Quand l’esprit vient aux plantes: Botanique sensible et subversion libertine (XVIe–XVIIe siècles). Dominique Brancher. Les seuils de la modernité 19. Geneva: Droz, 2015. 370 pp

Drawing attention to the status of plants during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, through an impressive variety of literary, philosophical, historical, and scientific sources, Dominique Brancher enchantingly reconstructs the turbulence surrounding a neglected topic. Traditionally subsidiary to a dual representation of nature, and compressed between Aristotelian psychology and Cartesian mechanics, botany evolved as a rich field of knowledge during the Renaissance and revolutionarily shaped European culture. Focusing on two aspects, l’esprit et le desir, thought and emotion, two macrocategories usually unrelated to plants, the book probes studies of vegetation from historical, philosophical, and literary perspectives.