Introduction: The World of Plants in Premodern Medical Knowledge

Note: This project has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 890770, “VegSciLif”. This introduction was written during a visiting period at the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. I thank Brenton M. Wells for his comments and discussion of this text, and Karen M. Reeds for her comments and edits.

The study of plants has traditionally developed as an important complement to medicine, especially as it pertains to the uses of medicinal plants in the preparation of recipes and therapies. This is what scholars generally call medical botany: its emphasis on the knowledge of plants as the basis for treatments, hygiene, therapies, and body balance has thrived since the ancient times,1 and it is sometimes differentiated from the study of plants in their own right. While the latter largely fell out of favour from late antiquity to the Renaissance, medical botany overshadowed the study of plants. Notwithstanding this differentiation, the extent to which plants and plant products were used to prepare remedies can serve as a benchmark to appreciate the changes in the history of botany, as Anne Stobart and Susan Francia have recently outlined. Indeed, analyzing the wide variety of connections between medicine and plant studies provides a way to see how the still-fragmented world of plants was understood in the pre-modern period.2 Through this volume’s case studies, we aim to delineate how much, in the transformations from the Renaissance world of plants to a modern science of plants, medical botany played a relevant role, combining traditions with innovative approaches.

Historians of botany have generally recognized a clear divide between (a) the Renaissance period, generally acknowledged as a moment of renewal in the approach to plants, but still related to the classical connection between plants and medicine, and (b) the late seventeenth century, when plant studies acquired autonomy, and botany became a science in the modern sense. As Claudia Swan has noted, botanical studies became “emancipate[d] from practical exigencies and acquired disciplinary status through the study of similarities and differences between appearances and internal structures”,3 and the physiological studies of plant functions, such as reproduction and how they transmit fluids gained momentum. In Outlines of the History of Botany, Robert John Harvey-Gibson described “the gradual evolution of the different aspects or departments of botanical knowledge. At first, […] botanical treatises were purely utilitarian—horticultural, agricultural, or medical […]. When plants began to be regarded as subjects of study for their own sakes and not merely as sources of drugs or as articles of food, an instinctive feeling was awakened that they must be related in some way to each other, in other words that they could be classified”.4 In the more recent History of Botanical Science, Alan G. Morton repeated a similar claim, suggesting that botany as a “field of enquiry was broadened [by the outburst of scientific activity in the second half of the seventeenth century] and [botany] was brought for the first time into contact with other sciences besides medicine, whence experimental and technical methods began to penetrate into botany; thus the way was opened to the formation of new theoretical concepts”.5 Similarly, Hilda Leyel has claimed that botany and medicine, after “[coming] down the ages hand in hand”, in the seventeenth century “their ways parted”.6 While these authors grasped a significant point, the history of the study of plants is much more nuanced—scholars in the Middle Ages and Renaissance also investigated the nature of plants per se, or tried to travel different roads from the study of simples, while traditions and medicine still played a crucial role throughout the seventeenth-century world of plants. However, as Agnes Arber has brilliantly pointed out, “workers [in the] field of medicine […] lay the foundations of the copious and exact knowledge of plants”,7 making the connections between medicine and plants a crucial perspective from which to understand botanical science, as a few scholars have more recently explored.8 Despite historians’ assertions of a growing divide between medical botany and a science of botany in the modern sense, the process of understanding the world of plants over the long terms does not (to adopt a botanical simile) look like two saplings leaning in opposite directions although they started from the same taproot; instead, it is much more like a shrub of intertwining branches.

In this sense, the assumption of clear-cut divisions between the “dark ages of botany”, the renewal of a botany grounded on materia medica in the Renaissance, and the early modern constitution of a new science based on observation—that is, a linear progress from one period to another—has kept historians from recognising the complexity of earlier knowledge of the the world of plants. Recently, Florike Egmond has challenged the “logical loop in defining sixteenth-century activities in terms of (an absence of) seventeenth century characteristics”;9 she argues that accepting a single hierarchical progress from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century underestimates the links uniting the scientific enterprises of the pre-modern times.

This volume takes Egmond’s objections to heart: its aim is to investigate those continuities seriously. By closely examining the ways that Renaissance and early modern scholars engaged with medical botany—through the production of herbals, the introduction of new plants with therapeutic properties, the comparison with diverse authorities, the experimentation in botanical gardens,10 the medical trials with parts of plants, the confrontation with traditional pharmacology, and the medical analogy between plants and animals—and by measuring their distances and connections with traditional systems, the present volume sheds new light on the ways medical knowledge favoured the shaping a science of botany through a combination of innovation and tradition.

In the Middle Ages, the study of plants intersected the field of medicine, as “plants themselves were usually just called by their medical uses: simplices medicinae or simplices, ‘simple drugs” or, most often, ‘simples’”,11 but it also crossed into symbolism, magic, folklore, and horticulture, as well as natural philosophy.12 As Iolanda Ventura has brilliantly specified, “during the Middle Ages, botany […] emerged from a mélange of several branches of knowledge […]. Moreover, medieval botany was a theoretical science that with few exceptions did not involve any practical experience”.13 Scholars with medical training benefited from Galen’s (A.D. 129-after [?] 216) De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus or from Dioscorides’ (fl. 1st cent. A.D.), De materia medica, the two main pharmacological collections written during Antiquity and the most influential during the Middle Ages.14 As this tradition expanded, the study of plants began to combine the description of pharmacological virtues with the attention to plants classification, ultimately highlighting a theoretical aim that gave a philosophical perspective to the study of plants.15 Nevertheless, the combination of herbal knowledge, pharmacology aims, and classificatory goals uncovered problems and lacunae, disclosing a clear gap between a theoretical and practical plant knowledge. Even before the Renaissance humanistic attempt to bridge such gaps—notably Nicolao Leoniceno’s (1428–1524) enterprise to renovate scientific knowledge, amend errors, and develop a more certain pharmacology through the humanist and philological approach to classical texts16—some late medieval herbals serve as significant case studies in their conscious presentations of a new approach to botany. Besides the famous case of the Carrara herbal (a late-fifteenth century vernacular Italian translation of the Liber aggregatus in medicinis simplicibus, that clearly combined Arab and medieval tradition, close observation of specimens, and pharmacological knowledge), another fifteenth-century illustrated herbal demands special attention: the Roccabonella Herbal, deliberately created by the Venetian physician Nicolò Roccabonella (1386–1459) and the artist Andrea Amadio (fl. 15th cent.) to prevent errors by apothecaries (see Sarah R. Kyle in this volume).17 Roccabonella claims that his manuscript, while based on ancient knowledge of simples, adopts a more modern order in the world of plants, sparking new light on the pharmacological and natural historical knowledge of the plants in the mid-Quattrocento.18

More or less at the same time, German illustrated, early printed herbals such as the Herbarius latinus (1484), the Hortus sanitatis (Gart des Gesundheit, 1485) and the Herbarius in Dyetsch (published in 1483, 1484, 1500) incorporated a...