ET LES DEBUTS
DE LA SCIENCE MODERNE
Jerry Stannard (U.S.A)
THE GRAECO-ROMAN BACKGROUND OF THE RENAISSANCE HERBAL
The solution to m any of the vexing problem s connected w ith the Renaissance herbal — botanical, methodological, iconographical etc. — tu rn s on th e question: How did th e h erbal contribute to the develop m ent of botany as science? This question has been asked repeatedly in the p ast century and m any different answ ers have been advanced. A problem of this m agnitude cannot be settled w ithin the compass of the present paper, n o r is it my intention to do so. R ather, I wish to call attentio n to some m aterial w hich has been som ew hat neglected in the various in terp retation s and assessments.
It has often been assumed, though seldom explicitly dem onstrated, th a t there was a sharp break betw een th e incunable and post-incunable herbals and secondly, th a t this break represented a m ajor advance in the developm ent of scientific botany. I t has been claimed more than once th a t modern botany was the resu lt of th e w ritings of a small group of scholars w ho w ere near-contem poraries and w ho w orked in close proxim ity. These men, O tto B runfels (1483— 1534), H ieronym us Bock (1498— 1554), and Leonhard Fuchs (1501—-1566), are generally known as the Scholar N aturalists. According to Sprengel and others, they deserve th e honorific title, “F ath ers of B otany.” 1 W ithin a single generation, so ru n s the argum ent, they reform ed botany single-handedly. By turning th e ir backs upon the errors of Greaco-Rom an botany, th e uncritical attitu d e of th e medieval com m entator, and the crudities of the Herbarius Latinus and Hortus Sanitatis, m odem botany was born.
It cannot be doubted th a t th ere are striking differences betw een the anonym ous incunable herbals and those w ritings of th e Scholar Na tu ralists which, beginning w ith B runfels’ H erbarum vivae eicones
1 Kurt Sprengel, G eschich te 'der B otanik, I, A lterburg—Leipzig, Brockhaus 1817, pp. 258ff.
1 4 2 J. S tann ard
(Strassburg 1530), have been regarded as landm arks in th e annals of science. Despite these differences, th e re is an equally large body of facts, presuppositions, and m ethods shared by th e Scholar N aturalists w ith th e ir predecessors. Indeed, the v ery distinction betw een an incun able and a post-incunable herbal w as established, n o t b y historians of botany, b u t by bibliographers and historians of typography. The distinction, in short, is extra-botanical and does not re fe r to the content of these tw o classes of Renaissance h erb al literature.
There is, however, a m ore com pelling reason for calling into question the sharp break postulated by nineteenth century historians. 2 Compared w ith th e lav ishly-illustrated folios of the Scholar N aturalists, the incun able herbals w ith th e ir stylized p lants and stereotyped designs seem to belong to a rem otely d ista n t epoch. B ut w hen one begins to analyze the sources of Renaissance herbals and to dissect in detail the various strata, it soon becomes ap parent th a t th e ir common debt to Graeco-Roman botany transcends th e ir differences. In th e following pages, I shall draw atten tion to a few exam ples of th e influence of Graeco-Roman botany upon the botanical w ritings of the Scholar N aturalists. I t almost goes w itho ut saying, th a t th e incunable herbals a re no less exem pt from this influence. B ut th e classical influences on the incunable herbals is w ell-established, 3 w hereas the determ ination of those same influences in the w ritings of th e F ath ers of Botany is less well known.
As their nam e implies, th e Scholar N atu ralists w ere scholars as well as naturalists. A lthough th a t m ay seem like an em pty tautology, it is a point often overlooked by those historians who, w;hile praising the w oodcuts fo r th eir high artistic and scientific m erit, h ave failed to observe th a t the accompanying tex t shows little evidence of originality. The Scholar N aturalists w ere the products of late Renaissance education and, accordingly, absorbed the ideals of the hum anists. This m eant, among other things, a high regard for th e classics. W ith th e increased availability of prin ted editions of Pliny, Dioscorides, and Theophrastus, they could leave lexicographical w ranglings to others, and push ahead to m ore im p o rtant problem s. 4
Up to th e end of th e sixteenth century, therapeutics and m ateria
medica w ere dom inated by ancient m edical practices. The physician’s
arm am entarium rem ained substantially a t th e level of Dioscorides, though it w as supplem ented by N ear E astern drugs advocated by Arabic medical w riters and brought into E uropean commerce in increasing
2 Cf. K. F. W. Jessen, B otan ik der G eg e n w a rt und V orzeit, Leipzig, Brockhaus 1864, p. 176.
3 Julius Schuster, S ecreta S alern itan a und G art G esundheit, M ittelalterliche H andschriften (Festschrift f. Degering). Leipzig, Hiersem ann 1926, pp. 203—237.
