Selected Readings
Plants, knowledge and traditional uses of plants, and books on plants in all parts of the world from Antiquity to present day, including methodological thinking about the fields of ethnobotany, economic botany, ethnopharmacology, and medical traditions are abundant and as diverse as numerous. Here is a selection.
The historian of ancient pharmacy John Scarborough collected several of his past essays in the volume, Pharmacy and Drug Lore in Antiquity. Greece, Rome, Byzantium (Variorum Collected Studies Series). Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2010, whereas the historian of the Middle Ages Agostino Paravicini Bagliani edited a volume of studies entitled Le monde végétal. Médecine, botanique, symbolique (Micrologus’ Library 30). Firenze: Sismel-Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2009.
The album Flora: The Aztec Herbal edited by Martin Clayton, Alejandro de Avila, Luigi Guerrini, reproduces a manuscript owned by Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597-1679). This codex was a copy of the famous Codex Badianus that reports the uses of plants by Precolumbian Aztecs and included color representations of such plants. The album is published in the collection The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, Series B: Natural History, 8. Turnhout: Harvey Miller Publishers and Brepols, 2009.
The reproduction of nature is a constant source of study as the work by Roderick Cave, Impressions of Nature: A History of Nature Printing. London: The British Library, 2010, suggests.
Modern ethnobotanists working in the field and collecting the knowledge of the increasingly rare traditional healers offer new approaches and the results of their work, be it for Europe: Manuel Pardo de Santayana, Andrea Pieroni, and Rajindra K. Puri (eds), Ethnobotany in the New Europe: People, Health, and Wild Plant Resources. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books Ltd, 2010, or North America: Paul Minnis (ed.), People and Plants in Ancient Eastern North America. Washington, D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 2010, and Paul Minnis (ed.), People and Plants in Ancient Western North America. Washington D.C., Smithsonian Institution Press, 2010.
Last but far from least, the current movement of return to medicinal plants is at the center of a renewed analysis by Ramesh Bandari, The Renaissance of Traditional Herbal Medicine. New Delhi: Cyber Tech Publications, 2010, and contributes to the return of pharmacognosy: Gunnar Samuelsson and Lars Bohlin, Drugs of Natural Origin. A Treatise of Pharmacognosy. Stockholm: Swedish Pharmaceutical Society-Swedish Pharmaceutical Press, 2009.
