Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution. A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670

8vo (24 cm), frontispiece, XXIV, 328 pp., 26 plates and 151 illustrations in the text. Publisher's cloth (spine and boards sunned, occasional foxing). A New Edition, Rewritten and Enlarged (originally published 1912). The standard scholarly history of the printed herbal in Europe, tracing its evolution from a botanical and secondarily an artistic standpoint across two centuries, from the earliest fifteenth-century printed herbals (the Herbarium of Apuleius Platonicus, the Latin Herbarius, the German Herbarius, and the Hortus sanitatis) through the great botanical Renaissance of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Germany, the Low Countries, Italy, Spain and Portugal, Switzerland, France, and England. Substantially rewritten and enlarged for this second edition, with new sections on botany in the Iberian peninsula and on the origin of the herbarium as a botanical practice, and the bibliography (Appendix II) trebled and newly indexed by subject (Appendix III). The work traces the parallel evolution of plant description, plant classification, and botanical illustration, and devotes a chapter to the doctrine of signatures and astrological botany. Richly illustrated with portraits of the great herbalists -- Brunfels, Fuchs, Bock, Dodoens, Mattioli, Gesner, Bauhin, Gerard, Parkinson, Cesalpino, Alpino, and others -- and with reproductions of woodcuts and engravings from the herbals themselves, including plates after the Vienna Dioscorides, the Herbarium Apuleii Platonici, and botanical drawings by Leonardo da Vinci and Dürer. Arber, a distinguished plant morphologist and historian of science, first conceived the book after encountering Lyte's translation of Dodoens' herbal in 1894. The work remains a foundational reference for the study of early printed botanical literature.…