The Siren and the Satyr as Spiritual Curatives in Jacob Meydenbach’s Hortus sanitatis

Abstract

Medieval herbals were encyclopedic medicinal compilations that detailed the physical structure and therapeutic properties of a wide range of plants, animals, and minerals. These books were essential to the practice of medieval physicians and herbalists, who often cultivated or collected their own medicinal specimens for use in the treatment of patients. 1 A fifteenth-century printed herbal held in the University of Melbourne ’ s Baillieu Library Rare Books Collection has been identified through examination of a hand-written inscription as a first edition Hortus sanitatis , published in 1491 by the Mainz printer Jacob Meydenbach. 2 The 1491 edition is the only one produced by Meydenbach, although three more economical editions were published by the printer Johann Pr € uss, who reduced the amount of paper required by using a smaller type and increasing the lines in each column of text. The Baillieu acquired its copy of the Hortus in 1903 and, prior to conservation treatment at the University ’ s Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, the book was in extremely fragile condition and missing its original binding and title page. 3 Containing only 386 of the original 454 leaves, the copy is imperfect; it retained, however, two alphabetised indices, several hundred hand-coloured woodcut illustrations, and a number of annotations in a later hand. 4 Many of the taxonomic entries in Meydenbach ’ s Hortus were Latin translations from a 1485 German-language compilation (also known as Hortus sanitatis, or Garten der Gesundheit ) by the printer Peter Sch € offer (c. 1425 – c. 1503), who was employed in the workshop of Johannes Gutenberg. 5 Unlike Sch € offer ’ s herbal, how-ever, Meydenbach ’ s version introduced a variety of fantastical and monstrous fauna, including the unicorn, the dragon, the manticore, the satyr, and the siren. Ostensibly a book of popular medicine, Meydenbach ’ s Hortus aligned itself closely with the tradition of the Christian bestiary, wherein the characteristics of various animals and monsters provided a didactic