ibclogo XVI International Botanical Congess


Abstract Number: 5162
Session = 16.15.3


BOTANY AT 1500


Karen Reeds, Columbia University and National Coalition of IndependentScholars, 127 Southgate Road, New Providence, New Jersey 07974 USA


Historians of science often use the year 1500 as a dividing point between ancient/medieval natural philosophy and modern science in Europe. Botany at 1500 exemplifies the co-existence of characteristically medieval and early modern approaches to the plant world. On the one hand, we have manuscript and early printed herbals repeating texts and pictures from the previous three-plus centuries, on the other, we have stunningly naturalistic images of plants in religious art, the humanists' first attempts to re-examine classical botanical texts, and the first encounters with plants from the Western Hemisphere. It is at this moment that the study of plants acquired a distinctive name-res herbaria"--and began to develop the tools of nomenclature, description, illustration, collection, and comparison that botanists today take for granted.


HTML-Version made 7. July 1999 by Kurt Stüber