Mushrooms and Eighteenth-Century Britain

This book explores British scientific engagement with fungi during the eighteenth century. Bridging the history of science, technology, medicine, and material culture, it sheds light on how the Age of Reason sought to unveil and conquer the fungal world.

As the first scholarly monograph to explore the intersection of fungi or mushrooms and science in the British Enlightenment, this book presents five thematic case studies. It begins by investigating the ‘Mushroom Stone’ and its transition from an object of ‘natural magic’ to an object of empirical study. It then explores the cross-channel influence of French horticultural techniques on the nascent British mushroom industry, alongside the medical controversies surrounding the ‘agaric of the oak’ as a surgical haemostatic. The latter half of the book focuses on the formalisation of mycology, providing a comparative analysis of James Bolton and James Sowerby, whose illustrated texts brought Linnaean order to British fungi. Finally, it examines the ‘fairy ring’ phenomenon, revealing public participation in natural history and the demystification of these local formations. Together, these chapters reveal how fungi were transformed from botanical puzzles into catalysts of scientific research.

This book is primarily aimed at historians of science and modern Britain; researchers in biological taxonomy and mycology; and students or general readers with an interest in natural history, history of science, or British history.