Introduction
1 From the Introduction to ‘A Description of a Journey Undertaken for the Discovery of Plants into the County of Kent’ (1632) in Thomas Johnson: Journeys in Kent and Hampstead, edited by J. S. L. Gilmour (Pittsburgh, PA, 1972). All the quotations in this chapter are taken from this translation (pp. 101-126) of Johnson’s Descriptio itineris plantarum of 1632.
2 On the matter of the cannon at least, Johnson exaggerated. The Britannia carried fifty-five not sixty-six.
3 Cannabis was widely cultivated for its fibres, which were made into hemp. An Act of Henry VIII’s required all landowners with more than sixty acres of arable land to grow cannabis to make ropes for his navy. See H. Godwin, ‘The Ancient Cultivation of Hemp’, Antiquity, 41, 1967, pp. 42-50.
I In the Beginning 370 BC-290 BC
1 R. D. Hicks (ed.j, Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London, 1925), vol. I, Book 5, ch. 2. Diogenes was probably writing in the third century BC.
2 Professor Bob Sharpies notes that Theophrastus often uses ‘male’ and ‘female’ of what are not in fact different sexes of the same plant, but of different species that seemed to him as it were more or less ‘manly’.
3 Theophrastus Enquiry into Plants, Book I, iii, 5, p. 191. All quotations from Theophrastus’s Enquiry into Plants are taken from Sir Arthur Hort’s translation for the Loeb Classical Library series, published by William Heinemann in 1916. References have been given for the longer quotations only.
4 Hort, Enquiry into Plants, Book III, x, 3-4, p. 225.
5 The difference between the two was not resolved until the late eighteenth century, much of the work being done by Johann Heinrich Troll (1756-1824).
6 Hort, Enquiry into Plants, Book IV, vii, 3-5, p. 341.
7 The word was introduced by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel in 1866.
8 Hort, Enquiry into Plants, Book IV, i, 1-2, P- 287.
9 Ibid., Book VIII, iv, 4-6, p. 171.
10 Ibid., Book IX, v, 1-3, p. 243.
11 Ibid., Book IX, viii, 7-8, p. 259.
12 Ibid., Book IX, xvi, 6-8, p. 303.
13 Ibid., Book IX, xvi, 9, p. 305.
14 Ibid, Book IX, xvi, 3-5, p. 299.
15 Ibid., Book IV, viii, 1-3, p. 347.
16 Ibid., Book IV, iii, 1-3, p. 305.
17 Ibid., Book VI, vi, 3-5, p. 39.
18 Ibid., Book I, xiv, 3-5, p. 101.
19 Cato the Elder, De re rustica, Book LVI. Quoted from On Agriculture, W. D. Hooper’s translation for the Loeb Classical Library series, revised by H. B. Ash (London, 1934).
20 Hort, Enquiry into Plants, Book II, ii, 9-11, p. 117.
21 A. L. Peck (ed.), Aristotle’s Parts of Animals (London, 1937) I, 5, 645a, 10.
22 It was normal in ancient Greece to call slaves of any age ‘boys’; the point was that they did not have the legal rights of adults.
23 Hicks, Diogenes Laertius Lives, vol. I, Book 5, ch. 2.
II All Men by Nature Desire to Know 600 BC-60 BC
1 See B. Ebell, The Papyrus Ebers (Copenhagen and London, 1937).
2 Akkadian was the language spoken in Babylonia and Assyria. See R. Campbell-Thompson, The Assyrian Herbal (London, 1924).
3 Sir Arthur Hort, Theophrastus Enquiry into Plants (London, 1916), Book IX, viii, 7-8, p. 259.
4 Aristotle, Historia animalium, I, 491a, 9. All quotations are taken from Aristotle’s Parts of Animals, A. L. Peck’s translation for the Loeb Classical Library series, published by William Heinemann in 1937.
5 Aristotle, Historia animalium, I, 409a, 5-8.
6 For a full analysis of Aristotie’s method, see James G. Lennox, Aristotle’s Philosophy of Biology (Cambridge, 2001), and D. W Thompson, On Growth and Form (abridged edn, Cambridge 1971).
7 Aristotle, De generatione animalium, IV, 12, 694b, 12-15.
8 For a full account, see John Patrick Lynch, Aristotle’s School (Berkeley, CA, 1972).
9 R. D. Hicks (ed.), Diogenes Laertius Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London, 1925), vol. V, Book 1.
10 Cicero, Academia, I, 9.34, quoted in Lynch, Aristotle’s School.
11 R. W Sharpies in D. J. Furley (ed.), From Aristotle to Augustine: Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. I (London, 1999).
12 Bob Sharpies questions whether either the Lyceum or the Academy survived Sulla’s sack of Athens in 86 BC. There were certainly state-funded teachers of these philosophies in Athens at the end of the second century AD and there was a neo-Platonic school until AD 529, but it’s not clear whether the same specific titles were used.
