Date/Time
Date(s) - 1 Oct 2015
4:30 PM - 6:00 PM
Location
Amado Recital Hall, Irvine Auditorium
Category(ies) No Categories
Thursday, 10/1/15 | W. F. Vande Walle, Professor of Japanese Studies, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven – “From Herbals to Natural History: The Case of Tokugawa Japan”
4:30-6:00 PM, Amado Recital Hall, Irvine Auditorium
Reception to follow in Cafe 58
Before the sixteenth century, herbalists and phytographers relied on Greek and Roman texts, notably Dioscorides’ De materia medica, rather than on empirical observation. When Renaissance botanists tried to correlate Dioscorides’ plant descriptions to the reality of their native floras, they found many discrepancies. Thus they realized that their compass was not reliable, and classical authority had to be supplanted by empirical scrutiny. German botanists were the first to initiate this paradigm shift, followed by their colleagues in the Low Countries, among others Rembert Dodoens (1516/17-1585). The herbals they produced gradually shifted their focus from healing to inventorying, thus helping to lay the foundation for the development of natural history.
Herbal studies in Japan, like many other fields of science, were based on knowledge transmitted from China. Some polymaths, including Kaibara Ekiken (1630-1714) and 平賀源内 (1728-1779), to some extent inspired by Dodoens’ herbal and Jan Jonsten’s (1603-1675) works on natural history, started questioning this classical authority and stressed the need for empirical study, thus generating a paradigm shift that was analogous to the one made in the West. However, while in the West the herbal tradition represented by Dodoens was superseded by natural history, in Japan both traditions co-existed for a long time. While in the 1820’s the integral translation of Dodoens’ herbal was under way, Itô Keisuke (1803-1901) was preparing the first introduction of the Linnaean system in Japan. His comprehensive presentation of the Linnaean system, Nihon sanbutsushi 日本産物志 was only published in 1873, five years after the Meiji Restoration.
* This lecture is the first in a series under the theme “Discovering the Early Modern through Tokugawa Japan.” This event is sponsored by the Penn Global Engagement Fund, the Center for the Integrated Study of Japan, and the Center for East Asian Studies Humanities Colloquiumhis