byzantine empire
This is an extract from:
Byzantine Garden Culture edited by Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
published by
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Washington, D.C.
© 2002 Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University
Washington, D.C.
Printed in the United States of America
www.doaks.org/etexts.html
The Vienna Dioskorides and Anicia Juliana
Leslie Brubaker
Dioskorides of Anazarbos, a physician and pharmacologist, wrote the Materia medica in the first century of our era, probably around .. 65. The text is essentially a herbal and lists hundreds of plants along with their medicinal uses. The Materia medica has many novel features, but pharmacological texts had existed for centuries before Dioskorides wrote his influential version: fragments of “drug lore” from the Mycenaean period and passages of
Homer suggest early general knowledge, which was apparently first codified in a medical manual sometime in the fourth or fifth century .. The earliest herbal, book 9 of
Theophrastus’ Historia plantarum, was written around 300 .. This work and later Hellenistic efforts, such as Nicander’s Theriaka and Alexipharmaka of ca. 130 .. (two poems on remedies for poison that remained familiar in the Byzantine period, as we shall see), were rather haphazard compilations. Dioskorides’ aim was to introduce order and accuracy to pharmacology; medieval appreciation of his efforts is evident in the scores of Greek, Latin, and Arabic copies of the Materia medica, which remained a fundamental handbook until the
Italian Renaissance.1
The Vienna Dioskorides and Its Illustration
The sixth-century copy of Dioskorides’ Materia medica in Vienna (Nationalbibliothek, cod. med. gr.1) includes 383 botanical pictures, the earliest preserved illustrations to
Dioskorides’ description of the pharmaceutical properties of plants.2 The title page (Fig. 1), composed specifically for theVienna manuscript,3 explains that the
Byzantine Garden Culture edited by Antony Littlewood, Henry Maguire, and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn
published by
Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection
Washington, D.C.
© 2002 Dumbarton Oaks
Trustees for Harvard University
Washington, D.C.
Printed in the United States of America
www.doaks.org/etexts.html
The Vienna Dioskorides and Anicia Juliana
Leslie Brubaker
Dioskorides of Anazarbos, a physician and pharmacologist, wrote the Materia medica in the first century of our era, probably around .. 65. The text is essentially a herbal and lists hundreds of plants along with their medicinal uses. The Materia medica has many novel features, but pharmacological texts had existed for centuries before Dioskorides wrote his influential version: fragments of “drug lore” from the Mycenaean period and passages of
Homer suggest early general knowledge, which was apparently first codified in a medical manual sometime in the fourth or fifth century .. The earliest herbal, book 9 of
Theophrastus’ Historia plantarum, was written around 300 .. This work and later Hellenistic efforts, such as Nicander’s Theriaka and Alexipharmaka of ca. 130 .. (two poems on remedies for poison that remained familiar in the Byzantine period, as we shall see), were rather haphazard compilations. Dioskorides’ aim was to introduce order and accuracy to pharmacology; medieval appreciation of his efforts is evident in the scores of Greek, Latin, and Arabic copies of the Materia medica, which remained a fundamental handbook until the
Italian Renaissance.1
The Vienna Dioskorides and Its Illustration
The sixth-century copy of Dioskorides’ Materia medica in Vienna (Nationalbibliothek, cod. med. gr.1) includes 383 botanical pictures, the earliest preserved illustrations to
Dioskorides’ description of the pharmaceutical properties of plants.2 The title page (Fig. 1), composed specifically for theVienna manuscript,3 explains that the