An Empire of Materia Medica at the Late Medici Court

Abstract

This article examines the “exotic” or non-native European materia medica used in the recipe collection of the last Medici Princess, Anna Maria Luisa (1667–1743) and traces the threads of local knowledge traditions within her collection. We cannot fully contextualize Anna Maria Luisa’s recipe collection without an understanding of how local knowledge, although incomplete and informed by inequitable colonial networks and encounters, was translated, assimilated, and adulterated as it was commodified and incorporated into the pharmacopeia of the late Medici Court. For Anna Maria Luisa, the provenance of foreign medicinal plants and stones was part of their value, and her recipes reveal the role aristocratic women played in attaching epistemic and social value to exotic materia medica and non-European therapeutic knowledge.