Poroi An Interdisciplinary Journal of Rhetorical Analysis and Invention ISSN 2151-2957 Volume 10|Issue 2 (2014) DOI: 10.13008/2151-2957.1194 Article 11 Forming Plants in Words and Images Jeanne FahnestockUniversity of Maryland Copyright © 2014 Jeanne Fahnestock This work is licensed under aCreative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Fahnestock, Jeanne. "Forming Plants in Words and Images."Poroi10, Iss. 2 (2014): Article 11.https://doi.org/10.13008/ 2151-2957.1194 Hosted byIowa Research Online This Visual Rhetoric of Science is brought to you for free and open access by Iowa Research Online. It has been accepted for inclusion in Poroi by an authorized administrator of Iowa Research Online. For more information, please [email protected]. 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FFoorr tthhee ffiirrsstt aanndd oonnllyy ttiimmee iinn mmyy lliiffee,, II,, aa ppeerrssoonn wwhhoomm pphhrreennoollooggiissttss wwoouulldd ddeessccrriibbee as totallyy llaacckkiinngg aa ““bbuummpp ooff vveenneerraattiioonn”” aapppprrooaacchheedd tthhee aauutthhoorr aanndd aasskkeedd ffoorr aann aauuttooggrraapphh oonn tthhee ttiittllee ppaaggee.. update ancient herbals, assimilate newly discovered plants, and begin to systematize the accumulated body of botanical knowledge. In Germany, the verbal practices underwriting these achievements were rationalized in the discourse arts and combined with new methods of visual representation and reproduction to create the new scholarly herbals appearing from the 1530s on. When accounting for the complex influences that brought about the new “sciences” of the sixteenth century (astronomy, anatomy and botany), historians of science certainly acknowledge the influence of the humanist-reformed discourse arts (see Serjeantson, 2006, for an overview). The evolving discourse of botany alone has received significant attention from Kristian Jensen (2001), Ian Maclean (2005), Brian Ogilvie (2006), and Sachiko Kusukawa (1997, 2012), as discussed below. But while the importance of rhetoric and dialectic is recognized (see Ogilvie, 118-119), it is not often used in the analysis of early modern texts. Historians tend to ignore the linguistic dimension of this influence, preferring philosophical accounts of argument procedures over discourse- based accounts. And though some scholarship on the influence of the discourse arts on the new sciences exists, no attention at all has been paid to the possible reverse influence, from the new sciences to the discourse arts. The case study offered here suggests how intimate and reciprocal the association was between the language arts and the developing science of botany in the sixteenth century. It can even be argued that the methods of medical botany influenced the methods of definition and description recommended in treatises on the discourse arts, at least in Protestant Germany. And once these expanded methods were taught to succeeding generations, they became the default practices of textual description and, arguably, of the observation that led to that description. Making a case for this influence requires, first, a reminder of the “formal” qualities of the early modern discourse arts and second, an account of the special processes of descriptive defining that were licensed in contemporary dialectical treatises. Next, plant descriptions from contemporary herbals are reviewed to see how they match the dialectical standards for descriptive definition for both known and newly discovered species. The following section then reviews defining through images, based on well-known exemplars produced in the early sixteenth century. The conclusion suggests that the practices in these texts of forming plants in words and images yielded long-term scientific results, enabling systematic botany in the eighteenth century and, arguably, even evolutionary botany in the nineteenth. Fahnestock 2 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) Training in the Discourse Arts Every natural philosopher writing in the sixteenth century – from Copernicus and Vesalius in the 1540s to Brahe and Kepler in the 1580s and 90s – had a very detailed and very formal training, in Latin, in the allied discourse arts of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic. These arts were transformed between 1480 and 1520 by Agricola, Erasmus, and their humanist followers across Europe. Any university-trained scholar’s understanding of language and argumentation was not merely influenced by, it was determined by this humanist construction of Latin into a common instrument of thought and expression. Nor was knowledge of language and of argumentative procedures disjunct. In fact throughout the rhetorical tradition, but peaking in the early modern period, scholars understood forms as content-laden in themselves. To appreciate the influence of an early modern education in the discourse arts requires understanding the role of linguistic forms in such training since these forms constitute what the linguist Edward Sapir once called the “grooves” of thought (Sapir, 1921, 14-15; 217). Students learning to compose in Latin followed prepared forms at all discourse levels, from the word to the sentence to the passage. These forms could be purely linguistic, or they could specify a function to be fulfilled, or they could even require the production of a certain kind of content. The content-less linguistic forms as extractable, repeatable patterns are ubiquitous in grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, from metaplasms of word formation, to syntactic schemes for sentences, to templates for syllogisms in their various figures. These linguistic forms are “empty”; they require a language about language to come into view. Advice about form could also specify functional slots to be filled, as in the epicheireme