The Puzzle of Distribution

The Puzzle of Distribution

In 1547, Jacques Bonnet, an apothecary in Manosque, France compiled an inventory of the shop of Rostand de Gréoux, shown in Figure 1. The inventory, which included more than 400 simples and compound remedies as well as their weights, tells us that de Gréoux owned a rather well-stocked apothecary shop, sourcing ingredients from Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Americas. Yet de Gréoux’s inventory provides us with more than a list of material goods. It offers a window into how sixteenth-century European apothecaries worked, how they conceptualized medicine, how they understood and organized the materials needed to practice their craft. These material goods and their geographic origin are also relevant in understanding de Gréoux’s potential alignment with contemporary apothecary shops local and distant. From this window, it seems that globalization was the standard. Yet this article also seeks to draw attention to the fact that studying de Gréoux in isolation is a window that offers a limited picture. Understanding the geographic origin of his simples and the manner in which they interacted is one example. To this end, the second half of this study provides different avenues for comparative work, matching up de Gréoux’s inventory with three other southern French inventories, as well as with similar but less directly related materials: Lumen Apothecariorum, an Italian reference pharmacopeia from the end of the fifteenth century that was popular in continental Europe for the next several decades and the Mediterranean corpus analyzed by Paula De Vos in her article “European Materia Medica.” However, just as close readings have their limitations, so too does comparative work. In putting these methodologies together, this article seeks to unravel what we can say of early modern apothecaries and what we still cannot. In essence, this article serves as an investigation into what it means to be global, to be part of a globalized system. These are questions that Historical Pharmacopeias (HP), a digital collection of historical pharmaceutical documents aimed at shedding more light on the people and materials involved in the global medical marketplace, attempts to address. In compiling, and continuing to compile, our corpus, HP adds to this list of statements on apothecaries and the documents surrounding their practice and engages with those things that still pose difficulties.¹

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Figure 1.

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME). “Inventory of Rostaing de Gréoux,” 1547, https://dalme.org/collections/global-pharmacopeias-workshop/records/d4c360b5-12c2-4f50-8e19-326d92839acb/1r/.

This article takes its titular inspiration from David Courtwright’s Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World, in which he explores the commodification of naturalia, when and why some substances became “globalized.”² In doing so, he also explores the relationship between Western remedies and “exotic” ones, arguing that only remedies that became popular in Western societies went on to become global commodities, even if their acceptance in these societies was not immediate.³ Where Courtwright’s examination seeks to understand globalization in the context of the retail sale and consumption of medicaments, this article seeks to understand globalization in the context of the transitory space on which the market depended: apothecary shops. In connecting de Gréoux’s inventory to a wider corpus, we can learn more about what the process of globalization was, and how it worked in the early modern period. In investigating it individually, we can understand something about the specifics of the practice of apothecaries, about their operations on a more practical level. On the one hand, doing so forces us to focus on the individual rather than the collective. On the other hand, conducting comparative work, focusing on the collective rather than the individual, forces us to shape broader arguments that leave out some of the details. In placing inventories like de Gréoux’s in a much broader (temporally and geographically) corpus, HP attempts to address both issues and allow avenues for both kinds of research. It is for this purpose that the following examination of de Gréoux’s inventory follows both paths, investigating the material goods of his shop and comparing these goods with those found in other early modern medical documents. Proceeding in this fashion, two types of globality form: a globality of use, apothecaries using the same simples and manipulating them in a similar way, and a globality of origin, the locations from which apothecaries sourced their ingredients. By creating a space in which these two types of globality can interact, this article engages with the difficulties in conceptualizing early modern apothecaries and the evidence of them that remains.⁴

The World in a Shop

How globalized was de Gréoux’s shop? The simplest answer is that it was very globalized, containing natural materials from the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, Asia, and Europe. A more complicated answer hinges on our understanding of the global in relation to early modern naturalia. Often when we speak of the globalization of the drug trade or the medical marketplace in Europe, “global” is somewhat synonymous with the importation of “exotic” naturalia. But by the 1540s, how exotic were violets or gum arabic? Is there ever a point at which natural materials become assimilated, so to speak, into the European consciousness of naturalia?⁵ In addition, what place do native European plants have or not have in this context? To be a global practice does not necessitate that it be unique or different or “exotic.” However, it should also be acknowledged that the process of globalization was often considered with these descriptors.

