The Five Books on My Desk

Why At Charlemagne’s Behest [ACB] Cites Liger, Estienne & Liébault, Culpeper, Dodoens, and Bauhin, and What I Actually Do With Them

Every plant that reaches an ACB post has been checked against at least two of five old books before I write a sentence about it. This is the discipline the work requires if “recovering old ways” is going to mean something more than borrowed nostalgia, and it’s why ACB runs on full citations rather than borrowed lines.

Here are the five books, plainly, and what each one earns its place on my desk for.

Nicholas Culpeper¹ — The English Physician Enlarged, 1653

English household medicine: an apothecary’s training turned into doctrine an ordinary family could use without paying a physician they couldn’t afford. Culpeper is the most quoted herbal in the English-speaking world, and also the most thinly quoted — most of what circulates online is a single borrowed line, stripped of the entry it came from. I read the full entry and cite what’s actually written there.

Rembert Dodoens² — A Niewe Herball, 1578 (Henry Lyte’s translation of the 1554 Cruydeboeck)

Flemish and methodical, organized by the plant’s own properties rather than the alphabet. Dodoens moved botany forward in ways Culpeper, writing a century later, quietly leaned on. Culpeper gives virtue and astrology; Dodoens gives description and place — where a plant actually grows, when it flowers, what it looks like in the hand. Reading the two together supplies a check that neither source gives on its own.

Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault³ — L’Agriculture et Maison Rustique, 1564, expanded through the 1570s and 1580s

The French household manual with no real equivalent in the two sources above: an independent tradition that ran through some eighty editions on its own strength, not a derivative of English or Dutch sources. This is where I go for the Galenic household pharmacy as it was actually practiced on a working farm — the wound-drinks and wine decoctions kept on hand because someone would eventually cut themselves on a scythe.

Louis Liger⁴ — La Nouvelle Maison Rustique, 1700, reissued through thirteen editions to 1804

Liger picked up Estienne and Liébault’s book roughly a century and a half later and condensed it for a new readership: the same household-apothecary tradition, filtered through another hundred years of use. Reading Liger against his own source shows what survived the condensing and what got simplified or dropped along the way. That drift is data — it marks which parts of a tradition were load-bearing and which were regional habit.

Jean Bauhin⁵ — Historia Plantarum Universalis, 1650–1651

Basel-born, Swiss-anchored, covering over five thousand plants across three volumes: the largest botanical encyclopedia of its era, and the source I reach for when a plant is genuinely continental or alpine and the English and Dutch pair doesn’t reach it.

Bauhin is where I confirmed that a plant still sold today as part of a branded “Swiss tea” was already carrying a specific Bernese dialect name in the 1650s — not a marketing invention, but an attested regional identity nearly four hundred years old.

Why Five, and The Five Books

None of these books agree with each other completely, and the disagreement is useful. A plant that shows up with the same virtue in an English apothecary’s astrological herbal, a systematic Dutch botany, and a French farmhouse manual owing nothing to either, is a real, cross-attested tradition–five books.

A plant that shows up in only one of the five is a regional or personal preference, worth noting but not worth building a claim on. Part of the job is telling readers which is which, rather than flattening all five sources into a single idea of “what the old herbalists believed.”

You will not find John Gerard cited here, and that is deliberate. His 1597 Herball is substantially the Reverend Dr. Priest’s unfinished English translation of Dodoens’s Cruydeboeck, completed and published under Gerard’s own name after Priest died before he could see it into print.⁶

It is a well-documented case of borrowed work published under another man’s name, not an independent witness to anything. However often it gets reprinted as an English classic, I go to Dodoens directly rather than to the man who took and plagiarized his work.

What This Looks Like Before You See It

Everything drawn from these five books passes a second check before it reaches a post: current herbal-safety literature, plant by plant, read alongside the historical recipe while I draft.

• Comfrey appears in the old wound-drinks as something to drink; modern research on pyrrolizidine alkaloids means I present it here as an external preparation only.
• Coltsfoot carries the same caution.
• Hypericum’s old life as a wound oil stands as written; taken internally, it interacts with a long list of medications, so that distinction has to survive translation into anything published under ACB’s name.

The old sources tell me what was trusted and why. Current science tells me what still holds as written, and what needs a modern caution added before it goes near a reader.

Scope and Limits: Five Books

I trained as a clinical herbalist for more than twenty years, and I am not licensed to diagnose or treat anything, in France or anywhere else. Nothing on this site does that. The work here is closer to archival research with a practical use: checking these old traditions from these five books against each other and against what is known now, then writing plainly about what still holds and what we should be glad to have left behind.

Lead plasters and mercury ointments turn up constantly in these same books, prescribed with total confidence by people who had no way of knowing better. The old ways were not uniformly wise.

Underneath the lead and the mercury, there is a real, working body of plant knowledge, checked five ways across four countries and four centuries. That record is worth checking carefully rather than either reviving whole or dismissing outright, and that’s the standard behind everything on this site.

If this work is useful to you, you can buy me a coffee — buymeacoffee.com/cskizer

Endnotes

1. Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physician Enlarged (London, 1653).

2. Rembert Dodoens, A Niewe Herball, or Historie of Plantes, trans. Henry Lyte (London: Gerard Dewes, 1578).

3. Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault, L’Agriculture et Maison Rustique (Paris, 1564; expanded editions through the 1580s).

4. Louis Liger, La Nouvelle Maison Rustique, ou Économie Générale de Tous les Biens de Campagne (Paris, 1700; thirteen editions through 1804).

5. Jean Bauhin, with Jean-Henri Cherler, ed. Dominique Chabrey, Historia Plantarum Universalis, Nova et Absolutissima, Cum Consensu et Dissensu Circa Eas (Yverdon, 1650–1651).

6. On Priest’s unfinished translation and Gerard’s use of it, see the standard bibliographic account in the history of English herbals; Gerard’s The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes (London, 1597) drew substantially on Rembert Dodoens, Cruydeboeck (Antwerp, 1554), via Priest’s incomplete manuscript translation.