Bernhard Hampp: The world of herbal books

Healing knowledge, plant magic and book history

No herb can cure it - what a devastating diagnosis! When once neither nettle nor thyme, not even henbane or belladonna helped, all hope was lost. After all, wild and garden herbs, along with minerals and animal products, were the only available remedies for centuries. No wonder that people passed on their knowledge of the power and effects of herbs in writing from the earliest times.

Herbal and plant books are not only an exciting field of collecting and interest. They also tell of developments in medicine, pharmacology and botany - in general, of man's view of nature. And they accompany the medium of the book in its technical development. From the ancient Egyptian Payprus Ebers, which recorded medicinal plants around 1550 BC, to today's e-book nature guides. Time and again, new inventions in printing and illustration techniques have given rise to further aesthetic facets of plant illustration.

The following compilation therefore highlights some of these works. Rather than being exhaustive or a ranking of the best, first and most important herb books, it is intended to encourage readers to explore the books themselves. Libraries around the world have made virtually all the works presented available online as digital copies. This means that the magnificent herb and plant books can be viewed on a screen or tablet.

Anyone who once wanted to say something learned about medicinal plants should have studied "their Dioscorides" thoroughly. De Materia Medica by the Greek military physician Pedanios Dioscorides, published in 78 AD, was the reference work par excellence from the end of antiquity until well into the early modern period. As late as 1554, the Italian physician Pietro Andrea Mattioli published a Latin translation of Dioscorides, which was very well received and successfully transported the ancient work into the age of printing. For centuries, Central European authors also uncritically adopted Dioscorides' explanations of herbs and their medicinal uses, even if they were not familiar with many of the Mediterranean plants described in the work. Dioscorides lists around 700 plants in his text-only work. The oldest surviving illustrated edition of Dioscorides - and therefore the oldest completely preserved illustrated herbal book of all - is the so-called Vienna Dioscorides. This parchment codex with almost 400 large color illustrations was created in Constantinople around 512 AD. It has been kept in what is now the Austrian National Library in Vienna since the 16th century.

However, some of the texts and most of the illustrations in this Viennese Dioscorides come from an older work: the three-volume Rhizotomicum of Krateuas. Krateuas, known as "the root cutter", lived around 100 BC.

Whether rightly or wrongly, Krateuas is often referred to as the confidant or even personal physician of Mithridates VI Eupator of Pontus, who was also an expert in herbs. In addition to a scientific treatise on roots and their medicinal benefits, Krateaus published a popular edition of the Rhizotomikum with color illustrations of the plants: Only two papyrus fragments of what is probably the oldest illustrated herbal book ever have survived.

After the decline of classical antiquity, herbal manuscripts came mainly from three sources: One: Arab-Muslim physicians and scholars such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) in Persia and Ibn Ruschd (Averroes) in Córdoba. The second: the school of Salerno in southern Italy, which from the 10th century onwards understood medicine as a science in the tradition of the ancient physicians Hippocrates and Galen. It produced works such as Platearius' influential medical doctrine Circa instansand the Regimen sanitatis Salernitanum, in which Arnaldus de Villanova collected health adages: "A full belly does not like to study" is one of them. Thirdly, there are the Christian monasteries, which cultivated the art of writing in their scriptoria on the one hand and cultivated healing plants in monastery gardens on the other. The St. Gallen monastery plan from the 9th century, for example, lists a medicinal garden (Herbularius) with 16 beds in which sage, lovage and fennel, among others, thrive.

Opulently illuminated manuscripts were produced on the monastery island of Reichenau. One of the Reichenau abbots, Wahlafrid Strabo, was himself a writer. In his Liber de cultura hortorum from 840, known to this day as Hortulus, the little garden, he sang the praises of the plants in his monastery garden in 444 Latin hexameters. Today, a newly created herb garden based on Strabo's Hortulus can be visited at Reichenau Minster Mittelzell.

In the 13th century, the Cologne Dominican and universal scholar Albertus Magnus not only carried out plant experiments himself, but also taught the proper planting and cultivation of medicinal plants in his writings such as the botany textbook De vegetabilibus et plantis. She had her Physica medicinal plant theory written down by a monk who knew Latin. The Physica describes the healing effects of marigold and arnica, for example. It also mentions the old German, popular names of plants such as "Wermuda" or "Lubestuckel". A manuscript of the Physica from the 14th century, for example, is kept in the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel.

No sooner had printing with movable type been invented than Johannes Gutenberg's former employee Peter Schöffer appeared on the scene in Mainz as a publisher of herbal books. While his Latin Herbarius, printed in 1484, still illustrated the 184 plants it presented with rough, schematic woodcuts - probably made by playing card carvers - his comprehensive Gart der Gesundheit, published a year later in German, contains a collection of impressive woodcuts that come closer to the nature of the plants. Some of these can be traced back to the illustrator Erhard Reuwich.

