“Metabolizing Medicinal Plants around the Mediterranean”

Alain Touwaide (The Huntington)

Multiple worlds were in contact around the Mediterranean and beyond, from the shores of the Atlantic Ocean to China, in Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance. Plants used for therapeutic purposes traveled together with people within this vast space. Whereas traditional studies have focused on the trade of such commodities, the new transdisciplinary approach that I present here focuses on both the medicinal uses of these plants and the knowledge thereof. Based on selected, yet significant examples collected from a vast textual body generated during the period and throughout the space under consideration, the paper will show that the knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants introduced into a non-native environment (be this environment natural, human, medical, or scientific) was metabolized in different ways, with deep or partial transformations, as well as exact continuities. Going beyond the description of facts, the paper will inquire into the factors that might have contributed to the differentiated transformations in the knowledge of the therapeutic uses of plants, generating dynamic images that reflect knowledge constantly in the making as a series of reactions (possibly cumulated) generated in and by the different environments crossed by the plants

“Sower of Discord: Political Use of Natural Things”

Barbara Di Gennaro (Yale University)

Exchanged in the Mediterranean since Antiquity, balsam was a sought-after medical plant charged with religious and medical meanings, a symbol of Mediterranean cross-cultural harmony. Its resin, called opobalsam, was used to anoint French and Jewish kings, was central in the Christian rite of confirmation and was related to Muslim miracles. Balsam was also a chief ingredient of theriac, the millenary antidote. For centuries balsam had been a powerful symbol of union among cultures in the Mediterranean, used as a precious gift among ambassadors and monarchs, but between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, its meaning changed. Balsam’s supposed dying out, its economic value on the market, and a highly competitive medical scene triggered a shift from sacred plant to a sower of discord. In 1640, Roman physicians and apothecaries became involved in a dispute about the “true” balsam used in the production of theriac, publishing as many as 26 publications within 6 years. The dispute soon exceeded the medical milieus and spread among physicians all over the Italian peninsula and among a wider public in the streets of Rome. What was at stake? The controversy over this rare natural thing was used politically to undermine the authority of Pope Urban VIII, who toward the end of his reign was ailing and weakened by a war against the Farnese family. Scientific arguments about balsam became the tools of a political battle fought through pamphlets, philological debates, and experimental trials about the “naturalness” of a resin that few physicians had ever even seen.

“To Name a Llama: Andean Animals and the Politics of Natural History, 1530-1650”

Mackenzie Cooley (Stanford University)

Sheep, goats, or camels—what were llamas? The Inca had systematically bred and distributed llama and alpaca throughout their vast territories. As Renaissance Europeans sought to make sense of the largest domesticated mammals of the Americas, they used different names to integrate Andean nature into a comprehensible framework of Old World animals, doing so in conflicting ways. Fascinated with fashioning American nature according to a Christian Reconquista paradigm and committed to establishing Castilian agricultural norms in Peru, the Spanish used the Castilian terms for sheep to describe camelids: males became “carneros” and females “ovejas,” often followed by some variation of “del Peru.” For non-Spanish natural historians and travelers alike, however, this was a problematic misnomer. Neither Pliny nor any other ancient author had mentioned the llama, noted Swiss naturalist Konrad Gessner. Comparing its parts to various Old World animals—not including sheep—after a specimen came to Europe in 1558, he termed it “Allocamelus.” After his six-month residence in Peru in 1595, Florentine traveler Francisco Carletti agreed that llamas were not sheep. Describing them as “montoni” (goats in Italian), he bemoaned the fact that “the Spanish very inappropriately call them sheep…they seem to me like little camels.” European perceptions of New World nature were hardly monolithic; Spanish observers were distinctly more eager than other Europeans to avoid animals associated with the Moors. Combining chronicles, natural histories, and archaeozoological evidence, this paper argues that ideas of what constituted the Christian animal kingdom influenced how European observers understood Incan domesticated animals.

“Animals Out of Place: The Curious Case of Three American ‘Tigers’”

Florencia Pierri (Princeton University)

In 1632 Spain’s Philip IV sent a letter to the viceroy of Peru asking for “the most ferocious animals that nature breeds, like lions, tigers, bears, and the like” for the animal enclosure in his new palace, the Buen Retiro. Philip had already asked for animals to be brought back from “any foreign kingdoms where the might live,” but he had neglected the wild animals that populated his own overseas domains. This request was fulfilled in 1633, who sent to Madrid three “tigers.” This talk will trace these animals’ journey from the jungles of Guayaquil, their trip up the coast of South America to Panama, their overland trek across the isthmus, the long ocean voyage to Spain, and the arduous cart ride from Seville to Madrid. In doing so, it will show the various meanings these animals took on dependent on their physical location and the people with whom they interacted. In Guayaquil, caught by indigenous hunters, they were the ochi that their ancestors had always hunted; on their journey from Peru to Panama, they were cargo just like any other to the Portuguese merchant hired to deliver them to Spain; for those who saw them as they traveled by cart from Seville to Madrid, they were major curiosities; and for Philip, they represented animals that could, in a fight, best their counterparts from the African continent or the East Indies, thus proving the superiority of his empire over the rest of the world.

“Coffee, Intellect, and Medicine: Marsigli’s ​Bevanda asiatica”

Duygu Yildrim (Stanford University)

When Luigi Ferdinando Marsigli (1658-1730), a Bolognese natural scientist and Catholic militant, came to Constantinople in 1679, he aimed to observe the Bosphorus to engage with contemporary discussions on oceanography. However, his interest in the Ottoman world expanded as he moved towards this intellectual trajectory, which resulted in works on the military system of the Ottomans, the currents of the Bosphorus, and medicinal uses of coffee. While working on these different subjects, Marsigli met Ottoman intellectuals in the capital. His Bevanda asiatica: Trattatello sul caffè (1685) was replete with references to one of these renowned figures, Hezarfenn Hüseyin (d. 1691-2), a contemporary encyclopedist.

Marsigli’s encounter with Hezarfenn in Constantinople fits into his interest in attaining “universal knowledge,” a quest for knowledge that could rise above the specificities of time and place. According to Marsigli, Ottoman knowledge culture and Ottoman nature belonged to the universal mechanical order. His Bevanda asiatica on the medicinal benefits of coffee on the universal human body most clearly embodies this notion. This paper focuses on Marsigli’s medical epistemology through a close reading of his work. I aim to demonstrate how his selection of scholarly references from medicinal traditions was changeable according to his post-humanist discourse on the Ottomans. In turn, how did this discourse determine the epistemological boundaries between intellectual “fields,” such as medicine, geography, and history, and shape their particular observational and experimental methods?