Name: The Naming of Names
ISBN: 9781596910713

Anna Pavord

Presents the history of how plants were grouped, ordered, and named for both pharmaceutical and practical purposes to make sense of the natural world.

The Search for Order in the World of Plants

The Naming of Names

Eloise

It contains a lot of very nice illustrations from the various books it talks about. The first few chapters about Theophrastus, Pliny, and Dioscorides were quite good and they’re definitely major players. And yes, it’s well-researched but not well written or well organized. There’s definitely an English bias in dedicating chapters to Willaim Turner and John Ray but only mentioning Carolus Clasius in a couple of pages. Calling it The Naming of Names when 98% of the book is the history of the various botanical books that were published is misleading. It really doesn’t go into how the latin binomial naming system became the dominant one. I also thought it was odd how Catherine de Medici wasn’t mentioned at all because she commissioned a lot of botanical art and was largely responsible for the plant knowledge of the renaissance disseminating to France and then the rest of Europe.

The Naming of Names The Search for Order in the World of Plants

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