Mediterranean botany. Making cross-cultural knowledge about materia medica in the sixteenth century

This essay examines the production of new knowledge about materia medica in the late sixteenth-century Mediterranean through a close analysis of Prospero Alpini’s Dialogue on Balsam (1591). Focusing on balsam—a plant of exceptional medical, commercial, and religious value—the study explores how Alpini negotiated classical authority, first-hand observation, and indigenous expertise in constructing botanical and medical knowledge. I argue that Alpini’s treatment of balsam was shaped by the plant’s economic and symbolic significance, which influenced both his rhetorical strategies and his decision to frame knowledge production as an explicitly cross-cultural and interreligious process. By granting authority to Muslim and Jewish Egyptian informants and presenting their shared knowledge as a guarantee of truth, Alpini articulated a model of scientific credibility rooted in religious plurality and lived experience rather than exclusively in classical texts. The essay further demonstrates that Alpini adopted different epistemic strategies depending on disciplinary context: while medical knowledge required validation through ancient authorities and theory, botanical knowledge privileged proximity, observation, and empirical familiarity. Situating Alpini’s work within the political, commercial, and intellectual landscape of the early modern Mediterranean, this study proposes “Mediterranean botany” as a distinct form of knowledge production, differentiated from colonial botany by long-standing intercultural exchanges, shared medical traditions, and non-imperial power relations. Ultimately, the essay challenges diffusionist narratives of early modern science and highlights the Mediterranean as a space of negotiated, multi-directional scientific co-production.