John Gerard, The Herball, or the Generall Historie of Plants (1633)

    At a time when the botanical knowledge inherited from Classical scholarship underwent a massive augmentation from Renaissance collecting and study, larger and more complete lists of plants were necessarily written. Instead of appearing in larger compendia of knowledge--such as Pliny’s Natural History--or works devoted exclusively to materia medica (recipes for making medicine from plants and other substances), Renaissance botanical knowledge began to appear in the German kreuterbuch or the English herball. These books contained information, both old and new, regarding a number of plants, including those recently discovered by Europeans during the voyages of discovery. Illustrations of various kinds tend to accompany the written descriptions, as one can see from our copy of Gerard’s Herball, the 1633 edition.

    Gerard’s long-standing relationship with the Barber-Surgeon’s Company of London began in 1562, when he became an apprentice to a surgeon. After receiving his freedom from the company in 1569, Gerard’s role in the organization increased in importance; he was appointed to a company admissions board in 1598 and 1607, the latter year also marking his reception of the title of master in the group. Yet Gerard’s experience with plants and horticulture define his career. Besides keeping his own garden, Gerard presided over several important gardens in London. He became the keeper of the physic garden at the College of Physicians in 1586 and caretaker of William Cecil’s gardens (Strand and Hertfordshire) in 1595. His wish to create a physic garden for the Barber-Surgeon’s company in the late sixteenth century never came to fruition.

    Despite this setback, Gerard did successfully publish his work. His 1596 Catalogus arborum, fruticum, ac plantarum is a list of the plants in his own garden. The work was expanded for a second edition in 1599 and published by John Norton, printer to Queen Elizabeth. Gerard retained this publisher for his major work, the Herball of 1597. Even though there is a large amount of borrowed information in this work—including text from an English translation of Dodeoens’s Stirpium historiae pemptades sex and illustrations from Bergzabern’s 1590 Eicones plantaru—there are a great deal of original observations, remarks, and allusions made by Gerard himself. Particularly English botanical information, including references to people and places, make Gerard’s work unique despite the unacknowledged borrowing.

    The frontispiece to the Herball displays the importance of plants throughout history and highlights the efforts to collect and study the vast corpus of botanical knowledge. The top third of the piece features the importance of plants in Biblical and Classical religion and history. The Roman goddesses Ceres and Pomona represent the religious significance of plants in Classical times. The center illustration features the Garden of Eden and the passage from the book of Genesis in which God gives the plants of the earth to Adam and his progeny. The center third of the piece contains the famed Classical writers on materia medica, Theophrastus and Dioscorides. They represent the tradition of botanical writing that Gerard, whose bust can be found at the bottom of the piece, continued in the Early Modern period.

    After his death in 1612, Gerard was certainly remembered through his work. The 1633 second edition of the Herball—which you seen before you here today—was edited, corrected, and augmented by Thomas Johnson to be suitable for a more scholarly readership. The edition was popular and useful enough to warrant a second printing in 1636. Plants in all of the Renaissance Center’s gardens—in addition to a tree donated in the Spring of 2006--can be found in Gerard’s work.