XVI International Botanical Congess

As the sixteenth century turned to the seventeenth, botany was about to take a major turn. Carolus Clusius's Rariorum plantarum historia (1601) marks the culmination of the late Renaissance descriptive tradition. The century before had seen the rise of an international community of botanists--a province of the Republic of Letters--and the introduction of botanical gardens and herbaria as research techniques. Clusius's successors in the early seventeenth century, such as Caspar Bauhin, would be increasingly concerned with systematizing the knowledge won by European naturalists in the sixteenth century, and with describing and understanding the floras of Asia and America.