13 Strabo XIII, 1.54, quoted in Lynch, Aristotle’s School.
14 Athenaeus I, 3a-b.
III The Alexandrian Library 300 BC-40 BC
1 Quoted in Edward Alexander Parsons, The Alexandrian Library (New York, 1952).
2 For the hieroglyphics for these plants and many others, see Victor Loret, La Flore pharaonique (Paris, 1887).
3 Sir Arthur Hort, Theophrastus Enquiry into Plants (London, 1916), Book IV, viii, 3—4, p. 345.
4 For a full account, see R. W. Sharpies in D. J. Furley (ed.), From Aristotle to Augustine: Routledge History of Philosophy, vol. I (London, 1999).
5 See Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London, 1776-88), Ch. LI.
6 The full story is told in M. Casanova, L’incendie de la Bibliotheque d’Alexandrie par les Arabes (Paris, 1923).
IV Pliny the Plagiarist AD 20-AD 80
1 Though he is not in any way pushing forward the debate on plants, there is a view that Pliny used his Natural History to celebrate the Roman Empire and its resources.
2 See Pliny, Letters (London, 1915), III, epistie 5.
3 Pliny, Natural History (London, 1952), XXIII, 112. Translated by H. Rackham for the Loeb Classical Library series (London, 1952).
4 See Pliny, Letters, V, epistle 6, p. 32ff
5 Pliny, Natural History, XVI, 60, 140. He says the art of topiary was introduced by Gaius Matius.
6 M. Launey, ‘Le verger d’Heracles a Thasos’, Bulletin de correspondance hellenique, 61, 1937, pp. 380-409.
7 Pliny, Natural History, XXI, 8.
8 Ibid., XXV, 16.
9 For the full account, see Pliny the Younger, Letters, VI, epistle 16.
V The Medicine Men AD 40-AD 400
1 From the Preface of Dioscorides’s De materia medica. See R. T Gunther (ed.), Dioscorides de Materia Medica: The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides (Oxford, 1934).
2 From Goodyer’s interlinear translation of Dioscorides, quoted in Gunther, Dioscorides.
3 Pliny, Natural History, XXV, 4. Translated by H. Rackham for the Loeb Classical Library series (London, 1952).
4 Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, MS gr.l, fol. 148.
5 Wellcome Institute Library, London, MS 5753.
6 Claudius Galenus, Opera omnia (Leipzig, 1821-33), vol. 14, pp. 30-31.
7 See Charles Singer, ‘The herbal in Antiquity and its transmission to Later Ages’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. 47 (1927), pp. 1-52.
VI Juliana’s Book AD 500-AD 600
1 For a full description, see Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions (London, 2000) by Minta Collins, whose lucid text first introduced me to Juliana. Her book has been an important source and I am grateful for her generosity in allowing me to quote from it.
2 Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, MS med. gr. LA colour facsimile with commentary by H. Gerstinger was published in Graz in 1970.
3 See Collins, Medieval Herbals, p. 44.
4 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS gr. 2286.
5 See Collins, Medieval Herbals, p. 42.
6 See E. S. Forster (trs.), The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (Oxford, 1927).
7 The manuscript is now in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford.
8 Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples, MS Ex Vindob. Gr 1.
VII The Arab Influence AD 600-1200
1 Syriac was a dialect of Aramaic, the ancient language of the Middle East, still spoken in parts of Syria and the Lebanon. It originated in Aram and by the fifth century bc had spread to become the lingua franca of the whole Persian Empire. It is the language of the later Books of the Old Testament. Syriac was spoken in Syria until the thirteenth century and is still used in the liturgies of some Eastern churches.
2 They were followers of Nestorius, patriarch of Constantinople (AD 428-431), who believed that Christ was two distinct persons, one human, one divine.
3 Son of and co-ruler with Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus.
4 Cordoba was the centre of Moorish Spain between 711 and 1236.
5 See Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions (London, 2000), for a detailed analysis of this often quoted account.
6 Dioscorides, De materia medica, Book II, ch 167. See R. T Gunther (ed.), Dioscorides de Materia Medica: The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides (Oxford, 1934).
7 Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, MS.or.289.
8 For a full description see Collins, Medieval Herbals, pp. 118-124.
9 Süleymaniye Mosque Library, Istanbul, MS Ayasofia 3703, reproduced in facsimile as Farmacopea Araba Medievale, edited by Alain Touwaide (Milan, 1992-3).
10 It was given to the library by Sir Thomas Adams, ‘Militis & Baronetti’ as the handwritten frontispiece describes him.
11 See Charles Raven, English Naturalists from Neckham to Ray (Cambridge, 1947).
VIII Out of the Black Hole 1100-1300
1 Süleymaniye Mosque Library, Istanbul, MS Ayasofia 3703, reproduced in facsimile as Farmacopea Araba Medievale, edited by Alain Touwaide (Milan, 1992-3).
