably both, for these two well-sold volumes, printed in Plantin's office, were important sources of information on plants still two centuries after their publication.<fnref n="135" /> More important, both were richly illustrated. Clusius was one of those scholars doggedly holding that sound opinions in matters of (overseas) natural history needed to be based on firsthand observation—a stance easier to state than to bring into actual practice. Nonetheless, if

<footnote n="133">133 Raquel Álvarez Peláez, *La conquista de la naturaleza americana* (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1993), 101-23; Jesús Bustamante García, “La empresa naturalista de Felipe II y la primera expedición científica en suelo americano: la creación del modelo expedicionario renacentista,” in *Felipe II (1527-1598). Europa y la Monarquía Católica*, ed. José Martínez Millán (Madrid: Parteluz, 1998), 39-59; David Freedberg, *The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, His Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), esp. 245-74; José Ramón Marcaida López, *Arte y ciencia en el Barroco español* (Madrid: Marcial Pons, 2014), 142-70.</footnote>

<footnote n="134">134 *Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae Thesaurus, seu plantarum, animalium, mineralium Mexicanorum historia ex Francisci Hernandez novi orbis Medici Primarii relationibus in ipsa Mexicana urbe conscriptis a Nardo Antonio Reccho Monte Corvinate Cath. Maiest. Medico et Neap. Regni Archiatro Generali Jussu Philippi II Hisp. Ind. etc. Regis collecta ac in ordinem digesta a Ioannae Terrentio Lynceo Constantinse Germano Pho. ac Medico notis illustrate* (Rome: ex Typographeio Vitalis Mascardi, 1651).</footnote>

<footnote n="135">135 Carolus Clusius, *Rariorum plantarum historia* (Antwerp: Officina Plantiniana, 1601) and *Exoticorum libri decem: quibus animalium, plantarum, aromatarum, aliorumque peregrinorum fructuum historiae describuntur* (Leiden: Officina Plantiniana, 1605). On Clusius, see the indispensable work by Florike Egmond, especially her *The World of Carolus Clusius: Natural History in the Making, 1550-1610* (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010). Although here Egmond pays little attention to the printing history of these two books, she minutely traces their sources through Clusius's widely spread correspondence. For an analysis of the pictures in the *Exoticorum*, see Sachiko Kusukawa, “Uses of Pictures in Printed Books: The Case of Clusius's *Exoticorum Libri Decem*,” in *Carolus Clusius: Towards a Cultural History of a Renaissance Naturalist*, ed. Florike Egmond, Paul Hoftijzer, Robert Visser (Amsterdam: Edita, 2008), 221-46. See also, in the same volume, the important chapter by Peter Mason, “*Americana* in the *Exoticorum libri decem* of Charles de l'Écluse,” 195-219.</footnote>
Clusius never set foot in the Americas himself, the Americas came to him: he was conveniently exposed to an intense circulation of *exotica*, and he and his richly illustrated books benefited from the consolidation of both the Dutch commercial expansion and printing trade.<fnref n="136" /> Although the availability of visual and textual information on overseas flora and fauna grew apace during the near century that separated Clusius from Plumier, and although (the author’s claims for unmediated observation notwithstanding) the images in both the *Exoticorum* and the *Rariorum* owed a great deal to Plantin’s printing practices,<fnref n="137" /> Clusius’s volumes (and images in particular) were a constant reference in late seventeenth-century naturalists’ work for naming and establishing equivalences between unfamiliar specimens and genera.

*The seventeenth-century traveling naturalists: Piso, Marcgraf, Du Tertre*

In his enumeration of authorities included among the front matter of the *Description*, Plumier also listed two seventeenth-century, lavishly illustrated works on American nature whose images weighed heavily on the image that European naturalists (and audiences by and large) had of the flora and fauna of the New World. “Guillelmus Piso. Historia naturalis Brasiliae. Lib. IV” and “Georgius Marcgravius. Historia rerum naturalium Brasiliae. Lib. I. II. III.” were actually two parts of the same editorial enterprise, the *Historia naturalis Brasialiae*, or the “Natural History of Brasil.” Published simultaneously in Leiden and Amsterdam in 1648, the book was practically made from two different works: the first, “De medicina Brasiliensi” (On Brasilian medicine), was written by Willem Piso (1611-1678), a physician from Leiden; the second part, the one specifically mentioned by Plumier in his list, was the “Historiae Rerum naturalium Brasiliae” (Histories of natural things of Brazil), authored by Georg Marcgraf (1610-44), an astronomer of the Dutch West Indies Company. <fnref n="138" /> Both authors coincided for several years in Dutch Brasil, mostly Recife, as part of the scholarly entourage of Johan Maurits

<footnote n="136">136 Mason, “*Americana* in the *Exoticorum*.”</footnote>

<footnote n="137">137 Kusukawa, “Clusius’s *Exoticorum*.”</footnote>

<footnote n="138">¹³⁸ Marcgraf and Piso, *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*. On Marcgraf, see P. J. P. Whitehead, “The biography of Georg Marcgraf (1610-1643/4) by his brother Christian, translated by James Petiver,” *Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History* 9, no. 3 (1979), 301-14; J. D. North, “Georg Markgraf, an Astronomer in the New World,” and P. J. P. Whitehead, “Georg Markgraf and Brazilian Zoology,” in *Johan Maurits van Nassau-Siegen, 1604-1678: A Humanist Prince in Europe and Brazil*, ed. E. van den Boogart (The Hague: The Johan Maurits van Nassau Stichting, 1979), 394-471. See also, in the same volume, F. Guerra, “Medicine in Dutch Brazil,” 472-93, for the context of Piso’s text on tropical medicine. For an editorial history of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*, see the recent contribution by Neil Safier: “Beyond Brazilian Nature: The Editorial Itineraries of Marcgraf and Piso’s *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*,” in *The Legacy of Dutch Brazil*, ed. Michiel van Groesen (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 168-86.</footnote>
(1604-1679), at the time Earl of Nassau-Siegen and governor of the Dutch possessions in Brazil from 1636 to 1644. Piso, however, was the privileged personal physician of Johan Maurits, whom he accompanied back to Europe at the end of the governor's mandate; Marcgraf, on the other hand, was sent by the Company to Angola, where he died shortly after his arrival.

