Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean

“Botanical Icons is an exceptional book. . . . a thoroughly-researched—and evidence-based—academic appreciation of the art—and science—of illustrations in botanical-medical texts from antiquity until the Middle Ages. It’s a fascinating account that will be appreciated by botanists specifically, and by all who are interested in the transmission of botanical knowledge.” * Plant Cuttings * “Recommended.” * Choice * “Botanical Icons is a fascinating, thought-provoking, critical survey of plant illustration practices in the premodern Mediterranean. Griebeler takes his audience on a journey that forces one to reconsider conceptions (and misconceptions) of Mediterranean visual botanical knowledge that are at the root of the modern scientific depiction of plants. The rich, scholarly text, which provokes questions on every page, is supported and augmented by the use of many carefully selected comparative images from across Mediterranean cultures.”  -- Stephen A. Harris, University of Oxford “Botanical Icons advances an original direction of interpretative inquiry into botanical illustration, one that weaves together art history, philology, and the history of medicine. Challenging historiographical trends that place ancient botanical illustrations and their medieval descendants into narratives that privilege the Latinate (‘Western’) tradition and culminate in the naturalistic treatment of plants in the early Renaissance, Griebeler reveals the complementary and contradictory ways that illustrations contributed to the production of visual knowledge of plants across diverse cultural and geographical locations of the Mediterranean basin. This exquisitely illustrated book joins our most significant surveys of botanical illustration.​​” -- Sarah R. Kyle, Iowa State University