Tiny book Badianus Manuscript was in the Vatican library

A tiny book Badianus Manuscript was in the Vatican library. It was formerly bound in red velvet with pages trimmed in gilded, and the cover still bore the impression of two metal clasps. It was composed in 1552 and reached Rome not long after. Based on its exquisite state upon rediscovery in 1929, it appears to have been in little use for several centuries. Although it goes by several titles, the Badianus Manuscript is the most widely used one, and it has two claims to be of significant historical significance. It explains how the native inhabitants of Mexico used plants prior to the Spanish conquest and is the oldest surviving record of Aztec plant lore.

Furthermore, it has the earliest documented mention of an orchid from the Americas, a plant used to make the cure known as “The Traveler’s Safeguard.” The plant was known as tlilxóchitl in the Náhuatl language, which was spoken by the Aztecs, Mexicah, and many other peoples of central America. This name is sometimes mistranslated as “black flower.” The orchid from which vanilla essence is extracted is now known by the name Vanilla planifolia.
A tiny book Badianus Manuscript was in the Vatican library.  It was formerly bound in red velvet with pages trimmed in gilded, and the cover still bore the impression of two metal clasps. It was composed in 1552 and reached Rome not long after
Vanilla represents a shift in the way the West views nature in general, as well as in how we comprehend orchids. For a millennium, the characteristics of orchids stayed mostly unchanged from Theophrastus, Pliny, and Dioscorides’ descriptions. However, many European intellectuals were taken aback by the discovery of America, which was actually a rediscovery because Viking explorers had been there much earlier. The ancient writers had occupied them for ages with annotations and commentary, but with the discovery of New World plants, it became increasingly evident that the names of these plants could not be derived from the works of the classical writers.

The discovery that there were novel plants in the New World, like vanilla, signaled the beginning of the end of hundreds of years of rather stagnant natural history. Examine a book written in 1568 by William Turner, the Duke of Somerset’s physician, to observe how little had changed from the time of the ancient writers. Turner gave the snappy title A New Herball: Wherein Are Conteyned the Names of Herbes in Greke, Latin, Englysh, Duch, Frenche, and in the Potecaries [apothecaries] and Herbaries Latin, with the Properties Degrees and Naturall Places of the Same, Gathered and Made, to this, the first printed herbal (book of medicinal plants) in English.

It is simply referred to as Turner’s New Herball in these impatient times, but the term “new” is a bit deceptive. If you read it, you will discover that among many well-known plants, there was one with a root “like unto stones” that is, resembling testicles. One of the “various kinds of orchis, which are called testiculus in Latin, that is, a stone,” is this one. Other names are cullions (derived through the French couillon from the Latin culleus, a bag, i.e., the scrotum.

Turner described several species, including what is now known as the Early-purple orchid (Orchis mascula), which “has many spots in the leaf, and is called adder grasse in Northumberland; the other kinds are in other countries called fox stones or hare stones, and they may, after the Greek, be called dogstones.”Turner and his peers weren’t being lazy; for over a millennium, the majority of Western academics believed that the ancient Greek and Roman philosophers knew everything, but that a great deal of their knowledge had been lost during the era that came to be known as the Dark Ages.
Turner's New Herball in these impatient times

Throughout this time, scholars worked in Europe’s universities and monasteries, but many considered their primary duty to be the preservation of as much ancient wisdom as possible, including any new fragments of lost texts they could unearth (the excitement surrounding a lost Aristotelian manuscript in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is a vivid fictional account of a very real passion). Because of this, the old documents had been copied, revised, and annotated for fifteen centuries, yet the fundamental facts regarding orchids were consistent throughout. Furthermore, the same holds true for most other plants and for the majority of Western knowledge as it does for orchids.

It was nearly unthinkable to think that fresh information might be created by discovering wholly new places, people, and objects. This started to drastically shift in the sixteenth century, and the novel plants such as the vanilla orchid—described in the Badianus manuscript are essential to comprehending the origins of contemporary Western science and, in certain cases, the modern world as a whole. But first, we must comprehend the history of orchids, Western science, and medicine since the end of the classical era before we can fully appreciate the revolution in knowledge reflected in that small red book.