Herbalism/Botany

by

Jessica Rosenberg

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780195399301-0541

Introduction

There was no discipline that went by the name of “botany” in early modern Europe. Instead, early modern Europeans pursued and practiced plant knowledge across a range of contexts: herbal medicine, natural history, horticulture and agriculture, and the collection and commercial circulation of specimens. Images of plants, with their range of attendant symbolic and cultural meanings, also played an important role in the period’s cultural production. Both humble and far-flung and valuable plants appear in literature and in visual art, and important genres in both mediums (like the pastoral and still life) were centrally shaped by plant life and understandings of the natural world. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries proved a transformative era for European plant knowledge, driven by social and economic change, including changing patterns in commercial practice and land ownership, and by changing cultural values and meanings assigned to vegetable life. The period would see the maturing of emergent epistemic practices of observation and description—a process in which plants again played a crucial role—that went on to feed into the emergence of the modern sciences. Perhaps most decisively for English readers, writers, and users of plants, both practical encounters with vegetable life and plants’ cultural meanings were transformed by colonialism and expanding spheres of commerce and trade: through encounters with unfamiliar plants from new imperial territories, and through reckonings with the Indigenous knowledge systems in which they were embedded.

Herbals, Printing, and Bibliography

Through the Renaissance and Reformation period, most plant knowledge that appeared in print was published in collections known as “herbals.” For many years, these volumes fell between the cracks of histories of science and literature and were relatively neglected by scholars, remaining of interest instead to gardeners and antiquarians. Arber 1986 and Rohde 1922 represent the first comprehensive 20th-century treatments of herbals, and it is not a coincidence, perhaps, that both were published by women. Herbals are now recognized as an essential source for knowledge of the period, not just of particular plants but also for the insights they provide into a range of historical subfields. Stannard 1999 shows their significance to the history of medicine, Elliott 2011 places them in the context of Renaissance intellectual history, Knight 2009 situates their importance within English literary history, and Neville 2022 demonstrates their significant role in the history of the book. Printed herbals collated and updated both classical sources (especially the materia medica of Dioscorides) and medieval manuscript collections, and were compiled, edited, and published through the combined labors of humanist scholars, physicians, knowledgeable practitioners (male and female), and the workers and proprietors of the printing houses where they were published. Barlowe 1913 represents an early but useful bibliographic overview, while Henrey 1975 assembles an essential and thorough survey of British books about plants printed before 1800.

• Arber, Agnes. Herbals, Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany 1470–1670. 3d ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986.

  Arber’s classic work on herbals, which was first published in 1912 and significantly revised in 1938, remains a standard reference in the field. It places these volumes in the context of the history of botany, medicine, and English printing, beginning with Bartolomeus Anglicus’s Liber de proprietatibus rerum, first printed about 1470, and tracking central themes and concerns, including description, classification, illustration, and astrology.

• Barlowe, H. M. “Old English Herbals, 1525–1640.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 6 (1913): 108–149.

  DOI: 10.1177/003591571300601512

  One of the earliest scholarly efforts to trace and compare copies and collate bibliographic information on printed English herbals. Includes brief bibliographic descriptions of particular works and copies.

• Best, Michael. “Medical Use of a Sixteenth-Century Herbal: Gervase Markham and the Banckes Herbal.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53.3 (1979): 449–458.

  Lays out, through close textual comparison, how Markham—a prolific author of agricultural and domestic handbooks through the early seventeenth century—echoed contents of the earlier herbal, the first printed in English in 1525. A brief but exemplary demonstration of the importance of textual copying and reuse in English traditions of herbal knowledge.

• Elliott, Brent. “The World of the Renaissance Herbal.” Renaissance Studies 25 (2011): 24–41.

  DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2010.00706.x

  Presents an overview of the intellectual and textual contexts for the Renaissance herbal, showing its transformation of medieval and ancient antecedents and the influence of humanist textual, scientific, and visual practices.

• Henrey, Blanche. British Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975.

  An important resource, this three-volume bibliography collects details on the printing history of British works on plants and gardening through the early modern period.

• Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009.

  Demonstrates the rich connections between printing and plant knowledge in early modern England, showing (through chapters incorporating both poetry and astute analyses of herbals, like Turner’s) how the same practices of collection operated across literary and herbal sources.

• Neville, Sarah. Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade: English Stationers and the Commodification of Botany. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2022.

  DOI: 10.1017/9781009031615

  Highlights the importance of printers and publishers for the development of herbals as a genre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, showing how the genre was shaped by considerations important to stationers (the book as a commodity, its meaning within a marketplace of other books) and relatively indifferent to priorities of modern scholars (including the originality and authorship of knowledge.)

• Rohde, Eleanour Sinclair. The Old English Herbals. London: Longmans, Green, 1922.

  DOI: 10.5962/bhl.title.59380

  The gardener and horticultural writer’s readable account of what was still a relatively neglected subject begins in the eighth century, with Old English manuscript herbals, and runs until the herbals and distillation books of the seventeenth century, concluding with a bibliography.

• Stannard, Jerry. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Variorum, 1999.

  Stannard’s posthumously published volume assembles a learned and richly documented account of herbal knowledge in premodern Europe, especially as it concerns the textual and material cultures of plant medicine.