Scientist of the Day - Peter Schoeffer

Columbine, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 162, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

Peter Schoeffer, a German printer, was born around 1425 and died in 1503. He worked mainly in Mainz, and he began his printing career as an assistant to Johannes Gutenberg, who was then in the process of printing the 42-line bible, the famous Gutenberg bible, which was completed in 1455. But the two parted ways when Schoeffer teamed up with the man who lent money to Gutenberg and then wanted to be repaid.

Peony, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 298, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

Iris, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 21, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

Schoeffer (sometimes Schöffer) printed many books in Mainz, but we are going to look at just one, a book with no title that everyone calls the Gart der Gesundheit ("Garden of Health"), or Der Gart, or just the Gart. It is an herbal, a book about plants and their medicinal uses, a genre that went all the way back to the ancient Greek Dioscorides (1st c. C.E.).  There are thousands of surviving medieval manuscript herbals, so it is not surprising that an early printer might want to set one into type. In fact, Schoeffer had done just that the year before, printing a medieval Latin herbal in 1484, along with woodcut versions of the unrecognizable plants in the manuscript.

White lily, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 229, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

Chicory, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 93, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

But the Gart was different, and not just because the text was now in German. The text was written by someone who had first-hand knowledge of the plants being discussed. And best of all, of the nearly 400 woodcuts that illustrate the text, at least 100 were drawn from life by a reasonably skilled artist with a good feel for layout, so the plants and especially the flowers look good!  That they were hand-colored with some skill is a welcome bonus.

Blind-tooled, alum-tawed skin binding, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

We show here some of the most attractive woodcuts in our copy, including a columbine, a peony, an iris, a white lily, and a chicory plant.  Note that these are large woodcuts, printed on sizable sheets of paper.   We also show the formidable blind-tooled, alum-tawed binding, and the marvelous full-page frontispiece that depicts Dioscorides, the father of medical botany. Our copy also contains an abundance of hand-written annotations, crammed into every available blank space, in a variety of hands.  This was a book meant to be used.  That being considered, it is in surprisingly good condition, considering that it will be 541 years old on this coming Mar. 28. There are some 77 copies of the Gart listed in the international incunabula database, with many of these in European libraries.  Most of these copies are incomplete, and we suspect that there are less than a dozen complete or nearly complete copies of the Gart in the world.  Even fewer have anything like the extensive annotations that appear in our copy, making it close to being a unique treasure. My thanks to Bruce Bradley for this bibliographic information.

Frontispiece depicting the ancient Greek physician Dioscorides, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

Although we regularly call the Gart an herbal, it was first and foremost a pharmaceutical work, and since many medical remedies were prepared from animal products, there are quite a few woodcuts of animals in the Gart, showing the sources of ivory, castor oil, collagen, horn, and the like. We show you one here, a feisty stag, as our last image, and in the near future, we will offer a second post on the animals of the Gart. We will also include, because we ran out of space here, the two most frequently reproduced Gart images, a mandrake, and his underground companion, a woman-drake, which, if not animals, are certainly animal-like.

A stag, hand-colored woodcut, [Gart der Gesundheit], printed by Peter Schoeffer, Mainz, chap. 292, 1485 (Linda Hall Library)

The Gart was a revolutionary book in its use of images drawn from nature by an artist, and it would not be equaled for another 45 years, when the publisher of Otto Brunfels' Herbal (1530) decided to include woodcuts drawn by a pupil of Albrecht Dürer. This time, the revolution took hold.   Images “drawn from life” became an essential requirement for all botanical books, and soon for zoological and anatomical books as well.

William B. Ashworth, Jr., Consultant for the History of Science, Linda Hall Library and Associate Professor emeritus, Department of History, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Comments or corrections are welcome; please direct to ashworthw@umkc.edu.