ABSTRACT
The Carrara Herbal is an exceptional illustrated book of materia medica. It is exceptional in both its illustrations and its content, making it of interest to historians of art and medicine alike. This chapter describes variety of imagery to establish the place of the Carrara Herbal within particular pictorial and textual traditions. It examines the selected examples of illustrated books of materia medica from across the genre's history that show the wide variety of uses, illustrative sets and collection-histories of these books. The chapter considers the book given to Anicia Juliana, daughter of Byzantine Emperor Flavius Anicius Olybrius, as an example of how illustrated books of materia medica may have been amalgamated into strategies of self-representation through contact with different visual rhetorics associated with the owner's other forms of patronage. It also considers the illustrated books of materia medica produced for Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen.
