The origin and spread of botanical gardens in European universities

In the decades around 1500, Europeans undertook voyages of transoceanic navigation unprecedented in human history. One of the consequences of these voyages was to flood Europe with plants from Africa, Asia, and the New World never previously seen by Europeans of recorded by ancient Greek authorities.

In their original settings overseas, many of these plants were known by indigenous people to have medicinal properties. In order to study these plants and their properties, botanical gardens were grafted on to medical faculties in European universities from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. First established in Pisa in 1544, these institutions spread rapidly to Padua (1545), Florence (1545), Pavia (1558), and Bologna (1568), all of which survive today, many of them in their original locations. Spreading north of the Alps in subsequent decades, this trend reached England in 1621 when the 'Physick Garden' was founded in Oxford. 

These botanical gardens were paradigm-shifting institutions in several respects. For one thing, they can be regarded as the first permanent research infrastructure for the direct, unmediated study of the natural world grafted onto European universities. Second, unmediated study of this kind meant supplementing the book learning proper to the liberal arts with manual forms of learning previously excluded from the university. Third, insofar as these research facilities gathered specimens encountered in trans-oceanic navigation, they represented a kind of collaboration between sedentary scholars who presided over the collections in Europe and the highly mobile but far less learned sailors and navigators made possible these collections in the first place. An even more radical form of cross-cultural collaboration was also evident when European physician sought to verify and institutionalise the medical knowledge of the indigenous societies on other continents who had identified the medicinal properties of these plants in the first place.

Further information on the sixteenth-century origins of these collections can be found here. The following material looks at the broader phenomenon through the lens of the Oxford Physick Garden established in 1621.  

Commentary: Howard Hotson (October 2024)