Rembert Dodoens (1517-1585) was a medical Professor from Belgium with a particular affection for botany. His interest led him to publish a number of works on the medical aspects of plants.
'Cruydeboek' from 1554 was heavily influenced by the work of Leonard Fuchs. Indeed, many of the woodcuts were taken from Fuchs' Herbal but Dodoens added a large number of new illustrations and wrote his own text. The work veered towards being a pharmacopeia and Dodoens broke with the alphabetical arrangement of Fuchs, grouping plants according to their characteristics in 6 different sections (the first image above shows the cover of 4 of these).
'Cruydeboek' was hugely successful, particularly after it was translated from the flemish into french ('Histoire des Plantes' by Charles de L'Ecluse, 1557) and english ('A Niewe Herball' by Henry Lyte, 1578). "It became a work of worldwide renown, used as a reference book for two centuries."
- This is the easiest link to the blocks of thumbnail pages from 'Cruydeboek' with high resolution images available (it was digitized by the great Kurt Stüber).
- The originating (dutch) site is Plantaardigheden but they do have a short outline in english.
- These are a few of the many sites online with information on Rembert Dodoens.
4 comments :
Cool!
I live in Belgium, and the city I live in has a hospital named after this man.
The covers in the thumbnails are magnificent, but, since I can read them I can tell you that you placed them in the wrong order.
You started with the 2nd part of the work, went on with the sixth and last part, followed by the fifth part and ending with the fourth.
Still, very cool!
Thanks Nikolaj. The covers weren't intended to be in any particular order - it was more a case of picking each out randomly when I made up the quartet image. To the best of my recollections, it happened this way because the quality of the appearance of the covers was an issue - so I ended up trying out six and replacing a couple as I made up my mind which ones I liked best.
I understand that. I wasn't trying to tear you down. I might have not considered my wording enough.
thanks for the quick reply!
No worries mate! Your wording was fine. Sometimes I'm here and respond to comments. Sometimes I .... don't! Caprice.
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