Plants and Politics in Padua During the Age of Revolution, 1820–1848

This book highlights the close interactions between plants, plant knowledge, politics, and social life in Padua during the age of revolution. It explores the lives and thoughts of two brothers, the lawyer Andrea Meneghini (1806–1870) and the botanist Giuseppe Meneghini (1811–1889), illustrating the world of Padua’s social and intellectual elite in the decades before the 1848 revolution. A closer look at park designs, gardening associations and networks, flower exhibitions, agricultural societies, organicist metaphors, and botanical research on the organization of living bodies opens up unexpected parallels between actors and ideas of two apparently distant areas: botany and political economy. It reveals unspoken dreams of progress and a new social order, but also sheds light on the ambiguous relationship between the Paduan elite and the Austrian rule.