It essentially depends on our definition of “exotic.” Viewing the exotic as something strange or foreign, something coming from the outside, implies that naturalia could assimilate over time. Many plants or plant simples were transplanted and successfully grown in areas different to that of their origin. However, their physical assimilation and their conceptual assimilation were not always the same, or at least did not often happen simultaneously. Dutch physician, Govert Bidloo (1649–1713), who acknowledged and engaged with the difficulties in drawing clear bounds for these categories, argued that plants that had been transplanted to the Netherlands and acclimatized could be considered native plants, likening it to these plants acquiring “citizenship.”⁶ Plants these medical practitioners had once regarded as strange or “exotic” were often adopted, given their own vernacular names, and treated as their own naturalia.⁷ Studying developing apothecary traditions in Russia, Clare Griffin has also noted this phenomenon: “looking at the histories of medical drugs, food, and spices, we can find numerous examples of how novel substances were incorporated into and even changed a society that initially distrusted them.”⁸ Even so, it was not always an easy transition for foreign plants to become commodified in the European market, as David Courtwright and Benjamin Breen have noted with psychedelic substances.⁹ Let us take another example from the Dutch context: botanist and professor at Leiden University Paul Hermann (1646–1695). Hermann, in his time and in ours, was widely recognized for collecting and recording Sinhalese naturalia, acquiring the name “the father of Sinahalese botany” from some scholars.¹⁰ While working for the Dutch East India Company in Ceylon, Hermann collected and preserved the indigenous naturalia he encountered. He also acquired information about these plants from the Indigenous population, including their local botanical names, pronunciation, etymology, and medicinal uses. Hermann was one of the first Europeans to create a list of Sinhalese vocabulary, consisting of 120 words, including categories for parts of the body, ailments, and months of the year.¹¹ Despite this wealth of information, Hermann did not use it in his role as professor of botany. As prefect of the Hortus Botanicus, Hermann introduced several new plants to the garden. Yet in his lectures on materia medica, he contained them to those plants that were, regardless of their origin, accepted into the European consciousness, including zedoary, galangal, calamus aromaticus, juniper, mace, and camphor, all of which were also mentioned among de Gréoux’s inventory.¹² Hermann, therefore, made a distinction between two different types of naturalia. Regardless of their ability to grow in a European climate, there were plants that he viewed as botanical curiosities, those that were relatively new to Europe, and plants that he viewed as, and taught as, materia medica, those that had been appearing in apothecaries’ inventories for several centuries.

Looking to De Vos, Breen, and Courtwright provides some possible explanations to these many-layered distinctions. Some natural materials in the early modern period simply didn’t become “commodified” in Europe in the same way that others such as cinchona bark, tobacco, or rhubarb did. This was due to a confluence of many issues. With the prevalence of Galenic pharmacy, in which each simple had its own qualities (e.g. hot, cold, wet, dry, etc.), medical practitioners sometimes struggled to place newer additions to the European medical marketplace into this system, especially when it came to mixing them into compound remedies.¹³ Some natural materials, like coca leaves, did not travel well and lost their potency quickly.¹⁴ Others were viewed as representing values too separated from those of Europeans.¹⁵

De Gréoux’s inventory, as well as the other inventories and medical publications to which this study compares it, demonstrates the ingredients and products of the mixing of medicines as a system of interrelation and concurrence, a system in which little occurred in isolation. This concurrence demonstrated a long tradition of global medical practices. In essence, this study engages with the dualistic aspects of this global system. Alix Cooper grapples with a European culture of natural investigation that simultaneously sought out strange or “exotic” curiosities and began to take interest in local or “indigenous” naturalia, stemming both from a curiosity in their local naturalia and a concern with the extent to which they consumed imported products.¹⁶ De Vos explores the simples discussed in a long tradition of medical and natural history publications in comparison with those in the works of Dioscorides and Hippocrates.¹⁷ In finding similarities between a Mediterranean corpus and these ancient texts, there was also a degree of comparability found among the corpus itself, a comparability that extends to the texts analyzed here. In attending to the small details in de Gréoux’s inventory, there are hints of individual variation. In comparing the inventory with other lists of natural materials, in using his inventory to look outward, we see that he was but one member of a system in which global commodities were the standard.

