Das ‚Debrecener Pflanzen- und Tierbuch‘

The Debrecen Book of Plants and Animals is an illustrated manuscript on parchment from the second quarter of the fifteenth century in the Library of the Reformed Theological University in Debrecen (Hungary). Largely ignored by earlier scholarship, it is the only illustrated German tranlsation of the most broadly disseminated corpus of herbal medicine from the Latin Middle Ages. The compendium, a collection of prescriptions for the treatment of various illnesses, contains four late classical texts: the first two, Ps.-Musa’s De herba vettonica and the herbal of Ps.-Apuleius, treat plant-based medicines, while the following two, the Liber de taxone and Sextus Placidus’s Liber medicinae ex animalibus, discuss medicines derived from animal material.
In contrast to the schematic illustrations of the Latin transmission, the Debrecen manuscript contains colored pen-and-ink drawings of extraordinary quality. The illustrator’s attempt to concentrate on the distinctive characteristics of individual plants and to represent them as lifelike as possible resulted in a hitherto unequaled precision in German-speaking regions. The central part of the book presents a facsimile of the manuscript, with the facing page containing a transcription and an English translation, so that facsimile, text, and translation can easily be compared. The edition and translation are accompanied by a commentary explaining problems of the Latin sources and the German translation, and are further enhanced by a glossary of the Bavarian vocabulary and an index of plant names. This edition is preceded by an extensive group of studies, which establish a new basis for the transmission and reception history of the Latin base text, attempt to trace the sphere of the source manuscript, and discuss the translation strategies of the German adapter. Marian Polhill (Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Puerto Rico) undertakes a contextualization of the ‚book of animals‘ within the hitherto little studied transmission of animal-based medicines in Arabic and Western cultures. Irmgard Müller (Professor of History of Medicine, Ruhr University Bochum) presents a medical-pharmacological study of the texts and examines the illnesses and their treatment in the context of medieval medicine. This multi-disciplinary collaboration combines literary, philological, medical-historical, pharmaceutical and art-historical research.