Botany truly developed as a science during the 15th and 16th centuries, as scholars and researchers faced the task of identifying and describing new plants from the Americas and Asia. In addition, many European plants had different names in various sources. The same plant could have different names in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and the vernacular languages. Further confusion was caused by the fact that some authors simply transliterated Greek and Arabic into similar sounds in Latin or the vernacular, and others translated the meaning of the plant name. As a result, the same plant might have several names, or, even worse, different plants might have the same name or very similar names. Every Renaissance botanist had to deal with these taxonomic difficulties. Andrea Cesalpino (1519-1603), papal physician, recommended in 1583 that plants be described according to their purposes. In this Aristotelian system, roses would be grouped with roses, fruit trees with fruit trees, and so on. Other botanists of the time followed other organizational principles, such as pharmacological purposes, edibility, or morphological characteristics.
Ancient botanical information not accessible during the Middle Ages was made available to scholars by 15th-century humanists. Ermolao Bar-baro the Younger (1454-93), for example, spent several years working on his most famous work, Castigationes Pliniae (Emendations of Pliny, 1493). He made thousands of improvements in Pliny’s text of natural history, determining that Pliny himself had misdescribed some plants. The definitive edition of De materia medica (Medical materials, 1544) of Dioscorides was that of the physician Pierandrea Mattioli (1500 or 1501-77). He included in this publication several European plants as well as exotic plants sent to him by friends traveling in foreign lands. Beautifully illustrated, this book was extensively reprinted during the 16th century. The works of several botanists were published by Christophe Plantin (c. 1520-89) or by his son-in-
Handbook to Life in Renaissance Europe
Law, Jan Moretus (1543-1610). Plantin operated the largest printing house in northern Europe, with shops in Antwerp and Leiden, running as many as 22 presses. (His Antwerp shop is now the Musee Plantin-Moretus, still set up as a 16th-century print establishment.) The herbals and other botanical books issued by this firm contained woodcuts by artists and engravers who worked directly for Plantin. The remarkable quality of these illustrations helped to popularize the study of botany. Carolus Clusius (1526-1609) worked for Plantin, translating Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Spanish botanical treatises. Such translations also contributed to furthering the knowledge of botany.
10.4 Botanical illustration and analytical text. Hieronymus Bock, Kreutterbuch (Herbal, 1595). (Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s Inc., © 2003)
World History
