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.
Lent Term 2026
26 January
Sandra Liwanowska (HPS, Cambridge)
Tall ambitions: giants and the pursuit of human improvement in the long eighteenth century
In the 1960s, Percy G. Adams asked why, in the so-called Age of Reason, belief in giants remained so widespread. Scholarship has often situated giants within curiosity culture, treating them as natural anomalies, 'jokes of nature', or relics of legendary ancestors. Yet in the long eighteenth century, giants stood apart from other monstrous figures. This talk argues that, amid fears of degeneration and new interests in heredity, selective breeding, and human improvement, exceptional height came to be valorised as a desirable trait rather than merely displayed as a fairground spectacle. Giants were reimagined as embodiments of Enlightenment ambitions to transcend physical limits in pursuit of an ideal 'tall' form. I will trace ideas of a 'race' of giants, the framing of human gigantism as attainable potential, and scientific efforts to explain abnormal height, before examining its valorisation in Frederick William I's Potsdam Giants, where exceptional stature became a symbol of military strength, civic virtue, and national identity.
2 February
Eszter Csillag (Hong Kong Baptist University)
Representing the tropical 'hortus': natural knowledge in Michael Boym's Flora Sinensis (1656)
The Polish Jesuit missionary Michael Boym (1612–1659) wrote some of the earliest European studies on China's natural history. His seminal work, Flora Sinensis (Vienna, 1656), is not merely a botanical catalogue but a complex representation of China as a land of unparalleled fertility. While Boym's text promotes Chinese cultivation techniques and exotic flora, its hand coloured print images particularly emphasize plants from the southern, tropical regions of China.
This lecture argues that these tropical zones functioned in the European imagination as a kind of pseudo-greenhouse – a naturally abundant space where desirable fruits and spices flourished without need for intervention. Through an analysis of Flora Sinensis, I demonstrate how Boym's project was shaped less by a strict scientific survey of native botany and more by a logic of availability and fascination. His work represents a moment where empirical observation merged with the economic and cultural desire for the exotic.
Consequently, this study proposes a shift in how we read early modern botanical books: rather than categorizing them by their native origin, we should examine them as records of cross-cultural encounters, where visual representation was dictated by what was accessible, remarkable, and valuable to the observer. In Boym's case, the 'science' of flora is inseparable from the allure of the tropical.
9 February
Brad Scott (Queen Mary University of London)
Plant knowledge-making and the entanglements of natural things: investigations with Hans Sloane's herbarium
The herbarium accumulated by Hans Sloane (1660–1753) is the largest pre-Linnaean plant collection in the world. Comprising over 125,000 specimens, now bound in 272 volumes, its components were gathered and assembled by hundreds of individuals from many parts of the world. With such diverse sources, some dating from the early seventeenth century, Sloane’s collection is a valuable witness to the practices of herbarium construction and plant knowledge-making in this period.
In this presentation, Brad Scott presents the work he has recently undertaken during his PhD at Queen Mary University of London and the Natural History Museum. In it, he suggests how the herbarium as a technology was not simply a tool of knowledge production, but also of knowledge effacement. Such processes were evident during the assembly and management of the component collections by their various creators and owners, and in the curatorial history of the collection since Sloane's death. Furthermore, different ways of knowing and the social and economic infrastructures that supported herbarium construction are barely visible within the pages of plant collections. Through a series of short case studies, the presentation will explore how the practices of collection-building normalised the gaps and silences in herbaria, and thereby occluded certain categories of knowledge and the agency of many knowledge-holders.
16 February
TBC
23 February
Hilbrand Wouters (University of Konstanz)
The fisherman's catastrophe, the historian's problem: on historicizations of water bodies as Second Nature
Water makes a poor archive. Eddies whirl without leaving trace, tides erase footprints. The apparent immutability of large water bodies has long lured modern fishing societies into catastrophically volatile practices, and has likewise challenged historians studying past interactions of humans with marine ecologies – the historical record essentially lost at sea.
