Locus Amoenus

Gardens and Horticulture in the Renaissance

Alexander Samson

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781444361513
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781118232804
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Renaissance History
• Index: History

Locus Amoenus provides a pioneering collection of new perspectives on Renaissance garden history, and the impact of its development. Experts in the field illustrate the extent of our knowledge of how the natural world looked and how humans related to their environment.

• A ground-breaking collection of new perspectives on garden history
• Essays demonstrate the extent of our knowledge of how the natural world looked and how humans related to their environment
• The book's broad coverage includes botany and herbals, literary reflections of changing ideas of landscape and nature, and human's place within it
• Contributors come from a wide range of experts, including archaeologists, scholars and the librarian and archivist to the Royal Horticultural Society
• Reflects the growing emergence of this field, which has been assisted both by archaeology and ideas from green studies and environmental criticism
• Richly illustrated throughout

1

The world of the Renaissance herbal

Brent Elliott

A herbal is a treatise on medicinal plants, traditionally intended for an audience of doctors and apothecaries; the purpose was to enable them to know which plants to use for medical purposes, and how to identify them in the field. As a genre, the herbal extends back into classical times, though there is only one title that has survived in complete form from that period: the Materia medica of Dioscorides, dating from the first century AD.¹ There was a mediaeval tradition, passed initially through Arab hands, which was in large part based on Dioscorides, but added to over the centuries by local herb lore and legend; the first printed herbals of the late fifteenth century fell into this tradition.²

What we may define as the Renaissance herbal arose in reaction against this tradition. During a period of a little over a century, between 1530 and the 1640s, the Renaissance herbal developed and reached its prime. This paper is far too short to give a very detailed account of its subject, but I will attempt to convey the most salient points about a genre that has received too little attention from scholars of Renaissance literature, however much attention it has received from botanists.³

HERBALS AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF BOTANY

What we may term the Renaissance herbal arose specifically from the demand that the traditions of plant lore be re-examined, and that the works of Pliny and Dioscorides be separated from the accumulated encrustation of centuries of myth and folklore.

The attack on the mediaeval herbal began with Niccolo Leoniceno, whose tract De Plinii aliorumque erroribus in medicina [On the errors of Pliny and others in medicine] was published in 1492. His arguments that Pliny had misidentified plants because of confusions over etymology were immediately and fiercely debated,⁴ but left a growing uncertainty in the academic world about the validity of traditional identifications. The first systematic attempt to resolve the uncertainty came in 1530, when Otto Brunfels, a physician of Basel, published Herbarum vivae eicones, a work which has long had the reputation of being a mediocre compilation, notable for its illustrations but not for its text.⁵ But this is to judge Brunfels by the standards of a later generation; his purpose was not to publish new descriptions of plants but to collate the information about them provided by Dioscorides, Pliny, and other sources, drawing attention to disparities. In 1531 Brunfels supplemented his work with Novi herbarii tomus II, 216 pages of which (Appendix, ‘De vera herbarum cognitione’) consisted of an anthology of extracts from Leoniceno and other writers about the identification of plants in classical sources. So, regardless of the quality of plant identifications and descriptions in Brunfels’s own text, he helped to stimulate further the interest in re-examining the accepted traditions, and thus prepared the way for Fuchs (one of whose earliest publications was a contribution to Brunfels’s appendix).⁶

Despite the attack on Pliny, the major effort of the early Renaissance herbal was not so much an attempt to break free from the classical authors, as to recover the authentic texts of the classical authors and free them from subsequent interpolations. The first printed texts of Dioscorides were published simultaneously in Basel and Cologne in 1529; the 1598 edition, published by Andreas Wechel in Frankfurt, remained the standard edition until the nineteenth century. In the meantime, Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on Dioscorides, first published in 1544, had passed through at least thirty-six editions in different languages.⁷ Mattioli attempted to identify conclusively the plants described by Dioscorides, but he would not be the last to do so.⁸ There had been no significant concept of geographical distribution in the early sixteenth century, until previously unknown plants began to be introduced from the Americas. Brunfels, in 1530, showed no real awareness that the flora of Germany might differ from that of Greece and the Near East. His coeval Euricius Cordus, whose Botanologicon was published in 1534, deliberately omitted what we would now regard as significant details from plant descriptions on the grounds that they exhibited regional variations; he at least recognized that some plants had been discovered since the time of Dioscorides.

