Papers

Wouter Klein and Toine Pieters, “The Hidden History of a Famous Drug: Tracing the Medical and Public Acculturation of Peruvian Bark in Early Modern Western Europe (c. 1650–1720)”, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 71.4 (2016) 400-421 (online version here)

Wouter Klein, “Review of: Samir Boumediene. La colonisation du savoir: Une histoire de plantes médicinales du "Nouveau Monde" (1492-1750) . 477 pp., figs., glossary, notes. Vaulx-en-Velin: Éditions des Mondes à Faire, 2016. €24 (paper)”, Isis 108.3 (2017) 692-694 (online version here)

Wouter Klein, Kalliopi Zervanou, Marijn Koolen, Peter van den Hooff, Frans Wiering, Wouter Alink and Toine Pieters, “Creating Time Capsules for Historical Research in the Early Modern Period: Reconstructing Trajectories of Plant Medicines” in: M. Hasanuzzaman e.a. (eds.), Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Computational History (HistoInformatics 2017), Singapore, November 6, 2017 (2017) 2-9 (online version here)

Events

Materia Medica on the Move. Collecting, trading, studying, and using medicinal plants in the early modern period, April 15-17, 2015, Leiden (conference program | conference report)

Launch Event, April 20, 2017, Utrecht (program)

Materia Medica on the Move II. Contextualizing drug components as collectables, commodities, and cultural markers in the early modern period, October 4-6, 2017, Amsterdam (conference program | conference report (in Dutch))

Video

Part of the closing conference was a workshop by Nils-Otto Ahnfelt and Hjalmar Fors from Uppsala University. They invited the participants to smell, taste and touch some of the items that could be found in the historical pharmacy, such as dried rhubarb and balsam of Peru. In doing so, the participants learned some of the depth of the artisanal knowledge of the early modern apothecary and gained new perspectives on the historical research central to the Time Capsule project.

Below a registration of the experience, produced by Katrien Vanagt of Serafín Productions and her team.

Digitized herbaria

As part of this project, two early modern herbaria from the collections of Naturalis Biodiversity Center were digitized. The first one, Paul Hermanns two volume herbarium of Ceylonese plants, can be found here. The other one, a herbarium in six volumes by a certain S. d'Oignies, can be found here.

Presentations and invited talks