Botanical Icons is a smart and meticulous study of premodern botanical art. The book counters conventional arguments about botanical illustration that read antique and early modern botanical visual culture as stagnant traditions based on the uncritical copying of earlier manuscripts. Instead, the book positively characterizes what [ premodern botanical illustrations] show, how they show, and what they might tell us about their makers and original viewers understanding of plants. . . . Scholars of the history of science from antiquity to the eighteenth century have much to learn from this remarkable book. * Isis * On finishing this excellent book, I was encouraged to think about my own relationship to plants and images of them, how I understand that relationship, and how I manage and mobilize it. . . . Botanical Icons argues, thoroughly and persuasively, that human work at comprehending plants and optimizing their utility for us is one of our most consistent needs and activities. Far from describing a distant, academic world of study-bound botanists, Griebeler provides a complex study of the science of plants, a historical science based on experience of the world, collaboration across time and space, and constant production of material aids to that studyin his book, primarily illustrated manuscripts. Correcting scholarship that has valued the early Renaissance as a point of creation of a naturalistic and accurate natural science, the author establishes the long history of such a discipline among Byzantine, Islamicate, and Latinate scholars who had developed before that misleading benchmark of Western history. * West 86th * I advise reading this outstanding work of scholarship from start to finish, word for word. * Plant Science Bulletin * Botanical Icons is a rich, stimulating and clearly written book, from which the expert can learn just as much as a reader without knowledge of the (enormous) state of research. * Bryn Mawr Classical Review * Botanical Icons is an exceptional book. . . . a thoroughly-researchedand evidence-basedacademic appreciation of the artand scienceof illustrations in botanical-medical texts from antiquity until the Middle Ages. Its 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
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