Historical Information

Historical research will integrate two parts, European and American. Research on orchards and apples in the European area will focus on ancient literature in order to locate possible traces of actual practices through the written record of land management, agriculture, and food production. Primary sources to be consulted will be made of three groups: (1) classical antiquity and Byzantium, with Theophrastus (4th-3rd cent. BC), Pliny (1st cent. AD), Gargilius Martialis (3rd cent.), Palladius (4th or 5th cent.), and the early-Byzantine Geoponika (with its 10th-century re-arrangement); (2) the abundant Arabic botanical and agronomical literature, particularly from Andalucia, from the 10th to the 13th century AD (including the pre-Islamic Book of Nabatean Agriculture); (3) the late-medieval Latin production derived or not from Arabic literature, from the school of Salerno to pre-Renaissance herbals, including Pietro de Crescenzi (13th-14th cent.). Secondarily research will take into consideration the body of material medica literature (e.g., Dioscorides to Pietro d’Abano).

Research in the Americas will concentrate on the literature produced in Europe at the time of the transfer of apple to the Americas. There will be a special focus on Spanish and English manuals similar to those listed above, including the Spaniard Andres de Laguna and the Englishman Gerard. The historical research will also trace new information produced in the New World.

The research will be based on the texts in the original language and will extract and database all relevant information concerning apple variety diversity, growing of apples and management of apple orchards. Items in the database will include exact reference to the edition (for control of accuracy and completeness), together with space and time indication (for a reconstruction of the dynamics of apple orchard management). This method has been previously employed by these researchers (Touwaide 2008).

Relevant textual and archival data will be translated into English. Also, representations of plants and gardens in books, and works of art will be collected and scrutinized for possible visual information (plant iconography) not necessarily explicitly contained in textual material. The historical data will permit a number of time-series analyses in the context of the spatial distribution of the development of apple orchard management systems.