MAT-MED Materia Medica in Transit. The Transforming Knowledge of Healing Plants

Project Information

MAT-MED in Transit

Grant agreement ID: 844886

DOI

10.3030/844886

Project closed

EC signature date 12 April 2019

Start date 1 October 2019

End date 31 December 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 251 002,56

EU contribution

€ 251 002,56

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MAT-MED in Transit (MAT-MED Materia Medica in Transit. The Transforming Knowledge of Healing Plants)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2022-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

'Materia medica' is a Latin expression meaning the body of knowledge about the medicinal properties of plants, of certain animals and minerals - the so-called 'simples' - that constitute the raw material for the preparation of medicinal remedies. The locution derives from the Latin title of the massive compilation put together in the 1st century AD by the physician Pedanius Dioscorides (original language: Greek; Latin translation: De Materia Medica).

The main purpose of MAT-MED in Transit is to trace the Italian circulation of knowledge about local and exotic medicinal plants between the late 15th and early 17th century. Despite its slow commercial decline, Venice is a good vantage point, because it continued to be an important centre for the circulation of 'simples' and related knowledge. This circulation, which is a segment of the more global transit of 'materia medica' between European countries and between Europe and the West and East Indies, took place both at the level of professional figures (physicians, apothecaries) and at the level of more common people, whose role is usually more difficult to trace and often dismissed by scholars as an exercise in empiricism and quackery.

MAT-MED in Transit demonstrates the social transversality of this circulation and the strong involvement of ordinary people as well, in the 16th century at its peak, only to decrease in the following century. Clear signs of this are the continuously growing production of Italian printed books on the 'materia medica' and the survival of numerous manuscript herbals. These, together with archive documents, are the main sources of this project, studied with an interdisciplinary approach that interweaves book history and history of science.

The ultimate aim of MAT-MED in Transit is to raise our current awareness of the value of nature as a resource in our everyday lives. To this end, during 2022 I have designed a number of specific activities and research products (exhibition, board game, videos).

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

In cooperation with the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) I created a database - MatMed-Readers (https://data.cerl.org/matmed/_search) for the systematic description of the reading traces now embedded in early printed books of ‘materia medica’: ownership inscriptions, manuscript annotations, drawings, critical comments etc. MatMed-Readers is primarily aimed at scholars and enables the qualitative and quantitative analysis of input data by means of refined search keys.

My research in and of itself mainly consisted of locating printed copies of 'materia medica' works in libraries and institutions, photographing copies with heavy traces of use and describing them in MatMed-Readers. Manuscripts and archival documents complementary to the research have been studied in a more traditional way. All together, they have been the subject of conferences and articles - published, forthcoming, or in the process of being written. See below some conference/talks programmes.

I also managed to create a website that I can update myself. A web page hosted by Ca’ Foscari (https://www.unive.it/mat-med) is being linked to the website I created in cooperation with the Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS) of Brown University (https://library.brown.edu/create/cds/mat-med-in-transit/). I conceived the MAT-MED in Transit website - temporarily accessible at https://emylonas.reclaim.hosting/mat-med/ but in the process of acquiring a cheap dedicated domain - as a tool to stimulate the interest of both scholars and a wider public. It offers a selection of manuscript and archival sources (many of which have never been published before), digitised and accompanied by archival/bibliographical references. Its main objective is to illustrate and share sources that explain us how, in the early modern period, 'materia medica' circulated and was studied to discover as yet unknown therapeutic (or harmful) properties, how medicinal plants were also cultivated in private gardens, and finally how they were processed in apothecary shops.

In MAT-MED in Transit website I also focused on a 16th-century source of special relevance to my project: the five-volume manuscript herbal of the Venetian Pietro Antonio Michiel (a non-professional who was very keen on exploring local and exotic 'materia medica'), now kept at the Marciana Library in Venice. With the help of Brown University CDS, I produced the digital edition (TEI) of the first volume - also preparing the remaining four tomes for the future digital edition (https://emylonas.reclaim.hosting/mat-med/edition/).

The Agreement facilitated the organisation of an exhibition at the Marciana Library (10 February - 2 April 2023) and a final international conference (29-31 March 2023), planned and largely prepared by 31 December 2022.

Videos illustrating "Gardens of Venice", "Herbal of P.A. Michiel" and "Apothecaries' Shop", planned and prepared by the PI by 31 December 2022, are being processed by Alicubi (https://www.alicubi.it/edit.html) will be screened during the final conference of the project (29-31 March 2023) and permanently available on the project website.

In cooperation with two engravers/graphic designer and a librarian, I created a board game, Il Giardino delle piante magiche ('The Garden of Magic Plants'): a sheet with 63 squares, a deck of 95 cards, two dice, 1 booklet with figures and descriptions of plant properties, in which the curious notion is combined with the latest scientific literature available on PubMed. The plant images are taken from a 1565 edition of Pietro Andrea Mattioli's Commentari a Dioscoride with watercolour woodcuts. The aim of the board game is for each player to create his or her own garden and, in doing so, learn about some of the properties of the plants they are collecting.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

My research demonstrates how and how extensively 'materia medica' was circulated, studied, and concretely manipulated not only by professionals in botanic university gardens, but also by rather ordinary people in their private gardens and at home. The research enhances and brings into focus a social level of circulation that modern studies have tended to relegate to empirical practices considered synonymous with quackery.

The database MatMed-Readers, permanently hosted by the Consortium of European Research Libraries, is a tool available to any scholar who wish to implement it with her/his personal research in the history of medicine and science, subject to contact with the PI. MatMed-Raders is ready to become a tool of storage and of subsequent analysis of the reading practices of early printed books of medicine.

The website and the videos are intended both for scholars and for a wider public, to stimulate curiosity to learn about plants.

The exhibition provides an opportunity to connect the study of the past with the craft and artistic practices of the present, as well as to foster connections between public institutions (Marciana, Ca' Foscari) with private entities (Aboca Museum, Wigwam Club Giardini Storici Venezia, artists, collectors).

Exhibition_Poster