Marcgraf's papers became coveted fodder for publication: his cartographic observations in Brazil were at the origin of a series of maps published in 1647 by Caspar Barlaeus, and his notes on the flora and fauna of the region passed to the hands of Joannes de Laet (1581-1649), a polymath with a particular interest in the Americas. De Laet was one of the directors of the West Indies Company, and as such, he capitalized on the Dutch circulation of information on, and artifacts from, the opposite shore of the Atlantic, on which he never set foot. He edited, extended, and completed Marcgraf's notes on Brazilian flora and fauna: the result was the eight books published by Piso as the second part of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* in 1648, four years after the death of Marcgraf. Unsurprisingly the volume was printed under Johan Maurits's "auspices and favor" (*auspicio et beneficio*): the governor's name was (apart from of the printers) the only to appear on the title page.139 The *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* can thus be seen as the work of three authors (the exact contribution of de Laet is unknown, but considered to be substantial), all of them linked to the university of Leiden, where the study of the natural world still orbited around the figure and work of Clusius: Piso and de Laet studied at that university (where the latter had actually been a disciple of Clusius), and Marcgraf spent a year there before moving to Brasil.140

The first part of the *Historia naturalis Brasialie*, on Brazilian medicine and by Piso, was organized into four books covering the environment of the regions in northern Brazil under Dutch control at that time (“De Aëre, Aquis, & Locis”: on the airs, waters, and topography), the regional endemic diseases, the native venoms and its antidotes and (in the fourth book, the one quoted by Plumier in his lists of authorities) the properties

<footnote n="139">139 As noted on the contents page of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*: “Ioannes de Laet, Antwerpianus, in ordinem digessit & annotationes addidit, & varia ab Auctore omissa suplevit & illustravit.” On de Laet, see for instance Erik Jorink, “Noah’s Ark Restored (and Wrecked): Dutch Collectors, Natural History, and the Problem of Biblical Exegesis,” in *Silent Messengers: The Circulation of Material Objects of Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries*, ed. Sven Dupré and Christoph Lüthy (Berlin: Lit, 2011), 153-84. The contribution of Johan Maurits is indicated on the title page of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*: “auspicio et beneficio Illustris. I. Mauritii Com. Nassau, illus. provincie et maris summi praefecti adornata.”</footnote>

<footnote n="140">140 Júnia Ferreira Furtado, “Tropical Empiricism: Making Medical Knowledge in Colonial Brazil,” in *Science and Empire in the Atlantic World*, ed. James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew (London: Routledge, 2008), 127-51, esp. 132-8.</footnote>
attributed by the indigenous populations to the simples of the area. The “Histories of the
natural things of Brazil” by Marcgraf, the second part of the volume, was organized into
eight books: the first three were those also quoted by Plumier, and they treated the
vegetable world; the other five were, respectively, about fishes, birds, quadrupeds and
snakes, insects, and “the Region itself, & its inhabitants,” to which a supplementary text
on the Tapuia and Chilean peoples was added.

All these texts (but particulary Marcgraf's) were interspersed with handsomely made
woodcuts: out of the four hundred pages of the book, more than three hundred included
engravings of different sizes on plants and animals (even some few on indigenous
populations), probably resulting from the drawings and paintings made by artists in
Johan Maurits's entourage, like Albert Eckhout (ca. 1607-1665).<sup>141</sup> Most of the plates
were reemployed in another book published ten years later by Piso, *De Indiae utruisque re
naturali et medica*—unlike the *Historia*, printed with the author's name on the title page.
This book was composed of three groups of texts: the first, by Piso himself,
encompassed six chapters drawing from, and developing, both parts of the *Historia
naturalis Brasiliae*, the second, attributed to Marcgraf, consisted of two chapters on the
topography and meteorology of Brazil (including observations on a solar eclipse) and his
previous text on the language and customs of indigenous peoples; the third group
gathered texts ascribed to Jacob de Bondt, or Bontius (1592-1631), on different medical,
naturalistic, and even anatomical observations in the Dutch East Indies. A surviving copy
of *De Indiae utruisque re naturali et medica*, now in Madrid, bears the ex libris of Plumier.<sup>142</sup>

Although Plumier only mentioned Marcgraf's contribution to the *Historia naturalis
Brasiliae* (those treating the flora), both his and Piso's writings in the volume were
assiduous references in the friar's books and manuscripts. In actual fact, European
knowledge on a good number of American plants was based on the descriptions and
figures of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* until well into the eighteenth century, even though

<footnote n="141">141 P. J. P. Whitehead identified the extant sources of the engravings in the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* and their current location in the Biblioteka Jagiellonska in Cracow (Libri picturati A 32-38). See P. J. P. Whitehead, "The Original Drawings for the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* of Piso and Marcgrave (1648)," *Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History* 7, no. 4 (1976), 409-422, and the third part of van den Boogart, *Johan Maurits*, 269-538, esp. R. Joppien, "The Dutch Vision of Brazil: Johan Maurits and his Artists," 297-376.</footnote>

<footnote n="142">142 Gulielmi Pisonis medici Amstelaedamensis De indiae utriusque re naturali et medica libri quatuordecim. Quorum contenta pagina sequens exhibet (Amsterdam: apud Ludovicum et Danielem Elzeverios, 1658). Plumier's copy is in the Real Biblioteca, Palacio Real, Madrid, shelfmarked VIII/15228.</footnote>
the work was circumscribed to the Brasilian flora and fauna.<fnref n="143" /> Both earned a place in
Plumier's curious hall of fame (his dedications of botanical genera of 1703) with the
*Marcgravia* and the *Pisonia*; more important, Plumier relied heavily on the two Dutchmen's
work and images, collating and verifying them against his own observations. Some of his
manuscripts were explicitly comments on their written and iconographic work,<fnref n="144" /> and
both his manuscripts and his *Description* make continuous comparisons with the notes
and images of Marcgraf and Piso. For instance, Plumier's *Phaseolus siliquis latis, hispidis, & rugosis, fructu nigro*, described and figured in his *Description*, was noted to be one of the
plants in Marcgraf's ("c'est le *Mucuna des Brasiliens* de G. Marcgrave liv. I. ch. 10."), and
the friar's images indeed owed a good deal to those by the latter and Piso, if only in the
choice of the parts of the plant to be depicted—Plumier also linked that plant to one of
the species in Clusius's *Exoticorum* (fig. 1.8).<fnref n="145" /> The text and especially the images of
Marcgraf's and Piso's *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* are perhaps the best example of the weight
that books and scribal and reading practices—involving both written and visual
materials—had in Plumier's natural historical research, including his field and
iconographic work. As will be further evinced in chapter 3, Plumier read in detail the
words and woodcuts by the two Dutchmen, copying them by hand, correcting,
abridging, and excerpting from them as both an exercise of memory, training in drawing,
and form of information management.

