Visualising Drugs & Dyes. Art and Pharmacology in Medieval Worlds, 600–1400

Plants, among other things, have long shaped the material practice and imagination of pharmacy. Far more than animals or minerals, plants and their products were central to medicine in premodern epistemologies. Notwithstanding a close, underlying relationship between art and pharmacology in surviving medieval texts produced between the seventh and the fourteenth century, visualizations of medical substance sand simplicia have not yet been the focus of art historical studies to a su$cient degree. Images of plants, pigments, and dyes invite investigations into their epistemic status as well as their therapeutic and mimetic capacities. What forms of knowledge do these images and substances provide? What audiences do they address and how does medicinal, pharmacological, or toxicological plant-related knowledge circulate, even across vast geographies in and beyond the Mediterranean? The project investigates how these images can be situated, between the practices and interests of scribes, painters, scholars, clerics, physicians, apothecaries, gardeners, rhizotomes, and others – while taking into consideration the changing status and roles of these actors across societies, including gender relations, while also asking for their role in concepts and imaginations of healing.