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Books by Sarah R Kyle

Book Chapters & Articles by Sarah R Kyle

Plants in 16th and 17th Century: Botany between Medicine and Science, 2023

The illustrated herbarius (now Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. VI, 59 [coll. 2548]) o... more The illustrated herbarius (now Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Lat. VI, 59 [coll. 2548]) of Venetian physician Nicolò Roccabonella (1386-1459) remains mysterious in part because of what he calls its "more modern order", the significance of which has been unexplored in modern scholarship. Created by Roccabonella and the Venetian painter Andrea Amadio (fl. 15th cent.) in the mid-fifteenth century, penned in ink predominantly on paper, and illustrated in watercolour, the Roccabonella Herbal contains 458 chapters
on individual plants used for medicinal purposes. While the general organisation of each chapter (image on one side of the folio and text in two columns on the other) and its subject matter (medicinal plants) remain consistent throughout the manuscript, the textual and visual contents of the codex, to my knowledge, do not consistently conform to any recognisable or traditional system of classification or organisation. Both the textual and visual content of Roccabonella’s book confront the reader with the uncanny feeling of engaging with different systems or parts of systems – from multiple times and places – simultaneously.

A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era (500–1400) (Cultural Histories), edited by A. Touwaide. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

Representations of plants and their cultural significance during the medieval era are as manifold... more Representations of plants and their cultural significance during the medieval era are as manifold as the uses of the plants themselves. As the other chapters in this volume illustrate, plants could help, heal, or harm the human body, and they are justly studied for their roles as foods, medicines, and commodities. Plant imagery intersects these aspects of cultural history. Images of plants appear in a diversity of contexts and styles and across artistic media. Plants are the subjects – or accompany figural subjects – of paintings, tapestries, architectural adornments, sculptures, illuminated manuscripts, and personal emblems. They are portrayed as rigidly schematic, overtly or covertly symbolic, and even as anthropomorphic. Yet they also are portrayed in highly detailed and realistic fashions. Scholarly interpretation of plant imagery often ties the plant illustrations to the cultural and religious significance of nature and of gardens, or to developments in medicine, pharmacology, and the rise of empirical observation of the natural world. As this chapter argues, however, these threads of interpretation weave together, overlapping and enhancing one another and so revealing the centrality of plant imagery in narrating the depth of human experience. Drawing examples from the variety of plant imagery primarily found in illustrated books produced across the wider Mediterranean world, this chapter explores the hermeneutical flexibility of plant representation in the medieval era and how this flexibility enabled illustrations of plants to connect ideals about the healthy body, the moral mind, and the spiritual soul.

A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era (500-1400), 2022

Interpretations of plant representation produced during the medieval period often tie the imagery... more Interpretations of plant representation produced during the medieval period often tie the imagery either to the cultural and religious significance of nature and gardens or to developments in medicine, pharmacology, and the rise of empirical observation of the natural world. I argue, however, these threads of interpretation weave together, overlapping and enhancing one another and so revealing the centrality of plant imagery in narrating the depth of human experience. Drawing examples from the variety of plant imagery primarily found in illustrated herbals produced across the wider Mediterranean world, this chapter explores the hermeneutical flexibility of plant representation in the medieval era and how this flexibility enabled representations of plants to connect ideals about the healthy body, the moral mind, and the spiritual soul.

This chapter appears in volume two of the six-volume A Cultural History of Plants (Bloomsbury).

Book Reviews by Sarah R Kyle

Renaissance Quarterly, 2022

Review of Sandra Hindman and Federica Tonioli (eds), The Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript P... more Review of Sandra Hindman and Federica Tonioli (eds), The Burke Collection of Italian Manuscript Paintings (Paul Holberton Publishing, 2021).

Conference Organization by Sarah R Kyle

CO-Organized Panel. In this panel, we aim to discuss the study of plants in different contexts, p... more CO-Organized Panel.
In this panel, we aim to discuss the study of plants in different contexts, periods, and areas from Late Middle Ages to the Early Modern world. The recent scholarship has highlighted the importance of the study of vegetation in diverse areas of human activity, thereby suggesting that the claim that botany was just a secondary branch of knowledge
throughout the ages is not supported by documentation. In contrast, this field of knowledge stands as a complex assmeblage of inputs, aims, case studies, and methodologies, and reveals a broader confrontation with nature as a whole. In this panel, we would like to approach this through different case studies. These cases involve a wide range of practices and practitioners (botanists, alchemists, physicians, natural scholars, philosophers and collectors) and concerns as, for example, (a) the exchanges of specimens, seeds, or parts of plants, (b) the study of herbs in pharmaco-therapeutics, (c) the naturalphilosophical
attempts to explain vegetal bodies, and (d) the natural-historical work of representing and cataloguing specimens’ diversities. Ultimately, the aim of the panel is to explore the complexity and the intersections in the knowledge of the second realm of nature.

Conference Presentations by Sarah R Kyle

Papers by Sarah R Kyle

Medicine and humanism in late medieval Italy, 2016