calling for certain kinds of support or amplification (Cicero, 101- 105), or the chreia, one of the early progymnasmatic exercises, where templates call for inserting comparisons, examples, and so on in a certain order (Kennedy, 2003, 15; 76; 97; 139; 193). Such functional forms require a language about argumentation to come into view differentiating what counts as a claim, what as support and what kind of support. A third kind of form, the least appreciated, specifies the nature of the content required to fill it. The forms in question here include the patterns presented in rhetorical and dialectical treatises for certain topoi. The a fortiori topics A minore and A maiore, for example, where differences of more or less of a phenomenon have to be found, present their users with templates demanding content to follow the phrases multo minus or multo magis (Melanchthon Fahnestock 3 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) 1846 [1547], 695). Similarly, the topic of proportion required formulaic phrasing to be filled in with correct numerical analogies (Melanchthon, 1846[1547], 696; una hydria ad duas metretas...sex hydrae ad duodecim metretas). Among these content-defined forms are the “formulae,” as Melanchthon called them, for descriptive definitions, which are explained below. These content- specifying forms require a subject matter language to come into view, and this subject matter language can then become the framework for a body of learning. There may be, in other words, a non-trivial relationship between such forms and the generation of knowledge. The new science of botany in the sixteenth century offers a particular case of synergy between a form specified in the discourse arts, its embodiment in a visual representation, and the management and even generation of knowledge. Forming Botanical Descriptions The initial stimulus for the renewal of botany, as for so many other fields of learning in the early modern period, was the recovery and correction of classical works, in this case by Theophrastus, Dioscorides, Pliny, Galen and others, all appearing in new editions and translations by the first decades of the sixteenth century. But the printing between 1460 and 1530 of the Greek texts and Latin translations of medical herbals like Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica, none with illustrations, created nomenclature problems, especially for those interested in the medical uses of plants2 (Hoeniger, 1985, 146; Reeds, 1976, 526). How did the names and descriptions in these classical works correspond to living plants with local vernacular names? And how did the plants described by these Mediterranean authors compare to those growing in northern climates? Indeed Brian Ogilvie has described the work of the first generation of sixteenth-century botanists as largely a matter of collation between ancient texts and living plants (Ogilvie, 2006, 34; 127; 134). There were many uncertainties, and the new botanical treatises published across the century often disagreed with each other over these identifications. Arguments over whether a plant described in a classical text matched a living plant involved definitions, and the rules and tactics for defining belonged to the disciplines of rhetoric and 2The famous illustrated codices of Dioscorides, now in Vienna and Naples, are not the source of these reprints. There were many other extant ms copies of Dioscorides, some illustrated, though without the riveting naturalism of the images in these most famous codices. Fahnestock 4 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) dialectic. All university-trained physicians, including the early cadre of pharmacological botanists, had been trained in these arts. Through the frame of Porphyry’s gloss on Aristotle’s Categories (relevant to the Topics as well), they knew the five “predicables” (genus, species, differentia, property, accident), and they knew that the definition of a species required the predication of a genus followed by the distinguishing differentia.3 Furthermore, in an Aristotelian understanding, a true definition had to express the essence or substance of the thing defined. Among the other predicables, a “property” had to be a feature unique to its species, and though it could be used to construct the differentia of a definition, it did not necessarily capture the essence of a subject. Nevertheless, the test for both a cogent genus/difference definition or a unique property was the same stylistic manipulation of reciprocal predication: Could the claim sustain a conversion in the form of the figure antimetabole? A genuine definition and a genuine property could, as in Porphyry’s example of the latter, “If a horse, then hinnability, and if hinnability, then a horse” (Spade, 1994, 10). These potential conversions, or reciprocal predications, are still important in all sciences where unknowns have to be identified. So for example the definition constructed from a genus term and a unique property – Gallium is an element with an atomic weight of 69.72 a.m.u. – converts to An element with an atomic weight of 69.72 a.m.u. is gallium, and offers an identifying test. However predicating just a genus (Copper sulfate is a compound) or an accident (Copper sulfate is a blue crystal) does not meet the test of conversion in A compound is copper sulfate or A blue crystal is copper sulfate. There are many other compounds and many of these form blue crystals. Here the use of the formal test of reciprocal predication worked in synergy with the systematic development of subject area knowledge. It takes external knowledge, after all, to know that there are other blue compounds in the world. Early modern botanists wanted to know the unique properties of plant species in order to be able to identify plants with certainty, but such knowledge was