The Premodern Colloquium presents Genevra Higginson (Department of History, University of Michigan), discussing her paper "When is a scientific illustration scientific?: Understanding the 319 etchings made for the French Royal Academy of Science's abandoned plant encyclopedia". This paper focuses on a group of 319 etchings made for the French Royal Academy of Science's plant encyclopedia, L’Histoire des plantes. Sanctioned in 1667 but impaired by competing ambitions of academicians, the project was canceled in 1692--leaving the impressive set of etchings in no-man's-land. Neither produced nor sold as fine art prints, nor ultimately bound with a formal treatise, the etchings were instead published and distributed as diplomatic gifts, with sporadic revisions, through 1788. Probing the ramifications of classificatory displacement, this paper questions how an image produced for knowledge production is inflected by contextual changes post-manufacture yet pre-circulation.

As this event will be taking place over Zoom, please register through the link below.

https://umich.zoom.us/meeting/register/H1iYJkvDQ3SeX6wCF0VOeQ