These two works were not the end of the story: along with religious prints, herbal books became the bestsellers of the incunabula period. Schöffer's publications were reprinted throughout Europe, with the texts and illustrations copied or slightly altered. The authors of herbal books were mostly local doctors - in the case of the Gart der Gesundheit, for example, the Frankfurt city doctor Johannes Wonnecke von Kaub. They almost always drew on traditional sources such as Dioscorides'De Materia Medica or Platearius' Circa instans . Moreover, their explanations were not always free of magic and superstition.

Only three authors, whom posterity praises as the fathers of botany, brought about a real innovation. The first of these pioneers, who were concerned with scientific accuracy and botanical classification, was the former Carthusian monk and later Protestant preacher and doctor Otto Brunfels. From 1530, he published his Contrafayt Kreütterbuch in Basel, first in Latin and then in German. The woodcuts, which Dürer's pupil Hans Weiditz drew from nature, are impressive: even withered leaves and caterpillar damage can be seen in some of the 176 depictions of plants.

Hieronymus Bock's detailed New Kreütter Bůch is more popular and still enjoyable and entertaining to read today. The nature-loving theologian, teacher and plant collector from Zweibrücken initially published a relatively unsuccessful herb book, but in 1546 he published an illustrated popular edition that caused a sensation: it was reprinted and reprinted many times up until the 17th century. The 19-year-old artist David Kandel contributed the majority of the 500 lifelike woodcuts.

The most appealing herbal book to this day was created by the third member of the group: Leonhart Fuchs, professor in Tübingen and, thanks to his botanical achievements, the namesake of numerous plants such as the fuchsia. He published the Latin De Historia stirpium in 1543 and the German New Kreüterbuch a year later. Although this contains two registers of German and Latin plant names as well as a "Kranckheyten Register", it is a far cry from a pure pharmacopoeia. It is considered one of Fuchs' great achievements to understand botany as a discipline in its own right and no longer as a mere medical auxiliary discipline.

Also worth mentioning are the 511 full-page woodcuts in which Fuchs illustrated corn and pumpkins, among other things, for the first time. The illustrations combine the various stages from the bud to the fully opened blossom to the fruit. Fuchs was the only publisher of his time to name the illustrators and show their portraits: Albrecht Meyer made the drawings, Heinrich Füllmaurer transferred them onto wooden panels and Veyt Rudolff Speckle was responsible for the topiary.

Fuchs' luxuriously designed work proved too expensive to be a commercial success. A second volume was therefore published without illustrations. A copy of the Latin edition is kept today by the Augsburg State and City Library (2 Nat 48), for example, and one of the German edition by the Bavarian State Library in Munich (Rar. 2037). Both are available online in full as digital copies.

Copperplate engraving conquered plant illustration in the Baroque period. 37 full-page early copperplate engravings can already be found in the two-volume Phytobasanos ("Plant Touchstone") by the Italian botanist Fabio Colonna. Printed in Naples in 1592, the content of this herbal book is based on Dioscorides. The new illustration technique captures plants such as stonecrop, which is depicted together with its delicate roots, in an unprecedentedly realistic way.

Pierre Richer de Belleval, one of the founders of botany in France, published a catalog of his botanical garden in Montpellier in 1598. Of around 500 engravings that he had made for a large botanical work, only four were published during his lifetime. The rest only went into print many years later.

In England, the draughtswoman and engraver Elizabeth Blackwell created a sensational collective work in 1737 with A Courious Herbal. The self-taught artist immortalized the plants of the botanical garden in Chelsea on 500 plates. Blackwell used the proceeds from the book to help her husband, a failed printing entrepreneur who was in debtor's prison. Even though the man got himself into trouble again and was executed in Sweden in 1747, the unique magic of Blackwell's self-engraved and colored illustrations remains.

The Nuremberg doctor and pharmacist Christoph Jacob Trew published a significantly expanded German version from 1747. It bears the title Herbarium Blackwellianum emendatum et auctum. Trew had the illustrations redrawn and engraved by Nikolaus Friedrich Eisenberger.

At the same time, the Regensburg pharmacist Johann Wilhelm Weinmann came to prominence. Weinmann, who owned a small botanical garden himself, published the monumental Phytanthoza Iconographia ("Pictorial Description") from 1737 to 1745. It contains more than 1,000 copperplate engravings printed in color, which he delivered to subscribers twice a year in packs of 50. The Augsburg painter Bartholomäus Seutter collaborated with the engravers Johann Jakob Haid and Johann Elias Ridinger on the design. While the detailed explanations are based on older herbal books, the illustrations are considered groundbreaking.

The Hortus eystettensis, a masterpiece of plant illustration in copperplate engravings, had already been published in Nuremberg around 1613. In this magnificent work, the pharmacist and botanist Basilius Besler documented the plants of the "Garden of Eichstätt" on 366 plates.

