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In spite of his victory, Linnaeus continued in such an extreme state of animosity that he
was unable to muster a shred of sympathy, even when Siegesbeck’s son committed suicide a
short time later. Instead, he regarded the tragedy as divine retribution for Siegesbeck’s treat-
ment of himself. Prudently, he refrained from saying so publicly.^30
If Linnaeus learned anything from his feud with Siegesbeck, it was to tread more care-
fully in matters of religion. Before he published two of his more philosophical works, De
Curiositate Naturali in 1748 and Oeconomia Naturae in 1749, he asked three prominent
Catholic theologians from Venice— one from the Franciscan order— to review the manu-
scripts for any taint of heresy or blasphemy. None could find anything that would conflict
with Christian morality or teaching.^31
Despite Linnaeus’s caution, in 1759 Pope Clement XIII banned all of his books from
Vatican territories and ordered all copies of his works to be burned. The immediate cause
was Linnaeus’s taxonomic category of Primates, which placed humans in the same group
as monkeys. While he was at it, the Pope also banned Systema Naturae for good mea-
sure. However, in 1774, Pope Clement XIV, Pope Clement XIII’s successor, reversed the
ban on the Systema Naturae, and Linnaeus rejoiced at the news that botanists were now
being invited to present lectures on his method at the Vatican. The new Pope’s approval
of Linnaeus’s sexual system was a dramatic sign that, by 1774, the Catholic Church had
become reconciled to the fact that plants had sex.Avoiding the “S”- word in British Botany Texts
It took a few decades for the general public to become fully aware of Linnaeus’s Systema
Naturae (1735), which they at first learned by means of summaries in popular books on
botany and eventually through translations into English and other languages. By the 1760s,
Linnaeus had become an international celebrity, hailed as the codifier of the new rules
of plant names and classification. Women, especially, were attracted to the new method
of binomial nomenclature and the user- friendly sexual system for identifying plants.^32
Increasing numbers of botany books based on the Linnaean sexual system were being writ-
ten by and for women, setting Linnaeus’s anthropomorphized vocabulary for describing
plant sex on a collision course with contemporary social mores. Discussing the mechanics
of “monogamous nuptials” was awkward enough, let alone the more usual case of polygamy.
Those authors who rejected the sexual theory itself dodged the issue entirely by retain-
ing Tournefort’s outdated asexual system of plant classification. Others, like William
Withering, who accepted both the sexual theory of plants and the Linnaean system of clas-
sification, nevertheless found it necessary to avoid any mention of the word sex, or even
the distinction between male and female floral structures. In the Introduction to his book,
The Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain (1776),
Withering stated that while it “is natural to ask the uses of these different parts— [a] full
reply to such a question would lead us to a long disquisition, curious in itself, but quite
improper in this place.” In other words, a full discussion of the roles of stamens and pistils
would inevitably lead to a discussion of sex, which would be “improper” in a book intended
for young women. As Withering explained in his preface, “from an apprehension that
botany in an English dress would become a favorite amusement with the ladies, ... it was