Behold the Kräuterbuch, a Lavishly Illustrated Guide to Plants and Herbs from 1462

When Kon­rad von Megen­berg pub­lished his Buch der Natur in the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, he won the dis­tinc­tion of hav­ing assem­bled the very first nat­ur­al his­to­ry in Ger­man. More than half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, the book still fas­ci­nates — not least for its depic­tions of cats, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Even the works derived from it have charms of their own: take the Kräuter­buch (or “Book of Herbs”) from 1462, in which Duke Albrecht III of Bavari­a’s per­son­al physi­cian Johannes Hartlieb adapts a sec­tion of the Buch der Natur with its own full com­ple­ment of 160 illus­tra­tions.

“Hartlieb’s sub­ject is plants, most­ly herbs, and their med­ical uses,” says the Library of Con­gress, on whose site you can view and down­load the book. “What makes the Kräuterbuch spe­cial is the side-by-side pre­sen­ta­tion of text and images. The high cost of such a rich­ly dec­o­rat­ed book makes it unlike­ly that it was actu­al­ly used by doc­tors or phar­ma­cists of the time.”

But even if they lack a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic prac­ti­cal­i­ty, these botan­i­cal pre­sen­ta­tions have a bright, sim­ple bold­ness that, in some respect, suits our visu­al aes­thet­ics here in the ear­ly twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry; you could call it a renais­sance equiv­a­lent of flat design.

“Each chap­ter of the Kräuter­buch fol­lows a tra­di­tion­al sys­tem of botan­i­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion derived from the Greek philoso­pher Theophras­tus,” writes Hunter Dukes at the Pub­lic Domain Review, which also offers a gallery of the book’s illus­tra­tions. “Ani­mals are por­trayed as phar­ma­co­log­i­cal­ly knowl­edge­able, such as in an account of deer rub­bing them­selves on pep­per­weed (Lep­id­i­um lat­i­foli­um) to remove hunters’ arrows”; anoth­er sec­tion holds that “dead­ly car­rots (Thap­sia) aid beg­gars in their decep­tions — rubbed on the face, they will pro­duce signs of lep­rosy, which can also be cured with vine­gar.” Dis­cussing the poi­so­nous man­drake (see image imme­di­ate­ly above), Hartlieb car­ries for­ward von Megen­berg’s sug­ges­tion “that its mag­i­cal prop­er­ties should be kept secret from com­mon­ers,” who, nat­u­ral­ly, would nev­er be in pos­ses­sion of such a lav­ish tome. Now all of us can access the Kräuter­buch — and most of us know that we’d be bet­ter off not mess­ing around with man­drake at all.

via the Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The New Herbal: A Mas­ter­piece of Renais­sance Botan­i­cal Illus­tra­tions Gets Repub­lished in a Beau­ti­ful 900-Page Book

Hor­tus Eystet­ten­sis: The Beau­ti­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed Book of Plants That Changed Botan­i­cal Art Overnight (1613)

A Curi­ous Herbal: 500 Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Med­i­c­i­nal Plants Drawn by Eliz­a­beth Black­well in 1737 (to Save Her Fam­i­ly from Finan­cial Ruin)

Behold a 15th-Cen­tu­ry Ital­ian Man­u­script Fea­tur­ing Med­i­c­i­nal Plants with Fan­tas­ti­cal Human Faces

The Sur­pris­ing Map of Plants: A New Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Plants Relate to Each Oth­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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