Hempe

John Gerard’s Herball has a significant if somewhat controversial place in the history of European botanical science. Gerard, curator of a physic garden in London, was allegedly commissioned to provide an English translation of Rembert Dodoens’ Stirpium historæ pemptades sex after its first translator unexpectedly died. Gerard combined Dodoens’ material with the work of Flemish botanist Matthias de L’Obel, who endorsed Gerard’s completed herbal by writing a commendatory letter published in its opening pages. Gerard’s illustrations were also mostly derivative, extracted from the herbals of his famous predecessors: Fuchs, Mattioli, Dodoens, and Hieronymous Bock. He published the resulting volume under his own name, with only a brief mention of his sources in the preface of the work.

Gerard adapted his classification of plants from Dioscorides. Information about each plant is categorized by the subheaders “the description,” “the place,” “the time,” “the names,” and “temperature and vertues.” In his unique seventeenth century prose, Gerard describes the virtues of the hemp plant above: “It consumeth winde, as the said Author [Galen] saith in his booke of the faculties of simple medicines, and is so great a drier, as that it drieth up the feed if too much be eaten of it...Matthiolus saith, that the feed given to the hens causeth them to lay eggs more plentifully.”