Â鶹Éçmadou

The Doctrine of Signatures is the study of plants as medicine, based on plants’ identifiable appearances. For instance, a plant with heart-shaped leaves cures cardiac disease. While the Doctrine of Signatures blossomed in 65 CE with Dioscorides of Ancient Rome, its strongest medicinal shoots emerged in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The compelling yet simplistic associations and identifications connecting plants and humans can be interpreted as an early study in cross-species relations. However, the Doctrine of Signatures concentrated on plants as human medicine, plants as morally good, plants as an aesthetic of cure.

This paper charts the development of the Doctrine of Signature as a plant-human relation, acknowledging its instrumentalization of plants. It also returns to its Ancient Roman inception to follow an alternative thread—the thread of women who held plant knowledge as cure, yes, but also as poison. This paper asks if creatively writing the Doctrine of Signatures can be done as a reclamation of women’s plant knowledge, as a connection to the vegetal realm, as a rejection of plant moralism, as an act of defiant activism, and as a darkly botanical poisonous act.

Prudence Gibson is a leading scholar in Critical Plant Studies, which sits at the nexus of plant science and the humanities (art). She is a Lecturer in the School of Art and Design, University of NSW, Sydney. Her recent books are Dark Botany: The Herbarium Tales (OHP, co-edited with Sigi Jöttkandt, 2024), The Plant Thieves (New South, 2023), The Plant Contract (Brill Rodopi, 2018), Covert Plants (ed., Punctum, 2018) and Janet Laurence: The Pharmacy of Plants (New South Books, 2015). Her recent article on poison gardens is in .

This talk is co-hosted by the Literary Provocations Hub and by the Â鶹Éçmadou English and Creative Writing Programme in the School of the Arts and Media.