Claudine A. Chavannes-Mazel and Linda IJpelaar’s edited volume, The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction of Plants in the Western World, 600–1600 begins with a caveat: the title may center on the word “green,” but the text does not tackle ecology in the modern sense. Instead, this translation of their 2019 Dutch language volume De Groene Middeleeuwen: Duizend jaar gebruik van planten 600–1000 explores the impact of plants on European book traditions from late antiquity through early modernity. These interactions are manifold and diverse, ranging from the representation of plants in pharmacological texts to the use of plants themselves as art materials, and the editors divide the fourteen essays into four sections around common themes. 

Part one, “Chronological Development: From Herbarium Pictum to Herbarium Vivum,” considers early strategies for recording the diversity of plant life in books and serves as a platform for exploring the interwoven histories of manuscript illumination, printed representations of plants, and early press-sample herbaria. These essays draw attention to the essential challenge of transmitting botanical knowledge through writing and the opportunities and pitfalls of pairing text with painted and drawn representations. Together, they call attention to the diverse uses that pictorial representations of plants supported and the ways that artists and users from antiquity to the sixteenth century sought to harness the immediacy of images. Following a schema established by Charles Singer in 1927 (“The Herbal in Antiquity and Its Transmission to Later Ages,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 47,1 (1927), 1–52), Claudine Chavannes-Mazel uses chapter one to map the development of herbaria from Hellenistic sources through the fifteenth century. Manuscript stemmas reveal the general conservatism of the illuminations that accompany texts in manuscript herbals. While Chavannes-Mazel calls attention to strands of naturalistic representation based on life study of the later Middle Ages, she pushes against a teleology that ends in the inevitable triumph of naturalism. Instead, she argues that manuscript-transmitted imagery was well tailored to a book culture where recognizable, schematic forms served several functions beyond the recognition of live plants.

Chapter two, by Iris Ellers, accounts for shifting methods of representation in the early modern period that gave rise to naturalistic representations of plants. She argues that changing scientific priorities, a mass influx of new plant species into Europe, and the replicability of printing encouraged users of sixteenth-century herbals to rely on illustrations to identify plants and organize plant knowledge and, in turn, to deploy naturalistic plant representation. This account of the development of early modern herbals focuses on rarely published incunabula and other printed books in the Liberna Collection, housed in Ellers’ home institution of the Draiflessen Collection in Mettingen. In chapter three, Gerard Thijsse traces the origin and early development of pressed and bound herbaria. Thijsse locates the emergence and rapid spread of herbaria within an internationally connected group of physicians in the early sixteenth century. Like the other essays in this section, Thijsse argues that new technologies (especially paper) and changing relationships with classical sources (especially the renewal of interest in the works of the third-century BCE philosopher Theophrastus and the first-century CE physician Dioscorides) encouraged the development of novel ways to represent plants, namely by assembling dried and pressed plants into the form of codices.

Part two, “The Use of Plants in the Middle Ages,” deploys manuscripts as a source for information about the use of plants in medieval societies. In chapter four, Micha Leefang and Annabel Dijkema contribute to a growing body of scholarship focused on the material and technical profile of medieval manuscript painting and demonstrate the current achievements and limitations of both archival and scientific analyses. Mining period recipe books call attention to a wide palette of plant-based pigments known to medieval illuminators, but Raman Spectroscopy readings on samples of late medieval Dutch manuscripts point instead to a greater emphasis on mineral pigments in actual practice. As Raman Spectrometry cannot distinguish between organic pigments, the authors are left to speculate on the composition of plant-based pigments based on their archival knowledge and experiments with the medium. Chapter five mines three well-known ninth-century Carolingian sources, the Capitulari de Villis, the Plan of St. Gall, and the Hortus of Wahlafrid Strabo to assemble a list of plants grown in early medieval gardens, while the sixth and seventh chapters focus on the relationships between plants and the human body. In chapter six, “The Long Shadow of Antiquity: Medicine and Plants,” Chavannes-Mazel challenges classic narratives that characterize medieval medical professionals as ignorant quacks. To do so, she historicized their practices within the intellectual legacy of antiquity, Christian religious scruples, and contemporary intellectual movements, especially the translations of Greek medical texts and Arabic commentaries in the medical college called the School of Salerno that flourished from the ninth to the fourteenth centuries. Chapter seven focuses on the use of plants in the diet and triangulates the relationship between medieval foodways and theoretical knowledge about nutrition and diet laid down in the texts of the second-century doctor Galen and the Tacuinum Sanitatis penned by Ibn Butlan in the late eleventh century.