Among the bookish authorities listed at the beginning of the *Description*, the only
dealing entirely with the West Indian flora and fauna was the work of the French

<footnote n="143">¹⁴³ Neil Safier, *Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 220-1, 230.</footnote>

<footnote n="144">¹⁴⁴ For instance, BCMNHN MS 35 “De naturalibus Antillarum, authore patre Carolo Plumier, Ordinis Minimorum provinciae. Tomus primus,” in which he lists plants and descriptions from the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*. Plumier opens this volume with an “Anotatio”: “Georgius Marcgrauius et Guillelmus Piso, unus botanicus, alter uero medicus insignes de plantis et animalibus brasiliensibus historiam naturalem ediderunt. Georgius Marcgrauius icones et descriptiones tantum protulit. Piso uero ipsarum facultates in lucem edidit. Piso de centum quadraginta plantis in suo quarto libro disseruit quas omnes nominibus suis insigniuit. Marcgrauius uero de ducentis et octoginta nouem. Inter quas sexaginta quatuor innominatae existunt. Harum multas in insulis antillanis reperi, quibus nomina sua adscripsi, et has in synonimis secundum, earum ordinem recensui, uti reperiuntur in libris Lugduni Batauorum et Amstelodami impressis apud Franciscum Hackium et Ludouicum Elzeuirium anno 1648. Annotando scilicet Librum, caput et paginam in quibus reperiuntur. E. C. Eam quam libro primo, capite uigesimo quinto pagina quinquagesima quarta in ordine primam, innominatam dicit, ego eam conuoluulum pentaphyllum hirsutum flore albo apellaui, sic adscribendo.” Plumier also referred to them in the preface to his *Solum, salum, coelum Americanum* (BCMNHN MS 23, fol. 3): “Pisonis, Marcgrauii, multorumque numquam satis laudandorum qui de mirabilibus americanis curiose docteque pertraitarunt, scripta lectitando, permulta propter eorum incuriosas delineationes non agnosse.” See appendix 2, pp. 424-6.</footnote>

<footnote n="145">¹⁴⁵ Plumier, *Description*, 92-3; Marcgraf, “Historiae Rerum naturalium Brasiliae,” 19 (I quote Marcgraf’s part of the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae* and not the entire volume because the pagination changes); Clusius, *Exoticorum libri decem*, 68 (quoted by Plumier as “*le phaseolus Nigitarum, phaseole des Nègres*, de Clusius dans son liv. 3 des plantes exotiques chap. II [read: 11]”).</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_25.png" /></figure>

<figure><img src="image_26.png" /></figure>

blackfriar Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre (1610-1687), né Jacques. As Marcgraf and Piso (or Plumier and Tournefort), Du Tertre largely drew his legitimacy from his being a traveler in the places he wrote about (“this History is sincere & veritable . . . [for] I am ocular witness of most of what it contains, & the rest is based in originals and trustworthy documents”).<fnref n="146" /> Having seemingly served in the Dutch navy and army before entering the Dominican novitiate, Du Tertre was sent to the West Indies around 1640 as apostolic missionary of his order, with the vicissitudes typical of such journeys (he was once captured by the English and kept prisoner in Plymouth for six weeks). <fnref n="147" /> He returned twice to the French “Ant-Isles” during the 1640s and 1650s. In 1654, Du Tertre published a bulky “general history” of the French West Indian islands, mainly Saint-Christophe (Saint Kitts), Martinique, and Guadeloupe. The first two volumes of his more famous *Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François* (General history of the West Indies inhabited by the French [1667-1671]) appeared in Paris over a decade later (and two other volumes appeared soon afterwards). <fnref n="148" /> For the writing of the *Histoire des*

<footnote n="146">146 Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre, *Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François*, vol. 1 (Paris: chez Thomas Jolly, 1667), sig. [a3v]: “Monseigneur, vous seres persuadé que cette Histoire est sincere & veritable, quand vous sçaurez que je suis témoin oculaire de la plus grande partie des choses qu’elle contient, & que le reste est fondé sur des originaux & des pieces digne [sic] de foy.”</footnote>

<footnote n="147">147 Du Tertre, *Histoire des Antilles*, 506.</footnote>

<footnote n="148">148 *Histoire générale des îles de S. Christophe, de la Guadeloupe, de la Martinique et autres dans l’Amérique* (Paris: chez Jacques Langlois et Emmanuel Langlois, 1654), and Du Tertre, *Histoire des Antilles*. We do not know</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_27.png" /></figure>

Fig. 1.8. (opposite left) Woodcut of the *Mucuna des Brasiliens* in Marcgraf's and Piso's *Historia naturalis brasiliae*. (Peter H. Raven Library, Missouri Botanical Garden, St. Louis.) (opposite right) Clusius's *Phaseolus Nigritarum* (Biblioteca del Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid.) (left) *Phaseolus siliquis latis, hispidis, & rugosis, fructu nigro* in Plumier's *Description*. (Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris.) Plumier related his *Phaseolus* to the species described and pictured in Marcgraf and Clusius. This is a good example of the practices of comparison, verification, and correspondence between observation and bookishness that underpinned natural history at the time.

