#hortus sanitatis

[diana-andraste]

[legally-i-am-death]

alrighty what's a myrmecoleon?

Alright buckle up motherfuckers because I never had a chance to present my temporary hyperfixation to the class of 100 students the way I was promised so I'm going to make it everybody's problem.

MYRMECOLEON!

Also known as the ant-lion, this magnificent beast would be nature's way of saying "Fuck this, I give up" - had it existed.

Because it's literally a half-ant-half-lion hybrid.

Pictured like this in Hortus Sanitatis (which has quickly become my favourite bestiary, we'll get to that)

the ant-lion is of course a mythical being. Which would be a reasonable end to the tale of this wonderous and possibly cursed creature, sure.

EXCEPT!

Just like many (or at least enough to be funny) creatures, this wonderful beast was quite possibly created due to a linguistic slip-up, a ye olde typo, if you will, a glitch in translation due to a mistake in the translated script, from possibly the oldest Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

So why is it in Hortus Sanitatis? Because one of the things this specific bestiary and herbiary is know for is that it includes mythical and folklore creatures and animals, which is made even more fun when you consider the author didn't really bother much trying to separate them from one another (As far as I know, I'm making my way through it with a damn dictionary so my progress is slow and a little confusing.) (It also has like a whole thing about uroscopy, which could mean nothing.)

If you want to check out the surrounding text, I took the illustration from page 550/913 of Hortus Sanitatis as scanned here.

Bestiaries in general have this fun tendency to use translated texts from other sources which can often be blamed for such fun things like accidentally inventing a whole new animal through a typo or accidentally filing a giraffe under chameleon (I'm pretty sure somebody far more educated on this topic than me made a post about that specific instance already).

So basically, Myrmecoleon is a lil or big fella that probably wouldn't be able to actually survive if real and was possibly created due to a typo being mistranslated by accident, which manages to tick off almost every box to make it my favourite creature rn.

I just think it's neat :3

[lionofchaeronea]

A spider on its web. Woodcut illustration from a 1547 edition of the natural history encyclopedia Hortus Sanitatis (Garden of Health), originally published in 1491. Photo credit: Wellcome Images/Wellcome Trust.

[nixieteeth]

eternally grateful to have a tattoo artist who gets excited when i send them shit like a Hortus Sanitatis woodcut as a design reference

look at my baby boys 🥹

[uwmspeccoll]

Summer Series: The Spectacle of Nature

Ortus sanitatis, or “Garden of Health”  

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.  

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.  

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.  

–Sarah, Special Collections Senior Graduate Intern

[picard-schreckensberger]

Hortus Sanitatis

1491

[dre4m]

Woodcuts from Hortus sanitatis, 1st edition Mayence, 1485

[heaveninawildflower]

Wodcuts from 1547. Hortus Sanitatis.

1) Winged mythical creature

2) Cockerel

3) Spider on its web

4) Five dogs

5) Three sheep

6) Adam and Eve

7) Three hares swimming in a river

8) A fish with the head of a pig

9) Mythical winged creatures

10) An onion.

Images and text information courtesy Wellcome Collection.  CC BY