THE MEANING AND ROLE OF HERBALS AND HERBARIA
THE MEANING AND ROLE OF HERBALS AND HERBARIA
Most generally, herbal is a collective name for books that feature the names and descriptions of plants. In the past, this information was often supplemented with texts about their medicinal, pharmacological, and often even magical effects. The term ‘herbal’ is derived from the Latin herba, ‘a plant’. Until the sixteenth century, herbal was used to denote books about medical plants (including their depictions); later, the term was also sometimes used to refer to herbaria, i.e., books containing dried flowers.
In the past, herbals and informative books about plants were used mostly to help treat the sick. They were used both by professionals (physicians, barbers, pharmacists, apothecaries, nurses, and students of all of the above) and laypeople (healers, wise women, midwives, etc.), but sometimes they were also used in domestic settings, mostly by housewives.
In the sixteenth century, botany had undergone revolutionary changes. This era was open to new ways of learning and interpreting the plant kingdom. Interest no longer focused just on medicinal plants: one can see efforts to describe as many plants as possible, plants growing in different environments, in various climatic and soil conditions. Journeys of discovery outside the ‘Old World’ led to encounters with new, exotic species, which required a new approach. In keeping with the times, illustrated herbals adjusted to new, more precise methods, and their wonderful illustrations aimed at capturing the likeness of the living model with maximum accuracy.
As science progressed, herbals and herbaria became educational instruments used not only by botanists but by everyone who studied plants, their presence in various locations, or their typical morphological characteristics, which helped determine the species and family. To this day, herbals and herbaria form a tangible testimony to botanical journeys of discovery around the globe, but they are also an irreplaceable source for documenting biodiversity and preserving samples of plants which serve as international reference standards.