The Signatures of Plants in Early Modern Europe, 1580-1720

This thesis analyses the signatures of plants, also known as the ‘doctrine of signatures’, as a technique in early modern science and medicine. By signature, it refers to the sensory characteristics of plants that were taken as indicators of their medicinal properties, often in the form of visual resemblances between plants and human organs or disease symptoms. It focuses on German-speaking Central Europe and England during the seventeenth century. Juxtaposing early modern practices of plant signatures with their representations in modern colonial medicine, anthropology, and social theories, it challenges the influential interpretation that the doctrine of signatures was a primitive analogical worldview that declined with the rise of modern science. Instead, it argues that the primitivity of plant signatures was only invented in modern times. Building on recent scholarship on early modern practices of knowing, this thesis argues that the doctrine of signatures was a technique used to address society’s material needs and advance natural knowledge in the seventeenth century. Early modern actors, from eminent experimental philosophers to anonymous practitioners, used plant signatures to teach students, collect local remedies, provide cultivation advice, and organise herbal information. Their similarity-making was simultaneously difference-making: they constructed plant-body resemblances not through any preset, self-evident ‘analogical thinking’, but by identifying the distinctive properties of natural things. Drawing on the late seventeenth-century Royal Society of London, a locale often associated with the rejection of the doctrine of signatures, this thesis shows that the plant signature was proposed and debated as a new technique rather than as an old theory. Many physicians and natural philosophers in this community sought to develop signatures into systematic rules for deducing plants’ medicinal properties and establishing them as facts, in conjunction with corpuscularianism and microscopy. This thesis approaches the doctrine of signatures as a set of heuristic and operational procedures that fluidly navigated different and even conflicting cosmologies and ontologies. It argues that the practices of plant signatures were not inherently part of any mystical or occult knowledge systems, but were only combatively constructed as such in early modern intellectual debates. In doing so, it shows how the technique of plant signatures was alternately constructed as old or new, progressive or regressive, by different actors across centuries, and how its persistent presence bypassed and even invalidated many demarcations.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Wen, Xinyi

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Margocsy, daniel
• Kassell, lauren

• Natural History
• History of Medicine
• History of Science
• History of Knowledge
• Historiography
• Book History
• Doctrine of Signatures
• Botany
• Herbal Medicine

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/9cd21e63-0217-4956-8d58-93d511a29517/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

Author Identifier

0000-0002-2147-2854

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/397759