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From Herbals to Walled Gardens
Plant Gender and Iconography
It is difficult to say precisely when classical antiquity ended and the Middle Ages
began. In the West, the Roman Empire ended decisively in 476 ad with the fall of Ravenna
to the Ostrogoths, an East Germanic people. This seismic event marked the founding of
Western Europe, whose inhabitants spoke Latin and Germanic languages and whose rulers
over time adopted Catholicism and accepted papal authority. In contrast, the Eastern, or
Byzantine, Empire centered in Constantinople (the “second Rome”) was insulated by dis-
tance from the Germanic tribes and avoided a catastrophic collapse. Instead, it was gradu-
ally absorbed into Western Asia until little remained of its former Roman identity. Citizens
of the Byzantine Empire spoke Greek instead of Latin, belonged to the Eastern Orthodox
Church instead of the Catholic Church, and adopted eastern styles of art and architecture.
In the seventh century, a new Abrahamic religion— Islam— arose and spread throughout
the Arabian Peninsula. By the middle of the eighth century, the new Islamic Empire had
displaced the old Sassanid Persian Empire and had expanded westward to include all of
northern Africa, Spain, and Portugal, and eastward to encompass modern- day Iraq, Persia,
Armenia, parts of Afghanistan, and northwestern India.
Despite their numerous cultural differences, the educated classes of the three
civilizations— Western Europe, the Byzantine Empire, and the Islamic Empire— shared a
common scientific vocabulary based on Greek physics and cosmology, including theories
about the four elements and the Hippocratic humors theory. In the field of botany, medi-
eval scholars deferred to the authority of De Plantis, believing it to be the work of Aristotle.
Likewise, they continued the tradition of the illustrated herbal based on Greek models.
This shared Hellenistic heritage of the medieval world, combined with the rapid diffusion
of ideas that followed in the wake of conquest and commerce, allows us to discuss medieval
botany as a relatively integrated whole.