EXHIBITS
Plants in the Renaissance: Medicinal Plants
Medicinal Herbs and Plants
Herbals and books covering botany were used in many European countries to document plants and their purported uses. Plants were used to cure or alleviate a variety of ailments. This exhibit focuses on herbals in Renaissance England and shortly thereafter. The development of this type of book in England came relatively late. As a result, some people believe English herbals added little to the development of botanical literature. [1] It may not have had influence over development and use of botanical literature in countries like Spain and Italy. However, it certainly affected the use of this kind of literature in England. The printing press was key in this change because it made it possible for more people to own herbals.
The development of the printing press changed the nature of the herbal. The relative ease of reproduction of these books allowed for more distribution. Herbals no longer had to be copied out by hand. We see a great shift in who can afford to own an herbal and how they were used. The earliest complete surviving herbal was a gift for a Byzantine Princess in Constantinople in the sixth century. [2] With the invention of the printing press herbals and other books become less valuable. They became more accessible to people who were not very wealthy or the elite of society. Medical practitioners could now purchase them. The use of these books were not limited to physicians and apothecaries. Gentlewomen in England would use them to help care for their families. Some medical knowledge was considered to be part of the education of an ideal gentlewoman. [3]
John Gerard was the best-known English herbalist and was a barber-surgeon. [4] Gerard’s Herbal was one of the books printed in England that was widely used. It covers a wide variety of plants, not all of which were medicinal in nature. However, many of them were used as medicine of various kinds. In Gerard’s Herbal, there is a description of a plant followed by a section on the virtues. These virtues vary widely, but there were plants used for conditions ranging from stomach aches to infected wounds. It is not possible to cover every plant that Gerard, and Johnson who revised the 1633 edition, believed had medicinal properties in this exhibit. However, information on several will be included to give an idea about what may be found within the herbal. It will show why these books were and still are important. They give us a glimpse into the past, with its differences and its similarities. Also, information from another physician’s book, Nicholas Culpeper, will be used to corroborate and expand on Gerard’s information about how these plants were used in early modern England. More information can be found about specific plants on this page’s subpages.
A note concerning the names Gerard uses needs to be made. He uses the English names of his time, but they may different from the ones used today. However, many of them are still in use today. The same name may be spelled differently since this book predates standardized spelling. Gerard also gives a Latin name, in addition to the English one. However, the reader should remember that Gerard’s knowledge of Latin was very poor. [5] Though Johnson made some improvements, the given Latin name may not match the one used today for the same species of plant.