Featured on PDR in the collection Johannes Hartlieb’s Book of Herbs (1462)

This 1462 Kräuterbuch (“Book of Herbs”) by Johannes Hartlieb enfolds, verbatim, much of Konrad von Megenberg’s Buch der Natur, published a century earlier and considered by scholars to be the first natural history written in German. (The Buch der Natur itself reworked herbals by Thomas of Cantimpré and Albert Magnus, who, in turn, borrowed heavily from Arabic botanical handbooks.) Unlike its predecessors, however, Harlieb’s volume features 160 illustrations abreast textual descriptions of the plants’ medicinal uses, and is thought to be the only fully illustrated herbal from the incunabula period of German history. In addition to reproducing the Buch der Nature, Hartlieb’s Kräuterbuch includes additional chapters from an unknown source on drugs, derived from both plants and animals. The cost of producing such an ornate…