The Anatomy of a Functional Inventory

In 1547, the notary Ferrarius was tasked with transcribing the inventory of de Gréoux’s apothecary shop in Manosque.¹⁸ The inventory was composed in May of that year by Jacques Bonnet, to whom the contents of de Gréoux’s shop were to be transferred.¹⁹ Little information remains on either apothecary. However, Bonnet’s presence and participation in the recording of the inventory allows us to view this document as indicative of the spatial organization of de Gréoux’s shop.²⁰ The inventory was separated into twenty categories: waters, syrups in jars, oils in jars, oils in vials, oils in tin bottles, ointments in jars, plasters, preserves in jars, opiate compositions in jars, jams in jars, pills, troches or lozenges, cordial powders, simples, electuaries, stones or minerals, colors, roots, seeds, simples (a second time), and instruments. The inventory also provided the measurements, usually in pounds or ounces, for all of the natural materials. The organization was revealing in of itself, demonstrating a preference for logical arrangement by type of material. However, in the simples sections in particular, the ingredients found therein were also ordered, grouped according to which ingredients complemented each other. Through an analysis of these simples, we can understand something of the conceptualization of them as ingredients for remedies.²¹

Simples

The ordering of de Gréoux’s simples, both in relation to the sections specifically dedicated to simples and to the inventory as a whole, provokes a seemingly simple question: what makes a simple?²² There was an important distinction in the inventory between pulverized plants and cordial powders that addresses this question. Cordial powders were given their own section, even while including entries such as “pulvis sandali rubei,” or powdered red sandalwood, seemingly just a pulverized version of a simple.²³ However, the same section also included entries such as “pulvis hyere picre,” a compound remedy normally made with around eighteen ingredients, and “pulvis dya rodon abbatis,” dya, or dia being a prefix denoting a composition.²⁴ In the simples section, as is shown in Figure 2, there were entries such as “pulvis liquiritie,” powdered licorice, and “pulvis fenugreci,” powdered fenugreek.²⁵ Evidently the difference between, say, powdered red sandalwood and powdered licorice was their use. Cordial powders, whether a powder of one ingredient or a powder of eighteen, were meant to be mixed with a liquid and consumed. Simples were ingredients. Powdered licorice was meant to be used in something like rosate novelle, an electuary that contained roses, sugar, licorice, cinnamon, cloves, ginger, and honey.²⁶ Although it may seem a slight distinction to make, it is an important one in understanding the organization and function of the simples in de Gréoux’s shop. An apothecary’s shop was a place of production, just as it was a place to sell the finished products, and the simples were organized in accordance with this chain of events.

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Figure 2.

The beginning of the simples section in de Gréoux’s inventory. DALME, “Inventory of Rostaing de Gréoux,” 5r.

To this end, many of the simples listed next to or near each other either shared certain qualities or appeared together in compound remedies. For instance, the first three simples listed were galbanum, asafoetida, and sagapenum. All three were resins, or denoted a resin from a specific plant, originating from the Mediterranean. Sagapenum, in particular, was often thought to be rather similar to galbanum and to smell like asafoetida. Carpo balsam and spice nardi (Spicae Nardi Indicae or spikenard), which appear alongside one another, were mentioned together in Arabic texts on aromatics.²⁷ Spikenard was an ingredient needed to prepare hiera picra, which also included mastic and carpo balsam, two other simples listed near each other.²⁸ There were several ingredients commonly used in hiera picra that were not among de Gréoux’s inventory: aloe socrotina, cinnamon, and radix asaria (hazelwort root).²⁹ As de Gréoux listed over two pounds of hiera picra in his inventory, it makes one wonder: Does this indicate that he had his own variation of hiera picra to which we may no longer be privy, or, more likely, does this indicate that he had mixed a batch of hiera picra some time ago and no longer had all of the simples on hand? While the following discussion of another common compound remedy, Confectionis Hamec, in de Gréoux’s inventory engages with the limitations of apothecary inventories as sources that illuminate only a specific moment in time, we must also acknowledge that these types of discrepancies had many possible causes. These causes, some of which are discussed later, include the seasonality of simples, the shelf life of simples and compounds, and the purchasing rather than crafting of certain materials.

