"Dragon" 25v

[nablator]

It would be useful to see more examples of these "herbs" in other "Achemist Herbals".  Based on this massive corpus of two samples (and some of Marco's comments), I conjecture that in fact there was only one "Alchemist Herbal", which was copied, mutated, truncated, and augmented through hundreds of copies by hundreds of scribes.  Has someone read Toresella's book about them?

Since I found one possible proto-"Alchemical herbal" ms. that has only two illustrated pages (herba Lunaria and I don't remember the name of the other one) I've been wondering too.

Toresella doesn't seem to have been able to find the exact source.

Translated by Marco Ponzi from Gli erbari degli alchimisti:

The Origin of the Herbals of the Alchemists

Dating the herbals of the alchemists is not easy, and it is also very difficult to pinpoint the origin of their iconographic tradition. They all seem to be closely Italian because, with a couple of exceptions, almost seventy of these alchemical herbals were produced in Italy, primarily in northern Italy, in the Venetian region. Furthermore, while some of the herbs can be easily traced to the Corpus of Pseudo-Apuleius and the Circa instans, such as the herb "grias" (fig. 22), which is directly derived from Pseudo-Apuleius and remains unchanged in many herbals, it seems that the alchemists' herbal is an independent elaboration, perhaps occurring in the 13th century. However, there are no examples of these herbals preceding the mid-14th century, and their period of greatest diffusion is the 15th century, disappearing by the mid-16th century.

All alchemical herbals descend from one or more original manuscripts which drew from the same body of knowledge used to create the initial text(s) from which all subsequent alchemical herbals were copied.

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