In this seminar, I discuss Arthur McEvoy’s 1986 The Fisherman's Problem: Ecology and the Law in the California Fisheries 1850–1980, an account of a tragic boom and bust-cycle. Instead of simply chastising greed, McEvoy combined law, economic history, anthropology, and innovative ecological science to create a finer understanding of the knowledge and myths that (mis)guide fish-dependent communities.
Though hardly the first and certainly not flawless, McEvoy was relatively early in doing what many are still doing: combining historical methods with ecology to narrate complex human-environment interactions. Prompted by growing environmental awareness, recent scholarship has widely theorized on the methodological and narrative innovations required for historicizing such relations – through McEvoy, I sketch a modest prehistory of these continuing challenges.
2 March: Kew Gardens Panel
Emily Hughes and Sophia Kamps
Papers of natural history: publishing and archiving botany at Kew in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Emily Hughes (UCL | Kew Gardens)
Despite vast research of the connection between Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the British Empire, little attention has been turned towards the records kept of it. This paper links the fields of history of science and archival studies to introduce a new perspective: the necessity of considering organisational administrators such as recordkeepers as agents of power and knowledge production within the field of botanic history (Stoler 2002). Asserting natural knowledge as a tool and instrument of colonial control, the paper considers how the circulation of information and knowledge around the empire was dependent on bureaucratic efficiency and recordkeeping at Kew. It takes a material culture approach, assessing how the physical binding and organisation of records can reveal changing colonial priorities through the 19th century, how administrators viewed and categorised natural resources and the world, and how this impacts how archive-users interact with records at Kew today.
Sophia Kamps (Royal Holloway, University of London | Kew Gardens)
Lovell Reeve was the leading natural history publisher of the mid-Victorian era, responsible for periodicals such as Curtis's Botanical Magazine, publications for popular audiences, and specialist works of enduring significance. Lovell Reeve's publications are the result of a complex system of labour and market dynamics, with the publisher working to bring together illustrators, writers, and printers and produce volumes for both specialists and lay audiences. This paper brings together an analysis of the economics of publishing natural history based on the Lovell Reeve papers at RBG, Kew, with a material culture focus on book production, from the creation of elaborate hand-coloured lithographs to the innovative trade cloth bindings used for Reeve's Popular Natural History series. Through an emphasis on production process and materiality, this paper explores the tension between the book as a commodity, a scientific tool, and a work of art.
9 March
Kimberley Glassman (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge)
Telling plant stories: agency of botanicals in Cambridge's collections
We often write histories from the perspective of humans and, as such, create connections through institutional collections from this purview. However, instead of creating links through people, what would happen if we initiated a search tethered to and centred around the plant? In this presentation, I situate the botanical species as the nucleic instigator of meaning-making within Cambridge's collections. From botanical art at the Fitzwilliam Museum to living and preserved specimens at the Cambridge Botanic Garden and Herbarium, I follow the story of one plant to exercise its agency within these collection networks: namely, the Amaryllis belladonna L.
16 March
Alice Wickenden (English, Cambridge)
Books and/of botany within Hans Sloane's library collection
In this talk I discuss the place of botany within Hans Sloane's library. Moving between horti sicci, print, and manuscript, I explore Sloane's presentation and storage of botanical collections within the library space and argue that the need to visually reproduce plants in printed books led to a triangulation of shared material: the original specimen, the engraved reproduction, and the attempt to identify or describe through language. I then move to a discussion of John Ray's Catalogus Plantarum Angliae et insularum adjacentium (1670; 1677), comparing the annotations across the eight copies (of two editions) owned by Sloane and arguing that the value in the duplication of books within Sloane's library was affected by the material existences of the individual copies. I conclude with a brief discussion of plant names in John Milton's Paradise Lost, showing how the library space as conceptualised through the discussion of Sloane can be extended metaphorically.