Plant animal book: Magnifying a microhistory of media circuits

Abstract

In his Anatomy of Plants (1682), Royal Society Fellow Nehemiah Grew writes: 'So that a Plant is, as it were, an Animal in Quires; as an Animal is a Plant, or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume'. Zooming in on the circuit of metaphors packed into this sentence, this essay explores: (a) how medieval zoophytes-marvels like the vegetable lamb and the barnacle goose tree-spurred early modern experiments in comparative anatomy ('a Plant is, as it were, an Animal .. as an Animal is a Plant'), and (b) how bibliographic tropes came to mediate these plant-animal comparisons ('an Animal in Quires .. or rather several Plants bound up into one Volume'). As I argue, not only the affordances of print culture but the book as a material object gave structure to the study of life in the seventeenth century, transforming the medieval book of nature device into an actual printed book.Plant animal book has an accompanying digital essay (www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v3/n1/plantanimalbook/). The noun essay derives from the French verb essayer, meaning to try, to attempt and to experiment. First used in English by Francis Bacon-and fittingly so, given the subject of this project-early modern essays tested the limits of genre by gathering aphorisms culled from commonplace books into thematically cohesive writing. By adventuring into the digital realm, Plant animal book moves to reclaim this earlier, more experimental sense of the essay's potential as a form. It is primarily a work of history (histories, more likely), and as such attempts to excavate concepts-such as plant, animal and book-which have fossilized with the passing of time. Yet it also essays an awareness of its own mediation, inviting readers to share in the exegetical fever of archival discovery that inspired it. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.