Thammasat University students who are interested in agriculture, botany, sociology, economics, culture, cultural and social anthropology, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.

The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction and Use of Plants in the Western World 600-1600 is an Open Access book, available for free download at this link:

https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/61939

The TU Library collection includes many other books about different aspects of plants.

The publisher’s description of the book follows:

How ‘green’ were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer’s madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature? The Green Middle Ages addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.

A preface notes:

If ‘green’ was ever a political movement or idea, then now, in the 21st century, it mostly means sustainability. But at some point in history, ‘green’ simply meant green. One was green without any social, political or economic connotation. In addition to the modern sense of green, the green earth, that is to say nature, had a deific component for the pre-modern inhabitant, since one could not grasp its power. In the twelfth century, the German mystic Hildegard von Bingen added the metaphorical idea of viriditas, the potentially ‘Divine Healing Power of Green’. The green earth was a generally treasured, indispensable and integrated component of life. Without green, one could not live. It would appear that as soon as written records started to emerge, people began to document whatever they knew about plants and trees: their limitless uses as food and medicine, scent, pigments for paint or as a dye. Over the centuries in Western Europe, this knowledge has been handed down to us in manuscripts dating back to antiquity, permanently impacting Western thought. Influential authors of antiquity who wrote about the uses of plants and trees, lived before or around the beginning of the Common Era, centuries before the timespan mentioned in the title of this collection of essays. Supplanting the traditional papyrus roll, the earliest extant books or codices dealing with the subject, were written on folia of parchment, sewn into quires. They date from the fifth and sixth centuries. The various authors of this book focus on the period between the sixth century to 1600 and, in particular, on those manuscripts in lesser-known European libraries, universities, museums and private collections, especially those in the Low Countries. Yet, in order to form a more complete presentation, the study of manuscripts in foreign collections was indispensable and together with the more local books, there was plenty of material to open the horizon for a complete overview. The oldest extant manuscript in Dutch collections of the Herbarium associated with the name Apuleius Platonicus is preserved at the Leiden University Library. It dates from the late sixth century. The famous En Tibi herbarium and the late sixteenth century collection of plants preserved in the so-called Rauwolff herbarium at the Leiden Naturalis Biodiversity Centre are equally outstanding. These two sources encompass a period of a thousand years, the timespan that became the period on which the authors decided to concentrate. The Netherlands owe several of their world-famous manuscripts and early printed books to a handful of book collectors whose heirs and subsequent owners appreciated and preserved them. In 1690, the University of Leiden purchased the collection of books and manuscripts from the estate of Isaac Vossius (1618-1689), the former librarian of Princess Christina of Sweden. Due to some legal complications, when the young university wished to cancel the purchase, it took some time before the crates could be unpacked. Eventually, though, the Leiden University library was enriched with 3,984 books and 728 medieval manuscripts, consequently doubling the library’s book collection. The Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in the Hague, now renamed The House of the Book, holds the collections of medieval manuscripts gathered by Willem Hendrik Jacob of Westreenen of Tiellandt (1783-1848) and his ancestors Gerard and Johan Meerman (1753-1815). Among them is a tenth-century copy of Apuleius Platonicus’s Herbarium which contains astonishing, almost modern-looking pen-and-ink drawings that are admired by a hand-full of scholars, but are unknown to the audience outside the academic world. Almost the same could be said of the medieval books in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (Royal Library) of the Netherlands in the Hague, collected throughout the years by the princes of Orange and other bibliophiles with an eye for beauty. Since their establishment, the universities of Amsterdam, Ghent and Utrecht have purchased books for their libraries but, unlike Royal Libraries, these universities have been mostly concerned with the contents of the books, rather than their aesthetic qualities. A few years ago, the so-called Draiflessen collection, assembled by a Dutch family, was transferred from Hilversum in the Netherlands to Mettingen, just across the German border. This private trove of books is prized for both its contents and its beauty. Even though there have been exhibitions, many catalogues published and numerous collections placed online, the manuscripts are still mostly unknown and few of us distinguish them as an indispensable part of our collective world heritage. One of the main goals of the Green Middle Ages is to make them known to a wider audience. Many a reader may be astonished as to the unexpected beauty of the illustrations, especially when he or she considers that the manuscript may have been created over a thousand years ago. […]

The Green Middle Ages is a series of articles by contemporary scholars of various disciplines, each with his or her own scientific language, interests and vision. The basis for each one of them was the desire to allow the sources to speak for themselves – how were plants used and what formed the foundation of this knowledge. The extant medieval manuscripts form the core of every chapter. The vast majority of their illustrations are published here for the first time.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)