Special Issue for: Journal of Early Modern Studies (ZetaBooks), vol. 6/1 (Spring, 2017)
Title of the volume: Gardens as Laboratories. The History of Botany through the History of Gardens
Deadline: October 1, 2016
After having undergone the undeserved condition of third excluded during the Middle Ages, the studies of flora experienced a new crucial consideration during the Renaissance, when the discovery of the New World brought in Europe an amount of new items (and especially anomalies and ambiguities), which undermined the accepted systematization of nature. Along the development of a crisis in the traditional systems of classifications, a new effort in collecting and disseminating knowledge flourished, resulting in a few important cultural achievements. Botanical practices developed as a central subject through both the request of collecting and the reproduction of plants, ultimately contributing in the epistemological ferments of the Renaissance and early modernity for reconstructing the ontological frontiers of nature under a new light – and sometimes reorganizing nature from a vegetal point of view, or using plants as literary model to portray human societies.
The goal of this volume is to delve into the status of botanical experiences through a number of papers focusing on the effort in collecting, gardening, and achieving botanical research, a set of practices involving a wide range of men and women – botanists, natural philosophers, literate, collectors, directors of gardens, erudite, book publishers, and travelers – drawing attention to vegetal items and making vegetation an ideal term of naturalistic knowledge.
The volume is open to both re-elaborated papers presented at the International Conference Manipulating Flora, and to anyone else who wants to submit unpublished works on this topic.
Please, contact the invited editors, Fabrizio Baldassarri (fabrizio.baldassarri@gmail.com) and Oana Matei (oanamatei@yahoo.com) for additional information.
Publishing steps: Papers must be submitted by October 1, 2016, and will be sent to two double-blind peer-reviewers; referee’s comments are due by December 1, 2016; the final submission is due by January 31, 2017. The edited volume will be published by March 2017.
General information and norms: Papers must be around 8000 words in lenght (notes included), with an abstract of 500 words maximum, and 5 keywords. Images can be published (b/w), with a minimum resolution of 300 dpi. All images must have a valid copyright. For each image added, please consider to remove 500 words from your paper.
Information for stylistic appearance and editorial norms: http://www.romanian-philosophy.ro/newsletter/pages/Guidelines%20for%20Authors.pdf
Please see the Manipulating Flora website for more information.
