Towards a New Science: John Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum
Introduction
The Theatrum Botanicum is a herbal, written by esteemed herbalist and apothecary John Parkinson, and published in 1640. It consists of over 1,700 pages and has approximately 3,800 detailed woodcuts.1 It is the largest of its kind, describing around 3,800 species of plants.2 The tradition of the herbal is one that extends back to antiquity.3 Brent Elliott describes a herbal as “a treatise on medicinal plants, traditionally intended for an audience of doctors and apothecaries.”4 They were used for plant identification and medicinal purposes.5
Historical Context
The Theatrum Botanicum could be considered an example of the progression of natural history. However, to discuss it solely as such would diminish its historical significance. This remarkable book is better understood as a transitional object, a last glimpse of the converging ends of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution before a new intellectual area of scientific inquiry began.
Conceived broadly, the Renaissance occurred between 1300-1650, and the Scientific Revolution between 1450-1700.6 It is notable that the Scientific Revolution began around the time print came to Europe, an event which significantly impacted European intellectual culture. Print allowed for a wider spread of knowledge, which would have enabled the scientific process of experimentation and replication to occur at a faster and larger rate. This new and vast access to comparative resources was an important component in the creation of the Theatrum Botanicum as it allowed for Parkinson to conduct comparative research and seek a true understanding of the natural world.7
Humanists took interests in the medical and scientific texts of antiquity in the early 15th century.8 They rejected the “corrupt medieval translations” and sought “true” explanations and understandings of the natural world.9 These pursuits lead to a renewed “engagement with the empirical world”, which arguably set the stage for the scientific revolution and thedevelopment of the new scientific method.10
As science progressed towards a new field throughout the 17th century, one of the biggest advancements for herbals was the improvement of nomenclature and organization. 11 This was an issue that plagued many early men of science, including Sir Francis Bacon, who was dismayed by the lack of accuracy, writing:
“[There] are either names of things which do not exist (for as there are things left unnamed through lack of observation, so likewise are there names which result from fantastic suppositions and to which nothing in reality corresponds), or [there] are names of things which exist, but get confused and ill-defined and hastily and irregularly derived from realities" 12
The names for plants were so varied and inconsistent that Leah Knight observes “so much of botanical work consisted simply of trying to assign correct names to plants.”13 Parkinson’s herbal attempted to address these issues, while also attempting to merge tradition with progress. According to Anna Parkinson, he had “collated and corrected existing literature, adding results of his own experiments.”14 Another reliability issue herbals faced were the depictions, which had become so distorted by centuries of hand copying that they were rendered practically useless for identification.15 Botanists were therefore dependent on the written descriptions instead, and Elliott aptly notes that “anyone who has attempted to identify a plant from a description alone will understand why descriptive botany made few strides until the invention of printing.”16
Parkinson's Place
Observation was a crucial part of Parkinson’s methodology.17 Where he could not observe a plant himself, he did extensive research.18 In instances he did not know the answer, he was not shy to reveal so himself, as he often does in what he calls "tribe 17", which contains ‘Strange and Outlandish Plantes.” Tribes are what Parkinson uses to section and classify his plants, though no explaination was found as to why he chose this term.
He would perform practical tests on the plants when he could, and relied on his practical experience as a gardener to guide his research and findings.19 He combined this modern empirical approach with Renaissance inquiry, actively seeking original sources in an attempt to uncover the “truth.”20
Using a very modern and innovative approach, he also compared modern sources he deemed reliable from across continental Europe.21 It reflected the culmination of Renaissance and Scientific Revolution methods such as a restoration of accuracy and the pursuit of truth, things which lead to the emerging scientific pursuit of empiricism and replicable observation, which were also characteristics of Parkinson’s research methods.22 It was Parkinson’s generation that brought about the transition to modern science, and were it's true pioneers.23
Parkinson's protp-scientific methods are exemplified by physical characteristics of the Theatrum Botanicum too, such as the woodcuts and the content organization. For the purposes of comparison, similar images from the 1633 reprint of John Gerard’s The Herball or Gernall Historie of Plantes have been included.
