Beschreibung:

Leonhard Fuchs
[De historia stirpium commentarii insignes. Basel, 1542]
folio (354 x 231mm.), 483 (only, of 509) hand-coloured woodcuts, 14 additional plain plates from an 8vo work bound EXTENSIVELY ANNOTATED IN SEVERAL EARLY MODERN HANDS, each plate renumbered in manuscript in an eighteenth-century hand, eighteenth-century half calf, defective, lacking title, preliminaries and other leaves, several marginal repairs, a few extending into plates, some leaves trimmed at margins, browning and soiling, upper board becoming detached, extremities rubbed
A copy of "perhaps the most celebrated and most beautiful herbal ever published" (Printing and the Mind of Man) with annotations in the hands of several early modern owners, demonstrating the evolving relevance of Fuchs' herbal as a practical and scientific resource for readers of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.
The earliest annotations, in Latin, and sometimes several lines in length, appear to be from a learned Continental reader of the sixteenth or early seventeenth century. But from early on, the present copy clearly made its way into the hands of English readers. There are several brief annotations of a rather parochial nature in a sixteenth- or early-seventeenth-century English hand. This annotator names a few of the plants in English, sometimes giving folk names (e.g. "Jack by the hedg" for Garlic Mustard), and at one point mis-identifies an Iris as a "Daffadil" (p. 12). Another, seventeenth century, English annotator shows an active interest in the medicinal applications of the plants, noting, for instance, that the Nymphaea Candida (White Water Lily) "remedieth lascivious dreames, beinge dronken. But the frequencie of it weakeneth the genitalles". On the following page, next to the illustration of the plant, are found the same reader's remarks that "the roote dronke with wine is excellente for those that are troubled with griping of the bellie & a desire to go to the stoole", and that the plant "helpeth the paines of the stomache, and the bladder. It taketh of morphewe [i.e. a discoloured lesion] from the skinne".
There are also at least two eighteenth-century hands present. One of these annotators has renumbered the plates in a hand closely resembling the ownership inscription of William Beeston Coyte—a practising medical doctor, Cambridge graduate, and later fellow of the Linnaean Society, who inherited the Ipswich Botanic Gardens and compiled an exhaustive catalogue of its specimens. Although we cannot be totally certain of the Beeston Coyte attribution, marginalia in the same hand elsewhere in this copy certainly point to an erudite reader, versed in Classical Greek. For instance, next to the text on Chamomile is the note "so called from Kαμας & Μηλον because it hath the scent of an Apple". Much of the marginal commentary in this hand is concerned with the therapeutic application of plants, for instance the note on Southernwood, a plant "sometimes used in Physick accounted good to destroy worms in Children. vide Miller". The citation here is from Miller's Gardener's Dictionary, a widely-read eighteenth century treatise on plants cultivated in England. We can imagine Beeston Coyte using this copy of Fuchs to help him identify plants appropriate for cultivation in his physic garden—specimens which would then find practical application during the course of his day-to-day medical practice. Some of the plants are also captioned with their binomial nomenclature, suggesting that Beeston Coyte may have found Fuchs' sixteenth-century herbal an indispensable reference work when researching his Hortus botanicus Gippoviciensis (1796).
PROVENANCE:Samuel Ewer, soap-boiler of Bishopsgate Street, London; gifted by Ewer in 1787 to his son-in-law William Beeston Coyte (1740-1810): "W.B. C[oyt]e ex dono S. Ewer 1787" inscribed to preliminary blank, bookplate of William Beeston Coyte; thence by family descent
LITERATURE:Horblit 33b; Hunt 48; Nissen BBI 658; PMM 69; Stafleu TL2 1909; VD16 F 3242; USTC 602520