Abstract
The French physician and botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) set sail from Marseille to Crete on 24 April 1700, in the company of the German physician Andreas Gundelsheimer and the artist Claude Aubriet, on a voyage to the Levant financed by the French crown. Among the many aims of the voyage – scientific, ethnographic, political, economic – was the identification of the plants described in Dioscorides’ Materia medica, still an important source for the early modern pharmacopia, and the discovery of new plants, especially those with medical uses. Crete was the first port of call on Tournefort’s two-year voyage, in part because ancient sources had praised its botanical riches. But Tournefort’s own experience of Crete shook his expectations, both of the reliability of ancient botanists and the continuity of ancient and modern Greek culture. His perceptions of Crete fuse the seventeenth-century categories of the Ancients versus Moderns debate with incipient Enlightenment views on intellectual progress and stasis. The discoveries and disappointments of Tournefort’s report on Crete, recorded in the form of letters to colleagues and crown officials back in Paris, reveal the moment when Greece ceased to be a purely historical and highly idealized notion and began to be relegated to the periphery by a self-declared West European center.
In honor of Kostas Gavroglu
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Notes
- 1.
Guides were barely mentioned in the published account, but in letters Tournefort acknowledged that their help was invaluable: he mentions especially a “Greek valet who climbs like the devil, understands Provençal [Tournefort came from Provence], and is a great help to us.” Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to Louis Morin (1700), 42.
- 2.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to [Pierre Bonnet] Bourdelot (1700), 57–59.
- 3.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 62–66.
- 4.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to the abbé Bignon (1700), 297.
- 5.
- 6.
Thomas Harriot, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia [1590], with De Bry engravings based on John White watercolors (New York: Dover, 1972), 75–85. The section containing the engravings of the Picts was “to show howe that the Inhabitants of the great Bretannie have bin in times past as sauvage as those of Virginia.”
- 7.
Bernard de Fontenelle (1754), Dialogue V: “Eristratus and Harvey”, 80–83.
- 8.
Starting in the 1680s, Tournefort’s plant-collecting trips were subsidized by the French crown: E. Bonnet (1891), 372–376; 393–395; 420–424. Joseph Laissus and Yves Laissus, “Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656–1708) et ses portraits,” 90e Congrès des sociétés savantes, Nice 1965, vol. 3, 17–46; Fontenelle’s éloge of Tournefort is reprinted as the (unpaginated) preface to Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), vol. 1. Trips were subsidized by the French crown, and he regularly sent back specimens to Fagon for the Jardin du Roi: E. Bonnet (1891), 372–376; 393–395; 420–424.
- 9.
On the Phélypeaux dynasty and its patronage networks, see Sara E. Chapman (2004), especially 145–175 on Louis Phélypeaux’s influence as Chancellor, 1699–1714. The genealogical chart on 205 shows the abbé Bignon’s relationship to the Phélypeaux.
- 10.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 4.
- 11.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 3.
- 12.
See Chandra Mukerji (2005), 19–33.
- 13.
Daniel Goffman (2008).
- 14.
On Cretan trade under the Ottomans, see Molly Greene (2000), 141–173, and on French trade specifically, 128–136.
- 15.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 48–49.
- 16.
A plant resin used as a fixative in perfumes and as an ingredient in medications.
- 17.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 85.
- 18.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to the abbé Bignon (1700), 300.
- 19.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 117, 143.
- 20.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 29–31.
- 21.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 73.
- 22.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 39.
- 23.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 56.
- 24.
- 25.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to the abbé Bignon (1700), 298; idem to Vaillant, 8 April 1701, ibid., 407.
- 26.
- 27.
- 28.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 50.
- 29.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to Guy-Crescent Fagon (1700), 289.
- 30.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 104.
- 31.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 105.
- 32.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 135, 100, 88.
- 33.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 69–70.
- 34.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort to the abbé Bignon (1701), 357.
- 35.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 136.
- 36.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 27, 45, 53–54, 61, 185.
- 37.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 54.
- 38.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 105–106.
- 39.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 81–82, 109.
- 40.
Jean D’Alembert (1751), vol. 1, i–xlv, on xxiv–xxxiii.
- 41.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 161, 164.
- 42.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 165.
- 43.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 70.
- 44.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 135.
- 45.
Larry F. Norman (2011).
- 46.
Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1717), 103.
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Daston, L. (2015). At the Center and the Periphery: Joseph Pitton de Tournefort Botanizes in Crete. In: Arabatzis, T., Renn, J., Simões, A. (eds) Relocating the History of Science. Boston Studies in the Philosophy and History of Science, vol 312. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-14553-2_7
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