Book on Plants, Liber de plantis
The work known as **De plantis** (also titled **Liber de plantis**, **Liber de vegetabilibus**, or **Liber Aristotelis de vegetabilibus et plantis**) survives in only five Arabic manuscripts but enjoys a larger presence in Latin. Its first Latin translation, completed around 1200, is attributed to Alfredus Anglicus (Alfred of Sareshel), likely carried out in Spain—evidenced by Spanish botanical terms such as “acelga” (chard) and “belenum” (henbane) and by the Hispanic transliteration of Arabic names.
Early Translations and Critiques
A single alternative version is mentioned by Roger Bacon in his Quaestiones supra De plantis, which he used as a teaching aid at Oxford. In his third opus, Bacon disparages the choice of “belenum,” calling it a Spanish term unknown to scholars in Paris or England. Albert the Great, in his De vegetabilibus, likewise laments the obscurity and difficulty of the Latin text, blaming its flawed translation for making Aristotle’s theories on wood colors nearly unintelligible.
Authorship Debates Over Centuries
Medieval consensus often credited Aristotle with De plantis, but Thomas Aquinas insisted that Theophrastus was the true author. Peter of Auvergne echoed this view, suggesting Theophrastus wrote the text to fill gaps left by his teacher. It was not until the nineteenth century that Ernst Meyer demonstrated Nicolaus of Damascus as the genuine author, clarifying centuries of misattribution.
Multiple Re-Translations and Their Contexts
The transmission of De plantis is remarkable for its many versions. After Alfredus Anglicus’s Arabic-to-Latin rendering, a Latin-to-Greek “retroversion” appeared around 1300. In the sixteenth century, scholars sought ever closer ties to the original, producing two fresh Latin translations in 1542 and 1543. The 1542 edition appeared within Averroes’s commentary on Aristotle in Venice (1550–1562), while Andrea a Lacuna’s 1543 version emerged in Cologne.
Manuscript Tradition and Commentary
Although 159 manuscripts of De plantis survive, only nine include Latin commentaries. The chief medieval commentators were Roger Bacon, Albert the Great, Peter of Auvergne, Adam of Bockenfield, and Alfredus Anglicus himself. Later compilers such as Vincent de Beauvais cited the text in his Speculum maius (Book IX, Speculum naturale), and thirteenth-/fourteenth-century manuscripts (e.g., Bodleian Tanner 116 and Digby 17) may reflect Simon de Faversham’s work. Sybil Douglas Wingate identifies yet another manuscript housed in Paris.
Theoretical Significance in Medieval Botany
Understanding De plantis requires grasping the scholastic distinction between subjectum formale (the formal aspect or viewpoint of a discipline) and subjectum materiale (the material it examines). While herbals emphasize practical uses of plants—medicinal, pharmaceutical, agricultural—De plantis offers a theoretical framework rooted in Aristotle’s Physica and De anima. It treats plants as natural-philosophy subjects, defined by their capacity for motion or reaction to motion, rather than merely as remedies or crops.
