In recent years, historians of science have come to appreciate the profound impact of Europeans' colonial endeavors on their understanding of nature in the early modern period. As they confronted “new worlds” in the Americas and elsewhere, Europeans scrambled to understand, catalog, and exploit the natural objects they found there for commercial, political, social, and intellectual profit. Old World knowledge was often inadequate to the task, and as a result, early modern Europeans developed not just new ideas to fill in the gaps, but also new epistemologies, empirical practices, and institutions that contributed in profound ways to what is still most often known as the “Scientific Revolution.” In some cases, Europeans also saw the peoples they encountered abroad as an important source of useful knowledge.

This notable interest in the foreign and exotic did not go unrivalled, however. As Alix Cooper argues in this innovative new book, interest in the local, indigenous nature of Europe was just as intense and just as productive in the early modern period. As European “‘stay-at-home’ authors” (p. 11) directed their attention to the “humble,” “lowly” plants and minerals in their own backyard, Cooper shows, they developed important new genres, methods, and formats for cataloging nature, from the pocket-sized lists that characterized the local flora to the regional mineralogy and more comprehensive territorial natural histories. The authors of these texts, most often learned physicians, engaged a variety of audiences, from local medical students and university officials in the sixteenth century to the princely court and other scholars in the Republic of Letters in the seventeenth century and a broad public in the eighteenth century. Authors shaped their catalogs of nature in particular ways to reach out to these different audiences, emphasizing the practical utility of herbs in local flora for medical students, for example, or highlighting the “natural wealth” in territorial mineralogies aimed at cameralist officials at court. Together, these authors and audiences documented Europe's indigenous nature as fully as exotic new species in faraway lands. In doing so, they developed techniques that would have a lasting impact on the practice of natural history.

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is Cooper's attention to the way in which Europeans rhetorically “framed their relationships with their own indigenes; that is to say, with the various kinds of collaborators and informants with whose assistance they wrote their local natural histories” (p. 154). By the eighteenth century, she argues, books about local nature posited many different models for articulating this relationship. Some authors, such as the eighteenth-century Swiss naturalist Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, demonstrated a deep respect for and willingness to incorporate local folk knowledge, while others, such as Scheuchzer's contemporary Linnaeus, tended to devalue, discipline, and efface it. The Linnaean model, rooted in the tradition of the local flora, eventually triumphed, in part because it made local knowledge more easily universalizable in an international Republic of Letters, but the various other models Cooper uncovers make it clear that this outcome was by no means predetermined. This story about the multiple modes of interaction between scholarly expertise and folk knowledge—indeed, about the very construction of these categories—will interest historians of popular culture in early modern Europe and historians of science alike. Moreover, it is just one example of the broader point that Cooper makes very nicely in this book: writing about local nature offered early modern Europeans a powerful way to think about relationships between place and identity, whether in social, political, economic, or intellectual terms.

Although Inventing the Indigenous includes fruitful comparisons to Baconian projects associated with the Royal Society in England, it is at heart a story about central European authors and texts. Indeed, Cooper argues that central European physicians pioneered the new interest in indigenous European nature and developed some of its most lasting forms and practices. It is perhaps not an accident that such an interest would appear in the “fragmented and decidedly non-colonial territories of the Holy Roman Empire” (p. 3), and Cooper's attention to natural history in central Europe makes her book a valuable contribution to a growing literature on the history of science as it moves beyond the canonical focus on astronomy and physics in England and France. Although Cooper does not explore this point in great detail, she suggests a way to put central Europe in conversation with the burgeoning literature on empire and science as well. The Spanish Atlantic would offer a particularly interesting point of comparison, since, as recent scholarship has shown, naturalists there grappled with similar issues of cataloging and collecting information about local nature, albeit in the context of different indigenes and certainly with a different field of power relations. Read alongside this scholarship, Cooper's excellent book brings to life the European side of the “quarrel between the ‘indigenous’ and the ‘exotic’” (p. 39) and shows how productive it was for the study of nature in the early modern period.