Rembert Dodoens (1517 to 1585) was a Flemish physician and botanist, also known by his Latin name, Rembertus Dodonaeus. His herbals were among the most important plant books of the late 1500s, and our Mandrake comes from his last and largest herbal.
His life
Dodoens was born Rembert van Joenckema in Mechelen, in what is now Belgium. He earned a medical degree from the University of Leuven in 1535 and later worked as a city physician in Mechelen. In the 1570s he served as court physician to the Holy Roman emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II in Vienna, and in 1582 he became a professor of medicine at Leiden University. He died in Leiden in 1585. The plant genus Dodonaea is named in his honor.
His herbals
His Cruydeboeck (“herb book”) of 1554 was written in Dutch rather than Latin and had 715 pictures, many of them borrowed from Leonhart Fuchs. Instead of listing plants alphabetically, Dodoens grouped them by their properties and how they were related. The book was translated into French in 1557 and English in 1578.
In 1583, the Plantin press in Antwerp published Stirpium historiae pemptades sex, a much larger Latin herbal that built on the Cruydeboeck and his other plant books. The title means “six groups of five books on the history of plants,” 30 books in all. It had about 1,300 woodcuts, sorted plants into 26 groups, and became the basis for John Gerard’s famous English Herball of 1597.
Dodoens in our collection
The Mandrake in our botanical art collection comes from his 1583 herbal. Most of that book’s woodcuts were drawn on the block by Pieter van der Borcht and carved by Plantin’s block cutters.
