In-person and virtual; link forthcoming.
A Theatre of Tea? Reflections on Athanasius Kircher’s ‘Tea Herb’ (1667)
Drawing upon Athanasius Kircher’s reflections on the “Tea Herb,” my presentation will look at how the tea plant emerged as a locus of botany, horticulture, and medicinal knowledge in early modern Europe. In sharp contrast to representations of solitary plants in Renaissance herbals, Kircher’s image presents the tea plant as an ornamental shrub arranged in neat rows and tended to by Chinese workers. Here, in a rare glimpse of tea cultivation in the seventeenth century, the plant is offered as a living form whose regulation and calibration affirmed its productive potential and ornamental properties against the backdrop of medical botany. What work, then, does the tea plant do in the picture? How is it positioned as an artisanal product? What makes it a Chinese “herb”? These questions direct our attention to the travelers, merchants, artists, physicians, collectors, gardeners, and naturalists who participated in and shaped the networks of knowledge from which tea emerged as a curative plant, botanical specimen, and sensory beverage. Above all, Kircher’s image discloses an interest in haptic engagements that, in turn, relied on what Pamela Smith describes as “embodied skill and knowledge” applied to the care and sustenance of plants. Taking my cue from Smith, I situate Kircher’s image within the broader framework of gardening techniques, and horticultural and botanical practices that were deployed to cultivate and preserve vegetal matter. In doing so, I look at how these engagements laid the foundation for a plantation industry that would be developed a few centuries later in South Asia.
