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Article ID: CBB957028410

Renaissance Herbalism. The Perils of Humanism (2017)

Touwaide, Alain (Author)

Mefisto: Rivista di medicina, filosofia, storia
Volume: 1
Issue: 2
Pages: 9-25

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Materia medica Herbals and bestiaries Medicine Veterinary medicine Interdisciplinary approach to knowledge Botany Pharmacy Humanism Epistemology Pharmaceutical botany Medieval Renaissance Europe

According to a traditional narrative in the history of life sciences and medicine, late-medieval herbalism merged the science and practice of the plants traditionally used for human consumption (alimentary, medical, and cosmetic) and veterinary treatments. The resulting knowledge (transmitted in manuscript form and in Latin, but also in the vernacular, though to a lesser extend) agglutinated elements from different provenance, from classical Greece, the Arabic World, the Southern Mediterranean, and also local knowledge. The material from these different sources was not always fully assimilated, generating linguistic chimeras which sometimes were scientific. It was the merit of the Renaissance (whatever this conventional historical designations refers to) to return to the root of all the subsequent developments of herbalism – be they Byzantine, Arabic or medieval – and to reinstate the ancient Greek science of herbs, leading to new developments that paved the way to modern botany and therapeutics. In this essay, I wish to re-examine such narrative, especially the impact of the reintroduction of Greek herbal literature on late-medieval and early-modern herbalism. I will argue that, contrarily to the generally received interpretation, the reintroduction of classical Greek science did not immediately foster a renewal of herbalism but, on the contrary, paralyzed it for several decades in a perverse effect of scientific humanism.

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