Antilles, Du Tertre drew from his personal experience on the islands, manuscript documents, and printed accounts. His understanding of historical sources went along the lines described above for antiquarianism and natural history, and the debates over the value of firsthand observation and source criticism resound on Du Tertre's pages.<fnref n="149" /> For the first volume, on the history of the French colonial establishment on the islands, Du Tertre derived information from “Concessions, Letters Patent, *Lettres de Cachet*, Commissions from the King, deliberations of the [French West India?] Company, & a quantity of other pieces that I have considered as the solid foundation on which I could ground my History”; the soundness of the sources used for the second volume, on the natural history of the islands, was less clearly stated, even if it was “enriched with several beautiful Figures, which are the most consistent with the things they represent of all those hitherto made.”<fnref n="150" />

<footnote>much about Du Tertre's life; one of the few biographical notes I could find is in [L. G. Michaud,] *Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne* (Paris: L. G. Michaud, 1815), vol. 12, 399-401.</footnote>

<footnote n="149">149 Du Tertre, *Histoire des Antilles*, sig. [a6r]: “Toutes les choses que contiennent ces deux Livres se rapportent à celles dont i’ay esté témoin oculaire, & qui n’ont point d’autre garand que ma foy & mon honneur, ou aux originaux & pieces autentiques qui m’ont esté communiqués qui se cautionnent d’elles-mesme, ou aux memoires que i’ay recueillis de plusieurs anciens habitans du païs, & bien que ie ne me fasse pas absolument le garand de celle-ci comme des autres, ie puis asseurer que i’y eu un soin particulier de rejetter tout ce qui m’a paru douteux, & de n’avancer que ce qui me semble le plus probable.”</footnote>

<footnote n="150">150 Du Tertre, *Histoire des Antilles*, sig. [a5v-a6r]: “Ie n’ay pù me dispenser de mettre dans le premier Volume plusieurs Concessions, Lettres Patentes, Lettres de Cachet, Commission du Roy, deliberations de</footnote>
And indeed, the two volumes (but especially the one on natural history) included a fair number of copperplate engravings: some few were landscape views, around half a dozen were maps of the region (some of which were rescued from Du Tertre's previous book), half a dozen others were plates presenting various plants and animals, and about seven pictured scenes of West Indian economic and social life (e.g., an “indigoterie” or indigo manufacturing, a “sucrerie” or sugar refinery, the sea turtle fishery, and so forth). Perhaps because these were among the very few printed descriptions and depictions of the flora and fauna of the French West Indies, the text and engravings of Du Tertre's second volume of the *Histoire des Antilles* became a recurring reference for comparison not only in Plumier's botanical books, but also in his manuscript catalogs and lists, written descriptions, sketches, and drawings of Caribbean plants and animals.<fnref n="151" /> Along with the *Historia naturalis Brasiliae*, Du Tertre's engravings and description were perhaps the printed materials with which Plumier engaged more immediately for a minute correlation between the world read and the world seen. As an example other than the case of the remora analyzed above, the friar often wrote down the names given by Du Tertre to vegetable and animal specimens he had before his eyes, or found in other books—for example, in a set of notes and images he excerpted from Marcgraf and Piso (Plumier's “reading notebooks”), where a good number of the drawings referred to Du Tertre's nomenclature (thus the Dutch *Ambaiba* was the “bois de Trompette du pere du Tertre,” and the *Mundubi* equated to the “Pistache du pere du Tertre”).<fnref n="152" />

### *The systematizers: Bauhin, Hermann, Mentzel*

A last group of authorities in the list of the *Description de plantes de l'Amérique*—and in Plumier's printed and manuscript corpus by and large—were works not on the natural history of the Americas, but treatises of a more generalist scope and, significantly enough, devoid of images: these were Gaspard Bauhin's *Πλυαξ* [Pinax] *Theatri Botanici* (1623), Christian Mentzel's “Pugillus rariorum plantarum,” included in his own *Pinax*—

<footnote>la Compagnie, & quantité d'autres pieces que i'ay considerées comme le fondement solide, sur lequel ie devois appuïer mon Histoire. . . . Le second Volume est l'Histoire naturelle . . . [et] je l'ay aussi enrichie de plusieurs belles Figures, qui sont les plus conformes aux choses qu'elle representent, que toutes celles qui se sont faites iusques à present.”</footnote>

<footnote n="151">151 There was also Charles Rochefort's *Histoire naturelle et morale des îles Antilles de l'Amérique* (Rotterdam: chez Arnoud Leers, 1658), exquisitely illustrated with half-page copperplates. However, Rochefort's account was heavily criticized by Du Tertre and never mentioned, to the best of my knowledge, by Plumier. Furthermore, some of Du Tertre's images of plants and animals bear a certain resemblance with those in Rochefort's volume. We lack sufficient research on any of these two editorial projects.</footnote>

<footnote n="152">152 BMM MS 913, “Icones plantarum,” fol. 24 and 160. Plumier’s fascinanting “reading notebooks,” with abridged manuscript copies of images and texts in printed books, are further analyzed in chapter 3.</footnote>
also called *Index nominum plantarum universalis* (1682)—, and Paul Hermann’s *Paradisi Batavi Prodromus*, printed with his *Schola botanica* (1689).<sup>153</sup> Building up on Conrad Gessner’s work (whose *Pinax Phyton*, or “Catalog of plants in Latin, Greek, German, and French” was published in 1542) and his own *Phytopinax* (1596), Bauhin’s *Pinax* was to become a landmark in the study of plants through the entire early modern period.<sup>154</sup> More importantly, Bauhin paved the way for taxonomical works to come; significantly, Bauhin’s *Pinax* was presented in the title as an “Index of the books by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, and those written by Botanists since the Origins; proposing with method, depending on their genus and their species, about 6,000 names of Plants presented in these books with their Synonyms and their Differences.”<sup>155</sup> As stressed in the title (and further analyzed below in chapter 4), Bauhin’s *Pinax* advanced an approach to the world of plants that came to structure the classification of nature for most of the early modern period. Two points need to be stressed. First, this was not a classification of plants known as much as a nomenclature or catalog of all the names so far given by botanists to those hitherto known—some 6,000 at that point. Second, Bauhin offered synonyms: he correlated the different names that different authors had given to (what Bauhin considered to be) the same plants.<sup>156</sup> What we would now call natural