In Le guidon des Apotiquaires, Valerius Cordus listed twenty-six distinct simples for making Confectionis Hamec.³⁰ According to Cordus’s measurements, de Gréoux’s inventory contained enough stock of five of these ingredients (agaric, senae, roses, prunes, and spikenard) and not enough stock of six ingredients (myrobalan citrinorum, myrobalan chebulorum, myrobalan indorum, rhubarb, colocynth, and polipodi quercini).³¹ Another five ingredients (absinth, thyme, violets, tamarind pulp, and seminis fumiterre) were present in de Gréoux’s shop not as simples but as compounds such as oils or waters, demonstrating that he had most likely stocked these simples at one point.³² Other ingredients in Confectionis Hamec were stocked as simples, but not in quite the same form as described by Cordus.³³ Of the many ingredients in Confectionis Hamec, only four received no clear mention in de Gréoux’s inventory. As this comparison demonstrates, we must take into account the limitations of our sources. An inventory is indicative of only a specific time and place and an apothecary’s stock was in a constant state of flux. However, these limitations provide information as well, information, for instance, on which simples were more easily acquirable, which were more commonly used in recipes, and potentially which had been acclimatized into Europe. While not the direct design of this study, the inventories made available by HP offer an opportunity to conduct this type of detail-oriented research, through which we may be able to learn more about individual variation in the conceptualization of simples, as well as the potential individual variation in the construction of recipes.

Weights and Measures

Another manner in which we can investigate the simples and compounds in de Gréoux’s inventory is through their use, indicated both by the number of their appearance in the inventory and by their listed weights. Based on the number of times specific natural materials, either in terms of variation (e.g., red coral or white coral) or in terms of their appearance in a remedy (e.g., violet water), were mentioned, the most commonly used simples were roses, appearing thirteen times in the inventory; sorrel, appearing three times; absinth, also three times; honey and violets, both with five appearances; licorice, four times; poppies, three times; sandalwood, five times; cassia, three times; sugar, seven times; cimini, three times; and ben, three times.³⁴ What makes this particularly striking, beyond providing evidence for popular natural materials in sixteenth-century French medicine, was the dispersion of these materials throughout the inventory. For instance, violets were mentioned as a water, oil, syrup, syrup with honey, and twice as a conserve. Each piece of the shop was interactive and could be manipulated or augmented. Both the simples in the remedies and the way they were compounded were important in understanding them. For this reason, it seems most appropriate to compare the weights of the items among their respective sections.³⁵ Table 1 outlines the largest amounts of specific waters, syrups, oils, animal fats, ointments, poultices, preserves, opiates, jams, pills, troches, cordial powders, electuaries, stones, colors, roots, seeds, and simples de Gréoux stocked in comparison with the average amount of the stock of those materials.

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Table 1.

Average Weight of Natural Materials in de Gréoux’s Inventory

The weights of certain types of compound remedies were much higher or lower based on shelf life, popularity, and standards of dosage. As Elaine Leong has noted: “the process of producing medicaments was time-consuming and labor-intensive.”³⁶ Makers of medicines crushed and prepared herbs, mixing them with melted fats for ointments. They steeped natural materials in water or alcohol, usually for at least twelve hours, to craft infusions.³⁷ The commodities crafted from these processes, however, had very different shelf lives.³⁸ Products such as ointments or salves had to be mixed much more frequently as they used animal fat, butter, or cream as a base. Waters, on the other hand, especially alcohol-based waters or cordials, could be kept and used for years.³⁹ In addition, these waters were often prescribed in greater quantities, with Leong noting that early modern English makers of household medicines prescribed them by the pint.⁴⁰ For these reasons, some types of compound remedies such as waters, syrups, and oils were recorded in pounds and were of greater quantities than compounds like pills and troches, normally recorded in ounces and drams.

