The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides

Abstract

IN 1909 the late Canon Vaughan of Winchester, having seen the collection of books on botany bequeathed to Magdalen College, Oxford, by Mr. John Goodyer (1592–1664), described Goodyer as “a forgotten botanist of the seventeenth century”. The Canon was Rector of Droxford: we know that many of the plants the descriptions of which by Goodyer were printed by Dr. Thomas Johnson in 1633 in his revised version of the rather unsatisfactory “Herbal” which Mr. Jolm Gerard (1525–1612) published in 1597, were grown in Goodyer's garden at Droxford. But as one of these plants was the “edible Sunflower”, the first tuber of which Goodyer had planted by March 25, 1617, and as Goodyer was able to report on October 17, 1621, that he had already “stocked Hampshire” with “this wonderfull increasinge plant”, we know that,whatever may have been the case with botanists, the memory of Goodyer has survived among gardeners interested in the history of their craft. In his introduction to the revision of Gerard's “Herbal”, Johnson informed his readers that Goodyer was the friend who had rendered him most assistance in that undertaking, and declared that his friend was “a man second to none in his industrie and searching of plants, nor in his judgment or knowledge of them”. The trifling amount £ f editorial modification bestowed on some of the descriptions with which Goodyer supplied him, suggests that Johnson was as much struck by the judgment his friend showed in recording his observations as by the knowledge these observations had yielded.

The Greek Herbal of Dioscorides.

Illustrated by a Byzantine A.D. 512, Englished by John Goodyer A.D. 1655, Edited and first printed A.D. 1933 By Dr. Robert T. Gunther. Pp. x + 701 (Oxford: Dr. Robert T. Gunther, 5 Folly Bridge, 1934.) n.p.