<footnote n="153"><sup>153</sup> Gaspard Bauhin, *Πίναξ* [Pinax] *Teatri Botanici Caspari Bauhini Basileens. Archiatri & Professoris Ordin. sive Index in Theophrasti Dioscoridis Plinii et Botanicorum qui à seculo scripserunt opera: Plantarum circiter ex millium ab ipsis exhibitarum nomina cum earundem synonymiis & diferentiis* (Basel: suptibus & typis Ludovici Regis, 1623), mentioned by Plumier as “G. Bauhinus. pinax Theatri Botanici”; Paul Hermann, *Schola botanica, sive Catalogus plantarum, quas ab aliquot annis in Horto Regio Parisiensi studiosis indigitavit vir clarissimus Joseph Pitton Tournefort, D.M., ut et Paul Hermanni P.P. Paradisi Batavi Prodromus in quo plantae rariores omnes, in Batavorum Hortis hactenus cultae, & plurimam partem à nemine antea descriptae recensentur* (Amsterdam: apud Henricum Wetstenium, 1689)—Plumier refers to the second part in particular, as “Paulus Hermanus. paradisi Batavi prodromus,” and not to be confused with Hermann’s subsequent and better known *Paradisus Batavus: continens plus centum plantas affabrè aere incisas & descriptionibus illustratas* (Leiden: apud Abrahamum Elzevier, 1698)—, and Christian Mentzel, “Pugillus rariorum plantarum,” in his *Πίναξ Βοζανώνυμος Πολύγλωσσος Κατολισμός* [Pinax Botanonymos Polyglottos Katholikos] *Index nominum plantarum universalis* (Berlin: Officina Rungiana, 1682), listed in the Description as “Mentzelius. Pugillus rariorum plantarum.” Although it might seem only a part of Mentzel’s *Index*, the “Pugillus” actually constituted the main body of the book. Hermann’s “Paradisi Batavi,” on the other hand, was one of the two books (together with the “Schola Botanica” properly speaking) included in his volume, from pages 301 to 386.</footnote>

<footnote n="154"><sup>154</sup> Conrad Gessner, *Catalogus plantarum Latinè, Graecè, Germanicè, & Gallicè* (Zurich: apud Christoph. Froschouerum, 1542), and Gaspard Bauhin, *ΦΙΤΟΠΙΙΝΑΞ* [Phytopinax] *seu enumeratio plantarum ab Herbarijs nostro seculo descriptarum, cum earum differentijs* (Basel: per Sebastianum Hericpetri [1596]). On the connections between Gessner’s and Bauhin’s works, see Philippe Selosse, “The underlying pattern of the Renaissance botanical genre *pinax*,” in *Opening Windows on Texts and Discourses of the Past*, ed. Janne Skaffari *et al.* (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2005), 161-78.</footnote>

<footnote n="155"><sup>155</sup> I adapted the name from the translation by Selosse, “Underlying pattern,” 168.</footnote>

<footnote n="156"><sup>156</sup> On Bauhin’s *Pinax*, I used the classic by Agnes Arber, *Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670* (Cambridge: at the University Press, 1912), esp. 94-6, 130-2, 139-40, 148-52, and the work by Brian W. Ogilvie: *The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe* (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006), esp. 210-5, and also his “Encyclopaedism in Renaissance Botany: From *Historia* to *Pinax*,” in *Premodern Encyclopedic Texts*, ed. Peter Binkley (Leiden: Brill, 1997), 87-100.</footnote>
classification or taxonomy was, in seventeenth-century Western Europe, mainly a work with books, authors, and names (and crucially so, even for Plumier's iconographic work, as we will see in chapter 4).

With his “Universal polyglot botanical dictionary” (and note the “universal” and the “polyglot” here), Mentzel’s ambition was to update Bauhin’s catalog and broaden its scope as far as languages were concerned. Printed in Berlin in 1682, Mentzel’s was a gargantuan enterprise—one, however, he had seen fit to impose on his adolescent son so as to have him learn botany. Mentzel faced the challenge of knowing how many plants were actually already known by compiling an alphabetical list of every name that every plant had ever received in virtually every language known so far. True, the book was ambitiously cosmopolitan: it encompassed plant names from not only European, but also non-European languages, such as Native American languages—he mentions “Brazilian, Virginian, and Mexican.” After a frontispiece elegantly framed by human allegories of the four continents, the title page listed a long enumeration of languages and dialects ranging from Venetian to Javanese.157 As Alix Cooper has shown, Mentzel saw his *Index* as a sort of double translation: from the non-European world to the European one, and from the world of popular, indigenous, and vernacular languages to that (in Latin and Greek) of learned scholarship.158 Yet despite Mentzel’s “awareness of globality,” the production of his book was extremely localized: he drew those names from the books at the Great Elector’s library in Berlin. Hermann, too, was largely following on Bauhin’s footsteps with his “Paradisi Batavi,” an eighty-page alphabetical list of “exotic plants observed in Dutch gardens.” These pages, at the origins of Hermann’s more famous *Paradisus Batavus*

<footnote n="157">157 I used the copy in the John Carter Brown Library (not all copies included this frontispiece), 1-SIZE J682 .M549i. The impressive list appears as follows: “EUROPAEORUM Latinâ sive vetere Romanâ, Graecâ antiquâ, Italicâ cum suis, Hetruriâe, Istriae, Venetorum, Forojuliensium, nec non insularum adjacentum Malthae, Cretae vel Candiae, Lesbî, &c. Dialectis, Hispanicâ, Lusitanicâ & in ea regnorum Cataloniae, Valentiae, &c. Gallicâ vetere & neotericâ cum suis, Burgundiae, Narbonae, Parisiensium, &c. idiomatibus. Anglicâ, Scoticâ & Irlandicâ. it: Danicâ, Germanicâ cum suis, Silesiorum, Marchicorum, Pomeranorum, Borussorum &c. sermonum proprietatibus. Belgicâ cum sua Brabanticâ. Bohemicâ, Polonicâ, Lituanicâ, Vinidicâ, Rutenicâ, Wallachicâ olim Dacicâ, Hungaricâ, Sclavonicâ, Croaticâ. &c. / ASIATICORUM, Hebraeâ, Chaldaicâ, Syriacâ, Arabicâ, Turcicâ cum sua Tripolitana, &c. Tartaricâ, Persicâ, Malabaricâ, Bramanicâ olim Brachmanicâ, prophetarum, magorúmq[ue], veterum, Zeilanicâ sive Cingalicâ, Javanicâ, Bengalicâ, Sinicâ, Japonicâ, Malaicâ, Coreicâ. &c. / AFRICANORUM Aegyptiacâ, Aethiopicâ, Mauritanicâ sive Barbaricâ & Tunensium, cum poenorum antiqua, Canaricâ & Madagascaricâ. / AMERICANORUM, Brasilianâ, Virginianâ, Mexicanâ & adjacentium populorum aliorúmq[ue] in insulis, & continente solo, hinc inde habitantium, quorum Sermonum monima non omnibus, sed quibusdam tantùm Plantis, quotquot apud Auctores reperta fuerunt, sparsim adposita sunt.”</footnote>

<footnote n="158">158 Alix Cooper, “Latin Words, Vernacular Worlds: Language, Nature, and the ‘Indigenous’ in Early Modern Europe,” *East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine* 26 (2007), 17-59.</footnote>
(1698), the “Dutch Paradise,” also draw some correspondence between different denominations given to the same plants.<fnref n="159" />

The systematizers mentioned in Plumier’s list of authorities hint at a problem that was pervasive and that we will encounter again in the following chapters (especially when tackling the seriality of Plumier’s drawings): namely that, before taxonomy as we know it existed, naturalists were not so much worried about arranging plants and animals into groups as they were about puzzling out how many distinct species there were and, above all, how many were actually already known and had already been described by previous authors.

