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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 75.3 (2001) 560-562



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Book Review

Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance

Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany


Jerry Stannard. Herbs and Herbalism in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Edited by Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 1999. xvi + 322 pp. (Pagination follows that of the original publications.) Ill. $101.95 (0-86078-774-5).

Jerry Stannard. Pristina Medicamenta: Ancient and Medieval Medical Botany. Edited by Katherine E. Stannard and Richard Kay. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Variorum, 1999. xxii + 324 pp. (Pagination follows that of the original publications.) $110.95 (0-860-78773-7).

Reviewing these two volumes of Jerry Stannard's essays is a bittersweet task. It is wonderful to have these classic studies of early botany, pharmacology, and medicine brought together, but melancholy to reflect that this is as close as we will get [End Page 560] to the magisterial book on the history of medical botany that only he could have written. Pancreatic cancer cut his life short in 1988, at the age of sixty-two. The 106-item bibliography in Pristina Medicamenta shows the range of his interests, from Jainist and pre-Socratic philosophy to medieval cuisine to the nineteenth-century Czech plant biologist Jan Purkyne=.

The core of Stannard's work was (to quote the Jerry Stannard Memorial Award for young scholars) "the history of materia medica, medicinal botany, pharmacy, and folklore of drug therapy before the 1700s." John Riddle's introductions to the two volumes urge the reader to pay special attention to the notes to these essays. They represent just a small fraction of another Stannard legacy: 1400-plus loose-leaf binders containing more than two million bibliographic citations, clippings, drafts, photocopies, offprints, and cross-indexes. (How he would have loved today's electronic bibliographic databases and Internet resources!) Stannard's Annotated Bibliographical Information System--STANBIS--has been donated to the Kenneth Spencer Research Library at the University of Kansas, which welcomes scholars to use this extraordinary resource.

On the evidence of the twenty-five articles reproduced here in facsimile and the STANBIS categories (my thanks to Sally Haines, Spencer Library, for the list), what might Jerry Stannard's magnum opus have been like?

First, it would have covered all of medical botany from Hippocrates up to Linnaeus. Long sections would have been devoted to ancient Greek and Roman medicine, to Byzantine works, and to medieval and Renaissance texts from Western Europe. Stannard would have analyzed in depth works by major authors, as he did in the essays on Hippocrates, Dioscorides, Pliny, Albertus Magnus, and Bartholomaeus Anglicus in Pristina Medicamenta (PM) and on Mattioli in Herbs and Herbalism (HH).

The coherence of medical botany over so long a period--aside from geometry and theology, it is hard to think of another field that still regularly invokes the authority of texts written two thousand years ago--poses a special problem for its historians. How has herbalism changed over time, or varied from place to place? Stannard would have dealt with this question by looking at less-well-known authors and texts in order to pinpoint the contributions of Greek medical theory; philosophical schools; Christian, pagan, and magical beliefs; folklore; and observations of local flora (see, e.g., the essays on Lucian, Aretaeus, Marcellus of Bordeaux, and Benedict Crispus in PM; and on Joachim Camerarius and Hans von Gersdorff in HH). He would have continued to mine the vast, largely anonymous literature of botanical glossaries, medical recipes, and craft treatises for what they could reveal about the knowledge and uses of plants in the Middle Ages (see the three essays on rezeptliteratur in HH).

Much of Stannard's analysis would have been lexical, tracing the transmission of plant names through Greek, Latin, and vernacular texts--a key aspect of this subject that his command of languages especially equipped him to undertake (see "Byzantine Botanical Lexicography...

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