Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions (review)

Minta Collins's very scholarly survey of medieval herbals has the unusual distinction of having been reviewed in the New Yorker (16 July 2001)—a tribute to the book's visual appeal and to the ever-growing popular interest in medicinal plants. For historians of medieval medicine and of herbal medicine in any period, the book is invaluable.

Dr. Collins originally undertook this work in order to understand the context of a late thirteenth-century herbal, Tractatus de herbis, British Library Egerton MS 747 (the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation in art history at the Courtauld Institute; a facsimile of Egerton MS 747 is forthcoming from British Library Publications). Among the manuscript's four-hundred-odd drawings are some of plants that have clearly been drawn from nature. This is a notable break with tradition—for centuries, pictures had typically been copied along with the text, and they became increasingly stylized. This herbal, however, initiated its own tradition by creating a set of new pictures, juxtaposing them to a previously unillustrated Salernitan text, Circa instans, compiled by Matthaeus Platearius, and augmenting that primary compilation with other material.

The novelty of Egerton MS 747 is all the more striking after watching Dr. Collins sort out the two main lines (and many side branches) of earlier Greek, Arabic, and Western European (both Latin and vernacular) herbals—one stemming from Dioscorides' De materia medica, the other from a Latin text derived from Pliny and ascribed to Apuleius Platonicus. In both lines and in all three cultures, she observes, "the evolution of the illustrative tradition [toward stylization]. . . is remarkably similar" (p. 138).

A great strength of Medieval Herbals is its demonstration that close attention to the physical appearance, layout, and production of these manuscripts will yield valuable clues to the ways they were used. A quick look at the confusing arrangement of a single page of Egerton MS 747 (folio 12; Plate XXII) shows how fruitful this approach can be. The artist (or, more likely, artists) who laid down the four drawings of plants and the scribe who then added the text clearly intended to use a traditional plan for herbals: plants indexed and grouped alphabetically, and each image followed by a neat block of descriptive text immediately below it. But the scheme faltered in practice: Lines of text extend over neighboring drawings. A picture of a tree has a label crossing its leaves and fruit; squeezed under its roots is the description of a wholly different plant, which is not pictured. Another block of text—also not linked to an image—begins with the plant's name in the same dark ink and large hand as the rest of the page, but then quickly switches to a paler ink and more compact hand to incorporate a long passage from Isaac Judaeus's treatise on diet. If the artist and scribe had been copying an earlier illustrated manuscript, Dr. Collins argues, they would have known how much space to rule off for each plant's picture and text entry. Instead, the awkward layout suggests that they were feeling their way, comparing notes with each other as they created a new herbal archetype.

The layout also implies the active involvement of the learned physician who commissioned the manuscript—and who may have been its scribe. In true scholarly fashion, he felt he had to insert the extra passage even though it required a change of ink and a cramped script. Moreover, the page suggests that, unlike many medieval physicians, this first user of Tractatus de herbis knew enough about plants to recognize their distinctive features in the freshly drawn pictures. Because he could tell which name was coupled to which image and which text, the jumbled organization of the page—essentially...