The slow, stately chant and the heavy, stressed alliteration of the words weave their spell as the Anglo-Saxon enchanter invokes the Christian God to bless the Earth, mother of crops, and to make her fields fertile and fruitful. He is perhaps unaware that he is addressing Gea, the Great Mother, who creates, nourishes and restores all living beings as had been done for unnumbered generations around the Mediterranean Sea.

So gatherers of herbs had sung and continued to sing from the pages of medieval Latin herbals. The portrait of Earth, the Mother and nurturer of all beings, is depicted holding a cornucopia brimming with herbs and flowers while the gatherer stands in front of her, asking her permission and her support before gathering the herbs that bring health and strength to men (see Plate 2). It is an image that the Greek and Roman world received from pre-Hellenic times and handed down to the Middle Ages in the herbals, those gardens on vellum where the accumulated knowledge of plant lore and their medical properties was preserved and re-elaborated.

Since the dawn of time, the quest for food has trained people to identify and distinguish edible plants from poisonous ones – and thus to learn their healing properties as well. This hoard of knowledge, handed down in oral tradition for millennia, gradually found its way into collections of remedies and medical treatises. The written tradition goes back to the Assyrians and the Egyptians. However, the true ancestors of the Late Antique herbals, which spread throughout medieval Europe, were the Greek works that began to appear in the fourth century BCE. The names of these ancient authors have been faithfully transmitted as precious legacy throughout the centuries, although the greater part of their work survives only in quotations by later writers. Little is known about Aristotle’s work on plants, but his library and his unpublished works were inherited by his pupil Theophrastus (371–286 BCE), the most important and influential botanist of antiquity.