The overwhelming number of plant species that medieval and early modern authors described has made the identification of these plants a seemingly intractable philological problem. Understanding this botanical profusion is complicated by the fact that today’s cultivated landscapes and gardens bear little resemblance to those of centuries past; plant breeders have altered the look of the most familiar crops and garden cultivars. Our experience of flora—what we see, smell, and taste—is profoundly different than that of authors who lived five hundred years ago. This makes the identification of the plants in medieval and early modern works a painstaking labor of terminological reconstruction.
Thomas M. Capuano has bravely taken up this labor in his marvelous Diccionario herbario, a dictionary of plant terms scoured from sixty-five medieval and early modern texts. Capuano has cast a broad net, drawing on works of literature, medicine, and agriculture from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The Diccionario is organized by vernacular plant terms, and for each plant Capuano provides a quotation describing the plant from a medieval or early modern text, vernacular names, and an identification of the plant (including its modern vernacular and scientific names). He also includes an index of scientific names, so that readers can explore the striking variety of terms used to describe individual plants. Capuano’s meticulous work will be a welcome aid to early modernists.
Knowing for certain which plants are denoted by any term is often impossible. When in 1557 Juan de Jarava translated Leonhart Fuchs’s De Historia Stirpium (1542), he probably used the word brezo to denote Calluna vulgaris (Scotch heather); other Spanish authors of the period, as Capuano notes, probably used the same word for Erica australis, or Spanish heath (96). This terminological flexibility hints at fascinating stories of usage and experience that cannot be told in a dictionary. Capuano judiciously calls his identifications of particular plants provisional and approximate (ii), but they will serve as immensely helpful points of departure for future scholarship.
Although Capuano’s achievement is remarkable, he has made some decisions that will confuse or disappoint. The dictionary begins with a very brief introduction that should have been much longer and Capuano does very little to help readers understand how he selected his sixty-five source texts. Curiously, for example, of the sixty-five sources, fourteen (or over 20 percent) are editions of the Celestina. He also cites one brief play by Cervantes (El viejo celoso) but no other dramatic works. It is not clear what system is at work here. Fifteenth-century manuscripts are very well represented; however, Capuano does not consult some of the most familiar works of early modern Iberian natural history (e.g., Clusius’s 1576 Per Hispanias). The selection of particular editions is also odd: Capuano cites the original 1513 edition of Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s extremely influential Obra de agricultura, but cites a 1724 edition of Miguel Agustí’s Libro de los secretos de agricultura (1626), which contains an important list of synonyms of plant terms. Frustratingly, the appendix in which the sources are listed omits the names of many of the authors (and in other instances goes so far as to cite the call numbers of the particular volumes consulted). These decisions remain opaque to readers.
The most controversial choice Capuano makes is to omit Spanish works about American and Asian flora. It is true that scholars such as Maríaluz López-Terrada and José Pardo Tomás have published numerous works that list and identify the exotic plants mentioned by colonial chroniclers and European natural historians, rendering their inclusion perhaps unnecessary here. Capuano characterizes his decision to exclude exotic flora as pragmatic (ii), and no doubt it was; the handsome, large-format book already contains thousands of entries. To omit exotic flora, however, misrepresents the botanical enthusiasms and political commitments of early modern Spanish authors. As Daniela Bleichmar, Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, and many others have noted, knowledge about exotic flora was not an abstract, scientific curiosity; it constituted an important element of imperial ideology. Capuano renders this largely invisible.
Despite my slight reservations about the selection of source texts and the exclusion of exotic flora, the Diccionario herbario represents a considerable achievement and a great service to readers who struggle to make sense of plant terms. Capuano’s meticulous excavation of fifteenth-century manuscripts will render the book of particular use to medievalists.
