“A Time Capsule of Late Renaissance Botanical Publishing: Caspar Bauhin (1560-1624) and the De Bry Family”
Abstract
How did complex, illustrated books about plants make their way into print in the early seventeenth century? For this talk, we will discuss three interconnections between Basel’s prominent botanist-anatomist, Caspar Bauhin, and the de Bry publishing house that reveal rarely-seen stages in early modern publication. Two virtually unstudied sets of material relating to Bauhin in the Universitätsbibliothek Basel (UBB) archives prompted our research:
- a folder of botanical drawings, watercolors, and copperplate proofs (“Plant Images Related to Caspar Bauhin and his Herbarium,” UBB, K IV 3, A-D);
- Bauhin’s unique cut-and-paste draft of his uncompleted Theatrum Botanicum -- a volume that interleaves a copy of Bauhin’s 1623 Pinax Theatri Botanici with pages of clipped woodcuts of plants and manuscript notes ([Caspar Bauhin and Johann Caspar Bauhin], “De Graminibus,” UBB K I 6a&b).
First, the folder’s watercolors and engraved proofs show that Johann Theodor de Bry, capitalizing on the success of the publication of Bauhin’s illustrated Theatrum Anatomicum (Frankfurt, 1605), persuaded Bauhin to help with Florilegium novum (Oppenheim, 1612, 1614, 1618), a deluxe, oversized album of elegant engravings of flowers. Second, we conjecture that Bauhin’s dissatisfaction with the Florilegium’s lack of real botanical content and order convinced him to return to the Renaissance herbal format of side-by-side text and woodcuts -- and to leave de Bry out of the Pinax’s acknowledgments. Finally, the folder’s watercolor of the American milkweed plant raises a tantalizing question: in the course of publishing Thomas Harriot’s A briefe and true report of the new found land of Virginia (Frankfurt, 1590), had the de Bry family made this close copy of a milkweed originally painted by John White, Harriot’s companion, in “Virginia” circa 1585, and transmitted it to Bauhin?