4 Bernhard Milt, “Schw eizerische Theophrastforschung und Schw eizerische Theophrasteditionen im 16. Jahrhundert und ihre Bedeutung,” G esnerus, 3, 1946, pp. 72—93.
am ounts through th e Italian ports. 5 It w as thus a m a tter of considerable im portance for th e Scholar N aturalist, w ho in alm ost all cases w as also a physician, to determ ine th e id entity of those samples m entioned by th e classical authors. For the purpose of identification, it was required to determ ine w h eth er th e p la n t occurred in W estern and C entral Europe, if so, to correlate its vernacular or local nam e w ith th e nam e o r nam es em ployed by th e ancients. If it can be said th a t botany w as b o m at this time, surely th e midwives w ere m edical pragm atism and classical erudition.
A generation earlier, Italian hum anists such as B arbara, Collenuccio, and Leoniceno h ad called to the attention, of an unsuspecting audience th e errors, b u t n o t th e nonsense, in P lin y ’s Historia N aturalis. The erro rs w ere gram atical and the ta rg e t w as careless L atin syntax of w hich Pliny afforded num erous examples. B ut these men, much like the com m entators on Dioscorides—M arcello Vergilio, Lusitanus, and R uellius—w ere m ore more adept at philological exegesis th a n botany. 0 I t is a t precisely th is ju n ctu re th a t the Scholar N aturalists exhibit th e ir g reatest claim to being th e fath ers of botany. They w ere n o t content to rely on books alone. R ather, by com bining th e ir talents, by bringing N atu re indoors, so to speak, they tu rn e d to the task of identifying the plants of the ancients in a new spirit.
This union of talen ts soon bore a rich harvest. B runfels’ H erbarum and th e som ew hat altered G erm an translation, the C ontrafayt K reiiter-
buch w ill provide a fram e of reference fo r exam ining a few instances
of Graeco-Roman influence. Following P a r t II of the H erbarum is a section of n early tw o hundred pages entitled De Vera H erbarum
cognitione A ppendix. Included in th e A p pen d ix are tw elve tra c ts of
varying length, representing th e m ajor intellectual in terest of early sixteenth cen tu ry botany—the identification of the p lants of antiquity. Bock and Fuchs firs t appear as authors in th e A ppendix. A nd like B runfels himself, they dem onstrate th e ir classical train in g fully as m uch as they do th e ir knowledge of plants.
A case in point is B runfels’ account of the violet. 7 He begins, in a section entitled Von den Nam m en, by paraphrasing P lin y ’s statem ent th a t n ex t to the rose and lily, the violet w as not highly esteem ed by the G reeks and Romans. 8. The second section G eschlecht und A r t is an adaptation of Dioscorides’ description of the several different colors
5 For an attem pt to establish a term in u s an te quern for th e introduction of Near Eastern drugs into Italy, cf. Jerry Stannard, “B enedictus Crispus, An Eighth Century M edical P oet,” Journ. H ist. Med., 21, 1966, pp. 24—46.
6 Jerry Stannard, “Dioscorides and R enaissance M ateria M edica,” A n alecta M edico-H istorica, 1, 1966, pp. 1—21.
7 C on tra fa yt K reü terbu ch , Strassburg bey H ans Scjotten 1532, fols. XCV—C. 8 Cf. P liny, H istoria N atu ralis, X X I, 14, 27.
1 4 4 J. Stannard
found among violets. 9 Passing on, each section in tu rn contains stray bits of inform ation derived, n o t from the plants, b u t from the texts of ancient authors. Nor does B runfels confine him self to the Greeks and Romans, for, in the section on the m edicinal properties, he tu rn s to Mesue and the Arabic w riters. 10 There is little in these pages that cannot be found in the corresponding chapters of the inclinable herbals; even vernacular synonym s appeared in th e editio princeps, the
Herbarius p rin ted by Schoffer a t Mainz in 1484. One m ay well wonder,
a t this point, ju st how radical was B runfels’ Herbarum.
