De Materia Medica - Herbals and botanical classification from ancient and early modern times in cross-cultural perspective

Starting with the first scriptural cultures, methods for classifying and describing (medical) plants has been developed, by means of which the collected knowledge could be handed down diachronically across language and cultural borders. The topic of this workshop is the study of the related text genres of herbals, thereby uniting the outcome of projects in Berlin dedicated to ancient, medieval, and early modern botany. In collaboration with international colleagues, we aim to reveal the similarities, differences, and relationships between the various corpora, beginning with the earliest botanical treatises in Cuneiform and Egyptian script, via the scientific peak of Graeco-Roman scholars and the Middle-Ages up until the later traditions in German language of the Early Modern Period.