The Impact of 16th Century German Botanical Treatises on Garcia de Orta’s Coloquios dos Simples
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 22105488 |
|---|---|
| Authors | João Paulo Cabral (0000-0002-2764-3538, Universidade do Porto, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2020 |
| Volume | 09 |
| Issue | 02 |
| Pages | 20-37 |
| Publication date | 2020-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Advances in Historical Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 2327-0438 • E-ISSN: 2327-0446 |
| Publisher | Scientific Research Publishing, Inc. (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4236/ahs.2020.92003 |
| OpenAlex | W3033003920 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
In the early sixteenth century, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Flemish and German academics led the revival of the study of botany. In Germany, Otho Brunfels, Jerome Bock, Leonhart Fuchs, Adam Lonicerus, and Valerius Cordus published herbals dealing with European medicinal plants, but notes on Asian products remain invaluable. The Portuguese doctor Garcia de Orta sailed to Goa in 1534. There, he published his Coloquios dos Simples e Drogas da India in 1563. It is precisely in the context of Indian materia medica that Garcia de Orta’s path intersects with that of the German academics. The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of Valerius Cordus’ and Leonhart Fuchs’ works on Orta’s Coloquios. To this end, the original Latin descriptions of Asian medicinal products made by Cordus and Fuchs were compared with Orta’s interpretations. It was observed that Garcia de Orta makes good use of Cordus’s descriptions of cardamom, cassia lignea, cinnamon, lignum aloes (agarwood) and tamarind fruits. His attitude towards Fuchs, however, was less accommodating because he was, in Orta’s words, “a heretic condemned for being a Lutheran” and he distorted the words of the German master about ivory. It was concluded that neither Garcia de Orta’s Renaissance humanism nor his scientific view of Indian natural history was any match for the influence of his religious beliefs. Orta did not escape the profound doctrinal and theological division that was raging Europe after the emergence of the Reformation movement
Art · Flemish · Garcia · German · Heresy · Humanities · Portuguese · Theology · Classics · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Studies in Science · History · History of Science and Medicine · Philosophy
Painting Naked Truth
The world of the Renaissance herbal
Towards a Reassessment of the Dating and the Geographical Origins of the Luso-African Ivories, Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries
The Many Books of Nature
Indigenous Knowledge and the Significance of South-West India for Portuguese and Dutch Constructions of Tropical Nature
Portuguese Contributions to Indian Botany
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |