The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific practitioners. Yet unlike many such institutions, the Jardin not only survived the French Revolution but by 1800 had become the world's leading public establishment of natural history: the Museum d'Histoire Naturelle. E. C. Spary traces the scientific, administrative, and political strategies that enabled the foundation of the Museum, arguing that agriculture and animal breeding rank alongside classification and collections in explaining why...
The royal Parisian botanical garden, the Jardin du Roi, was a jewel in the crown of the French Old Regime, praised by both rulers and scientific pract...
"Eating the Enlightenment" offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to larger debates over the state of the nation in Old Regime France. Embracing a wide range of authors and scientific or medical practitioners from physicians and poets to philosophes and playwrights E. C. Spary demonstrates how public discussions of eating and drinking were used to articulate concerns about the state of civilization versus that of nature, about the effects of consumption upon the identities of individuals and nations, and about...
"Eating the Enlightenment" offers a new perspective on the history of food, looking at writings about cuisine, diet, and food chemistry as a key to...