In this magnificent work, the apothecary and botanist Basilius Besler documented the plants of the "Garden of Eichstätt" on 366 plates. The Prince-Bishop of Eichstätt, Johann Konrad von Gemmingen, had this bastion garden created in the shadow of his Willibaldsburg Castle by scholars such as Besler and the physician Joachim Camerarius the Younger. He also commissioned the opulently designed book, which is still one of the milestones of plant illustration today. In 1998, the Bavarian Palace Administration replanted the bastion garden within the walls of Willibaldsburg Castle, which had been forgotten in the meantime: As with Strabo's Reichenau Hortulus, the book served as the model. The bibliophile masterpiece in royal format (57 by 46 centimetres) was, of course, no longer a classic herbal book that provided doctors or lay readers with all available botanical and medical-pharmaceutical information on the respective plant. Rather, the decorative character dominated.

This also applies in part to the works of Maria Sybilla Merian (1647-1717). To this day, they are among the most valuable and most highly traded in the field of plant books...

The daughter of the Frankfurt engraver and publisher Matthäus Merian the Elder, who was famous for his city views, she produced the three-volume New Flower Book with 36 copperplate engravings from 1675, which were intended as drawing and embroidery models. Together with her daughter Dorothea, she traveled to Surinam from 1799 to 1801 and studied the flora and fauna there. Her book Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium presents more than 90 insects and 50 plants from the South American country on 60 annotated plates. Amsterdam engravers created the illustrations based on Merian's skillful drawings.

Meanwhile, the field of herb and plant books continued to expand. Children's and school books brought nature closer to the younger generation. From 1790 to 1830, the Weimar publisher Friedrich Johann Justin Bertuch published his multi-volume picture book for children: containing a pleasant collection of animals, plants, fruits, minerals ... all selected from the best originals, engraved and accompanied by an explanation appropriate to the intellectual powers of a child. Of a total of 6,000 individual engravings, a large part is devoted to plants. The explanations - here, for example, on the pimpernel herb - read as follows: "It was considered an excellent remedy against the terrible dog bite. Now the opinions of doctors are divided about its usefulness."

The 18th century brought an - albeit short-lived - innovation in the field of illustration: the Erfurt professor of medicine Johann Hieronymus Kniphof used nature printing. This process, in which an inked plant is printed on the paper itself, had already been used sporadically in manuscripts. Kniphof's Botanica in originali, Das ist Lebendig Kräuter-Buch from 1733 presents herbs such as borage and hyssop on 200 subsequently colored plates, as well as complete printed heads of cabbage. The natural self-print remained a rarity.

Lithography became established as an illustration technique in the 19th century. Pharmacist and pharmacologist Theodor Friedrich Ludwig Nees van Esenbeck (1787-1837), who was also responsible for the botanical garden at the University of Bonn, published a comprehensive, three-volume collection of medicinal plants in Düsseldorf from 1821. It bears the title Plantae officinales, or collection of officinal plants. The 522 hand-colored lithographic plates are the work of the artist and naturalist Aimé Constant Fidèle Henry.

The prolific Berlin draughtsman and lithographer Carl Friedrich Schmidt is regarded as the master of plant illustration in the 19th century. Together with the pharmacologist and botanist Otto CarlBerg, he published the four-volume illustration and description of all the officinal plants listed in the Pharmacopoea Borussica or the parts and raw materials used by them, according to natural families, from 1858 onwards. Plants and their leaves, inflorescences, roots and other details are illustrated on 204 plates.

Lithographs adorned countless children's picture books: flowers and plants now sometimes became fantastical, narrative creatures, such as in the saga Flora's Feast - A Masque of Flowers (1889) by the English illustrator Walter Crane, a leading representative of the Arts and Crafts movement, in the rhymed flower fairy tale (1898) by the Swiss painter and lithographer Ernst Kreidolf or in Sybille Olfer's Etwas von den Wurzelkindern (1906).

From 1929, the three-volume flower book with 250 drawings by the typographer, graphic artistand calligrapherRudolf Koch was published by the Mainzer Presse. Koch's drawings were cut into wood by Fritz Kredel and colored by hand by Emil Wöllner. A summary with 58 of the illustrations was published in 1933 as a volume of the Insel-Bücherei under the title Ein kleines Blumenbuch. This sold almost 500,000 copies over the decades and was reprinted in 2014.

With the triumph of photography and offset printing, the large field of plant books split up completely. In addition to countless specialist books on botany and phytotherapy, decorative illustrated and photographic volumes, plant poetry such as Karl Heinrich Waggerl's Heiteres Herbarium (1950) and plant stories, children's and youth books, guides on the use of herbs in cosmetics, household and, of course, the kitchen were published. Added to this was self-sufficiency literature such as John Seymour's Complete Book of Self Sufficiency (1976) along with an almost unmanageable amount of gardening literature, which itself became a genre. Finally, encyclopaedias and identification books for home use continue to appear to help with the identification of wild herbs - even if the latter have recently lost many of their functions to apps and websites.

The classic identification guide " Was blüht denn da" , first published by Alois Kosch in 1935, can be considered a classic. The 60th updated edition was published in 2021. Around 2000 plants are depicted in lifelike drawings.

In the tradition of the oldest herbal books, compendiums have recently been devoted to all aspects of plants and wild herbs: their importance in botany, medicine and folk medicine, agriculture and cuisine, European and non-European cultural history and religion, in legends, fairy tales, rituals - and books.

(Bernhard Hampp, 2024)