Although Plumier’s list of “Authors quoted in this volume” aimed at enumerating the works quoted in the friar’s first book on American botany, it actually provides us with a helpful guide to the bookish tradition on which European natural history of the New World relied at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Renaissance classics by Oviedo, Hernández, Clusius, and Cristóvão da Costa, the seventeenth-century illustrated volumes by Piso, Marcgraf, and Du Tertre, and the works on botanical systems by Bauhin, Hermann, and Mentzel constituted the bookish horizon in relation to which Plumier’s work took shape. It is delicate to assess how much of Plumier’s iconographic corpus was actually made in the field, or even in the West Indies, and how much in the library or cells of his Parisian convent, or onboard a ship. But it seems reasonable to believe that, even for a traveler and firsthand observer like the Minim friar, the library never ceased to be a central space in the production of knowledge on overseas natures, in one way or another. Plumier’s papers and printed volumes offer a good insight into the way in which fieldwork, direct observation, and visual representation were practices closely related, in the work of late-seventeenth-century naturalists, with practices such as poking around in books. However dramatically practitioners portrayed the mythical and long-lasting turn from the “little books of men” to the “great Book of Nature,” the commerce with classics was central to the making of natural history. Texts and images, printed books and manuscript papers did not need to provide the actual sources for Plumier’s images for playing an important role in what and how was represented in them. Seen in this light, the friar’s iconographic corpus invites us to reassess the contours of firsthand observation by contextualizing it within a broader history of the place that

<footnote n="159">159 Hermann, *Paradisus Batavus*.</footnote>
information management had in the enterprise of natural historical knowledge: in other
words, to nuance any intuitive distinction between the worlds of travel and the worlds of
scholarship.

Conclusion

This chapter sought to address the place that visual representations played in the
making of natural history in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France. In
doing so, it revealed the pressing epistemic uncertainties with which naturalists were
coping at the time. They proudly proclaimed that these could only be waived by
departing from the bookish tradition, a claim that was far from new in the world of
scholarship. As Francis Bacon put it famously more than half a century earlier: “down
with antiquities and citations or supporting testimonies from texts; down with debates
and controversies and divergent opinions; down with everything philological.”<fnref n="160" /> But for
those among Plumier’s contemporaries who, like Perrault and Tournefort (and unlike
Plumier himself), explicitly reflected upon these questions, the problem was one that
affected the sources of their knowledge: it was the danger, in Perrault’s words, “of being
misled by the testimonies [one] works with.” History, a knowledge based on a descriptive
approach to particulars, required uncontroversial sources (“tali prove,” Coronelli said),
namely the plants, animals, and antiquities themselves. Visual representation offered, for
both antiquarians and naturalists, a valuable instrument for stockpiling such evidence by
means devoid of interpretation and controversy.

Yet, as this chapter aimed at showing, the work of naturalists as concerned with the
factual as Plumier and his contemporaries was not alien to bookish culture altogether.
Their self-portrayal as intrepid travelers was not at odds with a rather sophisticated work
with books. As a matter of fact, they lent credence to previous scholars: a much-needed
intellectual certainty in matters of natural knowledge could only be attained by combining
direct observation with the mastery of the literary corpus. The terms according to which
late seventeenth-century advocates of firsthand observation engaged with printed words
and figures were best articulated by Tournefort, for whom one of the principal aims of
botany was to carry out the “critique of the authors that have written about these plants,
& whose descriptions are not consistent with the natural.” Naturalists could only operate

<footnote n="160">¹⁶⁰ Francis Bacon, *Novum organum*, aphorism 3, quoted in, and translated by, Anthony Grafton, *Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800* (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 [1991]), 2.</footnote>
usefully as observers by being fully aware of what was already known in the Western tradition. Scholars like Perrault, Dodart, Tournefort, or Plumier were far from pretending to rewrite natural knowledge from scratch. Even when aspiring to a history of natural particulars, they overtly reached, to use Dodart's words, for "ancient and modern Authors . . . so as to confront their descriptions with ours."

We need to understand Plumier's iconographic archive of the West Indian nature within this intellectual context, one structured around practices of comparison, correspondence, and verification of the world of plants and animals with the world of books. In the corpus of the Minim friar, text and images were intertwined in various ways. In crafting a gargantuan collection of images resulting from his own firsthand observation on the islands, Plumier not only dialogued with the scholars of his own time, but also with the literary tradition that late seventeenth-century naturalists claimed to rebuke. Traveling with a view to observing with one's own eyes—as well as crafting images for the sake of collecting sound sources for a historically oriented knowledge of nature—stood as modes of reading or at least of engaging with the printed world.
<figure><img src="image_28.png" /></figure>
## 2. “Par les ordres du Roy”

# The Culture of Scientific Royal Patronage in Louis XIV's France

In September 1746, Carl von Linnaeus, long praised as the father of modern taxonomy, was replying to a letter of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences. The society that he had helped found was asking him to recommend a naturalist whom they wished to send to China on the boats of the national East India Company: they intended this to be the first of a series of scholars to be funded annually to botanize in the Far East. In his reply, Linnaeus praised the project of the Academy: it would allow Sweden “to shine brilliantly amongst all curious nations; we, who before have scarcely known how to tell the difference between fir and larch, shall now be able to teach foreigners to count the eggs in the polipy [sic].” Linnaeus’s patriotic pride was pleased not only by the prospect of Swedish scholars being able to instruct others on the intricacies of the sexual reproduction of polyps, but also by the Academy’s intention to make such an assignment on a regular basis: systematically sending a naturalist every year would allow Sweden to surpass exemplary precedents. The Prince of Botanists evoked a specific one: that of Louis XIV’s support to traveling naturalists like Joseph Pitton de Tournefort in the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean; Louis Feuillée (1660-1732) in South America; the brothers Alexandre (n.d.) and Jean-Baptiste Lignon (b. ca. 1667) in Guadeloupe; Joseph-Donat Surian (d. ca. 1691) in the West Indies; Joseph-François Lafiteau (1681-1746) in North America—and Charles Plumier.<fnref n="1" />

