"In Search of the Lost Archetype? An Alternative Reading of the Illustrations Provided in the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius"

In studies of the iconographic tradition of Pseudo-Apuleius' Herbarium two positions have clashed: a 'classificatory' model, based on the stemmatic reconstruction of witnesses, and an evolutionary, fundamentally chronological one. But when speaking of botanical images, it is now necessary to pose the question as to whether the chimerical research of the Urtext (and its lines of descent) perhaps belongs to a superseded ecdotic reading, and moreover whether the various witnesses should instead be considered in relation to their respective production contexts and the uses to which they were put. The search for the archetype has led to involving what a deep-rooted historiographic habit has called the “accessory” elements of pharmacotherapeutic iconography, be it that tied to Dioscoride’s Περὶ ὕλης ἰατρικῆς in Greek, Latin or Arabic versions, or to the corpus collected around the Herbarium of Pseudo-Apuleius: not only figure drawings and episodes relating to the gathering of herbs and the preparation and administration of medicaments, but also mythological tales and bucolic scenes, or those depicting daily life, seafaring activities, hunting parties and travels. Up till now, the crux of the matter has been to establish precisely when the aforementioned drawings and scenes were first incorporated into the illustrative apparatus of the herbals: that is to say, in late antiquity or in the medieval period. The focus should be shifted from their origin to their function, and to the mechanisms underlying their reception on the part of readers and viewers, thereby moving beyond the conventional (and misleading) terminology by means of which these elements have, up to the present, been defined variously as: “accessory”, “explicatory”, “adventitious”, “anecdotal”, “supplementary”.