I'd like to point out that the original description - by Ulisse Aldrovandi - was not 'alchemical herbals' at all.
It was a description of plants known to "the alchemists" and by reason of his distinguishing them from the content in your standard Latin herbal, it may imply plants outside that range.
Who exactly he meant by 'the alchemists' we don't know. But he called them 'plants of the alchemists', not 'alchemical herbals'.
Aldrovandi had a professional interest in non-standard (and non-European) collections of plants and plant-pictures, because he was - to quote the wiki - "a driving force behind Bologna's botanical garden".
"At his demand and under his direction a public botanic garden was created in Bologna in 1568, now the Orto Botanico dell'Università di Bologna"
It was certainly not the first botanical garden in Europe.
A merchant called Datini had a collection of rare and exotic plants in his own botanical garden in the 14thC.
Bologna's, under Aldrovandi, may have had greater emphasis on medicinal plants, but not all did.
In writing about Aldrovandi, I noted one point not in the wiki article, viz.
"...Aldrovandi in later life was appointed Inspector of Pharmaceuticals"
adding that "it seems reasonable to suppose that he might know which plants were of interest to pharmacists, and which of greater interest to ‘alchemy’ [I should have said 'alchemists'] – in whatever sense he might have meant that term.
Changing Aldrovandi's own description of the manuscripts he collected and called: "
plants of the alchemists" to Torasella's "alchemical herbals" gives an altered sense of the original intention, and I do not think an easy assumption of alchemical content, or of these as a variety of ordinary medicinal herbal is necessarily desirable. But those are the facts.
That post about Aldrovandi
'The Great Aldrovandi... owned a Ming bowl' was published at voynichimagery on April 4th., 2013, and considers the issue of plants depicted apparently from first hand knowledge appearing the Voynich manuscript as much as two centuries earlier than the same plants' forms were correctly known to Europeans - who were still hunting for specimens of plants named in Dioscorides.
I also mention the arrival in Italy of some Japanese converts to Christianity in the first half of 1585, with the persons they met, and some annoyed remarks by Sassetti that the Jesuits in the east were not sending back information about any eastern natural history or botany.
So what does that say about the Voynich and the oft-assumed connection between it and the old Latin herbals?
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