Blogger of the visually bizarre BibliOdyssey has a number of nice online herbal scans you might well enjoy: each page has a brief description of the related manuscript and links to other places you can read more about the subject, while each picture links to its own Flickr page (which is handy).

  • Arzneipflanzenbuch‘ [BSB Cod.icon. 26], Augsburg circa 1525. Herbal with lots of eccentric roots (sounds familiar, eh)
  • Hieronymous Braunschweig’s Distillerbuch, Strasburg circa 1500. Distillation manual, with plenty of alchemy, chemistry, botany, medicinal tips, etc.
  • Rembert Dodoens’ Cruydeboek, Belgium 1554. Hugely popular herbal built on Leonhard Fuchs’ equally famous herbal (but with many additions).
  • Tacuinum Sanitatis, 15th century copy owned by the Bibliotheque Rouen. An extremely nice-looking herbal book of medicine with herbal bits, exactly the kind of high quality artefact the Voynich Manuscript plainly isn’t.

7 thoughts on “Some online herbals…

  1. Ernest Lillie on January 10, 2010 at 6:50 am said:

    Interesting links — thanks, Nick.

    I followed the link for the “Arzneipflanzenbuch” through to where BibliOdyssey gave a link to the complete manuscript ( after the thumbnails ) but was only able to get a proxy error. A little reasearch gave me the following link to the complete scan:

    http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0001/bsb00012872/images/

    Cheers!

  2. Rene Zandbergen on January 11, 2010 at 12:07 pm said:

    Here’s another nice online copy of Dodoens:
    http://archiv.ub.uni-marburg.de/dodoens/

    To access the individual pages, click on
    ‘Inhaltsverzeichnis’ (=Contents)

  3. Ernest Lillie on January 13, 2010 at 8:51 pm said:

    Thanks for the new link, Rene!

    Being able to have access to things like this is one of the great, understated triumphs of the Internet. Links to specific “Special” manuscripts like this one and the Voynich, along with resources like “Google Books” has truely revolutionized the ability to do research into virtually any subject.

    I still drive my local library crazy with requests for little known, dusty tomes from various universities and magazine collections, but the content is slowly making its way online.

    Cheers!

  4. John Willemse on February 17, 2011 at 11:49 am said:

    Thanks for those links to the ‘Arzneipflanzenbuch’! Great images and some of them have interesting similarities with images from the VMS! For example, page 60v of the book features a plant labeled Morsus Serpentis (Snake bite) with faces drawn on the roots of the plant. Was that a common practice in Herbals in general and does it have a specific meaning?

  5. John: usually it was for mandragora (as per 59r in the Arzneipflanzenbuch), but I don’t know of a morsus serpentis head-shaped root tradition, sorry. The vaguely-matching VMs page is f33r, but I suspect that will turn out – pace The Curse – to be a Herbal-B engine diagram, probably a hoist with with two 10-tooth gears and an idle pinion, operated by two people on the ground (i.e. the two heads in the roots). 🙂

  6. John Willemse on February 18, 2011 at 3:51 pm said:

    😀 I found it intriguing nevertheless. I’m afraid I’m getting sucked into the VMS once again; this time concentrating more on the images. I found some interesting discrepancies not mentioned elsewhere, as far as I can tell, which I will post at a later time. 🙂

  7. John: keep at the front of your mind that there is only one Voynich sucker (but a never-ending supply of suckees). 🙂

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