Nuncius 35 (2020) 20–63 brill.com/nun A Woodblock’s Career Transferring Visual Botanical Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
[email protected] Abstract The Antwerp publishing house Officina Plantiniana was the birthplace of many impor- tant early modern botanical treatises. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies, the masters of the press commissioned approximately 4,000 botanical wood- blocks to print illustrations for the publications of the three Renaissance botanists – Rembert Dodoens, Carolus Clusius, and Matthias Lobelius. The woodcuts became one of the bases of early modern botanical visual culture, generating and transmitting the understanding of plants throughout the Low Countries and the rest of Europe. The physical blocks, which are preserved at the Museum Plantin-Moretus in Antwerp, thus offer a material perspective into the development of early modern botany. By exam- ining the 108 woodblocks made for Dodoens’ small herbal, the Florum (1568), and the printing history of a selected few, this article shows the ways in which the use of these woodblocks impacted visual botanical knowledge transfer in the early modern period. Keywords woodblocks – early modern botany – knowledge transfer 1 Introduction In Antwerp in 1568, 108 woodblocks with images of ornamental and fragrant flowers were used for the first time to print the illustrations in the book Florum, et coronariarum odoratarumque nonnullarum herbarum historia (referred to as the 1568 Florum in this article).1 Ordered by the printer-publisher Christophe 1 Rembert Dodoens, Florum, et coronariarum odoratarumque nonnullarum herbarum historia (Antwerp: Christophe Plantin, 1568).