German Incunabula Herbals from the Russian State Library: Towards Popular Literature

Abstract

Early printed herbals have a special place in the 15th-century book production as they were popular both with academics, including medical scientists and pharmacists, and with the common reader. The popular response to the mass production of herbal books made possible by the invention of printing left textual and linguistic evidence in the form of handwritten marginal notes. In the present study, six copies of illustrated herbals printed in Mainz by Peter Schoeffer in 1484 and 1485 are compared as to the subject, language and function of the marginal notes found in them. Five of these books are from the Rare Books Department of the Russian State (former Lenin) Library, the sixth copy from the Moscow University Library is used to enable better comparison. The analysis has shown that the types of marginal notes vary significantly depending on the owners’ social status, interest, background, and on the time and region. Marginal notes in Latin or Greek are considered from the point of view of their thematic (content) and chronological (dating) characteristics. As the result of many centuries of natural science, herbals were an important source of professional knowledge for academics, including medical scientists and pharmacists, of the time. Thematically, linguistically and paleographically, marginal notes of this type can be ascribed to professionals or students of natural sciences. Notes made considerably later than the incunabula era can in fact only be explained by an academic interest on the part of the reader (some notes date after 1700). Marginal notes made in German and, judging by the handwriting, dating closer to 1500 reflect work of common medical practitioners or even of lay readers, who used their herbals to cope with practical problems of their everyday life. These German marginal notes are of high interest as a source for German language history, as they contain synonymous names of plants, additional to those used in the printed text. The analysis of their form, dialect, and distribution proves that they offer valuable lexical material (regional names) in the semantic field usually scarcely documented in medieval literary texts. Those descriptions, which are indicative of region or dialect, show a distinct Southern German origin of their authors.