2 MS Ayasofia 3703, Rubus fruticosus, fol. 17v.
3 MS Ayasofia 3703, Physalis alkekengi, fol. 35v.
4 Tractatus de herbis, British Library, London, MS Egerton 747.
5 Otto Pacht, ‘Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, XIII (1950), pp. 13-47.
6 Ibid.
7 Bartholomew of England, De proprietatibus rerum, ch. 196. See Bateman, Batman uppon Bartholome his Booke De proprietatibus rerum (London, 1582).
8 The Lay of the Nine Healing Herbs, British Library, London, MS Harley 585, fol. 174v.
9 Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, MS Voss.lat.Q.9.
10 O. Cockagne in Leechdoms, Wort-Cunning and Starcraft of Early England (London, 1864-6), a translation of MS Cotton Vitellius C III in the British Library, London.
11 Ibid.
12 TJie first manuscript once belonged to William Harvey (1578-1657), the physician who published the treatise on the circulation of blood.
13 See Charles Singer, From Magic to Science: Essays on the Scientific Twilight (London, 1928).
14 Spare pages at the back of the manuscript are scribbled over with prescriptions of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century: pains in the head caused by ‘fumes from the stomach’ can be cured by a concoction of coriander, cinnamon, cloves, mace, nutmeg and leaves of red rose. The English practitioner who wrote these notes made much use of guaiacum, newly arrived as a wonder drug of the tropics and thought to be especially effective against syphilis.
15 See, for instance, MS Ashmole 1462 in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, which was made c.l 190-1200.
16 British Library, London, MS Sloane 1975.
IX The Image Makers 1300-1500
1 Francesco Petrarch, De rebus memorandis (Book of Memorable Things) (Basel, 1563).
2 Printing with moveable metal type was invented by the Chinese in the eleventh century and had been used in Korea since the fourteenth century.
3 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS Lat. 6823.
4 Bibliotheque de l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris, MS Masson 116.
5 Carrara Herbal, British Library, London, Sloane MS 2020.
6 Otto Pacht, ‘Early Italian Nature Studies and the Early Calendar Landscape’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, vol. XIII (1950), pp. 13—47.
7 Liber de simplicibus, Biblioteca Marciana, Venice, MS Lat. VI 59.
8 The English art critic John Ruskin (1819-1900), mad about Venice, champion of all things Venetian, employed an artist, Antonio Caldara, to make copies of Amadio’s illustrations.
9 Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, MS nouv.acq.Lat.1673, fol. 28v.
10 Biblioteca Casanatense, Rome, MS 4182.
11 Petrarch and his fellow humanists of the fourteenth century had encouraged a similar shift in script which gradually changed from Gothic to a more legible Renaissance hand, the litera fere-humanistica.
12 See especially the Medicina antiqua, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna, MS Vindobonensis 93.
13 See, for instance, the tapestries made in Brussels 1466 at the Musee d’histoire de Bern and the Unicorn tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
14 Musee du Louvre, Paris.
15 Antonio Pisanello, Study of Plants, c. 1438-42, pen and ink, brown wash and white heightening on red prepared paper, Musee Ingres, Montauban.
16 For a full account, see Thomas Kren and Scott McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance, the catalogue of an exhibition held at the Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2003 and at the Royal Academy, London, in 2004.
17 See, for instance, the fat caterpillar, dragonfly, peacock butterfly, wasps, flies and hoverfly on the borders of the Cocharelli Treatise, British Library, London, Add. MS 28841, fol. iv.
18 But see the Book of Hours made by Jean Bourdichon for Anne of Brittany where 340 plants, named in French and Latin, are displayed in the borders.
19 Albrecht Dürer, Iris, watercolour and body colour, brush, pen, on two sheets stuck together, Bremen, Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett In v. 35.
20 Under the plan is a note: ‘Let us have fountains on every piazza.’
21 Leonardo da Vinci, A Treatise on Painting, translated by John Francis Rigaud (London, 1877), ch. 334.
22 Albrecht Dürer, Vier bucher von menschlicher proportion (Nuremberg, 1528).
23 Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.
24 See, for example, the exotic date palm, Italian cypress and umbrella pine in Van Eyck’s famous Ghent altarpiece made in 1432, or the plantain, dandelion, buttercup, wild strawberry, primrose, violets and ferns in the turf of St John Writing the Gospel by Dirk Bouts (c.l420-c.l475). When Bouts died, Dürer was still only four years old. In the centre panel of Hans Memling’s triptych of 1484, St Christopher carries the Christ child through grass spangled with dandelion, mallow, campanula, martagon lilies. Memling’s flowers include a large clump of creamy narcissus.
X Theophrastus Reborn 1250-1500
1 ‘In hoc sexto libro vegetabilium nostrorum magis satisfacimus curiositati studentium quam philosophiae. De particularibus enim philosophia esse non poterit.’
2 The Herbarius of Apuleius Platonicus was printed in Rome c.l481 by Johannes Philippus de Lignamine.
3 For a full account of the effect of printing on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe, see E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979).
4 Marie Boas, The Scientific Renaissance 1450-1630 (London, 1962).
5 Preface to the De Gart der Gesundheit (Mainz, 1485), quoted in A. Arber, Herbals, their origin and evolution 1470-1670 (Cambridge, 1912), pp. 24-6.
