Introduction to the history of medical and veterinary mycology

English herbals and floras', in which The Grete Herball of 1526, the second printed herbal in English, is subjected to "systematic analysis". Ryden's book is a philological study of The Grete Herbalrs 500 English plant names, their frequency of use, provenance, typology, and synonymy (i.e., identity). The purpose of the larger study of which this book is a part is to understand "continuity and discontinuity in plant-name patterning" (p. 7); that is, to determine not so much the history of every single plant name in early-modern English, but to outline changes in groups of names. Ryden's work will be useful to anyone studying medieval or modern plant names as well. He finds a number of first usages in English, provides modern identifications, and gives the reader a good introduction to his subject. Historians will, even so, find some of the author's assumptions disturbing. The Swedish project removes plant names from their herbal context, omitting from the study animal products, stones, and other non-botanical substances. In doing this, the study becomes ahistorical. We read, for instance, that The Grete Herball "is a mixture of facts and fancies, a reflex of both rationalism [empiricism] and irrationalism [superstition], .... In no respect does it foreshadow the expanding knowledge of botany in the 16th century" (p. 18). The persective of several centuries will no doubt reveal our own times to be a "mixture of facts and fancies" too, littered with continuities and discontinuities apparent only to future generations. The important fact about early herbals that, like renaisssance anatomies, they served a rather different purpose in society from their modern "counterparts"is not dealt with in English plant names. Despite this limitation, Ryden's work is of much philological interest, and helps supply a shocking gap in English-language scholarship. Faye Marie Getz University of Wisconsin