Allegories of Alterity in Nineteenth-Century Imperial Botany: Flora’s Children as the Four Continents

Friday, November 21st
WGS Sitting Room
704 Commonwealth Avenue
Suite 101

Featuring speaker Miranda Mollendorf

This talk is about the British botanist Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1797-1812), a lavish publication described by its author as ‘a Universal Empire of Love’ that contains the ‘choicest flowers of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.’ The book presents plates of the flowers inscribed within a landscape and accompanied by poetry. The effect of both setting and accompanying text is to ‘humanize’ the flowers, and Thornton’s personifications draw on the traditional allegorical iconography of the ‘four continents’ to ascribe to each flower racial and cultural characteristics associated with its territory in a hierarchical scheme that privileges Europe as the locus of culture and power. The ideological overtones are perhaps most striking in the sexual and racial characteristics associated with colonial flowers from Africa, Asia, and America. Ultimately, Thornton’s Temple of Flora inscribes flowers with colonial desire, as commodities that can be bought, collected and exchanged within the covers of a book.

Miranda Mollendorf is the 2014-2015 WGS Visiting Scholar. She recently received her Ph.D. from the History of Science Department at Harvard with a dissertation entitled “The World in a Book: Robert John Thornton’s Temple of Flora (1797-1812).” Dr. Mollendorf studies art and science relationships, especially from the 16th to the 19th centuries in England and America; investigating the visual culture of natural history and anatomy; botany; gender and the body; history of the book; travel; the display of nature in frontispieces, zoos, libraries, cabinets of curiosity, and museums, along with the associated cognitive/ emotional aspects of curiosity and wonder.

A light lunch will be served to all registrants.

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