Friday, November 21st<\/B>
\nWGS Sitting Room
\n704 Commonwealth Avenue
\nSuite 101<\/p>\nFeaturing speaker Miranda Mollendorf<\/h3>\n
This talk is about the British botanist Robert John Thornton\u2019s Temple of Flora (1797-1812), a lavish publication described by its author as \u2018a Universal Empire of Love\u2019 that contains the \u2018choicest flowers of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.\u2019 The book presents plates of the flowers inscribed within a landscape and accompanied by poetry. The effect of both setting and accompanying text is to \u2018humanize\u2019 the flowers, and Thornton\u2019s personifications draw on the traditional allegorical iconography of the \u2018four continents\u2019 to ascribe to each flower racial and cultural characteristics associated with its territory in a hierarchical scheme that privileges Europe as the locus of culture and power. The ideological overtones are perhaps most striking in the sexual and racial characteristics associated with colonial flowers from Africa, Asia, and America. Ultimately, Thornton\u2019s Temple of Flora inscribes flowers with colonial desire, as commodities that can be bought, collected and exchanged within the covers of a book.<\/p>\n
Miranda Mollendorf is the 2014-2015 WGS Visiting Scholar. She recently received her Ph.D. from the History of Science Department at Harvard with a dissertation entitled \u201cThe World in a Book: Robert John Thornton\u2019s Temple of Flora (1797-1812).\u201d Dr. Mollendorf studies art and science relationships, especially from the 16th to the 19th centuries in England and America; investigating the visual culture of natural history and anatomy; botany; gender and the body; history of the book; travel; the display of nature in frontispieces, zoos, libraries, cabinets of curiosity, and museums, along with the associated cognitive\/ emotional aspects of curiosity and wonder.<\/p>\n
A light lunch will be served to all registrants.<\/i><\/p>\n
Registration for this event has closed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Friday, November 21st WGS Sitting Room 704 Commonwealth Avenue Suite 101 Featuring speaker Miranda Mollendorf This talk is about the British botanist Robert John Thornton\u2019s Temple of Flora (1797-1812), a lavish publication described by its author as \u2018a Universal Empire of Love\u2019 that contains the \u2018choicest flowers of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America.\u2019 The book […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4338,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3224],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5449"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4338"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5449"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5456,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5449\/revisions\/5456"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/wgs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}