Introduction

Scientific materialism reveals some aspects of nature but obscures others. As early modern naturalists sought to define pollen, pitcher plant, and armadillo, they separated them from other ecological and cultural landscapes that shaped their meanings. Simultaneously, alienation became more central to European science as it made experiment and empiricism the bedrock of the new science. For naturalists for whom travel was a challenge, in order to complete an empirical study, alienation of the natural thing was a necessity. Knowing is a world making practice: through knowing, historical actors “make the worlds they know.” By building on the recent ontological and material turns in scholarship, the natural things examined are in-between concepts, objects, and materials. Natural Things features object biographies as nonhuman nature passed into human hands. Through the paradoxical process of alienation as both an extractive and a generative force in knowledge construction, natural things transformed, were transformed, and transformed others.