How ‘green’ were people in late antiquity and the Middle Ages? Unlike today, the nature around them was approached with faith, trust and care. The population size was many times smaller than today and human impact on nature not as extreme as it is now. People did not have to worry about issues like deforestation and sustainability.
This book is about the knowledge of plants and where that knowledge came from. How did people use earth and plants in ancient times, and what did they know about their nutritional or medicinal properties? From which plants one could make dyes, such as indigo, woad and dyer’s madder? Is it possible to determine that through technical research today? Which plants could be found in a ninth-century monastery garden, and what is the symbolic significance of plants in secular and religious literature?
The Green Middle Ages addresses these and other issues, including the earliest herbarium collections, with a leading role for the palaeography and beautiful illuminations from numerous medieval manuscripts kept in Dutch and other Western libraries and museums.

Claudine Chavannes-Mazel (1949) studied Art History and Palaeography/Codicology at Leiden University and earned her Ph.D in 1988. Her dissertation topic was the richly illustrated fourteenth-century encyclopaedia, Le Miroir historial that was made for the dauphin of France and is now kept in the Leiden University Library. From 1977-1983, she was part-time teacher of Manuscript Studies and Art History at the Tiele Academy in The Hague (now The Hague University of Applied Sciences). Except for an interval of four years doing research in London, she taught Medieval Art History at the University of Leiden (1979-1983, 1987-1993). In 1993, she was appointed Professor of Medieval Art History at the University of Amsterdam. She has had emeritus status since 2014.

Linda IJpelaar (1970) studied art history at the University of Amsterdam, where she received her Master’s degree cum laude. Her areas of specialisation are iconography and the history of the book. In cooperation with the Royal Library in The Hague and the Edam Museum, she curated the exhibition Machtige Boeken! De librije van Edam en de Reformatie. She works on contract as an instructor and contributes to museum exhibitions and publications.

Preface
PART 1 - Chronological Development: from herbarium pictum to herbarium vivum
Introduction | Early Writings on Beneficial Plants: Perceptions and Prescriptions
The Web of Written and Illustrated Plant Books from Antiquity to the Invention of the Printing Press
Chapter 1. From Copy to Copy. 1500 years of Plant Illustrations
Chapter 2 Early Printed Herbaria. A Brief Sketch Based on Examples from the Liberna Collection
Chapter 3. ‘Everlasting Gardens’ . Origin, Distribution and Purpose of the First herbaria viva
Part II - The Use of Plants in the Middle Ages
Chapter 4. Painting with Plants. The Use of Vegetable-based Dyes in Medieval Manuscripts
Chapter 5. Naming Names. Plants in the Age of Charlemagne
Chapter 6. The Long Shadow of Antiquity Medicine and Plants
Chapter 7. ‘The Cook is the Best Doctor'. Plants for Food and Health: Recipes and Prescriptions
Part III - Plants in medieval literature
Chapter 8. ‘And it Grew and Waxed a Great Tree' A Short Survey of Plants in the Bible
Chapter 9. Good Trees, Bad Trees Biblical Tree and Plant Symbolism in the Liber floridus
Chapter 10. The Herb Book in Jacob van Maerlant's Der naturen bloeme
Chapter 11. A Thorny Rosebush and Other Greenery: Love, Lust and Suffering in the Romance of the Rose
Part IV - Plants in Medieval Book Illumination
Chapter 12. Names of Flowers and Plants in the Margins of late Medieval Manuscripts
Chapter 13. Flowering Margins. The Development of Strewn-Flower Borders in Early Netherlandish Manuscript Illumination in the Fifteenth Century
Chapter 14. Flowers of Meaning. The Interpretation of Marginal Decoration in Southern Netherlandish Manuscripts from around 1500
Appendix I: A Hand-written Text from Late Antiquity in the Leiden University Library. The Wonders of Plantain in Apuleius Platonicus’ herbarium (Leiden, UB ms VLQ 9)
Appendix II: A Late Medieval Printed Text in the Athenaeum Library in Deventer Recipes in a Herb Book from 1497, the Ortus sanitatis (Deventer, AB 2000 E 45 KL)
Footnotes
Picture acknowledgments
About the authors
Bibliography
Indices