Background: Botany in Ancient and Medieval Europe

Botany in Ancient and Medieval Europe

Since antiquity plants have been recognised as fundamental to human lives. By providing us with the essentials of life, it is hardly surprising peoples across the globe created elaborate and sophisticated ideas about plants important to them. However, western scientific approaches to understanding plants were shaped in Ancient Greece and Rome (Hardy and Totelin, 2016).
 
The Greek philosopher Theophrastus (c.371-c.287 BCE) theorised about the lives of plants, whilst Romans applied plant biology to medicine, e.g., Dioscorides (c.40-c.90 CE) and agriculture and horticulture, e.g., Varro (116-27 BCE), Cato the Elder (234-149 BCE) and Virgil (70-19 BCE). Theophrastus’ Enquiry into plants and On the causes of plants are collections of lecture notes discussing plant anatomy, physiology, morphology, ecology and classification (Morton, 1981). In contrast, Dioscorides’ De materia medica is a practical, illustrated work focused on medicinal plants, which, for nearly 1,500 years, was the basis of western knowledge about the medicinal properties of plants, as it was copied, translated, recopied and abstracted (Arber, 1986).
 
During the first millennium of the current era, knowledge of the Greek language was lost in western Europe (Ogilvie, 2006). Rediscovery of Greek science in Europe happened where cultures and ideas met. In the first centuries of the second millennium CE, Greek, Muslim and Christian knowledge came into contact in southern Europe (Al-Khalili, 2010). The Schola Medica Salernitana in Italy was particularly important in this respect. Here Greek manuscripts, on plants and many other subjects, held in the Arab world, were translated into Latin (Morton, 1981). Western Europe re-discovered ancient Greek knowledge, spurring humanist ideas of the Renaissance (Ogilvie, 2006).
 
Whereas Ancient Greek philosophies viewed humans as part of nature, Christian doctrine interpreted humans as apart from nature (Morton, 1981; Shapin, 2018). The Earth was at the centre of a universe fundamentally created for humans; everything subservient to the caprice of Homo sapiens. Moreover, the doctrine interpreted the world as fallen into corruption; the natural world was merely a backdrop to humanity’s spiritual quest.