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How ‘green’ were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability. This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer’s madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature? 'The Green Middle Ages' addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.

Inhoudsopgave

Preface PART 1 - Chronological Development: from herbarium pictum to herbarium vivum Introduction | Early Writings on Beneficial Plants: Perceptions and Prescriptions The Web of Written and Illustrated Plant Books from Antiquity to the Invention of the Printing Press Chapter 1. From Copy to Copy. 1500 years of Plant Illustrations Chapter 2 Early Printed Herbaria. A Brief Sketch Based on Examples from the Liberna Collection Chapter 3. ‘Everlasting Gardens’ . Origin, Distribution and Purpose of the First herbaria viva Part II - The Use of Plants in the Middle Ages Chapter 4. Painting with Plants. The Use of Vegetable-based Dyes in Medieval Manuscripts Chapter 5. Naming Names. Plants in the Age of Charlemagne Chapter 6. The Long Shadow of Antiquity Medicine and Plants Chapter 7. ‘The Cook is the Best Doctor'. Plants for Food and Health: Recipes and Prescriptions Part III - Plants in medieval literature Chapter 8. ‘And it Grew and Waxed a Great Tree' A Short Survey of Plants in the Bible Chapter 9. Good Trees, Bad Trees Biblical Tree and Plant Symbolism in the Liber floridus Chapter 10. The Herb Book in Jacob van Maerlant's Der naturen bloeme Chapter 11. A Thorny Rosebush and Other Greenery: Love, Lust and Suffering in the Romance of the Rose Part IV - Plants in Medieval Book Illumination Chapter 12. Names of Flowers and Plants in the Margins of late Medieval Manuscripts Chapter 13. Flowering Margins. The Development of Strewn-Flower Borders in Early Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination in the Fifteenth Century Chapter 14. Flowers of Meaning. The Interpretation of Marginal Decoration in Southern Netherlandish Manuscripts from around 1500 Appendix I: A Hand-written Text from Late Antiquity in the Leiden University Library. The Wonders of Plantain in Apuleius Platonicus’ herbarium (Leiden, UB ms VLQ 9) Appendix II: A Late Medieval Printed Text in the Athenaeum Library in Deventer Recipes in a Herb Book from 1497, the Ortus sanitatis (Deventer, AB 2000 E 45 KL) Footnotes Picture acknowledgments About the authors Bibliography Indices

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