Medieval texts dealing with plants can rarely be called botanical in any contemporary sense. Most of them focus on the practical uses of plants as medicine. Although thousands of such herbals, valued for their useful applications, dominate our view of medieval writings about plants, this study considers a quite different kind of non-botanical treatise on plants from the later Middle Ages, one that addresses plants in terms of planetary dominance. Medieval writings on the connections between the celestial and the vegetable, unlike herbals and compendia of materia medica, appear to the modern reader to have little practical application. Nonetheless, a consideration of such writings is valuable if we are to appreciate fully how medieval people understood the vegetable world and its place in the cosmos. There were two kinds of such treatises disseminated in the late Middle Ages: one – made up of three textual traditions – addressing the relationships of all seven planets to plants; and a second cluster of texts, each one about a single plant deriving its powers from a specific planet (see Table 1).

Background

Planets loomed large in the Western pre-modern understanding of cosmic forces that affected the terrestrial. Seven planets were understood to rotate around the earth in a geocentric cosmos. The seven in this Ptolemaic model of the universe, accepted in the West before Copernicus and Galileo, included the sun and moon. Planets in the treatises discussed here could be classified in an order beginning with Saturn, the outermost planet in the geocentric cosmos, followed by Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and – closest to the earth – the moon. Each planet was understood to govern the day bearing its name, so an alternate sequence of planets was by weekdays: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday (Mars), Wednesday (Mercury), Thursday (Jupiter), Friday (Venus), and Saturday (Saturn). (See Table 1.) In some cases, the weekday order began with Saturday.

Attempts to identify plants named in these texts are tentative. It would be highly desirable to provide identifications using Linnaean nomenclature, but in the cases of the texts considered here, plant names vary, and identification is uncertain. In A.(1) of Table 1, for example, the plant associated with Saturn, asphodelos, is listed under Affodillus by Hunt and identified with a variety of plants, none of them the golden “daffodil,” Narcissus pseudonarcissus, that is described in fifteenth-century texts.