Introduction: The World of Plants in Premodern Medical Knowledge

The study of plants has traditionally developed as an important complement to medicine, especially as it pertains to the uses of medicinal plants in the preparation of recipes and therapies. This is what scholars generally call medical botany: its emphasis on the knowledge of plants as the basis for treatments, hygiene, therapies, and body balance has thrived since the ancient times,1 and it is sometimes differentiated from the study of plants in their own right. While the latter largely fell out of favour from late antiquity to the Renaissance, medical botany overshadowed the study of plants. Notwithstanding this differentiation, the extent to which plants and plant products were used to prepare remedies can serve as a benchmark to appreciate the changes in the history of botany, as Anne Stobart and Susan Francia have recently outlined. Indeed, analyzing the wide variety of connections between medicine and plant studies provides a way to see how the still-fragmented world of plants was understood in the pre-modern period.2 Through this volume’s case studies, we aim to delineate how much, in the transformations from the Renaissance world of plants to a modern science of plants, medical botany played a relevant role, combining traditions with innovative approaches.