Published just over 40 years after Gerard’s original (1597), Parkinson’s herbal was purportedly intended as a replacement for Gerard’s.24 In the images presented, important similarities and differences should be noted. In both cases, plants are described in order of kind, description, place, time, names, and virtues. Parkinson generally goes into more detail than Gerard did, but respects the categories and some of the observations made by his predecessor.
In the images presented, one might notice the remarkable resemblance between the woodcuts of the edible mushrooms and “flaxweedes.” At first glance, they appear nearly identical. It is only upon closer examination that subtle differences, demonstrating Parkinson’s tendency to keep what was accurate and replicable, but improve upon what was lacking.
The most important differences are the general organizational structure of the book and the accuracy of information for each plant. Gerard separates plants into broad categories, divided among three “books” which is included in the first book, not a table of contents. Parkinson divides his categories among seventeen “tribes” of his own design, which present a more specified categorization of the plants and reside in their own table of contents at the start of the book. He organized them first according to their physical effects in the first seven, then expanded “towards modern botanical classification to arrange the huge number of plants that did not fit into the traditional arrangement of a medical catalogue.”25 His masterpiece is just as full of the medicinal uses for plants as discussions of their various names and “mistaken identities”, which plagued herbals for centuries.26 Jill Francis describes Parkinson's midset as a product of the “new empirical methods of scientific observation and experiment.”27 He aimed to create a reliable resource, a standard.
Conclusion
The Theatrum Botanicum presents a masterpeice which demonstrates a respect fpr the past and appreciation for the future. It hybridizes older Renaissance methods of inquiry through its endeavour to uncover the truth nehind all information through a vast survey of sources, while also including new and observable information gathered through new scientific methods of empirical inquiry. Within the next fifty years in England, science became formalized, and this book is a material emblem of the men who brought science into a new age.28
By: Vilde Bentzen
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1. Observation.
2. Julie Bruton-Seal, Matthew Seal, The Herbalist’s Bible: John Parkinson’s Lost Classic Rediscovered, (Simon and Schuster, 2014), chapter 4.
3. Brent Elliott, "The World of the Renaissance Herbal," Renaissance Studies 25, no. 1 (2011): 24-41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24420235, 24.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Lois N Magner, and Oliver J Kim, “The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution,” A History of Medicine, 3rd ed., (2018): 119–52. https://doi.org/10.1201/9781315113814-6, 119.
7. Anna Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist: John Parkinson, Herbalist to King Charles I, (London: Frances Lincoln, 2007), 258-259.
8. Leah Knight, Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture, (London: Routledge, 2009), 17.
9.Magner and Kim, “The Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution,” 120.
10. Knight, Of Books and Botany, 17.
11. Knight, Of Books and Botany, 18.
12. Ibid., quoting Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum p. 342.
13. Ibid., 18.
14. Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 258.
15. Elliott, "The World of the Renaissance Herbal," 27.
16. Ibid., 27-28.
17. Jill Francis, “John Parkinson: Gardener and Apothecary of London,” in Critical Approaches to the History of Western Herbal Medicine: From Classical Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. Susan Francia and Anne Stobart, 238-239.
18. Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 256-260.
19. Francis, “John Parkinson: Gardener and Apothecary of London,” 238-239.
20. Ibid., 231.
21. Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 258; Francis, “John Parkinson: Gardener and Apothecary of London,” 240.
22. Ibid; Parkinson, Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 10.
23. Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 10.
24. Elliott, "The World of the Renaissance Herbal," 35.
25. Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 258.
26. Ibid.
27. Francis, “John Parkinson: Gardener and Apothecary of London,” 229-230.
28. Bruton-Seal and Seal, The Herbalist’s Bible, chapter 4; Parkinson, Nature’s Alchemist, 10.