Why read The Naming of Names?

Book cover of The Naming of Names: The Search for Order in the World of Plants

Book description

Searching for Order traces the search for order in the natural world, a search that for hundreds of years occupied some of the most brilliant minds in Europe. Redefining man's relationship with nature was an important feature of the Renaissance. But in a world full of plagues and poisons, there…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Naming of Names as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Theresa Kishkan

Author

I learned about botanical nomenclature as a 19-year-old, and it opened a world to me, a place where plants told me something about their origins and their function. This book gives me the background to the long history of naming.

Those who gathered plants, who learned their uses and needed to be accurate, also required a system that would allow them to write about their knowledge in a way that allowed others to use it and share it. From Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus in 4th century BE Athens to Islamic scholars to the 18th-century medical professor Carl Linnaeus, Anna Pavord immerses…

From Theresa's list on plants and how our lives are woven with theirs.