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The Signatures of Plants in Early Modern Europe, 1580-1720 https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.126801 Wen, Xinyi 0000000221472854 Margocsy, daniel Kassell, lauren This thesis analyses the signatures of plants, also known as the ‘doctrine of signatures’, as a technique in early modern science and medicine. By signature, it refers to the sensory characteristics of plants that were taken as indicators of their medicinal properties, often in the form of visual resemblances between plants and human organs or disease symptoms. It focuses on German-speaking Central Europe and England during the seventeenth century. Juxtaposing early modern practices of plant signatures with their representations in modern colonial medicine, anthropology, and social theories, it challenges the influential interpretation that the doctrine of signatures was a primitive analogical worldview that declined with the rise of modern science. Instead, it argues that the primitivity of plant signatures was only invented in modern times. Building on recent scholarship on early modern practices of knowing, this thesis argues that the doctrine of signatures was a technique used to address society’s material needs and advance natural knowledge in the seventeenth century. Early modern actors, from eminent experimental philosophers to anonymous practitioners, used plant signatures to teach students, collect local remedies, provide cultivation advice, and organise herbal information. Their similarity-making was simultaneously difference-making: they constructed plant-body resemblances not through any preset, self-evident ‘analogical thinking’, but by identifying the distinctive properties of natural things. Drawing on the late seventeenth-century Royal Society of London, a locale often associated with the rejection of the doctrine of signatures, this thesis shows that the plant signature was proposed and debated as a new technique rather than as an old theory. Many physicians and natural philosophers in this community sought to develop signatures into systematic rules for deducing plants’ medicinal properties and establishing them as facts, in conjunction with corpuscularianism and microscopy. This thesis approaches the doctrine of signatures as a set of heuristic and operational procedures that fluidly navigated different and even conflicting cosmologies and ontologies. It argues that the practices of plant signatures were not inherently part of any mystical or occult knowledge systems, but were only combatively constructed as such in early modern intellectual debates. In doing so, it shows how the technique of plant signatures was alternately constructed as old or new, progressive or regressive, by different actors across centuries, and how its persistent presence bypassed and even invalidated many demarcations. University of Cambridge 2025-06-30 Thesis Doctoral Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) eng This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust Doctoral Studentship (Medical Humanities) Grant No. 221115. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/397759 embargo 2027-02-10 https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/0734aedd-ad00-49fd-976e-5412a4867a59/download 0c62f968a0572106f213d7a123ea157d https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/9cd21e63-0217-4956-8d58-93d511a29517/download 87eda9de84448d1f82354d60eee3eb5f http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved Natural History History of Medicine History of Science History of Knowledge Historiography Book History Doctrine of Signatures Botany Herbal Medicine