A herbal is a book that names and describes plants, mainly for their use in medicine. The word comes from the medieval Latin herbalis, meaning “of herbs.” Many herbals were illustrated, so readers could recognize each plant.
From copied manuscripts to printed books
One of the most influential herbals was De materia medica, written in the 1st century CE by Dioscorides, a Greek physician in the Roman army. It was read for more than 1,500 years. Before printing, herbals were copied by hand, and their pictures were copied from earlier copies, again and again. The first printed herbal with many pictures of plants came out in Rome around 1481, illustrated with woodcuts.
Drawn from life
The first printed book to show plants drawn from real life was the Gart der Gesundheit (“Garden of Health”), printed in Mainz in 1485, but only 65 of its 379 pictures were drawn that way. The next step came in 1530, when Otto Brunfels published a herbal with woodcuts that Hans Weiditz drew from nature. In 1542, Leonhart Fuchs published one with over 500 woodcuts drawn from life. In the 1600s, herbals gave way to floras, books that describe the plants of a region for the study of botany.
Herbals in our collection
The Mandrake in our botanical art collection comes from Rembert Dodoens’s 1583 herbal. John Gerard’s famous English Herball of 1597 was based on an English translation of this book. Köhler’s Medizinal-Pflanzen, from the late 1800s, is often called a herbal too, and it is the source of our Köhler plates.