It is important to note in this discussion that early modern systems of weight, specifically the weights of apothecaries, do not necessarily match up to our modern understanding of these terms. In an excellently detailed but now dated article, Ronald Zupko defined and explained apothecarial weights, differentiating between inexact and exact units of measure. Inexact weights were often used in medieval herbal remedies, but most seem to have not been as common among early modern apothecaries. These were the barley corn in England or the goutte in France, which was comparable to the grain; the pincée or pugille, equivalent to a small quantity of powder, seed, or grain that could be picked up with the thumb and two or three fingers; the fascicule, manipule, or poignée, equal to a handful of ingredients; and the English box, a small container for medicaments and valuable goods, or the French jointée, equivalent to the amount a man could hold with both hands clasped together, normally in reference to grain.⁴¹ Exact units, those more commonly associated with early modern medical practice, were scruples, drams, ounces, and pounds. Zupko notes that the first three were used most often in practice or in writing recipes, whereas pounds were more frequently used in keeping records. Despite being more exact in their description, different localities did not necessarily agree on what made up those descriptors. In France, the scruple (scrupule) was equal to 24 grains, 1/24 ounce, or 1/384 pound (livre). The dram (drachme) was equal to 3 scruples, 72 grains or 1/8 ounce. The ounce (once) was equal to 8 drams, 24 scruples, or 576 grains. The livre was equal to 5,760 grains, 12 ounces, 96 drachmes, or 288 scruples.⁴² In England, however, the scruple was equal to twenty grains. The dram was equal to 1/8 ounce. The ounce was equal to twenty-four scruples or eight drams. The pound was equal to 5,760 grains, 288 scruples, 96 drams, or 12 ounces. In Italy, as noted by Michelle Laughran, the scruple (scrupolo) was equal to 1/24 of an ounce through the medieval period—the same as in France.⁴³

Essentially, apothecary weights, like the identification of natural materials, pose a problem for establishing a comprehensive understanding of apothecary practice. Their weights and measures have been discussed very rarely in scholarship from this century, with the most helpful sources published in 1965 and 1990.⁴⁴ Although there was a certain degree of similarity among the natural materials used in early modern apothecary shops, the systems of weight to which they were subject contained important distinctions. These distinctions make it more difficult for historians of medicine, especially those working in a global context, to establish a standard from which to draw correlation. However, they are useful in reminding historians interested in global connections to acknowledge the local context as well and strive to create a balance between the two. With this in mind, one of the upcoming goals for HP is to compile information on medieval and early modern pharmaceutical weight systems. In essence, one aspect into which the project intends to expand is to update the work done by Zupko and Kisch, including the systems imposed by other locations and investigating their use in functional pharmacopeias and inventories. As we can see through de Gréoux’s inventory, standards for use and the employment of these standards were not always the same. We have countless early modern examples of physicians and apothecaries alike using the same symbols, as seen in Figure 3, across Europe to denote scruples, drams, ounces, and pounds. Yet these symbols were noticeably absent from de Gréoux’s inventory. This was possibly because the inventory was transcribed by a notary rather than an apothecary (see Low’s article in this special issue). We should therefore ask how widely accessible these symbolic and measurement systems were and which groups were privy to these kinds of specialized knowledge. These investigations into not just the materials used and manipulated by medical practitioners, but also the manner in which they wrote about and depicted these materials, provide a more comprehensive picture of pharmacological intervention.

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Figure 3.

Early modern symbols for apothecary weights and measures. Zupko, “Medieval Apothecary Weights and Measures,” 59.

The Challenge of Origins

The difficulties in attempting to identify natural materials from the early modern period and match them to our modern botanical understandings must be acknowledged.⁴⁵ Some more recent studies, such as that by Lardos et al., have attempted to identify more precise methodologies to this effect. In their article identifying naturalia mentioned in the Byzantine work John the Physician’s Therapeutics, Lardos and colleagues began by identifying a reference text. As recipe books, pharmacopeias, and other works on pharmacy often do not discuss the physical attributes of the plants they engage with, their team had to look for other sources for these identifying descriptions. Due to its influential nature and geographical proximity to John the Physician’s place of origin, Lardos et al.’s reference work was Dioscorides’s De materia medica. After this, they began an interdisciplinary investigation correlating the natural materials in Therapeutics with those in De materia medica and subsequently identifying them by modern scientific standards. Each correlation was noted with a degree of certainty, noting that some botanical names from antiquity may have referred to a genus rather than a specific species, may have been used to denote several similar plants, or were perhaps unidentifiable.⁴⁶

