Herbals were books describing plants and their uses, mostly medical. From Dioscorides's first-century De materia medica to Gerard and Culpeper, they shaped how Europe named, grew and used herbs.
Overview¶
A herbal is a book describing plants, usually with their names, appearance, habitat and medicinal uses, and often with illustrations. For most of European history herbals were the main works of botany and pharmacy, and they are why many culinary herbs have the reputations, and sometimes the names, they still carry. They are historical documents, not medical guides: many of their claims have not survived modern testing, and some plants they recommend are harmful.
Classical foundations¶
- Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC), Aristotle's successor, wrote Enquiry into Plants and On the Causes of Plants, the first systematic botany in the Greek tradition.
- Pedanius Dioscorides, a Greek physician who probably served with the Roman army, wrote De materia medica around AD 50–70. It describes about 600 plants and their preparations, and it was copied, translated and commented on for some 1,500 years. The magnificent illustrated copy known as the Vienna Dioscorides was made in Constantinople around AD 512.
- Pliny the Elder's Natural History (AD 77) gathered a great deal of plant lore, some sound, much hearsay.
The medieval herbal¶
In early medieval Europe, herbal knowledge was preserved and copied in monasteries. English examples include the Old English Herbarium, a translation of a Latin herbal attributed to "Pseudo-Apuleius", and Bald's Leechbook (10th century), a collection of remedies. The German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179) wrote Physica, which describes hundreds of plants.
The Islamic world greatly extended Greek pharmacology. Ibn Sina (Avicenna), in his Canon of Medicine (completed 1025), and the Andalusian botanist Ibn al-Baytar (d. 1248), whose compendium lists over a thousand simples, added many plants unknown to Dioscorides, including Asian spices. Latin translations of these works shaped medical teaching in European universities.
See also physic and monastery gardens.
Printed herbals¶
Printing transformed herbals from rare manuscripts into widely available books.
| Date | Work |
|---|---|
| 1485 | Gart der Gesundheit, Mainz: an influential German printed herbal |
| 1526 | The Grete Herball, London: an English translation of a French herbal |
| 1530 | Otto Brunfels, Herbarum vivae eicones: illustrations drawn from living plants |
| 1542 | Leonhart Fuchs, De historia stirpium: exceptionally accurate woodcuts |
| 1551–1568 | William Turner, A New Herball: the first original English herbal |
| 1554 | Rembert Dodoens, Cruydeboeck (Antwerp) |
| 1578 | Li Shizhen completes Bencao gangmu, printed 1596 |
| 1597 | John Gerard, The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes |
| 1640 | John Parkinson, Theatrum Botanicum |
| 1652 | Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physitian |
William Turner (c. 1508–1568), a clergyman and physician, is often called the father of English botany; he gave English names to many plants.
John Gerard's Herball (1597) became the best known English herbal. It was, however, largely based on a translation of Dodoens by a Dr Priest, which Gerard reorganised and published without adequate credit, and it contained many errors. Thomas Johnson's much corrected edition of 1633 is the one botanists valued.
Nicholas Culpeper (1616–1654), a London apothecary, published A Physicall Directory (1649), an unauthorised English translation of the College of Physicians' Latin pharmacopoeia, and then The English Physitian (1652), a cheap herbal for ordinary people. It linked each plant to a ruling planet within an astrological scheme. It has never been out of print, but should be read as a document of 17th-century thought.
Beyond Europe¶
Li Shizhen's Bencao gangmu (Compendium of Materia Medica), compiled over decades and printed in 1596, describes nearly 1,900 substances and is the landmark of Chinese pharmacology. In Mexico, the Libellus de medicinalibus Indorum herbis of 1552, written in Nahuatl by the Aztec physician Martín de la Cruz and translated into Latin by Juan Badiano, records Indigenous plant medicine. Sanskrit Ayurvedic texts had long served a similar role in South Asia.
⚠️ The doctrine of signatures
Many Renaissance herbals repeated the doctrine of signatures: the idea that God marked plants with signs of their use, so that walnuts, which look like brains, treat the head, or spotted lungwort treats the lungs. It was popularised by writers including Paracelsus and Giambattista della Porta (1588) and the English herbalist William Coles (1656). It is folklore with no scientific basis, and some plants "signed" for healing are toxic.
From herbal to botany¶
From the 17th century, botany separated from medicine. Naturalists such as John Ray began classifying plants by structure, and Carl Linnaeus's Species Plantarum (1753) established the two-part Latin names still used today: Ocimum basilicum for basil, Salvia rosmarinus (formerly Rosmarinus officinalis) for rosemary. Pharmacy moved toward isolated compounds and standardised preparations.
Why herbals still matter¶
Herbals preserve old plant names, cultivation notes and cooking uses, and they explain the reputations of herbs such as sage (from Latin salvere, to be healthy), borage (for courage) and rosemary (for remembrance). They also record how dangerous some traditional remedies were. For modern safety information on culinary herbs and spices see nutmeg toxicity, coumarin in cinnamon and poisonous lookalikes.