Naples Dioscurides

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The Naples Dioscurides in the Biblioteca Nazionale, Naples^[1], is an early seventh century Greek herbal based on the De Materia Medica of the first-century Greek military physician Dioscurides. The Naples Dioscurides does contain the descriptions of plants and their medicinal uses. Unlike De Materia Medica, the text is arranged alphabetically by plant. The codex derives independently^[2] from the same model as the Vienna Dioscurides, composed ca. 512 for a Byzantine princess, but differs from it significantly: though the illustrations follow the same infered model, they are rendered more naturalistically in the Naples Dioscurides. Additionally, in the Naples manuscript, the illustrations occupy the top half of each folio, rather than being full page miniatures as in the Vienna Dioscurides. The plant descriptions are recorded below the illustration in two or three columns. The style of Greek script used in the manuscript indicates that it was probably written in Byzantine-ruled southern Italy, where ancient Greek cultural traditions remained strong, although it is not known exactly where it was produced. Marginal notes indicate that the manuscript had contact with the medical school at Salerno in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

A luxurious facsimile has been published by Salerno Editrice, Rome, in collaboration with Akademische Druck of Graz, Austria, publishers of a comparable facsimile of the Vienna Dioscurides.

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[edit] References

• Crinelli, Lorenzo. Treasures from Italy's Great Libraries. New York, The Vendome Press, 1997.