Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (review)

Jerry Stannard. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Brookfield, Vermont, Ashgate Publishing Company, 1999. xvi, 327 pp., illus. $110.95.

This new volume in the Variorum Collected Studies Series serves as a memorial to the work of Jerry Stannard, the late authority on premodern medical pharmacology. The photograph of Professor Stannard opposite the title page was doubtless selected as one especially emblematic of the man. It shows him seated at a large, well-lit carrel in a book-lined room, carefully examining what appears to be a sprig of dill flowers extending from a vase to his left. The folio-sized pages of a massive illustrated early printed herbal lie open before him. As John Riddle notes in his introduction, "You can be sure he knew the plants of the field as well as of the book stack."

The volume presents seventeen articles by Jerry Stannard, published between 1968 and 1985. Several of these were formerly hidden away in festschriften, congress proceedings, and small newsletters, while others appeared in such noted journals as the Bulletin of the History of Medicine and Analecta Medico-historia. Despite the inevitable redundancies in such an assembly, the pieces make a fairly coherent whole. Stannard’s own notes often assist in cross-referencing as he directs readers to earlier articles found in the volume. As in other books in this series from Ashgate, the publishers reprint the articles in their original typeface and pagination, and their separate notes, with the addition of a roman numeral at the top of every page to coordinate each article with the table of contents, and with an eighteen-page index at the end. A helpful introduction by John Riddle pays tribute to Stannard’s scholarship and places this work in the context of his wide-ranging studies.

The essays are divided into four groups. The first, "Medieval Herbals," deals with the origin of herbals as a genre and the difficulties of defining that category. The second, "Late Medieval Rezeptliteratur" surveys characteristics of recipe collections as a genre older than herbals and somewhat overlapping them, since herbals sometimes include recipes, and recipes some patches of botanical data (the subject of article VI). The third section, "Renaissance Italy and Germany" recounts how these two medieval genres interacted with the rediscovery of Dioscorides, the long-obscured fons et origo of Western pharmacology, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how herbals, recipes, Dioscorides, and other factors shaped the imposing works of P.A. Matthioli, and somewhat lesser-known efforts by JoachimCamerarius and Baptista Fiera. Stannard also looks at the state of the apothecary practice in sixteenth-century Strassburg through the works of Hans von Gersdorff and some anonymous lists from roughly contemporary apothecaries in that city.

One suspects that Stannard delighted most in the three studies that constitute the fourth, last, and longest section, "Species Studies." This section contains only three pieces, each analyzing a single plant identity: squill (Urginea maritima and allied species), dill (Anethum graevolens), and most complex of all, "The Plant Called Moly" (the title of article XV), a medicament from Odyssey X, 304—06, that shifted its identity between three different plant families in the ancient world and created such confusion among moderns as to occasion "identifications representing eight families and 10 genera" (p. 255). As one might imagine, that essay and the other essays in section 4 are not for the beginner. Untranslated citations of various ancient, medieval, and modern language and botanical complexities make them difficult going. On the other hand, the shorter essays in the first two sections provide excellent guidance for modern students who might be confused by premodern cultural patterns and habits of thought. For instance, in article VI the author surveys the various and usually implicit theoretical bases of medieval herbal lore. The humoral schemata inherited from the...