Richard Choksey (QMUL) - 2025-26 Students
r.choksey@qmul.ac.uk

Understanding Place in Early Modern Herbarium Collections

This project seeks to assess the tractability of an early-modern botanical collection for science and humanities research. The turn of the 18th century saw extensive botanical collections accumulated across a network of gentlemanly naturalists and medical practitioners. The apothecary James Petiver assembled perhaps the most comprehensive collection of the period, receiving specimens from across the English-speaking colonial and commercial world. As an archivist and recorder, Petiver is of particular note for the primacy that he gave to locational information; while his contemporaries often arranged specimens alphabetically, Petiver organised his herbarium by geographic region. This project seeks to make use of this emphasis on ‘place’, asking whether the collection can yield insights for scientists and humanities scholars alike.

The project will triangulate specimens with information held in correspondence and manuscripts, improving the provenance data. It will then assess the tractability of the collection for modern researchers using several disciplinary approaches, ranging from Geographic Information Systems and environmental history to ethnobotany.

Principal Supervisor: Dr Richard Coulton

Supervisor at Partner Organisation: Dr Mark Carine

Partner Organisation: Natural History Museum