The life sciences and geoscience did not play any sort of significant role in medieval academia. This changed during the Renaissance, which saw the emergence over the sixteenth century of natural history, in its modern meaning, in particular botany. This a several subsequent episodes of this series will deal with the various aspects of that emergence[1].
As is the case with almost every development in the sciences during the Renaissance, if one wants to understand the emergence of natural history in this period, then one first needs to know what existed earlier. One first needs to understand what existed in antiquity and then examine how the knowledge from antiquity was received and regarded in the Middle Ages.
There was no coherent, single area of knowledge in antiquity that can be labelled natural history but rather three distinct areas of information about plants and animals that would partially coalesce many centuries later, during the Renaissance. The first of these areas was philosophy and in the first instance the work of Aristotle (384–322). In his vast convolute of books Aristotle also turned his attention to animals, his principal work being his History of Animals (Latin: Historia Animalium).
This is very much an application of his philosophy to a largely empirical study of animals based on observation. Aristotle says that his is investigating the what i.e., the factual facts about animals, before establishing the why i.e., the causes of these characteristics. Aristotle’s pupil Theophrastus (c. 371–c. 287), who took over as head of the Lyceum after Aristotle, applied Aristotle’s philosophy to the world of plants in his Enquiry into Plants (Latin: Historia Plantarum) and his On the Causes of Plants (Latin: De causis plantarum).
The second area of interest in antiquity was medicine and the use of plants in the treatment of ailments. Here the central text is the On Medical Materials (Latin: De materia medica) of the Greek physician, Dioscorides (c. 40–90 CE). This five-volume work, composed between 50 and 70 CE, contains description of about 600 plants as some animal and mineral substances and approximately 1000 medicines made from them. The emphasis is very much on the medical, so the botanical descriptions of the plants are fairly simple but the descriptions of their medical uses comparatively extensive and detailed. The therapeutical work of the Greek physician Galen (129–c. 216) also contains lists and descriptions of simples i.e., that medicinal plants or a vegetable drug with only one ingredient.
Our last source from antiquity is vast, sprawling encyclopaedia Naturalis Historia (Natural History) of the Roman aristocrat Gaius Plinius Secundus (23/24–79 CE), known in English as Pliny the Elder, the book that would go on to give the discipline its name. This monumental work, 37 books in 10 volumes, was intended to cover, according to Pliny, “the natural world or life” and covers topics including astronomy, mathematics, geography, ethnography, anthropology, human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, horticulture, pharmacology, mining, mineralogy, sculpture, art, and precious stones, so not natural history as we now know it. Nothing in it is original from Pliny himself but is drawn together from a myriad of diverse sources. It claims to contain 20,000 facts drawn from 2,000 books. Unlike, Aristotle’s work it is not based on empirical observation. On plants, Pliny lists far more plants than Dioscorides, but they are by no means all medicinal, one of Pliny’s main sources was the works of Theophrastus.
We now turn to the reception of these authors from antiquity in the Middle Ages. Albertus Magnus (c. 1200–1280) included Historia Animalium in his edition of the works of Aristotle and would go on to write works on zoology and botany in his own writings. However, these played no significant role in the curricula of the medieval universities. The works of Theophrastus remained unknown in Europe during the Middle Ages, although his name was known through other sources such as Pliny
Galen was one of the major medical influences on the medieval European universities next to Ibn Sina’s The Canon of Medicine, but mostly in translation from Arabic into Latin and not from the original Greek. As I pointed in an earlier episode the discovery and translation of Greek manuscripts of Galen’s work by Renaissance humanists led to a neo-Galenic revival as opposition to the work of Vesalius.
The De materia medica of Dioscorides did not need to be rediscovered either in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance because it never went away. In the medieval period manuscripts of the De materia medicacirculated in Latin, Greek, and Arabic. It was present even in the Early Medieval Period. Probably the most famous manuscript is the so-called Vienna Dioscorides, an elaborately illustrated, Geek manuscript produced in Constantinople for the imperial princess Anica Juliana (462–527), daughter of the Western Roman Emperor Anicius Olybrius (died 472). The manuscript was created in 512. The illustrations are thought to have been copied from the of Krateuas, a first century BCE Greek herbalist, none of whose work has survived.
The illustrations in the Vienna are stunning but exemplify a major problem, not just with De materia medica but with almost all other medieval herbal manuscripts. The, probably, mostly monks who copied them over the centuries did not make their plant drawing by looking at real plants but merely copied the drawing from the manuscript they were copying. This meant that the illustrations degenerated over time and were oft barely recognisable by the Renaissance.
The medicine taught at the European, medieval universities was notoriously theoretical and almost wholly book based. This meant that the texts on medicinal plants by Galen and Dioscorides found little use on the universities. Instead, they were consulted by the apothecaries and the monks, who cared for the sick in the hospices of their monasteries, the earliest European hospitals.
Pliny’s Naturalis Historia was, of course, ubiquitous throughout the High Middle Ages, which given the number of errors, myths, and falsehood it contained, was perhaps not such a good thing. Pliny is the main source for all the monsters and strange human races, such as the headless Blemmyes or the one-legged Sciapods, found on medieval Mappa mundi.
In fact, the Renaissance shift towards the creation of the modern natural history began, as we will see, with a philological analysis of the Naturalis Historia.
Right up to the late fifteenth century the three fields of natural history information, the philosophical, the medicinal, and the encyclopaedic remained separate areas dealt with for completely different reasons. Beginning in the late fifteenth century and continuing throughout the sixteenth, as we will see, they began to fuse together and to evolve in phases into the modern discipline of natural history. Over the next few episode we will follow that evolution.
[1] In writing this and several of the following episodes, I shall be moving out of my safe zone as a historian of science. I don’t usually include sources in my essays, as I regard them more as newspaper columns for the general reader than academic papers. However, in this case I want to point my readers to Brian W. Ogilvie’s The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe (University of Chicago Press, 2006, ppb. 2008), which together with other sources formed the backbone of my writings on this topic. It is a truly excellent book and I recommend it whole heartedly to my readers. Brian Ogilvie is naturally not to blame for any rubbish that I might spout in this and the following blog posts.
The Renaissance Mathematicus 
Reblogged this on THE DARK SIDE OF THE MOON….
The pairing of the very sick patients in the beds wasn’t accidental. In accordance with the theory of humours, they put people with a fever (an excess of yellow bile in the theory) together with those who they thought had an excess of phlegm, on the assumption that each would correct the balance of humours in the other.
As always a great read, and a very fair outline of Latin Europe’s ‘official’ learning on these subjects. I say it’s very fair because of the disjunction between Latin Europe and the rest of the world, even where the eastern Mediterranean and the non-Latin Christian traditions are concerned. The vast wealth of information on plants, including medical uses, that was available elsewhere – even so close as Spain – was simply unknown to the Latin world. I’m thinking in particular of one massive work on plants produced in Muslim Spain in which (from memory) over 2,000 plants of all kinds, are described, and also the Nestorian Christian tradition which combined information from the classic Greek works with the Egyptian heritage and ongoing work of their own. None of this affected that Latin west whose line of formal studies over the centuries you’ve so well outlined, but it did affect medicine ‘on the ground’ in medieval Europe thanks initially to the Jewish physicians and later, occasionally, the occasional Latin author. For example, Marsilio Ficino’s Liber triplicitas includes a recipe for rhubarb pills which has its counterpart and probable origin in the Syriac (Nestorian) medical tradition. There’s more one might say about 8thC Italy, but I won’t go on. I suppose what I’m saying is that the book-tradition in Latin Europe isn’t necessarily what defined the living traditions known to ‘unofficial’ Europe.