The word "incunabula" is Latin, a neuter plural meaning "swaddling clothes" or "cradle." In book history, it is used to refer to all books printed with metal type from the beginning of Gutenberg's movable type printing press, around 1455, to the end of 1500. This is an arbitrary but traditional date that marks the end of the "infancy" of printing, as it rapidly spread to centers across Europe and into the Americas. Known as "incunables" in Spanish and French (and often in English), "incunaboli" in Italian, and "incunábulos" in Portuguese, these earliest of printed books have long been of great interest to librarians, book collectors, and historians of the book.
What Are Incunabula?, The University of Chicago Library
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This page is from a collection of leaves from incunables - books printed in roughly the first 50 years of printing technology. It was printed in Augsburg by Hans Bämler in 1475. The woodcut shows a scene of martyrdom.
Today we are looking at a natural history book from the incunabula period, meaning it was printed before the year 1501. Hortus sanitatis (also written Ortus sanitatis, Latin for The Garden of Health), is a natural history encyclopedia that was first published by Jacob Meydenbach in Mainz, Germany in 1491. Not much is known about the author, but the Hortus sanitatis is considered one of the earliest printed natural history books and it is encyclopedic in its approach, covering plants animals, birds, fish, and stones. It is illustrated with numerous woodcuts throughout. The copy I looked from UW-Madison Special Collections is uncolored, but there are hand-colored copies that exist. The frontispiece depicts what looks like alchemists and their jars of elixirs. Along with naturalistic woodcuts of plants and animals, the book also features many biblical scenes such as Adam and Eve. A notable aspect of the Hortus sanitatis is that it was one of the last herbals to only feature Old World plants and it is in the Medieval herbal tradition. We will discuss the impact of voyages of exploration on the science of botany in later posts.
The history of botany in the West can be traced back to ancient scholars such as Aristotle (384-322 BCE), Theophrastus (371-287 BCE) and Dioscorides (40-90 CE). One of the earliest surviving illustrated manuscripts of Dioscorides' text De materia medica (On Medical Material) is the Vienna Dioscurides or Vienna Dioscorides, an early 6th-century Byzantine Greek illuminated manuscript that also include some illustrations of animals along with plants. Botany for many of the Greek philosophers like Aristotle was a subject based on ideas and not on direct observation of plants. Systematic botany has its roots in the field of medicine because herbs are useful as healing agents. Â
Medieval botany loosely resembled that of the ancients but was mainly based on local folk practices. An important scholar of the medieval period is Albertus Magnus (1200-1280), a German Catholic Dominican friar, philosopher and bishop who wrote extensively on a wide range of topics that fall under the umbrella of “natural philosophy” which included the study of plants. Albertus Magnus is considered ahead of his time because he had some original observations and suggestions for the classification of plants while still being rooted in Aristotelian botany. Â
I am looking at the evolution of the printed herbal and how it influenced new ideas of direct observation and scientific processes. Herbals are thought to have reached their zenith in the 16th century with the three founders of botany, German physicians named Otto Brunfels (1488-1534), Leonhart Fuchs (1501-1566), and Hieronymus Bock (1498-1554). I will return to these Renaissance botanists, but I wanted to make sure that we featured an early printed herbal such as Hortus sanitatis that is still very much steeped in the Medieval worldview.
View more posts in the Summer Series: The Spectacle of Nature. Â
–Sarah, Special Collections Senior Graduate Intern
The two pages of the Valencian Bible that survived the Inquisition.
Did you know that Catalan/Valencian was the 4th language in the world that the Bible was printed in? Known as the Valencian Bible, it was printed in 1477, only after the Vulgate in Latin (1448), the translation to German (1466) and Italian (1471).
The first translation of the Bible in the Catalan language had been made by the Catholic Church between 1287 and 1290 but, as you’ll know, the printing press wasn’t invented until 1440, so before that date all books had to be copied by hand.
The printing press allowed for many more books to be produced in less time and for cheaper, and so more copies came to be in circulation.
However, in 1482 the Inquisition started an investigation because it suspected the Valencian Bible might be heretic. The Inquisition burned all the copies of this bible and imprisoned Daniel Vives, the corrector who had worked in the text and who the Inquisition considered responsible for it.
Only two pages have survived, which had been kept inside another book. In the early 1900s, it was bought by North Americans and nowadays it’s kept in New York (USA).
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Lucifer devours Brutus, Cassius, and Judas Iscariot in Dante’s Inferno.
Dante Alighieri, 1265-1321. Divina commedia. IImpressi i[n] Venesia : P[er] Bernardino Benali & Matthio da Parma, del MCCCCLXXXXI adi .iii. marzo [3 March 1491]Â
