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Minta Collins. Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Traditions. British Library Studies in Medieval Culture. London: British Library; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. 334 pp. Ill. $80.00 (cloth, 0-8020-4757-2), $34.95 (paperbound, 0-8020-8313-7).
Minta Collins's very scholarly survey of medieval herbals has the unusual distinction of having been reviewed in the New Yorker (16 July 2001)-a tribute to the book's visual appeal and to the ever-growing popular interest in medicinal plants. For historians of medieval medicine and of herbal medicine in any period, the book is invaluable.
Dr. Collins originally undertook this work in order to understand the context of a late thirteenth-century herbal, Tractatus de herbis, British Library Egerton MS 747 (the subject of her Ph.D. dissertation in art history at the Courtauld Institute; a facsimile of Egerton MS 747 is forthcoming from British Library Publications). Among the manuscript's four-hundred-odd drawings are some of plants that have clearly been drawn from nature. This is a notable break with tradition-for centuries, pictures had typically been copied along with the text, and they became increasingly stylized....