for the most part inaccessible to them. More accessible were the “accidents,” the qualities taken in by the senses, making up the fifth predicable. Porphyry dissociated these into the separable versus inseparable: “Accident is what 3Early modern students were more likely to learn the five predicables and methods of definition from dialectical treatises of the time rather than from reading the Isagoge itself. Fahnestock 5 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) comes and goes without the destruction of the substrate. It is divided into two kinds. One kind of accident is separable and the other inseparable. Thus sleeping is a separable accident, whereas being black is an inseparable accident of the crow and the Ethiopian” (Spade, 1994, 11). The difference between the two is simple: an inseparable accident is always present in its subject and a separable accident is not. Copper sulfate is blue predicates an inseparable accident, but Copper sulfate is on the third shelf in the storeroom states an easily changed separable accident, and such separable accidents, useful as they may be for identifying things in particular contexts, cannot form definitions, a rule with the authority of Aristotle who clarifies in the sixth book of the Topics that “the differentia of a thing cannot both belong and not belong to it” (Aristotle, 1984, I, 243). It is easy to dismiss separable accidents like “on the third shelf” from the work of definition. But inseparable accidents always belong to a species. How then are inseparable accidents any different from properties which are also always present in a species? Why are they also ruled out for conversion-sustaining definition? The answer is that an inseparable accident, like having a blue color, is not unique to its subject the way a true property is (like an atomic weight or a spectrographic signature to use contemporary examples). In the case of defining plants, this problem of the non-uniqueness of inseparable accidents is acute because any particular leaf shape and size, any flower color, and any root or stem type is likely to be shared with another plant. So no inseparable accident, on its own, can serve as the differentia in the definition of a plant, or of anything else. But a solution to the problem of defining and identifying through inseparable accidents is possible. Though no single inseparable accident may be uniquely and hence convertibly predicated of its subject, a collection of them might be so that their assemblage could add up to the differentia creating a convertible definition. Furthermore, what is defined in dialectic as an inseparable accident is typically a quality salient to the senses such as color, shape, texture and taste. So anyone listing multiple inseparable accidents of an object will in effect describe it in the act of defining it – or define it in the act of describing it. And, according to Porphyry, extending Aristotle, accidents can include differences in degree, namely comparisons about more or less of a feature (Spade, 1994, 18). This resource will become a mainstay in descriptions of allied species when observers note that one plant is taller or has hairier leaves than another etc. Fahnestock 6 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) The solution that salvages inseparable accidents for arguments from definition has been attributed to Boethius in De Topicis Differentiis in a passage discussing the variety of topics concerned with definitions: Definition differs from description because a definition contains genus and differentiae; a description comprises understanding of the subject, either by means of certain accidents producing one property or by means of the differentiae of the substance (substantialibus differentiis) brought together apart from the appropriate genus (Stump, 1978, 49-50). When Boethius equates a collection of accidents with a property – “certain accidents producing one property” – he is saying that such a collection meets the standard of reverse predication. When he talks about such a collection producing a differentia apart from a genus, he means that a description can simply list features without placing an item in a genus.4 Overall, Boethius licenses two standards in definition, one with Aristotelian genus/difference rigor and the other laxer and more functional, compiled from several inseparable accidents and amounting to a description.5 A clearer characterization of pragmatic defining by a collection of enduring accidents, and one that takes this distinction into the early modern period, is found in Rudolph Agricola’s influential late fifteenth-century De Inventione Dialectica under the topos of definition. (Peter Mack has drawn attention to Agricola’s comments in this key passage [Mack, 1993, 151-56]). After Agricola acknowledges the standard method of defining with genus and differentia, he points to the lack of true differentiae, making it 4Further passages in Boethius legitimize definition from accidents as description: “If the argument is taken from the things themselves, it must be taken from their substance, from the things that follow from the substance, from the things that are inseparable accidents—those that adhere and cannot be or generally are not separated or disjoined from their substance. Those which are drawn from their substance consist in description, definition, or in addition, explanation of the name” (Stump 1978, 60; see also 73, 74 [in the diagram of Themistius’ topics]). 