Scientia

Because I do not think that the modern division between science and the arts has in itself much meaning for him, I feel glad when my own research encounters the work of Oliver Rackham. Last week this happened on two separate occasions: someone gave me a reference to some work he's done on one of my Old English boundary clauses; and I discovered at the BL that he has produced a parallel edition and translation of the Latin Life of St Fursey. I was reminded about it on Monday when I visited Bologna's herbarium with my parents, who were here for the weekend. Ulisse Aldrovandi started Bologna's herbarium and botanical gardens in the sixteenth century, making them some of the oldest in the world. My father wanted to see a specimen of Juniper indica Bertol, collected in the early nineteenth century by two Englishmen, and sent to Bologna where it was published as a new species by someone whose name I forget. Apparently this particular Juniper has a complicated taxonomic history. In the field it is easily distinguishable as two different plants: one forms a large tree growing at about 10 000 feet of altitude and a bit higher; the other is shrubby, not exceeding about four metres in height, but growing at altitudes of up to 15 000 feet or higher. DNA analysis has confirmed what the field botanists had long suggested, that they are different species. But since their leaves, branches, berries etc are exactly the same they look the same in herbaria and the taxonomy has become entangled. My father wanted to see not only the specimen but all the information they had on where it was collected. Botany depends on careful classification and clear international nomenclature, and as such a botanist has to be a competent historian, able to disentangle previous naming schemes to work out what people were talking about when.

My father and the curator of the herbarium, a very helpful woman about my age, talked about the difficulties of keeping records about what you're collecting while you're actually there in the wild collecting it. She said that when their students first start to make their own herbaria they tell them not to collect more than five things in the first day. Apparently all the students have to make a herbarium as part of their degree, and when I said I thought that was excellent she seemed surprised at the idea that one could teach differently. She was saying how she needed to go out collecting every spring to keep her eye in, and even her professor, a venerable scholar, had to refresh his identification skills in the field every year to keep on top of things. It made me happy because I have long been aware that in the UK botany, which both my parents studied at university, is not a fashionable discipline. It has been superceded by plant science. People do brilliant stuff in this field, but I do think sometimes that maybe there is a tendency for them to be a little too dismissive of botany and taxonomy. I don't really know enough about it to speak with any authority, but I get the impression that Oliver Rackham's type of scholarship, a type of botany broadened out into both ecology and landscape history, is not currently taught. I don't think there are students in Cambridge assembling their herbaria and carefully cultivating the habit of accurate field labelling of specimens. Will there be in the future professors who like to climb into tree houses to scrutinise caterpillar damage in the broad-leaf canopy? Will there be professors of plant science for whom medieval latin is a necessary research tool, who think it important to extend their knowledge of plant and tree behaviour into the past? More likely historians will be historians, and scientists will be scientists, and that will be that.

It's not only a matter of a loss of scholarship and a diminution in the sum of human knowledge. It also has serious repercussions for other areas of work. Take the recent discoveries about the efficacy of some yew extract in treating ovarian cancer. If you isolate the useful compound or molecule, but then discover that only some species of taxus have it, then the taxonomy becomes very important. (I understand this has been happening with some medical developments, although I'm not sure if medicinal use of taxus is among them.)

In the meantime the visit to the herbarium made me think of two different things relevant to medieval manuscript work. It reminded me that I made my own basic attempt at a medieval script herbarium or book of specimens, specifically for tenth-century square minuscule, when I was doing Part I. I wonder whether it could be a useful teaching exercise; you could send the kids out and ask them to come back with some specimens (photocopies, unless they're very cunning) of script neatly labelled and taxonomised. After all palaeography, like botany, is supposed to allow you to identify wild specimens; you ought to be able to give me a piece of script you'd just found in an old binding and I ought to be able to tell you what it is, just as my father can tell me what tree a random leaf came from.

The other thing was a good deal more obvious... As flyleaves in his herbarium volumes Ulisse Aldrovandi had used pages from old manuscripts. Some are illuminated. They look like thirteenth- or fourteenth-century law books to me (though check out my careful use of subjunctives in the last sentence of the last paragraph). I have no idea if the scholars of Bolognese law script and illumination know about them, but they are all digitised with the rest of the herbarium here:
http://www.sma.unibo.it/erbario/erbarioaldrovandi.aspx
Go to volume 6, copertina, for a good example if this sort of thing interests you. (I'm talking to you, Mr Kidd, if you've made it this far down the post.) A study of what Aldrovandi was discarding when he made these volumes would be very interesting. And long live scholarship unconfined by genre.