Books and/of botany within Hans Sloane's library collection

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• Alice Wickenden (Faculty of English)
• Monday 16 March 2026, 13:00-14:00
• Seminar Room 1, Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact ma2019.

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.

This talk is part of the Cabinet of Natural History series.

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