B ut attention to classical nom enclature did not in all cases prevent an em pirical study of the plants themselves. W riting of the inguinalem
Dioscordis, Bock in the aforem entioned Appendix, states “quod ego
sciam, nusquam vidi, licet flosculos, e t plantas, quorum capitula e t folia p er orbem incisuris divisa similibus stellae viderim .” 11 Yet, by approach ing botany from the standpoint of rectifying Dioscorides’ errors and omissions, Bock rem ained w ithin the intellectual confines imposed by an earlier period. 12
One of the m ost frequently heard criticism s of the level of botanical knowledge displayed in th e incunable herbal, concerns th e role of m a
teria medica. It has been argued th a t because of the m edical orientation,
plants w ere arranged, not in accordance w ith system atic criteria, but by the use of pharm acological criteria. One would expect from such a criticism , th a t the Scholar N aturalists had renounced th e ir dependence upon materia medica and w ould concentrate upon morphological de scriptions. Fuchs, tru e to his medical and classical training, approached plan ts from th e standpoint of ancient medicine. The title of his trac t in the A p pen d ix is revealing: Annotationes aliquot herbarum et simpli-
cium, a m edicis hactenus non recte intellectorum . The thirty-one
chapters devoted to an equal num ber of drugs of vegetable origin follow a ra th e r rigid p attern. A passage from a classical te x t is selected, paraphrased, and then criticized. Then fu rth e r passages are adduced, either to support Fuchs’ criticism or to dem onstrate th a t even among the ancients th e re was disagreem ent on m atters of interpretation. His discussion of rheub arb aru m is typical. 13 A lthough we are in doubt regarding th e tru e n atu re of this simple, he begins, all th e ancient physicians described it, sometimes as qa. a t other tim es as rhacoma,
9 Cf. Dioscorides, De M ateria M edica, ed. W ellm ann, IV, 121.
10 That th e A rabic m edical botanists knew m ore about the vio let than Brun fels allow ed is proven by Ernst Bergdolt, “Beitrage zur G eschichte der Botanik im Orient. I,” Ber. d. D eutschen Botanischen G esell., 50, 1932, pp. 321—336.
11 Bock, De V era H erbarum ..., p. 273. For th e id en tity of th e plant in question, cf. E. S. Burgess, “H istory of Pre-C lusian Botany in its Relation to A ster,” M em oirs of th e T o rrey B otanical Club, 10, 1902, pp. 342—343.
12 Louis M asson, “Le L ivre des Plantes de Tragus,” A escu lape 24, 1934, pp. 301—310.
rheon, etc. Then Dioscorides’ description of th e root is cited: it is d ark
on th e outside, like th a t of th e g reater centaury, y et sm aller th an it and redder, w itho ut odor, porous, and ra th e r light. 14 Fuchs continues by calling attentio n to the discrepancies betw een Dioscorides’ re p o rt and those of P liny, Mesue, Avicenna, etc. He mentions, m oreover, th e con flicting claims concerning the m edicinal properties of rh eubarbarum . F inally in desperation he concludes th a t our rheubarbarum , and by this he m eans th e dried pro d u ct available in the shops of th e apothecaries, is totally d ifferent from th e rh eu b arb aru m of antiquity.
We m ay well adm ire Fuchs’ attem p t to solve a difficult problem and we m u st g ran t th a t he was correct in his conclusion. He cannot be blamed for failing to determ ine th e source of the rh eu b arb aru m of commerce, though l’Ecluse, using sim ilar .methods, m ade a good guess some th irty years la te r. 15 The fact is, th a t w hatever Fuchs was doing, and some m ay not wish to call it botany, it w as nothing new and n ot th e sort of activity which, by itself, w ould fu rth e r the progress of botany as a science. The source of rh eubarbarum , for th e benefit of those who do not like to be left in suspense, w as finally discovered, b u t not u n til th e la tte r half of the nin eteenth cen tury and by m ethods, is scarcely needs to be said, th a t w ere quite d ifferent from those em ployed by the Scholar N atu ralists. 16
If space perm itted, it could be shown in much g reater detail, how; th e Scholar N atu ralists w ere indebted to their G reek and Rom an p re decessors. This should not be taken to m ean a rejection of th e ir g reat ness. B ut history bids us to be im partial. No one today w ould deny the classical heritage and its deeply-felt influences in the contributions of Vesalius or Copernicus. There is, m u ta tis m utandis, no fu rth e r reason for ignoring the G raeco-Rom an background of the so-called F ath ers of Botany. T hat th ey m ade the contributions they did, in spite of the restraining links of antiquity, is a tru e r m easure of th e ir greatness th a n the ahistorical judgem ent th a t by th e ir w ritings, the catena aurea was severed and modern botany bom.
1* D ioscorides, III, 2, Wellm.
15 Carolus Clusius, A rom atu m , e t S im pliciu m aliqu ot m edicam en toru m apu d Indos n ascentium historia, Antwerp, Plantin 1567, p. 165.
16 Henri B âillon, “Sur l ’organisation des Rheum et sur la Rhubarbe officin ale,” Assoc. Franç. pour l’A van cem en t des Sciences. C om ptes-R en du s de la ire S ession (B ordeaux 1872), Paris 1873, pp. 514— 529.
