A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past.
 
This book traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the early modern period. By examining Greek, Latin, and Arabic botanical inquiry in this early era, Andrew Griebeler shows how diverse and sophisticated modes of plant depiction emerged and ultimately gave rise to practices now recognized as central to modern botanical illustration. The author draws on centuries of remarkable and varied documentation from across Europe and the Mediterranean.
 
Lavishly illustrated, Botanical Icons marshals ample evidence for a dynamic and critical tradition of botanical inquiry and nature observation in the late antique and medieval Mediterranean. The author reveals that many of the critical practices characteristic of modern botanical illustrations began in premodern manuscript culture. Consequently, he demonstrates that the distinctions between pre- and early modern botanical illustration center more on the advent of print, the expansion of collections and documentation, and the narrowing of the range of accepted forms of illustration than on the invention of critical and observational practices exclusive to modernity.
 
Griebeler’s emphasis on continuity, intercultural collaboration, and the gradual transformation of Mediterranean traditions of critical botanical illustration persuasively counters previously prevalent narratives of rupture and Western European exceptionalism in the histories of art and science.

Drawing upon literary, historical, and visual evidence, this collection of interdisciplinary essays examines how the Mediterranean shaped practices of gender in the premodern era. This volume bridges the gap between gender studies and Mediterranean studies, which have a natural fit with each other in their interest on defining identity carefully through connectivity and attentiveness to cultural hegemonies. The essays in this volume build off of this double approach to offer a unique contribution to the field, and use gender to understand the Mediterranean and the Mediterranean to understand premodern gender.

Whereas other volumes have examined gender in the premodern period or premodern Mediterranean Studies, to date no other volume has sought to explore the intersection of the two.  The interdisciplinary nature of the essays will make them useful to both scholars and teachers, for they will combine theory and practice in a length that makes them easily accessible to advanced students as well as specialized researchers. The first chapter provides a critical overview of the scholarship on Mediterranean studies as a field of area studies as well as an overview of gender studies in the medieval period. As such, the volume will be useful for students, teachers, and researchers, and its interdisciplinary nature reflects the diaspora of the Mediterranean itself.