In Linnaeus's comparison is suggested a link between state and traveling naturalists that would endure and strengthen over time until the present day. Plumier has recurrently been considered to be part of a generation of French naturalists entrusted by the absolutist government of Louis XIV explicitly to collect information in the colonies and bring it back to France. This material, mostly on the flora and fauna of overseas territories and sometimes published in the metropolis, would have served the ambitions of the “Colbertian” state to gather and accumulate information of any kind on the

<footnote n="1">¹ Linnaeus to Pehr Elvius, Uppsala, September 23, 1746, in the Linnaean Correspondence digital project, http://linnaeus.c18.net, letter L0732. An English translation is available in Albert Alberg, *The Floral King: A Life of Linnaeus* (London: W. H. Allen & Co., 1888), 156-58.</footnote>
territories under their sovereignty.<fnref n="2" /> Plumier and his drawings and prints of West Indian plants and animals offer a privileged case study in this sense. His career was not that of a marginal individual with respect to this institutional scientific machinery: on the contrary, it contains all the elements to be interpreted as an integral part of it. Pensioned by the state and allowed to exhibit the sumptuous title of *botaniste du roi*, Plumier undertook three government-sponsored trips to the French West Indies; what is more, his two lavishly illustrated books on botany were printed at the king's expense and at the king's presses housed at the Louvre Palace. His books repeatedly presented themselves as the results of voyages undertaken “par les ordres du Roy”—by the orders of the king—which became a pervasive formula mushrooming in the accounts of scholars traveling under the aegis of the crown. These elements of a thriving career caused him to be described as an “agent and protégé” of that increasingly administrative and information-amassing monarchy of late seventeenth-century France.<fnref n="3" /> Hence naturalists like Plumier, traveling through the West Indies and the Levant, through South and North America, have been integrated into a narrative of a highly bureaucratized and centralized “scientific arm” of the *ancien régime*.<fnref n="4" /> They came to epitomize the place natural history has been attributed in the construction of the modern state: like Linnaeus, historians looked back and the cohort of botanists traveling under the aegis of the Sun King appeared as the forerunners of those grand expeditions of the second half of the eighteenth century in which “natural history became a powerful political tool of enlightened economic reform” and colonial control.<fnref n="5" />

Yet the myth of origins needs to resemble the present it serves rather than the past it evokes. In an effort to transcend individual experiences and draw large historical narratives, historians have sometimes placed Plumier and other late seventeenth-century traveling naturalists at the service of a successfully absolutist monarchy: the modernist reading of the political system under the reign of Louis XIV draws a picture of completeness of the government's monopoly of information management and knowledge control that seems closer to the ideal that the power may have aspired to than

<footnote n="2">² On the information system of the “Colbertian” state, see Jacob Soll, *The Information Master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s Secret State Information System* (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2009).</footnote>

<footnote n="3">³ James E. McClellan, *Colonialism and Science: Saint Domingue in the Old Regime* (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 113.</footnote>

<footnote n="4">⁴ James E. McClellan and François Regourd, “The Colonial Machine: French Science and Colonization in the Ancien Regime,” *Osiris* 15 (2000), 31–50, and James E. McClellan and François Regourd, *The Colonial Machine: French Science and Overseas Expansion in the Old Regime* (Turnhout: Brepols, 2011).</footnote>

<footnote n="5">⁵ Paula De Vos, “Natural History and the Pursuit of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Spain,” *Eighteenth-Century Studies* 40, no. 2 (2007), 230.</footnote>
to the reality it had to grapple with. This chapter follows the scarce remaining traces of
this botanist's relationship with his sponsoring individuals and institutions in order to
interrogate the part that the visual materials resulting from his travels played in it. It will
call attention to the dangers of a literal reading of the official rhetoric surrounding
traveling naturalists: the title of royal botanist or the motto "on the orders of the King"
invite an institutional interpretation that risks, however, dismembering the agency of
both the scholars and the patrons involved in this sort of royal sponsorship. The
following pages aim at recomposing this. That overseas scientific travels such as
Plumier's were sponsored by the government does not mean that traveling naturalists
were obedient agents of a coherent sort of state, or that such kinds of scholarly
enterprises were consciously integrated into a cohesive project of global expansion. The
chapter shows the fragility of patronage bonds, and the crucially important mediating
role that Plumier's corpus of images, both as a discourse (on the Americas) and as an
object (of collectors' desire) played in ensuring a fairly stable royal support for his travels.

The career of the Minim friar and *botaniste du roi* Charles Plumier as a traveling
naturalist sponsored by an undeniably developing state such as late seventeenth-century
France poses the problem of how to integrate individual fortunes within a larger account
of the equation of knowledge and empire in absolutist France. This is a major historical
question, and it is partially echoed in the materials this and other somewhat nomadic
scholars circulated—the journals they wrote, the specimens they shipped, the images they
drew, the lists they compiled. Naturalists like Plumier had to move in, and negotiate with,
both very different communities—from savants to patrons and ministers—and
networks—from the urban dynamics of Paris to the trans-Atlantic imperial spaces. Some
of his patrons were at the same time prominent officers of the navy administration and
passionate collectors and amateurs of botany and art. Images like Plumier's were at the
very same time commodities in the market of luxury trade, objects of curiosity, works of
art, part of the state machinery devoted to the glory of the king, descriptions of the
natural world informed by concrete modes of inquiry, and pieces of the puzzle of nature
in which scholars were attempting to find an order at that time. In late seventeenth-
century France, the royal patronage of traveling naturalists was grounded on these
different, though profoundly congruent, dimensions of natural history.

This chapter aims at analyzing the central role that Plumier's corpus of images
played in securing him royal patronage. Plumier was not originally engaged by the
monarchy to produce his iconographic archive or to collect information on the colonies'
natural worlds in view of a use in terms of imperial control from a distance. His images,
however, eventually showed a potential not only for aesthetic receptions among courtly
audiences, but also to serve the glorification of the monarchy—which, somewhat
fortuitously, allowed Plumier to secure royal patronage for his trans-Atlantic journeys.

