Erin Petrella (Columbia University)
Magicae Herbae, Alchemy, and the 15th Century Reception of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis
At Book II.2 of the Historia Naturalis, Pliny the Elder says of nature, sacer est, aeternus, immensus, totus in toto, immo vero ipse totum...omnium rerum certus et similis incerto. Such “unscientific” views resulted in critiques of Pliny as a natural history authority (Garrison 1931; Goodyear 1982; Wallace-Hadrill 1990) in the Renaissance. This waning, however, took place within the same epistemic discourse (e.g. Foucault 1966; Smith 1994) as the 15th century stabilization of printed editions of Pliny (e.g. Leoniceno 1492; Barbaro 1493) and the earliest botanical texts (Brunfels 1530; Fuchs 1542).
There was a third category of texts within this discourse: medieval herbals, which were heavily dependent on the Historia Naturalis. The connections between the herbal tradition and the Renaissance reception of Pliny have been well researched in terms of content (Nauert 1979; Ogilvie 2006; Doody 2010; Nutton 2012) and the printing history of Pliny’s work (Monfasani 1988; Davies 1995). Similarly, the connections between the development of botany as a science and the herbal tradition are well established (Arber 1912; Kemp 1990; Kusukawa 1997; Nutton 1997).
Yet one relevant feature of Pliny’s work has been largely ignored: at XXV.5, Pliny discusses in surprising depth a number of magical herbs, in the ancient accounts of which, he must admit, there is some truth, coguntque confiteri multum esse veri quod supersit. At the same time, he bemoans the association of herbs with the magicae vanitates of Asclepiades, the Greek rhetorician turned “physician”. This tension in Pliny, between a willingness to discuss magical herbs and a concern for their abuse by Asclepiades, had a parallel in the Renaissance reception of the medieval herbal tradition. Herbals were annotated, corrected, and incomplete, with no philosophical first causes underlying their claims. The imprecision of this tradition reached its apex in the fifteenth century, when a number of alchemical herbals (e.g. Firenze MS 106, Pavia Aldini 211, Penn LJS 419) appeared in Italy. Unlike their predecessors, these herbals illustrated and described plants that did not exist and therefore had no referents and no actual uses. By the late 15th century, this aporiatic feature of the alchemical herbals had become conceptually problematic for the humanists.
This paper argues that the alchemical herbals displayed an attitude towards nature that was in opposition to the Italian humanists and early botanists, who tried to control nature by stabilizing Pliny’s Natural History and by systematizing the nomenclature and description of plants. However, Pliny’s description of nature as “sacred, eternal, immeasurable” and “certain of all things yet resembling the uncertain”, together with his engagement with magical herbs, preceded the alchemical herbal tradition. The discourse in which the reception of Pliny in the 15th century and the development of botany were both embedded was therefore also characterized by the waning of the alchemical herbal tradition.