Notebook Book of Herbs

These twelve plates are taken from the Kräuterbuch (Book of Herbs), a treatise by Johannes Hartlieb completed in 1462. The work 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 serving as a practical handbook for physicians and apothecaries, these approximately 160 illustrations—highly colorful yet deliberately simplified—depict medicinal herbs, along with a small number of animals, some of them mythical. They were most likely intended as a prestigious manuscript for the library of Albert III of Bavaria (1438–1460).