A. H. DUPREE. Asa Gray, American botanist, friends of Darwin. (Paperback reprint with a second preface). John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 1988 (1989). Pp xxiv, 503; illustrated. Price: £9.50. ISBN 0-8018-3741-3 (original) (raw)
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Anglo-Saxon England inherited a large body of medicinal plant lore from classical antiquity. Although Latin medical texts provided much useful information to the Anglo-Saxons, they also presented numerous problems not encountered by their original audiences. Two of the greatest problems were identification of the Greek and Latin plant names and access to non-native plant species. Even if foreign plants could be acquired and in some cases cultivated in English herbal gardens, there remained the problem of interpreting which plant species was referred to in the various herbal descriptions or recipes.3 This problem had clearly existed for the original audiences of these texts too, as both Pliny and Dioscorides, for example, give numerous alternative names for the plants they discuss, and after the passage of time, such variants only multiplied. For a speaker of a Germanic language like Old English, with his or her own set of names for plants from an entirely different geographical region, the difficulty of identifying the plants named in the sources would have been far greater. Bilingual glossaries of plant names were one aid in dealing with this linguistic difficulty.
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Much of our knowledge of Old English plant-names is derived from two types of sources: the extant corpus of Old English medical writings and the numerous Latin-Old English glossaries that survive from Anglo-Saxon England. The Old English medical writings, such as the Herbarium. Bald's Leechbook, and others, have been fairly well researched in terms of their sources and the herbal lexicon they preserve (e.g., Cameron 1982, 1983; De Vriend 1984; D'Aronco 1988; Adams & Deegan 1992), but the sources of the plant-name glossaries have rarely been examined, if at all. Unfortunately, without an understanding of the sources used to compile a glossary and its subsequent development, it is quite difficult to set value on the evidence the glossary provides for the meanings of certain words, for glossaries are prone to errors of copying far more than literary texts. In this paper, I would like to examine several of these Old English plant-name glossaries in order to determine the source or sources used to compile them. There arc four glossaries in particular that 1 will consider: the Cleopatra Glossary, the Brussels Glossary, the Durham Glossary and the Laud Herbal Glossary. In spite of some major differences among these glossaries, they all descend from a common archetype. After examining a small selection of entries, I will present some preliminary observations on the textual sources, the original archetype glossary, and its production and later development.
The Rise of Botanical Terminology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
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Early modern scientific literature was to a big part written in Latin and until today many technical terms are derived from a Greek or Latin root. Botany, in particular, has maintained this tradition of describing and naming new plant species in Latin to this day. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw a sudden and un-precedented increase in knowledge of plants not only due to the Europeans’ encounter with other parts of the world but also due to a more thorough study of the indigenous flora and the new possibilities that inventions like the microscope offered.This new knowledge sparked the development of more comprehensive and specialized terminologies. The following chapter aims at giving an overview of this development and tries to answer the questions why new terms were introduced, how they were formed, and what contributed to their acceptance and success. The study is based on several important texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the findings are exemplified by a close reading of passages on the development of fruits.
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Anglo-Saxon England, 1988
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A Database of Medieval Plantnames
This paper is about a database, built in Graz, Austria, of plant names from mediëval manuscripts concerning food and health. It is meant for researchers from as many as possible disciplines in the humanities as well as pharmaceuts and medicins. The paper also contains explanation of the basic classical system of the humours and temparaments.
Herbals. Their Origin and Evolution. A Chapter in the History of Botany. 1470-1670
Brittonia, 1988
Jacques d'Alechamps (1513-1588) [Wood-cut, ciica 1600, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum]. Enlarged ......••••• 97 51. "Ornithogalum magnum" [d'Alechamps, Historia generalis plantarum, 1586] 99 52. "Tabaco" = A^/t-(?/M«a, Tobacco [Monardes, Joyful! newes out of the newe founde worlde, 1580] 105 53. Text-fig. 22. "Walwurtz m7i.-aYX\VL" = Symphytum, Comfrey [Brunfels, Herbarum vivse eicones, Vol. I. 1530].
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