XI Brunfels’s Book 1500-1550
1 Otto Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones, (Strasbourg, 1532), Dedication.
2 ‘… which has been learned not from books but from experience’.
3 ‘I’ve accepted the name given by the artists who painted this flower’.
4 ‘They persuaded me to include a picture of the herb which is commonly called Good Henry, or Schwerbel. The herb women told me that.’
5 Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones, as quoted in T A. Sprague, ‘The Herbal of Otto Brunfels’ in Journal of the Linnaean Society, Botany vol. 48 (London, 1928), pp. 79-124, read to the society on 3 November 1927.
6 Ibid.
XII The Irascible Fuchs 1500-1570
1 From the Dedicatory Epistle of Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium (Basel, 1542), translated by Elaine Mathers and John Heller in the facsimile edition and commentary published by Stanford University Press in 1999. All quotations from De historia stirpium are from this edition and are reprinted by kind permission of the publisher.
2 Ibid.
3 Meyer’s original drawings are now at the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
4 Fuchs, De historia stirpium, Cap CXLVII, p. 392.
5 Ibid., Dedicatory Epistle.
6 George Hizler, Oratio de vita et morte … Leonharti Fuchsii (Tubingen, 1566), translated by Elaine Mathers and quoted in the Fuchs facsimile published by Stanford University Press.
7 ‘On August 14, 1535, the honourable Leonhart Fuchs, doctor of medicine, summoned and sent by our illustrious prince, was admitted to the council of the academy to teach medicine at an annual salary of 160 florins, and has sworn to his hiring and … to contribute to the university articles for publishing, and the university agrees to pay 15 florins for him to publish his own Books himself.’ Translated from the Latin original at Universitatsarchiv, Tubingen, fol. 66v, and quoted in the Fuchs facsimile published by Stanford University Press.
8 See the Dienerbuch - a record of people, events, activities for the town - for 1549. ‘Doctor Leonhart Fuchs occupies the nunnery at Tubingen, wherein much construction has been done for him. He uses the garden by the house and expects that he might realise 20 pounds from it … the house is being improved and rebuilt, which he deserves, with window, stove and all other things. The university has so much income that it can well support the doctor.’ From Klaus Dobat and Karl Magdefrau, ‘300 Jahre Botanik in Tübingen’, Attempto 55-56 (Tubingen, 1975), pp. 8-27.
9 Ibid.
10 Original letter, written in German, in the Old Royal Collection, Royal Library, Copenhagen, quoted in the commentary to the Fuchs facsimile published by Stanford University Press.
11 Title page, originally in Latin, of De historia stirpium, published by Isingrin, Basel, 1542.
12 Letter from Fuchs to Camerarius, dated 23 November 1542, in the Trew Collection, Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen. Twenty-six of these letters came into the possession of Christoph Jacob Trew (1694-1769), a physician and a wealthy patron of botany.
13 Letter from Fuchs to Camerarius, undated but probably written end 1541, or early 1542.
14 See Marcel de Cleene and Marie Claire Lejeune, Compendium of Symbolic and Ritual Plants in Europe (Ghent, 2003), p. 370.
15 Fuchs gave the foxglove its Latin name, a translation of the German common name, ‘fingerhut’. Meyer’s illustration (see plate 72), an afterthought on p. 893 of the Historia, is the first published picture of the flower, which for centuries had been used by country people as a medicine. (Its power was confirmed by William Withering in An Account of the Foxglove, and Some of its Medicinal Uses, with Practical Remarks on Dropsy, and Other Diseases (Birmingham, 1785).)
16 Fuchs, De historia stirpium, p. 228, as translated in the Fuchs facsimile published by Stanford University Press, p. 368.
17 T. A. Sprague and E. Nelmes, ‘The Herbal of Leonhart Fuchs’, Journal of the Linnaean Society, Botany vol. 48 (London, 1928), p. 553, read on 29 November 1928.
18 Fuchs’s De historia stirpium was also a beautifully made book, which is perhaps why the pre Raphaelite William Morris and the Victorian art critic John Ruskin both bought copies from the London shop of the antiquarian Bookseller, Bernard Quaritch.
19 Fuchs, De historia stirpium, Dedicatory Epistle.
20 From the Fuchs-Camerarius correspondence in the Trew Collection, Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen, translated by Elaine Mathers.
21 The manuscript, bound in nine folio volumes and including 1,529 hand-coloured pictures of plants, is in the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
22 Conrad Gesner, Bibliotheca universalis (Tiguri, 1545).
23 Letter, written by an amanuensis, from Gesner to Fuchs, 18 October 1556, translated by John Heller from the original in the Bibliothek Zentrum, Zurich, MS C50a no.20.
24 Letter from Fuchs to Camerarius, 24 November 1565, in the Trew Collection, Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen, translated by Elaine Mathers.
