Taking „Nature’s path“ in Eighteenth-Century Britain

Recent work on eighteenth-century natural history and medicine has illuminated the complexities, tensions, and ambiguities in what contemporary practitioners presented as straightforward appeals to nature. Finding that these claims of taking nature as a guide resulted as often in disagreement as in conformity, historians have come to understand invocations of nature as functional rather descriptive, and to explore the interconnections of sensibility and reason, utility and aesthetics.

However, while the eighteenth-century imperative to follow nature has been widely acknowledged, less attention has been paid to how programmatic statements in learned discourses actually operated in practice. With regard to attitudes towards nature in relation to natural history practice, the call to attend to “regimes of experience” offers a promising way forward.

While at MPI I intend to commence the research for a book-length study which embraces this notion of cultivated experience in order to examine the interconnectedness of social relations and views of nature in Britain during this period. To overcome the difficulties of finding audience reactions or the views of those whose experience is rarely articulated I shall extend an approach in which the material objects of natural history are seen to embody such relations. As a starting point, I propose to focus on a series of natural objects that can also be considered as artificial and, at times, even unnatural, thereby expanding on research I have already done on the eighteenth-century cucumber.

This approach promises ways to tap the voices of those rarely considered in connection with debates concerning luxury, display, knowledge and commodification. A focus on material objects will also show how intellect, politics and nature coalesce not only in attitudes towards the external world but also with respect to the interior landscape of the eighteenth-century body both in terms of health and of embodied skill.