This interdisciplinary conference will examine botanical knowledge exchange among early modern individuals at the periphery of professional science. We focus on women, domestic workers, artisans, merchants, and enslaved and indigenous naturalists who used plant knowledge in their everyday life, yet did not (or could not) derive a living primarily from botany. 

Over the course of this conference, and a subsequent publication, we intend to address the following questions:

1. What kinds of people and spaces fostered botanical knowledge outside of traditional institutions of learning?

2. What role did embodied experience play in the acquisition of botanical knowledge?

3. What did the social networks of these practitioners look like, and how did this overlap with or differ from the networks of professional scientists?

4. How was the knowledge of these non-professional practitioners valued (or devalued) by their contemporaries?

Our conference is organised into four panels: 'Embodied Knowledge', 'Knowledge from Books', 'Medicinal Knowledge', and 'Knowledge and Empire'. As our keynote speakers, we are delighted to welcome Dr Catherine Powell-Warren (KU, Leuven), author of Gender and Self-Fashioning at the Intersection of Art and Science: Agnes Block, Botany, and Networks in the Dutch 17th Century (Amsterdam University Press, 2023), and Dr Leonie Hannan (Queen's University, Belfast), author of A Culture of Curiosity: Scientific Enquiry in the Eighteenth-Century Home (Manchester University Press, 2023). 

The conference will also feature a tour of the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens, a Natural Dyes workshop with artist Nabil Ali, and a Botanical Illustrations study session at the Fitzwilliam Museum. 

For more details, please see our Programme and Workshops pages.