Part three, “Plants in Medieval Literature,” explores the circulation of plant imagery as symbols, diagrams, and topics of popular interest in the literary culture of the Middle Ages. Chapter eight considers the mutability of plant identification based on biblical passages and the history of attempted identification, while chapter nine calls attention to the use of trees as diagrams that serve as multilayered metaphors for spiritual and religious content. Chapter ten’s discussion of Jacob van Maerlant’s thirteenth-century text Der Naturen Bloeme describes the circulation of herbal knowledge within thirteenth-century vernacular texts and the porosity of the boundaries between popular and professional medical literature. It also reveals the profusion of scribal errors in manuscript copies of Book X of Der Naturen Bloeme that alter the identity of plants and the diseases they supposedly treat, offering an interesting caveat to Chavannes-Mazel’s claim for professional competence among medieval doctors. Chapter eleven introduces the Romance of the Rose (written in two stages between ca. 1225 and 1270) and considers the multivalence of the rose as a symbol.

The three essays in part four, “Plants in Medieval Book Illumination,” turn to the decorative representation of plants in the Western manuscript tradition. Chapter twelve offers a general stylistic introduction to historiated manuscript margins, calling attention to formal developments, the interplay of life study and pattern books as source material for illustration, and the role in imaginative practice like creating chimerical plants. The author also includes a series of tables of standardized nomenclature for various plant forms encountered in later medieval Franco-Netherlandish manuscript illumination which will be of especial utility to manuscript specialists and catalogers. Chapter thirteen traces the development of the so-called “strewn borders” and its enmeshment within a wider tradition of representing plant life in manuscript borders. While now-dominant narratives imagine the strewn border emerging from a fundamental shift in the spatial relationships between text, margin, and miniature, this chapter emphasizes continuity with practices of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and the incompleteness of its trompe l’oeil effects (see for instance Thomas Kren and Scot McKendrick, Illuminating the Renaissance: The Triumph of Flemish Painting in Europe, (Los Angeles, 2003), 124). The final chapter intervenes into a longstanding debate about the significance of the plant imagery in “strewn borders,” and calls attention to instances where flowers harmonize or add layers of meaning to the content of text and miniature (for a summation of this discussion, see Lynn F. Jacobs, Thresholds and Boundaries: Liminality in Netherlandish Art (1385–1530) (Oxon, 2018). After these chapters fall two appendices. The first is a transcription and translation from a sixth-century copy of the fourth-century Herbarium of pseudo-Apuleius in Leiden (UB Ms. VLQ 9), while the second is a translation of five entries on medicinal plants from an incunable copy of the Ortus Sanitatis in the Atheneumbiblioteek (2000 E 45 KL) published in Mainz by the printer Jakob Meydenbach. The author uses the translated entries of five plants to compare medieval herb lore to modern scientific research into the therapeutic potential of plants.

Across the essays, The Green Middle Ages: The Depiction of Plants in the Western World, 600-1600 seeks to characterize herbals as sufficient to the culturally embedded needs of their makers and users. This approach serves their broader agenda of undercutting the condescending dark ageism that animated early studies of medieval herbals, especially the foundational work of Charles Singer (1927). Because the authors rarely review their bibliography within the text or call attention to the history of the field or the state of the scholarship, reading this text alongside Minta Collins’ Medieval Herbals: the Illustrative Traditions (2000), and Andrew Griebeler’s Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (2024) could provide readers with a firm context upon which to judge the interventions of specific essays. Usefully for those interested in the Western herbal tradition, the book emphasizes never-before or rarely illustrated manuscripts, incunabula, and printed books from Dutch museums and library collections. The text is therefore sumptuously illustrated, but the confusing organization of the images and errors in the captions can make it difficult to locate images mentioned in the articles.