While HP commends and intends to contribute to work of this kind, our source base, as de Gréoux’s inventory demonstrates, poses certain difficulties to these types of processes. Identifying a reference work is more challenging when dealing with a global corpus. It is especially challenging for the global products of apothecary inventories, often compiled by or for specialized practitioners under the assumption that the necessary botanical and pharmacological knowledge needed to interpret these writings was already present in their audience. If we can acquire the same knowledge they had, then we could presumably better understand, better figure out the natural materials they discussed and identify them. De materia medica was a widely influential work for many centuries, but its use, for our purposes, might prevent us from observing small local or temporal shifts in pharmaceutical work.⁴⁷ For my present purposes, I compared de Gréoux’s inventory to other early modern inventories in an effort to identify a degree of standardization. However, we should always keep in mind that while there was a certain level of agreement between what was stocked in these inventories, it does not mean that there was always agreement between what these names signified and what these plants did. While Lardos et al. worked in the Greek language and argued that the names of natural materials remained fairly similar from Dioscorides to John the Physician, most of the HP documents are in Latin or the vernacular, or, more often than not in the case of the inventories, a mix between the two. In de Gréoux’s inventory, the titles for the sections were written in French, but the names of the materials vary, sometimes French, sometimes Latin, and sometimes something that resembles the writing conventions of Catalan or Provençale. There also needs to be some metric made for dealing with a lack of written standardization, not just among the corpus but also in individual inventories.

(Not So) Simple Origins: Geographic Dispersion and its Discontents

To this end, HP is in the process of constructing a glossary of medieval and early modern medicaments, beginning with an Italian pharmacopeia, the 1511 Concordiae Pharmacopiae published by the Barcelona apothecary guild, and building a list of medical vocabulary from there. In essence, this glossary will eventually serve as a reference for the type of work that many scholars interested in ethnopharmacy have recently been completing.⁴⁸ It will also serve as a reference for the type of work done by this section. Using resources such as the Kew Botanic Garden Plants of the World Online, the Folgerpedia glossary of the medical terminology from John Ward’s diaries, De Vos’s charts, and the University of Michigan’s Middle English Compendium, this study has been able to identify, with varying degrees of certainty, the names and geographic origin of over half of the botanic simples listed in de Gréoux’s inventory.⁴⁹

There are still many issues, illuminated by the inventory of de Gréoux, when it comes to identifying the origin and the importance of the origin of naturalia. Some of these difficulties have been broached by earlier sections of this article, such as plants for which we have a long record of use in European medicine. Natural materials such as red storax, mentioned by Hippocrates and used by the ancient Romans, Ottomans, and Greeks; myrrh, mentioned by Dioscorides and used by ancient Egyptian and Islamic cultures; sal ammoniac, mentioned by Pliny and used in medieval Islamic medicine; berber seeds, mentioned by Dioscorides and Hippocrates; or dragon’s blood, used in ancient Rome and China, were so woven into the culture of European medicine by the early modern period that we must question the importance of their origination. For instance, violets were native to the Mediterranean, yet they were growing in European gardens during this period and represented one of the largest commodities among de Gréoux’s inventory.⁵⁰ There are also plants, like Euphorbia, commonly used as a laxative or purgative, that have many varieties, making it nearly impossible to tell if de Gréoux was denoting a specific variety of Euphorbia or if he was referring to the genus as a whole, or, even still, if he differentiated between the two at all.

It was to investigate some of these uncertainties that Figure 4, documenting the geographic origin of the botanic simples in de Gréoux’s inventory, was created. There are first some explanatory remarks to be made about the figure. In configuring the information in this manner, it naturally becomes somewhat of a generalization. The designations of Europe, Asia, Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and the Americas cover a wide swath of land.⁵¹ A plant like thuris, commonly known as frankincense or the olibanum tree, which was native specifically to Oman, Somalia, and Yemen, is difficult to place into one of these broad categories.⁵² Other plants, like hyssop, native to both Europe and the Mediterranean, clearly fit into two categories. Examples such as these have been included among the tally for both regions, in the case of hyssop for both Europe and the Mediterranean. The same applies to plants originating from what we might now call Eurasia. The purpose in doing this is not to list or include these plants as separate items but to develop a fuller understanding of the plants in de Gréoux’s inventory. It was quite possible that de Gréoux used and stocked chicory from both Europe and Asia. The purpose in completing the chart in this manner is to demonstrate the variety of early modern natural objects—and the inconsistency. This is an inconsistency that HP, especially in the glossary, hopes to illuminate and reduce.

