This research seminar is concerned with all aspects of the history of natural history and the field and environmental sciences. The regular programme of papers and discussions takes place over lunch on Mondays. In addition, the Cabinet organises a beginning-of-year fungus hunt and occasional expeditions to sites of historical and natural historical interest, and holds an end-of-year garden party.
Seminars are held on Mondays at 1pm in Seminar Room 1.
For further details about upcoming events, or to be added to the mailing list for the Cabinet of Natural History, please contact Melissa Altinsoy or John Schaefer.
Michaelmas Term 2025
13 October
Mika Hyman (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Seeking immunity: cacao research and the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture 1930–1940
20 October
Ewa Zakrzewska (History, EUI)
Making communication common: information architecture, classificatory schemes and reference aids in the repositories of early scientific societies
In this talk I'd like to share my work-in-progress on designing shared information environments in European academic societies between 1600 and 1750, as illustrated by their repository projects and designs of research infrastructure. Specifically, I'll be bringing material evidence of methods of referencing, categorising and browsing in early scientific archives into the spotlight to ask whether it can illuminate 17th-century concerns about commitment to theory and communication strategies in the face of natural-philosophical divides. How do you break free of the constraints imposed by 'complete schemes of opinion' (scholastic taxonomies and over-theorised explanations), while preserving a pragmatic order in a gathered body of experiments, observations, and records? In a time of debates over the possibility of adopting a universal framework of meaning and translating it into infrastructural tools aiding communication, undermined by divides and nuances in natural-philosophical schools, how do you make repositories an effective working tool? By posing these questions and presenting preliminary archival findings, I invite the Cabinet to join me in considering strategies of enabling open-ended, indeterminate search in the age of classificatory controversies in natural philosophy, and ensuring purposeful communication across different schools of thought in science and natural philosophy as evidenced by the material shape of repositories.
27 October
Bronte Evans Rayward (Geography, University of Cambridge)
Practical environmental narratives: managing land in the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas)
In this presentation, I will reflect on the historical development of British settler colonial activities on the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas) and how these interacted with commodity narratives in the British-claimed Antarctic region. Utilising agricultural research, local periodicals, and other archival material, I will narrate the social and environmental impacts of local political uncertainties about landscape management and sovereignty, and its unfolding over a period of time. I will argue that this uncertainty enabled a discourse of pragmatic landscape management. This local emphasis on pragmatism in the Islands conflicted with idealism and international cooperation promoted in British Antarctic political negotiation from the mid-twentieth century. I examine how these contexts interacted to shape stories of environmental research and conservation in the Falkland Islands. Local interest in the Islands' native environments transitioned post the 1982 conflict from a hobby to a complex component of local identity. Personalities speaking directly to British Antarctic history mediated and influenced this shift, suggesting the importance of taking a regional and relational perspective. To conclude, I offer some observations about the contemporary relationships between environmental conservation practice and local identity.
3 November
Nathan Cornish (History and Digital Humanities, University of Southampton)
Resurrecting the list: exploring Coimbra Botanical Garden in 1800 through multi-species network visualisation
In 1800, Kew Gardens received a full catalogue of the plants at Portugal's only university botanical garden through Joseph Banks' network in order to facilitate the exchange of plants. This catalogue represents a rare opportunity to visualise and analyse the garden not only through the structure of taxonomic arrangement but also as an environmental node in a colonial network of plant exchange. Network analysis used as a speculative and creative tool enables different ways of seeing the garden that highlight the physical connections of plants moved within the network of botanical study. Building on this methodology looks towards ways of precisely and creatively understanding the environmental history of imperial science at a larger scale than following the stories of individual plants.
10 November
Maya Juman (Veterinary Medicine, University of Cambridge)
Viral ghosts and specimen hosts: pathogen detection in natural history museum collections
Natural history collections are a valuable but largely untapped resource for studying emerging infectious diseases across space, time, and host species. However, the detection of viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi in museum specimens is highly contingent on collection, preservation, and storage practices. In this seminar, I will discuss two case studies of retrospective viral discovery from my own research, including the detection of SARS-related coronaviruses and zoonotic poxviruses in archival bat and rodent tissues, respectively. In doing so, I will also explore the downstream implications of political and historical collecting context for data retrieval from museum specimens.
17 November
Kate Hooper (Independent Researcher)
Who was Henslow?
Kate Hooper has just published her first book, Who Was Henslow?, a biography of John Stevens Henslow. This year marks the bicentenary of Henslow being appointed Professor of Botany in Cambridge, in 1825.
Kate enjoyed a 37-year career as an NHS doctor. However, her love of plants begun with her own small patch of garden aged five in Hertfordshire, developing her own garden to studying Garden Design and horticulture part-time at Writtle and West Anglia Colleges respectively. Having founded Perfect Circle Designs in 2002, she designed and landscaped gardens in the UK and France with her business partner. She enjoys gardening with her husband in the mild dry climate of South Cambridgeshire.
Following the birth of her first grandson, Kate hung up her stethoscope in 2022. She was delighted to be accepted both as a Volunteer Garden Guide and Herbarium Volunteer at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. It was then she began to ask questions about Henslow. Why did he take on the Chair of Botany when he was already Professor of Mineralogy? How did he manage to persuade the University to buy 40 acres of land in central Cambridge for the study of botany? Why did he move his family to a small parish in Suffolk, before the new Botanic Garden opened? Despite a lifelong desire to travel why did he forego the chance to join the Beagle voyage of 1831? (He let his most famous student, Charles Darwin, travel instead.) As a devout Christian, how did he react to Darwin's famous book, On the Origin of the Species?
24 November
Liz White (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Biblio-botany: early modern gardens in print and material culture
The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries bore witness to a delicate symbiosis between books and plants. New printing technology meant that information could be disseminated to a generation for whom botany was emerging as a discipline of its own, not merely as a subcategory of medicine. Herbals by the likes of Brunfels, Fuchs, Dodoens, Mattioli and Gerard were popular compendia for all manner of domestic uses, and their woodcut images, powerful surrogates for the plants which were difficult to transport from country to country. During this period of experimentation and discovery, gardening became an 'art' which could bring one closer to God, the very first gardener. Botanical imagery and horticultural metaphor suffused all areas of public and domestic life, including literature, stagecraft, needlework, religion and politics. Gardens both as ideas and as physical spaces formed vital centres of socio-economic life in Renaissance England, functioning as sites of storytelling and scandal, politics and poetry, profits and pleasures.
1 December
Thomas Banbury (HPS, University of Cambridge)
Christ and the mangrove: theology and botany in early modern Brazil
The colony of 'France équinoxiale' existed for only around four years (1612–15) in what is now the Brazilian state of Maranhão. Amongst the building of fortifications and looming war with the Portuguese, a group of French Capuchin friars arrived to preach to the native Tupinamba peoples, and conduct natural historical enquiries into the region's plants, animals and insects. The results were two comprehensive travel accounts by Fr. Claude d'Abbeville and Fr. Yves d'Évreux, detailing their extensive contact with the locals, which were suppressed for political reasons by the French government in 1615. Nevertheless, the works show the influence of a tradition of Franciscan education in both natural philosophy and the teaching of religion, which, I argue, creates a direct connection between the medieval bestiary tradition and the teaching of catechism by analogy. Drawing on the work of Charlotte de Castelnau-L'Estoile and Hélène Clastres, I explore how these projects of collecting local nature and converting local peoples worked in concert to foster a localised form of theological teaching, which used native flora and fauna to explain complex theological matters.