Paul Hermann’s annotated herbaria: Philology, ethnobotany, and techniques of text-making in eighteenth-century botany

Our theme for the autumn and winter terms is ‘An Open Book: Gardens in Literature and Letters’.

While in Sri Lanka (then Ceylon) as a medical officer for the Dutch East India Company (VOC) from 1672 to 1680, the German botanist Paul Hermann (1646–1695) compiled several herbaria of local plants. This talk will focus on the dense handwritten annotations in two of these herbaria and, firstly, demonstrate how they document the linguistic skills and interests of those who collected plants and information about their uses in an overseas trading settlement. Hermann’s botanical practice both required and generated knowledge of Sinhalese and its script—an Indo-Aryan language spoken by the island’s largest ethnic group. His herbaria contain observations on the semantics, morphology, and pronunciation of Sinhalese, which are inseparably intertwined with his botanical and ethnobotanical observation.

Subsequently, Hermann’s herbarium notes will serve as a starting point for examining writing, reading, and publishing practices in eighteenth-century botany. Along with field notes, letters, manuscripts, illustrations, and printed books, herbaria were knots in the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany.

Bettina Dietz holds an MA and a PhD from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. She was a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University from 2010 to 2023, when she returned to Germany to begin her current research project, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG), at the Forschungszentrum Gotha of the University of Erfurt. Her research focuses on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century botany with a current emphasis on collaborative practices of writing, reading and publishing. Other recent areas of interest are herbaria, botany and materia medica, and the relations between botany and philology.

Recent publications include ‘Herbaria as manuscripts. Philology, ethnobotany, and the textual-visual mesh of early modern botany’, History of Science, 62:1 (2024); ‘Iterative Books. Posthumous publishing in eighteenth-century botany’, History of Science 60:2 (2022), ‘Knots in a Web. Botany, materia medica, and South Asian languages in the publication of Paul Hermann’s Ceylon-herbaria (ca. 1690-1770)’ in Plants in the 16th and 17th Century: Botany between Medicine and Science, ed. by Fabrizio Baldassarri, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2023).

e- this seminar is free to attend but booking is required.