DODOENS, Rembert (1517-1585)

Stirpium historiae pemptades sex Sive Libri xxx

Antuerpiae [Antwerp]: Ex officina Christophori Plantini [Plantin-Moretus], 1616. Folio. (13 5/8 x 9 inches). With 1341 woodcuts of plants within text, [xvi], 872, [66] pp.

Contemporary ornately blind-stamped panelled pigskin

A major Plantin-Moretus edition of Dodoens’s culminating herbal, bringing together the work of one of the leading sixteenth-century botanists in a large Latin folio illustrated with an extensive series of botanical woodcuts.

Dodoens' Stirpium historiae pemptades sex is his final and most comprehensive botanical work, arranged in six "pemptades," or groups of five books, making thirty books in all. It gathers and revises his decades of botanical writing, from the vernacular Cruydeboeck tradition through the Latin synthesis first printed by Plantin in 1583. The work describes plants by appearance, names, habitat, flowering time, and medicinal use, reflecting a period in which botany was developing from the older herbal tradition into a more systematic observational discipline. The illustrations are central to the book's authority. The text is illustrated throughout with more than 1,300 woodcuts of plants, many associated with the Plantin workshop and with designs by Pieter van der Borcht, alongside blocks connected with the earlier herbal tradition of Fuchs and Dodoenss Cruydeboeck. The 1616 edition is often described as the second Plantin edition and the best revised and enlarged form of the work, with the Plantin-Moretus imprint and imposing folio format presenting Dodoenss botanical scholarship in its mature Latin form. Dodoens, a Flemish physician and botanist from Mechelen, served as imperial physician in Vienna before becoming professor of medicine at Leiden. His botanical writings circulated widely in Dutch, French, English, and Latin, influencing later herbals, including John Gerard's Herball. This Plantin-Moretus folio combines classical authorities, vernacular plant knowledge, medical use, and Renaissance botanical illustration in one of the defining books of pre-Linnaean botany.

Hunt 201; Nissen BBI 517.

Item #42756

Price: $4,750.00