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The output of this profound, life-long desire was a large collection of almost 900 dried plant specimens from France, Italy, Lebanon, Syria and today’s Iraq bound in four book volumes. He also reports that the tales of Augsburg merchants had awakened in him the desire to travel (Rauwolf 1583). He expresses his intention to acquire knowledge on these plants and see them in their native habitats in the Mediterranean. In the first lines of his travelogue, Rauwolf finely outlines the concept of sixteenth century botany, expressing his keen interest, since very early in his life, in the plants described by the ancient Greek and Arabic authors. This book was to become a bestseller at its time, having been published in multiple editions and translations (Walter 2009 Ghorbani et al. This hazardous journey that lasted 3 years (1573–1576) is documented in detail in Rauwolf’s printed travel account (Rauwolf 1583). Later he became famous as the first early modern European to travel to the Near East up to Baghdad in search for new medicinal plants (Walter 2009 Ghorbani et al. Rauwolf was born in Augsburg, a bustling merchant city in southern Germany, from a middle class family of iron traders. In this so-called botanical Renaissance of the sixteenth century, no other naturalist exhibited the adventurous and pioneering spirit of the German physician, botanist, and traveler Leonhard Rauwolf (1535?–1596). It was through these processes that botany diverged from a medicinal practice into a scientific discipline of its own (Stefanaki et al. They carried out field expeditions to collect plants, press-dried and glued them on paper sheets, compiling the oldest book herbaria that survive today. Turning to nature in search for the plants described in antiquity, these sixteenth century naturalists discovered new plants, unknown to the ancient authors, and attempted for the first time in history to catalogue all then known species (Ogilvie 2006 Cooper 2007 Egmond 2018). Finally, we reconstruct the story of making of the book herbaria, as evidenced through observations of paper watermarks and handwritten texts in the book volumes, and show that all four book herbaria of Rauwolf were probably bound between 15.ĭuring the sixteenth century, numerous scholars across Europe devoted themselves to the documentation, description, collection, and preservation of the natural world (Ogilvie 2006 Cooper 2007).
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We also show that Leonhart Fuchs (and not Carolus Clusius) extensively annotated the three book herbaria.
#ERIK LEONHARD OBITUARY PROFESSIONAL#
We further discuss Rauwolf’s professional botanical network during his student years and suggest that the famous Swiss botanist Johann Bauhin (1541–1613), friend and companion of Rauwolf during his field excursions and their medical studies in Montpellier, has played a significant role in the compilation of this precious historical plant collection. These well-preserved specimens indicate that Rauwolf was eager to collect exotic plants already in his early botanical steps.
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We show the botanical value of Rauwolf’s early book herbaria, exemplified by two exotic American specimens, namely one of the oldest surviving specimens of tobacco ( Nicotiana rustica), collected in Italy, and the oldest known French record of prickly pear ( Opuntia ficus-indica). These form a three-volume plant collection bound in leather and gold, which contains over 600 plants that Rauwolf collected between 15 in S. Here, we focus on the less studied, early book herbaria of Rauwolf. A very prominent figure among them was the German physician, botanist, and traveler Leonhard Rauwolf (1535?–1596), famous for his travel account and luxurious book herbarium containing plants from the Near East. The sixteenth century was a golden age for botany, a time when numerous naturalists devoted themselves to the study and documentation of plant diversity.