25 Rauwolf’s collection is now in the Rijksherbarium, Leiden.
26 Letter from Fuchs at Tubingen to Rondelet at Montpellier, 10 December 1556, Universitatsarchiv, Basel, Fr Gr II 5a, no. 44, translated from the Latin by Karen Meier Reeds and quoted in her Book, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York and London, 1991).
27 Letter from Fuchs to Camerarius, 24 November 1565, in the Trew Collection, Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen, translated by Elaine Mathers.
28 Ch. XLI, p. 256 from Fuchs’s original manuscript in the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.
29 Letter from Fuchs to Camerarius, 3 April 1563, in the Trew Collection, Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen, translated by Elaine Mathers.
XIII In Italy 1500-1550
1 The Latin name for the Volga was the flumen Rha from which rhubarb, Rheum rhaponticum, gets its name.
2 See David Abulafia (ed.), The Mediterranean in History (London, 2003).
3 Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, MS Ital. II XXVI 4860. See also Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown (Cambridge, 1997).
4 Nicolo Leoniceno, Introduction to Plinii ac plurinum aliorum auctorum … (Indication of Errors in Pliny) (Ferrara, 1492).
5 Marcello Virgilio Adriani, Preface to Dioscorides Materia Medica (Florence, 1518).
6 Antonio Musa Brasavola, Examen omnium simplicium medicamentorum … (Rome, 1536).
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Sir Walter Raleigh, The History of the World (London, 1614).
XIV The First Botanic Gardens 1540—1600
1 For a full account of the botanic garden at Pisa, see Fabio Garbari, Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Alessandro Tosi, Giardino dei Semplici (Pisa, 2002).
2 See Emilio Tolaini, Forma Pisarum. Storia urbanistica della cittd di Pisa (Pisa, 1979).
3 Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Mediceo 1171, cc256-7, quoted in Garbari et al, Giardino.
4 Biblioteca Universitaria di Bologna, MS Aldrovandi 136, Observations variae XIX.
5 Giovanni Battista de Toni, I placiti di Luca Ghini (Venice, 1907), p. 29.
6 Ibid., pp. 24-25.
7 See S. Seybold, ‘Luca Ghini, Leonhart Rauwolf und Leonhart Fuchs’, Jh. Ges. Naturkunde, 145 (1990).
8 Letter to George Marius, dated 12 December 1558, in Pier Andrea Mattioli, Epistolarum medicinalium (1561) in Opera (Frankfurt, 1598), Book 3, p. 118.
9 See Bartolomeo Taegio, La villa (Milan, 1559).
10 The site of this second garden is commemorated in the street name Via del Giardino in Pisa.
11 Andrea Cesalpino, De plantis libri XVI (Florence, 1583), translated from the Dedication.
12 Ibid., Lib. I, cap. XIII.
13 M. Lobelius and Pierre Pena, Stirpium adversaria nova (London, 1570), p. 161.
14 Letter, dated 26 September 1592, quoted in G. Calvi, Commentarium inserviturum historiae Pisani vireti Botanici Accademici (Pisa, 1777).
15 Al-Ghassani was physician to Sultan Ahmad al-Mansur and his book, dealing with 379 Moroccan plants and drugs, was called Hadiquat al-azhar fi sarh mahiyat al-ushb wa al-aggar.
16 Cesalpino, De plantis, translated from the Dedication.
XV The Long-nosed Nitpicker 1540—1600
1 Pierre Belon, Les Observations de plusieurs singularities (Paris, 1555).
2 Giovanni Battista de Toni, 7 placiti di Luca Ghini (Venice, 1907), p. 23.
3 See letter to George Marius, dated 12 December 1558, in Pier Andrea Mattioli, Epistolarum medicinalium (1561) in Opera (Frankfurt, 1598), Book 3, p. 118.
4 Ibid., Book 3, p. 171.
5 Pier Andrea Mattioli, Commentarii in libros sex Pedacii Dioscoridis Anazarbei (1565 edition), Book 2, ch. 139, pp. 544-5.
XVI Weaving the Web 1500-1580
1 The first scientific society in Europe, the Accademia dei Lincei, was founded by a Roman nobleman, Federico Cesi, in 1603. The name ‘lynx-eyed’ was suggested by Galileo, a founder member.
2 Amatus Lusitanus, In Dioscoridis … de medica materia libros quinque enarrationes (Venice, 1553).
3 From William Turner’s A new herball (London and Cologne, 1551-1568).
4 Pieter Coudenberg in a letter to Conrad Gesner, quoted in Gesner’s De hortis Germaniae (Tiguri, 1561), p. 244.
5 Preface to Turner, A new herball, 1568 edition.
6 Turner, A new herball, 1551 edition.
7 Marjorie Blarney and Richard Fitter, Wild Flowers (London and Glasgow, 1980).
8 Public Record Office, Edw. VI Dom vii, no. 32, quoted in W R. D. Jones, William Turner (London, 1988).
9 Public Record Office, Edw. VI Dom xi., no. 14, fol. 24.
10 British Museum, London, Lansdowne MS 2, no. 63, ff 139-40.
11 Public Record Office, Edw. VI Dom xiii, no. 19.
12 Quoted in Blanche Henrey, British Botanical and Horticultural Literature Before 1800 (London, 1975).
13 British Library, London, Lansdowne MS VIII, no. 3.
14 W Pierce, The Marprelate Tracts, 1588, 1589 (London, 1911).
15 See B. Dietz, The Port and Trade of Early Elizabethan London, Documents, London Record Society (London, 1972), pp. 63, 78, 138ff
16 Turner, A new herball (1568 edition), part II, p. 27.
17 Ibid., part III, p. 80.
18 He included, for example, the foxglove, which he said, ‘groweth very much in Englande, and specially in Norfolke about ye cony holes in sandy ground’.
