TITLE:
The Impact of 16th Century German Botanical Treatises on Garcia de Orta’s Coloquios dos Simples
AUTHORS:
João Paulo S. Cabral
KEYWORDS:
Botany, Garcia de Orta, Valerius Cordus, Leonhart Fuchs, German Botanists
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Historical Studies,
Vol.9 No.2,
June
3,
2020
ABSTRACT: In the early sixteenth century, Italian, French,
Portuguese, Spanish, Flemish and German academics led the revival of the study
of botany. In Germany, Otho Brunfels, Jerome Bock, Leonhart Fuchs, Adam
Lonicerus, and Valerius Cordus published herbals dealing with European
medicinal plants, but notes on Asian products remain invaluable. The Portuguese
doctor Garcia de Orta sailed to Goa in 1534. There, he published his Coloquios
dos Simples e Drogas da India in 1563. It is precisely in the context of
Indian materia medica that Garcia de Orta’s path intersects with that of
the German academics. The aim of this paper is to analyze the influence of
Valerius Cordus’ and Leonhart Fuchs’ works on Orta’s Coloquios. To this
end, the original Latin descriptions of Asian medicinal products made by Cordus
and Fuchs were compared with Orta’s interpretations. It was observed that
Garcia de Orta makes good use of Cordus’s descriptions of cardamom, cassia
lignea, cinnamon, lignum aloes (agarwood) and tamarind fruits. His attitude
towards Fuchs, however, was less accommodating because he was, in Orta’s words,
“a heretic condemned for being a Lutheran” and he distorted the words of the
German master about ivory. It was concluded that neither Garcia de Orta’s
Renaissance humanism nor his scientific view of Indian natural history was any
match for the influence of his religious beliefs. Orta did not escape the
profound doctrinal and theological division that was raging Europe after the
emergence of the Reformation movement.