Gardens

Like the anatomy theatre, the botanical garden is a site of medical research which spread from Italy in the sixteenth century to northern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth. The visual materials for charting this diffusion are rich and various. This small cluster shows how a single example -- Oxford's physic garden, founded in 1621 -- can be used to explore at a relatively advanced level one crucial theme from several complementary perspectives: namely, how the botanical garden, rather like the anatomy theatre, occupied an awkward, liminal position in the early modern university, straddling the divide between liberal, theoretical science and mechanical, practical art.