5This distinction between definition and description is probably not, however, attributable solely to Boethius. A distinction between definitions based on substance and other discursive forms was worked out by the rhetorician Victorinus several decades earlier in his De Definitionibus. This work lists fifteen methods of definition, only the first concerning the substance of the thing defined (Stangl, 1888, 33). Fahnestock 7 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) necessary to construct definitions that at least approach the truth. Such approximations, he says, require circumlocution in speaking [loquendi circuiti], collecting many details which the thing is known to possess and which, when joined, create a certain property. Agricola offers as a clarifying example the definition of an ass as an animal “solid-footed, large-eared and fecund.” He points out that none of these features belongs to the ass alone: The mule and hare are long-eared and all animals are fecund. But “solid feet” excludes all animals except the horse and mule; "long-eared" then excludes the horse and "fecund" the mule. “At last,” he says, “as with steps that which is defined is reached” (Agricola, 1563 [1485], 41). Agricola does not use forms of the term accidens in this passage, but any feature not unique to a species would be understood as belonging to that category. Agricola is also aware that these definitions are in effect descriptions, but he wants to distinguish these defining descriptions from other kinds: “For the description which poets and orators sometimes use expresses a thing more verbosely, nor is it used to express what a thing is but what kind it is, as it places it before the eyes for inspecting.” (Agricola, 1563[1485], 42). In this difference between what and what kind Agricola is referencing the “essence” requirement for definitions as well as the stasis distinction in rhetoric between the definitional and qualitative stases.6 In formal linguistic terms, however, the descriptions themselves arguing for what or what kind cannot really be distinguished, though Agricola suggests that evocative poetic descriptions tend to be longer. The term descriptio used in these passages from dialectical treatises by Boethius and Agricola was of course also a term found in rhetorical treatises as a label for a functional form, a form widely noted in manuals and figure lists under various names from antiquity through the early modern period: hypotyposis, demonstratio, descriptio, tractatio (Sonnino, 1968). In the progymnasmata also, description, or ekphrasis, was a distinct compositional exercise (Kennedy, 2003, 45; 86; 117; 166; 218), and though plants were rarely specified as subjects for such exercises, Libanius did produce partial descriptions of the date palm and apple tree embedded in his sample encomia (Gibson, 2008, 261- 6Porphyry, following Aristotle in the Categories, distinguished between predicables that concern what a thing is versus what kind or what manner of a thing it is. “For to the question what manner of thing a man is, we say ‘rational.’ And to the question what manner of thing a crow is, we say ‘black.’ (Rational is a difference, and black an [inseparable] accident.) But when we are asked what a man is, we answer ‘animal.’ (The genus of man was animal.)” (Spade 1994, 3). Fahnestock 8 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014) 266). Erasmus also listed Pliny’s many descriptions of living things as examples of such visualizations in Book II of De Copia (Erasmus, 1963 [1514/1534], 50). There are then converging or overlapping accounts in rhetoric and dialectic of functional descriptions, even descriptions of plants, serving arguments in the definitional and qualitative stases. Early modern students would both practice the textual routines of description in their compositional exercises and learn their philosophical uses in their study of dialectic. Melanchthon recorded his great admiration for Agricola in an encomium on his life, derived in part from conversations he had in Tübingen with elderly scholars who had known Agricola. He even credited Agricola with botanizing in Italy while he was a student of Theodore of Gaza, the translator of Pliny (Reeds, 1976, 527). But Agricola's Dialectica has very few examples from the domain of natural history and those it has, like defining an ass, are traditional. And while Agricola separated oratorical from dialectical definitions on the basis of function, Philip Melanchthon, well known for fusing rhetoric and dialectic, combined them. Indeed in his final and fullest rhetoric text, Elementorum Rhetorices (1542), he claimed that “Definition” as a means of amplification “has here [in rhetoric] the same meaning altogether as in dialectic” (LaFontaine, 1968, 279: “Definitio prorsus hic significant idem quod dialecticis [sic],” translation modified; see also LaFontaine, 1968, 82). Most important for the case at hand, Melanchthon specified a distinct method of definition from combined inseparable accidents and he applied it to botanical description, in effect both reflecting and licensing the usage of this technique in herbals. Melanchthon’s comments and application are found in the four dialectical treatises that he wrote spanning his long career at the University of Wittenberg. The first appeared in 1520 just two years after he came to Wittenberg as a professor of Greek and at a time when he was also required to lecture on Pliny’s Natural History. In the first book of this brief dialectic, Melanchthon distinguishes definitions of terms from definitions of things, and gives four forms of the latter: from essentials or properties, from causes, from division into parts, and finally, The fourth type of defining [is] definition based on accidents, when many added forms describe a thing in some manner ... Among these we frequently use genus with accidents, as the Halcyon is a bird a little larger than a sparrow, with a predominantly blue color, with purples and whites mixed in the wings, with a slender and elongated head and throat. Larch wood is honey colored, imperishable, with no easily split cracks. Of Fahnestock 9 Poroi 10,2 (December 2014)