Description
Believe it or not, polygamy was everywhere on the minds of eighteenth-century Europeans. Intellectuals, travellers, botanists, and even clergymen grappled with the question of plural marriage. First, and with reference to botanical tracts, global atlases, Enlightenment theories, and religious treatises, this talk will showcase the breadth of textual references to polygamy from the Enlightenment period. Taken together, such texts reveal not only the prevalence of polygamy across European genres, but also how polygamy functioned as a central classificatory category for differentiating plants and humans– into distinct species and societies, civilized or barbaric. The talk will then pivot to the Newberry’s collections, particularly its holdings pertaining to Jonathan Carver. Carver’s early journals, composed during his exploratory sojourn through the northern Midwest in 1766 and 1767, reveal both his desire to contribute to the established genre of travel writing, which included an attention to kinship and gender, and that he grappled with the reality that polygamy was not a sure sign of barbarism. Each of his publications, including his treatise on tobacco, proceeded to sanitise and simplify the polygamy that he had observed abroad. Ultimately, his gargantuan 1779 London-published Universal Traveller omitted polygamy from his discussion of the Americas altogether; he reserved it solely for his descriptions of Asia and Africa, places imbued with ‘barbarism’ in the European imaginary, and places he had never been. Placing Carver’s writings within a larger Enlightenment-era context reveals that polygamy was a tool of colonial knowledge production and that emerging ideas of human difference were more negotiable on the edges of empire than they were in the metropole.
About the Speaker
Jocelyn Zimmerman is an Assistant Professor of History at Butler University where she teaches cultural, intellectual, and queer histories of Early Modern Europe, the British Isles, and colonialism. She recently taught an upper-division course on "Scotland and the World," in which students debated whether Scotland was colonizer or colonized and put together an immersive Robert Burns' Night celebration. Her research focuses on embodied colonial knowledge production in the eighteenth century, particularly as it relates to gender and sexuality on the fringes of empire. Her forthcoming article with the Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies, titled "'Nymphs', plural: Plurality among Scots in the East India Company," explores how and with what repercussions Scotsmen used coded, classical metaphors to romanticize their interracial plurality abroad. That article will also be a small part of her larger book project, which this talk is also a part of and named after: Knowing Polygamy: Plants, People, and Progress in the Eighteenth Century.
About Colloquium
Colloquium is a weekly series of talks featuring staff, fellows, and scholars who are working with the library’s vast collections. These events bring together experts from various fields to share their research on a wide range of topics, followed by an opportunity for the audience to ask questions and engage in conversation.
Colloquium is open to the public and offers a chance to explore fascinating ideas and new discoveries. No advance registration is required.