Medieval Plants

Since before the time of Socrates, humankind has known the value of plants -- from flowers which may look superb and which may simultaneously be lethally poisonous, to roots which can contribute to combating disease and providing other medical benefits. The Middle Ages comprised an era of social reorganization leading to considerable differentiation between the rural politically-unrepresented poor and the urban aristocratic rich. In parallel there was a similar differentiation between occupations -- kitchen-cooks were no longer also household stewards, apothecaries no longer also physicians, barbers no longer also surgeons. Every one of these occupations made professional use of plants. The secrets of their use were handed down from teacher to pupil. In time there even grew up a pseudo-scientific lore around them. Based on extremely rare and beautiful documents traced by the author to their hiding-places in the best museums on Earth, the text -- which is of considerable historic value in its own right -- opens this world of the past to our world of the present. Readers, while perhaps experiencing a certain sentimentality for centuries now gone, will discover the vertu of, say, mandrake or vervain from a time when such names alone were enough to inspire poetry and evoke dreams of faraway horizons.