Herbal

A herbal is a book describing plants that have various uses, particulary in medicine or the folklore of traditional medicine.

Quotes

  • Dioscorides—to give him the name by which he has generally been known in this country—compiled a work which is usually cited under its Latin title, De materia medica libri quinque; in this treatise he included about five hundred plants. No contemporary version has survived; the only manuscript which we shall consider here is Byzantine, and dates from around a.d. 512. It was made for Anicia Juliana, a noble lady whose father, Flavius Anicius Olybrius, had once been, for a brief space, Emperor of the West. Juliana, who lived into the age of Justinian, was renowned for her ardent Christian faith, and for the churches she built. It is probable that the manuscript associated with her name remained in Constantinople during the first millennium of its history.
  • Written in vernacular Italian for the last Duke of Padua, the Carrara Herbal is a translation of the work of a 9th-century Arab physician called Serapion the Younger, and it is celebrated for the beauty and realism of its paintings. The unnamed artist did not copy the works of others but instead looked at nature. ... we see the artist expressing his own knowledge of plants through what he sees with his own eyes and this was revolutionary.
    Like the painter of the Carrara Herbal, the Italian fine artist Antonio Pisanello (c. 1395–1455). working in the very early years of the Renaissance, was ahead of his contemporaries in so far as he also drew directly from nature.
  • While other Herbals have been re-issued, such as Nicholas Culpepper's English Physician, 1652, and John Parkinson's Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris, 1629, Gerard's, in its original form, is hardly suitable for present-day publication. Fourth-fifths of it would be regarded as tedious, such as the long descriptions of many forgotten varieties of plants, or laborious arguments and quotations about the names and identities.
    There remains the fragrant essence, that which has given the work its fame, mostly Gerard's own observations as distinct from the original translation of Dodoens's Latin herbal.
    • Marcus Woodward, "Introduction by M. Woodward". Gerard's Herball: The Essence Thereof. London: Gerald Howe. 1927. pp. vii–xix.  (quote from p. xviii; 303 pages; John Gerard's Herball edited & distilled by Marcus Woodward from the Edition of Th. Johnson, 1636)
  • Encyclopedic article on Herbal on Wikipedia
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