About the Talk:
This talk examines the making of the Hortus malabaricus, the first large-scale encyclopedia of South Asian botany from the late seventeenth century. With its hundreds of entries and lavish illustrations, the Hortus malabaricus aimed to provide, for the first time, an all-encompassing overview of the plant world of the Malabar coast and the regions beyond. In recent decades, historians and botanists, ranging from K S Manilal and Richard Grove to Harold Cook and Kapil Raj, have examined in detail the diverse contributions of various groups and professionals to the making of this encyclopedia. In this talk, Professor Dániel Margócsy reviews these valuable accounts and offer a novel perspective by considering a little-known group of manuscripts, nowadays preserved in Italy and France, which directly relate to the writing of the Hortus malabaricus, and the role of the discalced Carmelite monk Matthew of Saint Joseph in its composition. Using these manuscripts, he will explore how religious spirituality may have played a complex role in shaping the study of botany in seventeenth-century Malabar coast.

About the Speaker:
Dániel Margócsy is Professor of History of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), and, with Mark Somos and Stephen N. Joffe, The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: A Worldwide Descriptive Census, Ownership, and Annotations of the 1543 and 1555 Editions (Leiden: Brill, 2018). His articles have appeared in the British Journal for the History of Science, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Netherlands Yearbook of Art History, Progress in Development Studies, Renaissance Quarterly and Social Studies of Science. He is currently working on a book project on Dutch East India Company and its role in shaping the development of science and technology.