FHI Field Trips | Plant Histories of Variety and Variance at the Duke Herbarium

Hosted by the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, Field Trips is a new series on current Duke faculty projects in environmental humanities. Each Field Trip combines a mini-seminar with an interpretive tour, at a physical site that has shaped the work under discussion. In its first year, the series will pay special attention to the emerging field of plant studies in the humanities.

Capacity limited: registration required. Registrants will receive readings, directions, other info prior to event.

For the 2nd event of the series, FHI Field Trips will venture to the Duke Herbarium, one of the largest herbaria in the United States. It contains over 825,000 specimens of vascular plants, bryophytes, algae, lichens, and basidiomycete fungi, with an especially rich representation of specimens from the southeastern US.

Our presenter will be Andrew Griebeler, Assistant Professor of Art, Art History & Visual Studies. A scholar of the intersections of art, science, and the natural world in the medieval Mediterranean, he is the author of Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (University of Chicago Press, 2024).

Prof. Griebeler will discuss a short excerpt from Botanical Icons, in which he investigates a series of doubled plant illustrations in a medieval manuscript. Most medieval botanical manuscripts do not include multiple pictures of plants under individual plant names. To make sense of these doubles, he consulted botanical keys, guides, and herbarium specimens. He soon realized that the makers of the manuscript were doing much the same thing. Understanding manuscript variants was thus also a matter of attending to variation among actual plants. As a result, he now sees stronger commonalities among the basic research methods of historians as well as medieval and modern botanists. Images and plant specimens together make up an inexhaustible archive of past and future observations, of seeing and learning the world around us.