Medieval herbals: the illustrative traditions

This nicely produced volume offers both more and less than its title promises. Begun as a dissertation on a group of late medieval herbals in Latin and French, including Wellcome 626, it studies the iconography of plants in a wide variety of manuscripts, from the Johnson papyrus, Wellcome 5753, written in Greek around AD 400, via Arabic manuscripts to Latin manuscripts of the fifteenth century such as BL Sloane 2020, the Carrara Herbal. This allows the author to trace links across cultures, and to compare plant drawings for the same text produced in northern Iraq, Constantinople, or Burgundy. Her major aim is to track the possible survival of a classical tradition of botanical illustration, insisted upon by Charles Singer, over the centuries from Crateuas, fl. 90 BC, and Dioscorides, fl. AD 60, to medieval France and Italy. This she does extremely well, showing how artists modified earlier drawings or inserted figures, and warns against any easy schematism or romantic idealization of the Greeks. She demonstrates the complexity of the herbal tradition, both in its text and illustrations, and future editors of Dioscorides or the Apuleius herbal, or indeed classical philologists interested in transmission, will neglect her findings at their peril. They are backed up by precise personal observation of most of the manuscripts here recorded, often challenging accepted views. Her inspection of Bodley 130 leads her to conclude that many of its most lifelike depictions were made at a date much later than the original illustrations. But she does not commit herself to a date, and the famous blackberry (fig. 51), one of those suspected of being retouched, does not seem to show the same signs of later reworking as does the spurge (pl. xviii). But so well based appear most of Dr Collins' observations that only further autopsy is going to disprove others that might seem more controversial. But those who are looking for a history of herbals and herbal texts will be disappointed by the intensity of the focus on plant illustrations. Non-illustrated texts are deliberately excluded unless they show affinities with others that are or were. One might regret, too, a failure to compare the tradition of zoological or of anatomical illustration, e.g. in the Niketas codex and its offspring, which can also contribute to the discussion about the development of realism and drawing from life that underlies much of Dr Collins' argument. She raises questions about patronage and the individual abilities of artists, but her conclusion is too brief to do them full justice. The great merit of this book is its willingness to go outside the traditional linguistic categories of editors to look at visual representations of the same plants in culturally linked, and then divided, areas. Dr Collins encourages her readers to think big, even if at times her eye and her notes are fixed firmly on minutiae. I have learned a great deal from her, and I shall constantly return to the beautiful illustrations and to