A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era

About this book

A Cultural History of Plants in the Post-Classical Era is the second volume in the six-volume set, A Cultural History of Plants and covers the period from 500 to 1400, ranging across northern and central Europe to the Mediterranean, and from the Byzantine and Arabic Empires to the Persian World, India, and China. This was an age of empires and fluctuating borders, presenting a changing mosaic of environments, populations, and cultural practices. Many of the ancient uses and meanings of plants were preserved, but these were overlaid with new developments in agriculture, landscapes, medicine, eating habits, and art.

The six-volume set of the Cultural History of Plants presents the first comprehensive history of the uses and meanings of plants from prehistory to today. The themes covered in each volume are plants as staple foods; plants as luxury foods; trade and exploration; plant technology and science; plants and medicine; plants in culture; plants as natural ornaments; the representation of plants.

Contents

Series Preface
List of Figures

Introduction / Alain Touwaide

1. Plants as Staple Foods / Melitta Weiss Adamson
2. Plants as Luxury Foods / Alain Touwaide
3. Trade and Exploration / Federica Rotelli
4. Plant Technology and Science: Perception and use of plants in China / Huaiyu Chen
5. Plants and Medicine / Iolanda Ventura, Tony Hunt, Johannes Gottfried Mayer
6. Plants in Culture / Divya Kumar-Dumas
7. Plants as Natural Ornaments. Pre-modern Iranian and Eastern-Islamic Lands / Yves Porter
8. The Representations of Plants: Mediators of Body and Soul / Sarah Kyle

Endnotes
Bibliography
Notes on Contributors
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

Alain Touwaide is a specialist of the history of botany, medicine, and medicinal plants in the MediterraneanWorld from Antiquity to the Renaissance and beyond. He is particularly interested in the exchanges of plants, practices, and knowledge between the different populations around the Mediterranean, and has abundantly published on this topic, with a particular focus on Greece and Byzantium. Trained as a philologist, he interprets historical texts at the light of ethnobotany/ethnopharmacology.