XVII Protestants Prevail 1530-1580
1 Writing in De naturis rerum in praise of the weasel, the medieval author Alexander Neckham noted how ‘educated by nature, it knows the virtues of the herbs, although it has neither studied medicine at Salerno nor been drilled in the schools at Montpellier’.
2 For a full account of the university at Montpellier, see Karen Meier Reeds, Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (New York and London, 1991).
3 Before it ever became established as a centre for the wine trade, Montpellier’s wealth was founded on spice.
4 Sean Jennett (trs.), Beloved Son Felix: The Journal of Felix Platter, a medical student in Montpellier in the sixteenth century (London, 1961). All subsequent quotations from Platter are taken from this source and are reproduced here by permission.
5 Laurentius Joubertus, Gulmielmi Rondeletii Vita in Operum Latinorum (Frankfurt, 1599).
6 The Place des Cenevols no longer exists; it was swept away during the construction of the Rue Nationale, now the Rue Foch. Catalan’s own sons had been lodging in Strasbourg until they went on to stay with Platter’s father in Basel. This system of exchange was common at the time and cut down on the cost of a university education.
7 In Platter’s day it stood on the Rue de l’Universite, now renamed the Rue de l’Ecole de Pharmacie.
8 W. G. Waters (trs.), Journal of Montaigne’s Travels (London, 1903).
XVIII Gesner’s Masterpiece 1530-1580
1 The final volume of Gesner’s Historia animalium did not come out until 1587, twenty-two years after Gesner’s death.
2 Heinrich Zoller, Martin Steinmann, Karl Schmidt (eds), Conradi Gesneri Historia Plantarum, 3 vols (Zurich, 1972-4).
3 For a full account of Gesner’s Bibliotheca universalis, see Hans Fischer, ‘Conrad Gesner (1516-1565) as Bibliographer and Encyclopedist’, The Library, Fifth Series, vol. XXI, no. 4, December 1966, pp. 269-81.
4 E. L. Greene, Landmarks of Botanical History (Stanford, CA, 1983), p. 797.
5 From the Preface of Conrad Gesner, De hortis Germaniae (Tiguri, 1561).
6 The long correspondence between Gesner and Jean Bauhin was published in 1591.
7 Universitatsbibliothek, Erlangen Inv. MS 2386, fol. 273v.
8 Conrad Gesner, in a letter dated 26 November 1565, collected in Epistolarum medicinalium (Tiguri, 1577). Twenty of the letters in this volume are addressed to Zwinger (1533-88), who was born in the year that Gesner first went to study in Paris.
9 Universitatsarchiv, Basel, UAB Fr Gr I 12 #203 (1596).
XIX New Pastures 1550-1580
1 Sean Jennett (trs.), Journal of a Younger Brother, The Life of Thomas Platter … (London, 1963), p. 165-6.
2 Michault had studied with Busbecq in Italy and subsequently became Imperial Ambassador at the Portuguese Court.
3 From the first letter, dated Vienna, 1 September 1555, and reprinted in Edward Seymour Forster (trs.), The Turkish Letters of Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq (Oxford, 1927).
4 Sir John Chardin, Travels in Persia, trs. E. Lloyd (London, 1927).
5 John Gerard, The Herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1597), p. 153. 6 John Parkinson, Paradisi in sole paradisus terrestris (London, 1629).
6 John Frampton, Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (London, 1662), tol. 1.
7 John Frampton, Joyfull newes out of the newe founde worlde (London, 1662), tol. 1
8 A particularly virulent form of syphilis had come to Europe when trade with the New World opened up in the decade after 1490.
9 Frampton, Joyfull newes, fol. 40.
10 Ibid., fol. 102.
11 Ibid., fol. 103.
12 Codex Barberini, Lat. 241, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Rome.
XX Plantin’s Team 1560-1620
1 Ludovico Guicciardini, Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi (Antwerp, 1567).
2 The business remained here until the middle of the nineteenth century. The building is now a museum with the presses, woodblocks (3,874 of them), page proofs, cases of fonts and furnaces to cast the type still as they were in Plantin’s time.
3 Translation from Colin Clair, Christopher Plantin (London, 1960).
4 When Rondelet died, he left Lobelius all his manuscripts.
5 It was published by Plantin in 1567, in an edition of 1,250 copies. The paper cost about forty-seven florins, the printing a little over twenty-nine florins and the illustrations ten florins. His total investment in the book amounted to about ninety-one florins and delivered a profit of 150 per cent.
