Thammasat University students are cordially invited to download a free Open Access book at this link that should be useful for readers interested in the English literature, allied health sciences, biology, ecology, and related subjects:
Early Modern Herbals and the Book Trade is by Assistant Professor Sarah Neville, who teaches English at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio, the United States of America.
The Thammasat University Library collection includes some books on herbals.
Herbals are books containing names and descriptions of plants, usually with information on their medicinal, tonic, culinary, toxic, hallucinatory, aromatic, and magical powers, as well as the legends associated with them.
Herbals may also classify plants that they describe, and may give recipes for herbal extracts or potions, in addition to mineral and animal medicines.
Herbals were often illustrated to make it easier to identify plants.
Herbals were among the first literature produced in Ancient Egypt, China, India, and Europe. Medical knowledge of the time was gathered by herbalists, apothecaries and physicians.
Herbals were also among the first books to be printed in China and Europe.
In the late 1600s, the development of modern chemistry and pharmacology reduced the need for herbals. But herbals have become somewhat more popular in recent years, due to a rising interest in aromatherapy and other forms of alternative medicine.
China is well known for its traditional herbal medicines that have been in use for millenia.
According to one legend, a mythical Emperor Shennong, founder of Chinese herbal medicine, composed the Shennong Bencao Jing or Great Herbal almost five thousand years ago as the first example of Chinese herbals.
It survives as a copy made about 1500 years ago, and describes almost 400 herbs.
The word herbal derives from a Latin term meaning book of herbs. It is sometimes used to differentiate it from treatises about flowers.
Traditionally, books about flowers have focused on the beauty of the plants instead of their usefulness, whereas herbals emphasize the practical benefits of plants.
Much of the information found in printed herbals originated from traditional medicine and herbal knowledge that was developed before books were written and printed.
Before printing was invented, herbals were produced as manuscripts, which could be kept as scrolls or loose sheets or bound. Early handwritten herbals were often illustrated with paintings and drawings. Like other manuscript books, herbals were published through repeated copying by hand, either by professional scribes or by the readers themselves. In the process of making a copy, the copyist would often translate, expand, adapt, or reorder the content. Most of the original herbals have been lost; many have survived only as later copies of copies, and others are known only through references from other texts.
As printing became available, it was quickly used to publish herbals.
Today, herbals are in the collections of major international libraries, including the Vatican Library in Rome, Italy, and in the United Kingdom, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Royal Library in Windsor, and the British Library in London.
Assistant Professor Neville writes,
For almost a century before it was an adjective, the word “herbal” was a noun. As objects, individual copies of early English herbals were not only read and consulted but also inscribed and illuminated, purchased and bequeathed. Written forms for herb lore extended back long before the English language, and those lists of plant descriptions and medical remedies, or “book[s] containing the names and descriptions of herbs, or of plants in general, with their properties and virtues,” became a popular genre in Renaissance England within a few decades of William Caxton’s importation of printing to Westminster. By that time, printed editions of classical works had already been increasing rapidly on the continent, including texts that contained accounts of plants: Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, with its chapters on plants in books 4–6, was first printed in Venice in 1469 and was regularly reprinted thereafter. Theophrastus, Aristotle’s pupil and Lyceum contemporary whose Enquiry into Plants influenced Pliny, initially found his way into print in Treviso in 1483. Peter Schoeffer published the first expressly vernacular herbal, Der Gart der Gesundheit (The Garden of Good Health), in 1485, and it was quickly reprinted and translated into other languages, its numerous pirated editions readily demonstrating that there was a lucrative market for vernacular books about plants.1 Given the genre’s popularity on the continent, it is unsurprising, then, that the first examples of the word “herbal” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) stem from the titles of two sixteenth-century London publications: the anonymous Grete Herbal of 1526 (STC 13176) and William Turner’s A New Herball of 1551. The word “herbal,” however, had first appeared in printed English a year earlier than the OED currently records in the title of an anonymous book of 1525 published by the London stationer and printer Richard Bankes, who copied his text from a popular medieval herbal manuscript known as Agnus castus. Like many early printed works derived from medieval manuscripts, Bankes’s title page used an incipit, a rhetorical convention of conspicuously delineating a text’s beginning by offering a description of the nature of the work: Here begynnyth a newe mater / the whiche sheweth and treateth of [the] vertues & proprytes of herbes / the whiche is called an Herball. Through the efforts and investment of Richard Bankes, the era of the printed English herbal had officially begun. When several discrete texts were copied and bound together within a single manuscript volume, titles starting with phrases like “here begynnyth” signified to readers the change from one text to another despite their seeming continuance on the handwritten page. In this context, Bankes’s “newe mater” thus begun can be interpreted as signifying the verbal material that would follow the text’s (now-printed) title page, the intellectual fabric “whiche sheweth and treateth of [the] vertues & proprytes of herbes.” Such a reading might posit that which “is called an Herball” was not the book object itself but the book’s content, and the word “herbal” would be an identifying characteristic not of the “matter’s” material medium but of its verbal meaning. This reading might be used to support an argument that Bankes’s 1525 book is a progenitor not to the first use of “herbal” as a noun but to the adjectival form of the word that the OED credits to 1612: the substance of the text of the verbal work that Bankes prints may be understood to refer to “belonging to, consisting of, or made from herbs.”
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)