The Vienna Dioscurides: Medicine, Magic and a Princess's Herbal

Around 512 the people of the Constantinople suburb of Honoratae wanted to thank a patron. Anicia Juliana, daughter of a western emperor and one of the richest women of the Roman world, had paid for a new church there. Their gift was a book: a luxurious copy of the most famous work of ancient medicine, Dioscorides' De materia medica, with a painting of every plant. On one of its first pages Juliana sits enthroned, flanked by personified virtues. It is one of the greatest books to survive from late antiquity, and it has been in constant use ever since.

The book

• About 491 leaves of parchment, with 383 surviving full-page paintings of plants out of an original 435 or so.
• The main text is De materia medica, written by the Greek physician Pedanius Dioscorides in the first century CE, the standard reference on medicinal plants for fifteen hundred years. The volume also contains poems and paraphrases on plants, snakes and poisons, birds and fish.
• The plant paintings are unusually naturalistic; many were copied from older illustrated herbals now lost.
• On UNESCO's Memory of the World register since 1997.

A thousand years of readers

The book stayed in Constantinople for a thousand years. Readers wrote in its margins: plant names in Greek minuscule, and later in Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Latin. It was rebound and repaired in the fifteenth century. After the Ottoman conquest it belonged, by tradition, to the physician of Suleiman the Magnificent's court. In 1569, on the advice of the Habsburg envoy Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, who had seen it in Constantinople, it was bought for the emperor Maximilian II and carried to Vienna.

Why it belongs in a religious archive

In the ancient and medieval world, medicine and religion were not separate. Healing plants were linked to gods and saints, collected at particular times with prayers or charms, and some plants carried legends of power. The Vienna Dioscurides shows the most famous:

The mandrake. Its forked root looks like a human figure. Legend said it shrieked when pulled up and killed whoever pulled it, so a dog must be tied to it and made to draw it out. One of the book's frontispieces shows the personification of Discovery (Heuresis) handing a mandrake to Dioscorides, with the dead dog at her feet. The mandrake was used as a sedative and anaesthetic, and it became central to later European folk magic and to accusations of witchcraft.

Symbology and sacred encoding

The patron as virtue. Juliana's portrait places her among personified virtues, a Christian-imperial image of the donor as a model of generosity. An inscription in the frame praises her building of churches.

Authority in a circle. Two pages show famous physicians gathered as a learned assembly, among them Galen and the centaur Chiron, who in myth taught medicine to Asclepius. Pagan and Christian authority sit together.

Plants as creation. For Christian readers, the ordered catalogue of plants and their powers could be read as a book of creation, showing the gifts God placed in nature.

Connections

Eastern Orthodoxy & Byzantium (ch60), with Classical Greece (ch15) and Rome (ch13) for the medicine it preserves, and The Witch Trials (ch32) for the later afterlife of mandrake lore. Compare the Voynich Manuscript (V01), whose plant pages are unread, and the Codex Gigas (V09).

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/vienna-dioscurides.html