This chapter explains the value of incorporting materialist analysis into studies of intellectual history and the history of science by examining the curious case of a tiny anonymous herbal that was one of the most popular English books of the sixteenth century. It shows that these works of natural history have been receiving increased attention from scholars and that this scholarship is unfortunately limited by too much attention upon herbals’ authors to the detriment of those figures who commissioned, marketed, made, and sold botanical books to an eager early modern public.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.

To reveal the sophisticated and nuanced calculus of English stationers, this chapter explores the recursive relationship between readers’ responses to printed herbals and the activities of the publishers who catered to them, as well as the shifting regulatory mechanisms that enabled stationers to navigate the amount of financial risk that herbal publication increasingly asked of them.

By exploring the decision-making processes that were made by English publishers and printers as they navigated both readers’ increasing demands for books and the regulations of the English crown and the City of London, Chapter 2 demonstrates how regulatory, economic, and material constraints upon the manufacture of English books as commodities affected their production. It considers how the English crown’s early directed efforts to control the spread of heretical and seditious material influenced herbal production, as well as the way that the circumstances of print publication changed radically in 1557 with the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company of London.

This chapter uses evidence from the English stage to demonstrate that, for early moderns, the book form was often as important as its content. The material aspect of book knowledge was most pronounced in matters of medicine, where books were especially well-suited as stage properties that could serve characters’ authoritative pretentions. What’s more, an appreciation of books as properties reveals how early modern readers engaged in medical care, not exclusively through deference to professional medical authorities but as individualized and idiosyncratic acts of self-healing.

Turner’s attitude towards printed books, and the uses to which they can be put by clever authors, can be seen to shift over the course of his interrelated careers as a physician, divine, and naturalist. This chapter demonstrates how Turner’s three herbals reflect a bibliographic self-consciousness in English botany that was emerging simultaneously with the efforts of English physicians to assert their influence over all elements of medicine. Anonymous bestselling English works like the little Herball as well as The Grete Herball were widely available during Turner’s undergraduate studies at Cambridge, but despite their popularity with readers, Turner claimed that those works offered little of use to professional medical practitioners. It was to remedy what he called the “unlearned cacography” of these texts that Turner was prompted in 1538 to first offer up his own botanical studies in English for the good of the commonweal despite his fellow physicians’ concerns that such an endeavor would make specialized professional knowledge widely available to laypeople.

After the pair eat of the Tree of Knowledge, Milton’s Adam, mourning that their newly discovered nakedness leaves them vulnerable to reproach, admonishes Eve and counsels that they should cover their private parts.

John Gerard’s Herball of 1597 was remarkably successful: it was twice reprinted, and it remained an authoritative botanical textbook through the eighteenth century. Copies of the book were regularly bequeathed by name in wills, and as we have seen, poets such as John Milton profitably mined its descriptions for details about plants and their uses. Yet, despite the evidence of Gerard’s wide renown among his contemporaries, his reputation as a herbalist has suffered from accusations of plagiarism that have plagued discussions of his work since the publication of the book’s revised second edition in 1633. This chapter explains how this narrative about Gerard’s 1597 Herball came about, paying close attention to the perspectives of the volume’s publishers to reveal that the logic of the traditional account of Gerard as a plagiarist makes little sense in the context of early modern herbal publication.