Inventing the Indigenous: Local Knowledge and Natural History in Early Modern Europe (review)

As Europeans in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries encountered the realm of the “exotic,” some of them, especially those living in German-speaking lands, also took stock of natural objects in their local areas. The result was a form of “local knowledge” that augmented the general understanding of nature and revised the identity of Europeans themselves as inhabitants of specific indigenous domains. In inventing, or imagining, the indigenous within a European milieu, no one stands out so much as the Swiss German physician Paracelsus. Cooper perceptively identifies his advocacy of domestic German medicines (in contrast to exotic imports) as part of a medical polemic that called attention to local places, illnesses, remedies, and economies and that helped to create a discourse juxtaposing indigenous and exotic parts of nature. Others soon followed suit, sometimes compiling extensive tracts describing the natural worlds of specific territories and defending local medicines. Cooper notes especially Jan van Beverwyck’s Autarkeia Bataviae (Leiden, 1644) and Lambert Bidloo’s Dissertatio de re herbaria (Amsterdam, 1683) as attempts to reestablish a sense of self-sufficiency in a Holland overwhelmed by alien influences.

For medical students, knowledge of native plants was especially important. Early modern attempts to supply that information led to an entire genre of botanical texts ultimately described as “local floras”—inventories of plants growing within precise areas, usually no more than three to five miles around a town. Most often, the town in question possessed a university or botanical garden. In one example, Ludwig Jungermann and Caspar Hofmann, two medical students at the university town of Altdorf, blended into their list of plants growing near Nuremberg a description of the local landscape, emphasizing its fertility and celebrating the civic identity of those who lived there. Other texts emphasized the productivity of certain regions, spawning yet another genre of local natural history, the regional mineralogy, which proclaimed the latent political and economic power of subterranean natural wealth.

In contrast to “local floras,” larger natural histories included reference to entire territories and took account of living (including animals) and nonliving parts of local nature. Yet in these works, different visions of natural history, reflecting dissimilar concepts of “nature” and “territory” when tied to economic strategies and political ambitions, began to take shape. By the eighteenth century, another problem related to local knowledge—whether knowledge based upon local informants could properly be considered “scientific”—began also to divide those making room for indigenous parts of nature within larger discussions of natural phenomena. Cooper’s focus in documenting this quarrel is upon the bibliographies of natural history that were published by Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, a Swiss entrepreneur and polymath, and Carl Linnaeus, the more famous Swedish naturalist. Whereas Scheuchzer listed such works as local floras and popular pamphlets recording marvelous events like earthquakes and insect showers, Linnaeus tended to devalue the contributions of local natural history.

Cooper’s study is valuable, well informed, and, in making a case for the role of German territories and of learned local physicians in the pursuit of natural history, imaginative and challenging in its focus. It brings to light important sources that would otherwise remain obscure and makes a convincing case for their relevance among the practices of natural knowledge in the early modern era.