From Plant Press Vol. 16 no. 1
The history of Botany is characterized by great figures such as the Greek Theophrastus (ca. 370-280 B.C.), the German Hieronymus Bock (1498-1554) and Leonart Fuchs (1501-1566), and the French Joseph Pitton de Tournefort (1656-1708) and Carl von Linnaeus (1708-1778), to mention just a few. They are not, however, the only ones who had contributed to the development of botany, from the most remote Antiquity to the present day of plant science. Botany as a discipline was made by a multitude of observers, authors, and illustrators whose names have not been preserved. Their works are hidden in notebooks located in libraries worldwide.
Alain Touwaide and Emanuela Appetiti explored several libraries in Athens and Thessaloniki in November and December 2012, searching for books and texts authored by Greek botanists whose identities have been lost through the centuries, from Antiquity through Byzantium between the 5th century BC to 15th AD, and later on in the Ottoman Empire.
Their exploration of these library collections was extremely productive. They found more than 100 volumes that were unknown to the scientific community. They discovered one manuscript, for example, that had representations of plants that had never been noticed by previous scholars.
Touwaide plans to publish the results of their research in the form of a world census of Greek botanical and medical manuscripts that will substantially expand our knowledge of the history of botany and botanical illustration. His work will provide the resources for a complex reconstruction of the development of botany, illustrating the slow process of accretion generation after generation, with a whole wealth of small, yet relevant observations first transmitted by oral tradition and written down at a certain point in time.
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