6 The link with Pisa continued when Francesco Malocchi (prefetto from 1596 to 1613) took over from Casabona. Pigments were ordered from Guido Marucelli’s shop on the Ponte della Carraia in Florence ‘to paint certain plants to be sent abroad to Carolus Clusius’ (Archivio di Stato di Pisa 518, payment no. 69, dated 10 June 1606, quoted in Garbari et al, Giardino dei Semplici).
7 De Morgues was born in Dieppe, a centre renowned for its cartographers and illuminators.
8 See M. Lobelius, Plantarum seu stirpium historia (Antwerp, 1576), p. 14.
9 In April 1605 this same fritillary flowers in the London garden of James Nasmyth, surgeon to King James I, the first time it has been seen in England.
10 M. Lobelius, Stirpium adversaria nova, with Pierre Pena (London, 1570), p. 312.
XXI The Last of the Herbals 1560-1640
1 Testimony by George Baker printed in the preliminary pages of the first edition of John Gerard, The Herball or Generall historie of plantes (London, 1597).
2 Ben Jonson wrote his epitaph.
3 The story is told by William How in his Stirpium illustrationes of 1655.
4 He later retracted it, perhaps as a result of his dealings with Gerard over the Herball. The Natural History Museum in London has a copy of the catalogue in Lobelius’s own hand with a cross note: ‘haec esse falsissima M. Lobel’ (This is most false, M. Lobel).
5 Gerard, Herball, p. 1,391.
6 Ibid., Dedicatory Letter.
7 Ibid., p. 275.
8 In the parsonage lived George Fuller, rector of Hildersham 1561-91, ‘a very kinde and loving man, and willing to shew unto any man the saide close, who desired the same’.
9 Gerard, Herball, 1633 edition edited by Thomas Johnson, Johnson’s address ‘to the reader’.
10 Ibid., p. 1,516.
XXII English Achievements 1629-1664
1 Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Autobiography, 1599, edited by S. L. Lee (London, 1886), pp. 57-9.
2 Sir Henry Wotton, letter to Thomas Johnson, 2 July 1637, quoted in A. Arber, Herbals, their origin and evolution 1470-1670 (Cambridge, 1912).
3 Translation of Johnson’s Descriptio itineris plantarum (1632) taken from J.S.L. Gilmour (ed.), Thomas Johnson: Journeys in Kent and Hampstead (Pittsburgh, PA, 1972). All subsequent quotations from Johnson are taken from this source.
4 The shrine had been destroyed by Thomas Cromwell scarcely a hundred years earlier.
5 For a full account of the journey, see W. J. Thomas, The Itinerary of a Botanist through North Wales in the Year 1639 (Bangor, 1908).
6 All Goodyer’s papers are deposited in the library of Magdalen College, Oxford. For a full account of Goodyer’s life, see R. T. Gunther, Early British Botanists and their Gardens (Oxford, 1922).
7 His translation, a full year’s work, was the only version of Theophrastus in English until Sir Arthur Hort provided one for the Loeb Classical Library in 1916.
8 Those three volumes comprised Jean Bauhin’s Historia plantarum universalis, published posthumously in 1650.
XXIII The American Connection 1620-1675
1 Hieronymus Bock in the Preface to the Kreuter Buch (Strasbourg, 1551 edition).
2 Conrad Gesner, Correspondence, edited by Jean Bauhin (1591).
3 List bound among the Goodyer papers, Magdalen College, Oxford, Goodyer MS 11, fol. 21.
4 Roger Williams, Key into the Language of … the natives in that part of America called New England (London, 1643), p. 98
5 The Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions (1668).
6 Francis Higginson, New England’s Plantation, or a Short and True Description of the Commodities and Discommodities of that Countrye, Written by a reverend divine now there resident (London, 1630).
7 John Josselyn, New England’s Rarities Discovered (London, 1672). Josselyn’s first visit to the New World started in Boston in July 1638. From there he sailed up the coast to Scarborough, where he stayed for the next eighteen months.
8 Ibid.
9 Salem was established by Puritan settlers who set up the Massachusetts Bay Colony there in 1628. Winthrop became its first governor and planted a garden on Conant’s Island in Boston harbour.
10 Massachusetts Historical Society, Winthrop Papers, vol. III.
11 John Ray, Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum (London, 1690).
XXIV The Beginning of the End 1650-1705
1 See John Ray, Methodus plantarum emendata, published in Amsterdam in 1703.
2 It still goes on, even if twenty-first-century scientists analysing DNA to demonstrate kinship between plants have moved far beyond Ray’s sensible third rule, that the characteristics used to group plants should be obvious and easy to grasp.
3 John Ray, Methodus plantarum nova (London, 1682).
4 Taken from the English version of the Preface in Ray’s Flora of Cambridgeshire, translated and edited by A. H. Ewen and C. T. Prime (Hitchin, 1975).