Leonhart Fuchs was the first herbalist to describe American introductions like maize; his De historia stirpium (1542) has traditionally been regarded as the first botanical work in which both the text and the illustrations were based on personal observation rather than copying. It was given an abridged translation into German the following year, as the New Kreüterbuch, and several octavo editions followed.⁹

Fuchs set the initial standards for plant description which most subsequent herbalists attempted to meet or surpass. From the point of view of the development of descriptive botany, his most important successors were a trio of Flemish authors all published by the firm of Christopher Plantin of Antwerp: Rembert Dodoens, Mathieu de L’Obel (more usually called Lobel or Lobelius), and Charles de l’Ecluse (more usually called Clusius). These authors between them, in addition to writing herbals as traditionally understood, laid the foundations of the modern regional flora. The Stirpium adversaria nova of Lobel and his colleague Pierre Pena (1571) described the plants of the Montpellier area (while including a miscellany of rare and recently introduced plants); Clusius’ Rariorum aliquot stirpium per Hispanias observatarum historia (1576) described the plants observed in a tour of Spain and Portugal. In his Exoticorum (1605), he reproduced a number of texts describing plants of the Americas.¹⁰

From Brunfels to Clusius, the standards of descriptive botany improved steadily: clearer and more detailed descriptions, an increasing consistency of vocabulary used to describe plant anatomy, an awareness of the need to record locations. (No herbal, in this respect, surpassed John Gerard’s Herball of 1597; Gerard relied on a network of correspondents around England to send him notices of localities where plants had been found.)¹¹ In other matters there was, from the modern point of view, little progress. There were no recognized standards for nomenclature. So long as there were few species to distinguish, everyone was happy with a two-word name, but the more related plants there were to distinguish, the longer and more descriptive the names became; and there was no accepted rule for the order in which the terms appeared in the name. As early as 1620, Caspar Bauhin felt it necessary to publish a dictionary of synonyms for plant names (Pinax theatri botanici). But there could be no generally acceptable resolution of the problem of naming when there was no agreement on how plants were to be classified. There were no distinct concepts of genus, species, or variety, let alone higher-order classifications like family. From Lobel onwards, a variety of classification schemes was tried, but until the mid-seventeenth century most herbalists were content to group plants by a mixture of criteria; medical, morphological, utilitarian, and sometimes etymological.¹² (There is no space here to enter into the debate about Renaissance encyclopaedism and its criteria for inclusion and organization of information, beyond saying that a more detailed consideration of herbals would prove a useful test case.)¹³

BOTANICAL ART IN THE HERBALS

The earliest printed herbals were the heirs to a long mediaeval tradition of plant illustration, one that has attracted an insufficient degree of scholarly attention in modern times, but for perfectly understandable reasons. For the botanist, plant illustration before the 1530s is a matter of antiquarian interest only, as manuscript and early printed illustrations alike are virtually useless for botanical purposes. We know from Pliny that classical botanists attempted to produce illustrated works on plants, but abandoned the attempt; when hand-copying was the only means of reproducing images, it did not take many generations of copying before the resulting images had ceased to resemble the originals exactly enough to be useful for purposes of identification. Botanists therefore relied on written descriptions, and anyone who has attempted to identify a plant from a description alone will understand why descriptive botany made few strides until the invention of printing.¹⁴

Manuscript and early printed herbals suffered from the recycling of a limited number of stylized images, which could be usefully employed only by those who already knew the plants in question, and did not need to use the images as field guides. Take the illustrations in The Grete Herball (printed by Peter Treveris, 1526): they are all printed from blocks of a standard size, with no indications of scale; they offer outlines only; flower and leaf shapes are highly schematized; and in some cases, mythological or emblematic considerations take precedence over description (mandrakes have human bodies, iris flowers are reduced to fleur-de-lis shapes). The anonymous artist need never have seen the plants he was depicting: they are based on the illustrations seen in earlier publications (Figs. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1 Woodcut, allegedly of a black hellebore but actually of an iris, from the fifth Venice edition of the Herbarius Latinus, printed by Alessandro de Bindoni in 1520. Even if the picture had been properly identified, how useful would it have been as a guide to identification? (Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library)

Fig. 2 Figures of male and female mandrake, from The Grete Herball (1526) (Royal Horticultural Society, Lindley Library)

In 1530, the first printed plant illustrations drawn from actual plants were published in Strasbourg by Johann Schott, in the first volume of Brunfels’s Herbarum vivae eicones, whose title means ‘Images of living plants’ (Fig. 3). The artist was Hans Weiditz, some of whose original drawings survive in the Felix Platter Herbarium in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Renaissance Studies Special Issue Book Series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Figure
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction Locus amoenus: gardens and horticulture in the Renaissance
• 1 The world of the Renaissance herbal
• 2 Clinging to the past: medievalism in the English ‘Renaissance’ garden
• 3 River gods: personifying nature in sixteenth-century Italy
• 4 Dissembling his art: ‘Gascoigne’s Gardnings’
• 5 ‘My innocent diversion of gardening’: Mary Somerset’s plants
• 6 Outdoor pursuits: Spanish gardens, the huerto and Lope de Vega’s Novelas a Marcia Leonarda
• 7 Experiencing the past: the archaeology of some Renaissance gardens
• Index