Book of Herbs Postcards

These twelve plates are taken from a treatise by Johannes Hartlieb, completed in 1462, the Kräuterbuch (Book of Herbs), which revises and expands upon the Buch der Natur (Book of Nature), the first German-language encyclopedia of natural history, published a century earlier by the Bavarian canon, entomologist, and meteorologist Konrad von Megenberg (1309–1374).Rather than a practical handbook intended for physicians and apothecaries, these 160 illustrations—highly colorful yet simplified—of medicinal plants (along with a few animals, some of them imaginary) should probably be regarded as a prestigious work created for the library of Albert III of Bavaria (1438–1460).