Sunday, October 02, 2005

Early Herb & Gardening Books

Thomas Hill The Gardner's Labyrinth 1608

Lusitano Amato Dioscorides Anzarebei De medica materia 1558

You're absolutely correct - not all these images really match the title. These are just the ones that caught my eye from a large collection available at an old Arizona State University website.

Durante Castore Herbario nuovo 1617

Hernando Francisco Rerum medicarum Novæ Hispaniæ thesaurus 1651

Pierre Pomet Histoire generale des drogues 1712


Doris and Marc Patten donated their extensive set of herbal and gardening books to Hayden Library at ASU and a large number of example images from the collection have been digitized.

This is an excellent set of illustrations. Excellent. There is even an outline of the publishing history and short review of each author and their work. This may be a few years old and I'm sure I've seen some of the images previously but this one is worth recirculating periodically, even if it is known around the traps.

4 comments :

Anonymous said...

That dragon re-appears in Kircher’s Mundus Subterraneus (1678), where it is described as belonging to the Museum of Cardinal Barberini.

peacay said...

I'm not sure if I'd seen that. After spending a fair amount of time examining a site like the Herb one, I start to feel as though I've seen them before.

There's another image which includes the same nomenclature of Draconis alati at Cornell. Strange how the dual naming didn't arrive until 1740+ from Linnaeus. One imagines everyone with a natural history bent would see all the contemporary publications such as that Mexican effort of F Hernandez (the posted dragon) who incidentally died in 1580, long before it was released.

Anonymous said...

I think Draconis Alati is only accidentally Linnean-seeming; it's just the Latin for winged dragon.

peacay said...

Heh.
Note to self: sharpen Occam's Razor.

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