Early Modern Amateur Botany and Historical Biodiversity: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Herbarium Ruperti (1698–1705)

The Herbarium Ruperti, compiled by the Lutheran theologian Georg Andreas Ruperti and containing ca. 1300 plants, represents one of the earliest comprehensive collections documenting the flora of northern Germany before the emergence of systematic botanical surveys. This paper situates the herbarium within current interdisciplinary research on historical herbaria. By combining historical analysis with botanical identification, conservation, and digitisation, the project reconstructs Ruperti's botanical practices and examines the broader cultural, scientific, and regional contexts in which the collection was created. Secondly, attention is given to the herbarium's value for reconstructing late seventeenth-century vegetation in Lower Saxony, documenting changes in flora, landscape and climate change. The paper also addresses the practical and methodological challenges of conserving contaminated historical plant collections and integrating them into modern digital research infrastructures through standards compatible with both humanities scholarship and biodiversity databases. The Herbarium Ruperti demonstrates that pre-Linnaean herbaria are not merely obsolete taxonomic relics but multifaceted historical sources that connect the history of science, environmental history, biodiversity research, and digital humanities. More broadly, the project illustrates how interdisciplinary collaboration between historians, biologists, conservators, and digital specialists can generate new perspectives on early modern natural history and contribute to contemporary biodiversity research.