Section 2

Title Page (For early books: is there one, and with what developments?)

Title Page for 1633 edition

The title page of the book is highly decorated and includes pictures of a number of figures.

Pomona, a Roman goddess of fruit trees, gardens, and orchards, and Circe, a Greek goddess known for her use of herbs and drugs against Odysseus’ men in Homer’s Odyssey, are depicted at the head of the page. Between the goddesses is in a collection of fruit, vegetables and herbs. The entire scene is capped by an image of the sun breaking through the clouds with the Hebrew word “Yahweh” imprinted within a triangle inside the sun.  This solar image can be found on title pages in numerous herbal texts of this time. Below the sun is a scroll containing a quote, written in Latin, from the book of Genesis chapter 1 verse 29 in which God gives plants to man.

The middle tier of the page is dominated by an ornamental name plate flanked by two figures from antiquity. The figure to the hinge is the Greek philosopher Theophrastus. As Aristotle’s heir he was, among other things, the author of two herbal texts which acted as a seminal influence on later botanist. On the fore-edge is the Roman surgeon and author Dioscorides. Written during the early imperial period, Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica became the basis for 1,000 years of herbals and is considered to be the most important herbal text ever produced (Anderson, 1977).

The tail of the page is also split into three sections. To the hinge and fore-edge are potted plants. The center panel is constructed of a large picture of Gerard in full Elizabethan garb above a second name plate. In the case of the lower plate, the names of the printers: Adam J. Flip, Joyce Norton, and Richard Whitakers as well as the location and date of printing, London, 1633 are listed.

Introductions

Gerard's dedication to Lord William Cecil

The beginning of the Herball is dominated by a series of three introductions and dedications; the first two being written by Gerard and the final by Johnson. The first item is a two page dedication to Gerard’s patron, William Cecil. As is stated above, Gerard had managed numerous gardens for Cecil in the 20 years preceding the publication of the Herball. The next section, again a brief two pages, is entitled “to the courteous and well willing reader (Gerard and Johnson, 1633, p. ¶¶).” This is the formal introduction of the text. It is in this section that Gerard famously makes the erroneous claim that the earlier translation, begun by Dr. Priest, had been lost and all work in the book was of his own doing. Both of these sections were included in the original 1597 production of the book.

First page of Thomas Johnson's introduction 

 The final section was an introduction to the second edition penned by Johnson. It is in this section that Johnson begins to politely, but strongly, note that the current edition does not contain the inaccuracies present in the earlier publication. Another prominent aspect of this introduction is Johnson’s inclusion of a “Balanced and comprehensive historical introduction (Arber, 1935, p. 134)” to the subject of botany.

Contexts (Set the book into its period and provide some background information)

            The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a good time to be a European botanist. Prior to the Renaissance the field of botany was a dead science in Europe, consisting of the monastic reproduction of Greek and Roman period manuscripts (Pavord, 2005). While all herbals are, to some degree, durative of their predecessors, this rote reproduction began to decline around 1300 as botanists started to emphasize the use of empirical research and the scientific method. Although progress was being made, it was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450 that truly kick started the age of the grand herbal. Through the use of movable type and woodblocks, physicians and botanists could compile comprehensive herbals containing hundreds or thousands of images at a fraction of the pre-printing cost and production time.

            While slower to take off than their continental neighbors, the community of English botanists was rapidly maturing in the years before the production of the Herball (Pavord, 2005). Though many of its most respected members were foreign born and educated, a number of native born experts were beginning to join the foreign born piers at the center of English herbal studies located around Lime Street in London. This community was highly collaborative with both professional members and wealthy amateurs counted among its ranks, and wealth was an exceedingly important factor in the collection and study of plants at this time.

            The first edition of Gerard’s Herball was published just 105 years after Columbus landed in the New World, and new plants were coming across the Ocean at an astonishing rate. The introduction of the potato, corn, yucca, and the banana all happened in the course of 50 years (Pavord, 2005). These voyages were expensive, and connections with the men making the trips were vital to the apothecaries and physicians responsible for the production of herbal texts. If nothing else, the ability to be the first to claim knowledge of a new exotic species of fruit was useful in the selling of a book.

            The production of the large format herbal was reaching its peak as Thomas Johnson began his career as an apothecary (Pavord, 2005). Gerard’s Herball, though twenty years out of date and riddled with factual inaccuracies, was so dominant that no one had attempted to compile a replacement. That is not to say that the work of discovering and cataloging new botanical samples was not continuing in earnest. Though scoffed at by a number of his older contemporaries, Johnson and a group of likeminded collectors and catalogers were scouring the countryside looking for flora which had not been previously described. In addition to their excursions to the outlying regions of the British Isles, they were also maintaining correspondence and trading new world and other exotic specimens and seeds.

            A final note on the time is that the detailed study of botany was rarely a science onto itself; the knowledge of plants and herbs was a required skill for doctors and apothecaries. As noted above, neither Gerard nor Johnson were listed as herbalists or botanists, but as a surgeon and an apothecary respectively. The two men from whom Gerard stole the majority of his information, Rembert Dodoens and Mathias Lobel, were prominent physicians, with Lobel acting as the personal physician to King James I of England.