5 Ibid.
6 R. T. Gunther (ed.), Further Correspondence of John Ray (London, 1928), p. 25.
7 Ibid., p. 68.
8 Preface to John Ray, Observations (London, 1673).
9 Ray’s herbarium is in the Natural History Museum, London.
10 Letter to Lister dated 18 June 1667, Correspondence of John Ray, Ray Society (London, 1848), pp. 13-14.
11 John Ray, Preface to Methodus plantarum nova (London, 1682), translated in C. E. Raven, John Ray Naturalist, His Life and Works (Cambridge, 1942).
12 The first road maps of Britain had only recently been published. They were prepared by Scotsman James Ogilby (1605-1676) who, by order of Charles II, brought out Britannica … the Principal Roads Thereof in 1675, illustrated with a hundred copperplate engravings.
13 Gunther, Further Correspondence, p. 181.
14 Willughby, whom he had taught at Cambridge and who had been his companion on nearly all the journeys he had made in Britain and abroad, had died in 1672.
15 Letter to Tancred Robinson, 1684, Correspondence of John Ray, p. 146.
16 The volumes were illustrated by engravings taken from original work done in Brazil by the artists Frans Post and Albert Eckhout. The portfolio of their work, containing more than 1,500 sketches, is in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow.
17 The wood engravings which had illustrated the early plant books were now obsolete. Copperplate engravings allowed artists to show the parts of plants in much greater detail. The earliest botanical book to use copperplate etchings had been Fabio Colonna’s Phytobasanos of 1592.
18 Gunther, Further Correspondence, p. 146. On 21 May 1685 Francis Aston, Secretary of the Royal Society, had written to the former Secretary, William Musgrave: ‘Mr Ray’s History of Plants being designed to be printed with old figures, we have prevailed that it may be printed without figures … I believe it will be an incomparable book.’ Quoted in R. T. Gunther, Early Science in Oxford (Oxford, 1945).
19 Preface to John Ray, Historia plantarum, vol. I (London, 1686).
20 The Oxford Botanic Garden was founded in 1621 near the River Cherwell, on a site outside the east gate of the city. The fine gateway was designed by Inigo Jones. Though Robert Morison did not take up his chair until 1669, Jacob Bobart had been appointed gardener c.l641. In his account of Oxford c.l670-1700, Thomas Baskerville wrote, After the walls & gates of this famous garden were built, old Jacob Bobert father to this present Jacob may be said to be ye man yt first gave life & beauty to this famous place, who by his care & industry replenish’d the walls, with all manner of good fruits our clime would ripen, & and bedeck the earth wth great variety of trees plants and exotick flowers, dayly augmented by the botanists, who bring them hither from ye remote quarters of ye world.’
21 Ray, Historia plantarum, pp. 183, 363.
22 Ibid., pp. 278-9.
23 Rudolph Jakob Camerarius, a pioneer in the study of sexual reproduction in plants, did not publish his De sexu plantarum until 1694. It was followed in 1718 by Sebastien Vaillant’s Sermo de natura florum.
24 Preface to Ray’s Historia plantarum, vol. II (London, 1688).
25 Courten was the grandson of Sir William Courten, silk merchant and coloniser of Barbados. The younger Courten’s collection was later acquired by Sir Hans Sloane and became one of the foundations of the British Museum.
26 Ray was, however, avidly read by the Italian scholar Marcello Malpighi and by the Frenchman Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, whose own book, Elemens de botanique was published in 1694.
27 Gunther, Further Correspondence, p. 191.
28 In Institutions rei herbariae (1700), Tournefort described a system of assigning species to classis according to the form of their flowers. Plant genera were organised and described in a lucid, straightforward fashion that made them easy to identify. For a while, Tournefort’s system was widely adopted in Europe.
29 Philosophical Transactions, XVII, no. 193, p. 528.
30 ‘The great difficulties the lovers of Botanie are forced to encounter …” in Philosophical Letters, 1718, p. 290.
31 From the Preface to the second edition of John Ray, Synopsis methodica stirpium Britannicarum (London, 1696).
Epilogue
1 Renaissance scholars had used the terms herbae and plantae, though in his translation of Theophrastus, Teodoro of Gaza had preferred stirpes. This was the word enthusiastically taken up in book titles by later authors such as Fuchs, Lobelius and Clusius. With his Botanologicon of 1534, Euricius Cordus had favoured Greek words over Latin ones, but it was not a popular move. In giving a new, specific name to the study of plants, Ray returned to the Greek botan- root.
2 See Gaspard Bauhin’s Pinax theatri botanici, published in Basel in 1623, the year before he died.
3 The full story is told in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, 26, 1896, pp. 211-226, 349-361.
4 See William Stearn, Dictionary of Plant Names for Gardeners (London, 1996).
5 Mark Griffiths (ed.), Index of Garden Plants (London, 1994).
6 The first code was drawn up by the Swiss botanist Alphonse de Candolle and confirmed the concept of precedence in choosing plant names.
7 See R. K. Brummitt, Vascular Plant Families and Genera (London, 1992).