ABSTRACT
Where Turner’s early work provides an apt opening bracket for the burgeoning botanical culture of the second half of the sixteenth century, John Gerard’s Herball provides a fitting close. Gerard was born around 1545, when Turner was probably working on his first English herbal; Gerard’s own botanical publications appeared near the very end of the sixteenth century, in 1596, 1597, and 1599. After Gerard’s herbal, no other significant work in the same genre appeared in England until 1633, when the book that appeared was only a much revised edition of Gerard.1 The age of the herbal-as distinct from more specialized genres separately aimed at smaller audiences of gardeners, physicians, or scientific botanists-was coming to an end by the time Gerard wrote. Indeed, the bibliographer of early English botanical and horticultural writing concludes that between 1600 and 1650, relatively few such works were published, compared with the productivity of the surrounding periods (Henrey 213). Gerard’s work therefore illuminates how verbal and herbal work had proceeded in the half-century between Turner’s time and his own. Yet as with Turner, Gerard remains of interest less for the positive results of his herbalism than for his work with words. In Turner’s case, taking such an interest exposed how his attitude to textuality was influenced by his work as a church reformer, and how the two basic verbal procedures of naming and translating formed the centre of his botanical work. In the case of Gerard, though, very different aspects of the bookish and textual cultures of his day are brought to the fore by his work with plants, including his problematic approach to authorship, his participation in an anthology-oriented and commonplacing book culture, and his poetic tactics and tendencies when putting botanical things into words.
