Le monde vegetal: Médecine, botanique, symbolique (review)

A glance at a medieval cathedral or illuminated manuscript reveals a world of stylized plants inhabiting the margins of the archway or page. These plant forms are such common medieval space fillers that it is easy to take them for granted. Agostino Paravicini Bagliani and the twenty-one contributors to this volume in a remarkable series devoted to "nature, sciences, and medieval societies" invite us to take a closer look at the medical, botanical, and symbolic meanings of plants in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.

Inevitably, the emphasis here is squarely on the symbolic: the medieval cast of mind decidedly preferred the allegorical, metaphorical, theological, and metaphysical. This was true of the alchemists and encyclopedists of the Muslim world, too, as essays by Carmela Baffioni, Paola Carusi, Michela Pereira, and Pinella Travaglia reveal.

In the Christian West, biblical references to plants and gardens and, more generally, to growth, fruition, and decay, served as powerful sources of visual and verbal imagery that went beyond the ornamentation of books and buildings (illustrated extensively in essays by Jean Wirth and Jean-Claude Bonne). Preachers, theologians, poets, and artists used plants and landscapes to invoke the Garden of Eden, the Tree of Jesse, the attributes of saints and the Virgin Mary, and divisions of human knowledge (essays by Pierre Dubuis, Jean Wirth, Denis Renevey, Danielle Bohler, Beaudouin Van den Abeele, Marco Rainini, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Vera Segre, and Séverine Lepape).

For medieval natural philosophers, the key point of interest about plants was the vegetative soul—described in Aristotle's treatise on the soul (De anima) and in a short treatise about plants attributed to Aristotle (De plantis). The concept explained growth, nutrition, and reproduction in all living creatures. Paola Bernardini analyzes theological debates about the role of the vegetative soul in humans. Surveying the classical sources and medieval transmission of De plantis, Luciana Repici argues that the work is fundamentally more coherent than generally recognized. The symbol of the Tree of Life allowed Roger Bacon and others to intermingle medical theory, alchemy, theology, and natural philosophy in discussing the prolongation of life (essay by Chiara Crisciani). The cultural connotations of the apple (explicated by Michele Pastoureaux) were even more complex, ranging from the delightful and nutritious to the melancholic, poisonous, and evil.

Even when sources allow us glimpses of real people using real plants in daily life, these essays reveal how the particular plants were enmeshed in a larger web of significations and symbolic connections. Understanding how to graft a grapevine and knowing the vine's antipathies and sympathies to other plants were matters of practical value for viticulture, but Pierre Dubuis observes that they also raised interesting theoretical questions about the properties of the vegetable soul. Medieval account books confirm (essay by Patrice Georges) that embalmers used the aromatic herbs and spices recommended in surgical textbooks, but the choices of aloes and myrrh may have been dictated as much by their pious associations with Christ's death and resurrection as by their qualities as preservatives. Classical and medieval law codes (discussed by Marina Montesano) forbade the making of poisons and love potions; court records suggest that it was then an easy step to interpret herb gathering as magic or witchcraft.

In 1530, the Singulier Traicté on the artichoke by Etienne de Laigue, seigneur of Beauvais (Stephanus Aquaeus), reflected both the vegetable's novelty in French kitchens and the humanist-diplomat's search for meaning via classical philology. Marie-Elisabeth Boutroue connects this curious treatise to de Laigue's Latin commentary on Pliny's Natural History, part of the first crop of Renaissance translations and commentaries of ancient medicine and botany (digitized facsimile, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et d'odontologie, http://www.bium.univ-paris5.fr/histmed/medica.htm), and to de Laigue's other essays on the properties of mushrooms, cabbages, frogs, snails, and turtles. Unfortunately, this volume does not provide the title page illustration of...