A Natural History of ‘Annoyances’: Knowing Weeds and Weeding Knowledge in the Early Royal Society and its ‘Georgicall Committee’

ABSTRACT

Seventeenth‐century virtuosi often figured themselves as epistemic weeders, grubbing up rank thickets of accumulated error. In this article, I argue that these metaphors were unnerved by the shifting status of weeds—ostensibly unwanted plants from the margins of cultivated space, unploughed land or the disturbed soils between growing crops—in and around the early Royal Society. I show how experimental uses were found for ruderal matter, and how plans were drawn up to repurpose neglected, truculent plants. These transmutations, cast as spiritualised redemptions of Fallen vegetation, often also comprised tacit appropriations of common practices of reuse. I then turn to the Society's short‐lived ‘Georgicall Committee’ and its attempt to produce a ‘perfect history’ of husbandry. As part of this, a farming questionnaire was fielded across England and Ireland, asking after, among other topics, the identification and removal of local weeds. In the plural worlds of cultivation it recorded, however, such plants were perceived, managed and transformed in various and regionally contingent ways. The article thus contributes not just to histories of weeds and weeding, but to burgeoning scholarly interest in tensions between thrift and waste, and the uncertain place of localised, working knowledge in the history of early modern science.