The Vegetable Lamb of Tartary: Renaissance Philosophy, Magic, and Botany

In the entry “Agnus scythicus” in their famous Encyclopédie (1751), Denis Diderot and Jean d’Alembert presenta plant growing in the land of Tartary, which was a vast region of Asia bounded by the Caspian Sea, the Ural Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, therefore including Machuria, Siberia and several other countries. This plant, they assert, produces fruits that “look exactly like that animal [i.e., a lamb]—it has the same legs, hooves, ears and head.” An astonishing body with a long tradition, the animal-plant known as the Tartary lamb was first described in medieval texts and later revived by early modern authors in the Renaissance (see Fig. 1). Conceived either as a zoophyte or a mythological body, the figure typically entails a combination of a plant and an animal; it even represents a transformation of a plant into an animal by means of procreation, insofar as the lamb is a fruit of the plant.