The chapter proceeds in four parts. First, I will look at Plumier’s formative years at
the French Minim convent of the Pincian Hill in Rome. These are meaningful for his
later career for two reasons: first, by the late seventeenth century, the community of
friars at that convent had reinforced their tight allegiance to the French king in the frame
of the tense diplomatic relationships between the crown and the Holy See; second, they
constituted an intellectual community which developed a particular blend of
craftsmanship and natural inquiry, one that actually became pivotal in their negotiating
patronage within transnational networks. Plumier’s first travel to the Caribbean in the
company of a fellow botanist will be the object of the second section: their divergent
paths embody the different ways in which each of them built his relationship to the state.
The last two sections will deal with how Plumier secured royal largesse for his botanical
research in the Caribbean by, first, establishing himself as a reliable go-between for the
colonial and metropolitan authorities and, second, by effectively integrating networks of
learned exchange in which the boundary between expertise and amateurship, between art
and science, if any, was fluid.

## Craftsmanship and royal patronage at the *Trinità dei Monti*

Before Plumier was entrusted by the French State with his first natural exploration
of the Caribbean islands, he had been botanizing in Southern France for about six years,
occupied with the observation and description of the flora of the region and with the
ambition of composing a general catalog of plants. Although one of the friars of the
Minim convent of Bormes, a Provençal town one hundred kilometers from Marseille, he
was granted “permission to wander through the coasts of Provence, & the Mountains of
the Alps in order to discover the most curious things regarding plants.”<fnref n="6" /> Yet botany was
a new passion for the friar. Right before arriving in Bormes in 1681, Plumier had spent
five years in the convent of his order in Rome: there, the study of plants came to hold

<footnote n="6">⁶ Charles Plumier, *Description des plantes de l’Amérique avec leurs figures* (Paris: de l’Imprimerie royale, 1693), sig. a3r: “L’obeïssance m’ayant rappellé dans ma Province, j’obtins de mes Superieurs la permission de parcourir les costes de Provence, & les Montagnes des Alpes, pour y decouvrir ce qu’il y a de plus curieux en matière de plantes.”</footnote>
<figure><img src="image_29.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 2.1. “Piazza della Trinità de Monti,” etching by Israël Silvestre, ca. 1660. The French Minims at the Trinità were under the direct patronage of the French crown: the convent was part of France’s territorial pretentions over the papal city—just as much, actually as Silvestre’s print, which was part of a collection of plates on “French Rome.” (Fabien Silvestre.)</figcaption></figure>

sway. However, like the large majority of his fellow Minim friars who indulged in
intellectual endeavors, 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 a distinguished French mathematician from the order,
Father Emmanuel Maignan taught mathematics. Maignan had come to be a prominent
scientific figure of his time, a renowned Catholic scholar whose work stood at the
intersection of mathematics, physics and theology. His life's work aimed at building up a
critique of scholastic Aristotelism by offering an alternative to it: his ambitious program
of natural philosophy attempted to reconcile theological knowledge and the culture of
experimentalism spreading at that time among students of natural philosophy. Maignan
was born in Toulouse, where he spent most of his life as professor of mathematics in the
monastery of his order, except for nearly fifteen years, during which he lived in Rome. In
1636, he moved from Toulouse to the convent of Trinità dei Monti, a French community
of Minim friars located at the very heart of the capital of Catholicism: there he taught
mathematics and took up the direction of the *studium*, the college of the congregation. He
soon became well integrated in the Roman clientele networks and scientific milieu: under
the protection of Cardinal Bernardino Spada, an influential artistic patron and former
papal nuncio in Paris, Maignan engaged among others in the debates and experiments on
the vacuum that took place in the Papal city around the 1640s. Appointed provincial of Aquitania in 1651, he returned as professor of mathematics to his old Toulouse convent, where Plumier went to meet him at the end of the 1660s.<fnref n="7" />

Plumier moved to Trinità dei Monti in 1676, perhaps encouraged by Maignan, who died that very year. The church of the Santissima Trinità dei Monti, at the top of the Pincian Hill and what came to be known as the Spanish Steps at Piazza Spagna, is nowadays one of the iconic images of Rome's urban landscape (fig. 2.1). Since long before the Spanish Steps were built in the 1720s, the convent of the Trinità had housed a small congregation of French friars whose constitution resulted from a peculiar game of allegiances: their almost mythical origins go back to the founder of the Minims himself, the Calabrian hermit Francis of Paola, who placed both the order and the Roman convent under the patronage of King Louis XII of France. A Catholic congregation in the heart of Rome, but under the direct protection of the kings of France, the history of the community of Trinità is marked by a tension that only aggravated over time.<fnref n="8" /> By the time Plumier arrived to the hillside, the long dispute for the control of the Pincio had just been closed in favor of the French due to the resolute actions of Louis XIV and the Minims' displayed loyalty to the Most Christian King. Located at the very heart of the capital of the Post-Tridentine Church, but placed under the protection and patronage of the increasing Gallican French crown, the Minim community of the Trinità epitomized the specificity of Plumier's career under the sponsorship of the French state.

Parallel to these developments (or perhaps as a direct consequence), the French Minim community in Rome became one of the most dynamic spaces of scholarship in the city during the second half of the seventeenth century—roughly the period in which both Maignan and Plumier sojourned at different moments. Their history has surely been

<footnote n="7">⁷ 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, and 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), 269-394.</footnote>

<footnote n="8">⁸ An illustrative episode of this tension took place in 1620, when the Minims of the Trinità addressed a letter to Louis XIII signed in “Your house of the Trinitè du Mont in Rome . . . [by] Your subjects and prayers,” the friars of the convent. The members of the community complained to their monarch about the attacks they were suffering from other Roman congregations because of their being “under the authority of our Kings and housing only their natural subjects,” that is, Frenchmen. The friars turned the question in a very interesting way: the problem was not that these attacks, whatever they were, could undermine their “particular interest,” but the “honor of Your Majesty and the French Nation, who has only this Convent in the whole of Italy, and perhaps in all the rest of the provinces outside France, with such prerogative.” The letter requested Louis XIII to make his ambassador in Rome renew the zeal of his protection of the Minims, seemingly relaxed in the previous times. BIF MS fonds Godefroy 268, fol. 258.</footnote>