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Figure 4.

Geographic dispersion of the natural materials in Rostand de Greoux’s Inventory. Source: DALME, “Inventory of Rostaing de Gréoux.” https://dalme.org/collections/historical-pharmacopeias/records/d4c360b5-12c2-4f50-8e19-326d92839acb/288r/; Paula De Vos, “European Materia Medica in Historical Texts: Longevity of a Tradition and Implications for Future Use,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 132, no. 1 (2010): 28–47; Robert Tallaksen, “John Ward’s Latin,” Folgerpedia, 2024, https://folgerpedia.folger.edu/John_Ward%27s_Latin#Alchemical_Symbols_and_Other_Abbreviations; Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, “Plants of the World Online,” https://powo.science.kew.org/; UMichigan, “Middle English Compendium,” Middle English Dictionary, 2023, https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary.

The figure essentially demonstrates two main points of conflict: native versus “exotic” and old world versus new world. Given the amount of emerging literature in the early modern period on concerns surrounding “exotic” plants and endorsements of native European natural materials, it is perhaps surprising that the second largest geographic category among de Gréoux’s simples was Europe.⁵³ Yet this pushes us to ask what exactly were the boundaries between native and non-native plants? In addition, in what ways does this confound or clarify our attempts at identification? In Lardos et al.’s study, they paired the work of John the Physician and that of Dioscorides partly due to their similar geographical origins and found connections between the texts for the flora of the surrounding regions. This doesn’t necessarily apply to the early modern apothecary, acting as both merchant and healer, in the same way it might to a practitioner writing a regional pharmaceutical work. What we instead see is that local flora, in this case European flora, was simply one part of the whole, a part that perhaps did not hold any special weight.

Providing a Control

One of the avenues of research opened up by HP is the ability to craft more deliberate comparisons. This might mean looking for likenesses and variances across geographic area, time period, or type of document.⁵⁴ It provides historians with the tools to investigate standards of practice and their divergences. From this source base we can observe and document, to use a phrase from De Vos, “knowledge in motion.”⁵⁵ To this end, this section extrapolates on the different types of comparisons to be made in such a corpus. The first subsection takes three southern French inventories from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries to compare them with the contents of de Gréoux’s inventory. These inventories offer obvious potential equivalents, equivalents where the only major variable is time period. The second subsection draws from De Vos’s work on Mediterranean medical publications and from an Italian reference pharmacopeia that was rather popular in continental Europe at the turn of the sixteenth century to draw broader conclusions about the similarities there are to be found between all of these works.

Inventories

In comparing the natural materials used and manipulated by early modern medical practitioners, something we have to keep in mind is the transformative capabilities of remedy making. If one apothecary’s inventory includes a gum of lemon and another includes a syrup of lemon, they are not necessarily fully comparable materials, even if they both use the same main ingredient of lemon, especially when considering that compounds using the same simples would most likely be used to treat different ailments and would produce different effects. This question is further complicated when lemons are not listed among these apothecaries’ simples. In de Gréoux’s inventory (this is also the case for the others that will be examined below), there was not a one-to-one match between the natural materials listed among his simples and the ingredients for his oils, waters, syrups, and so on. For instance, he had four pounds of chamomile oil stocked and no chamomile listed among his simples. This is not an issue with the inventory itself but an issue with crafting a precise comparison. One must consider the shelf life of compound remedies, the ability to source and store simples, and the seasonality of these simples. As discussed, apothecary inventories offer a picture of one moment in time, a moment in which de Gréoux may have just used up his chamomile to concoct other remedies, or a moment when chamomile was out of season and he only had the longer-lasting oil in stock. This affects not just how we examine inventories individually but also how we can compare them. For this reason, I have produced two versions of the comparison between de Gréoux’s inventory and the inventories, all functional, of three other early modern apothecaries operating in southern France.⁵⁶

The first of these apothecaries was Mathieu Roux, operating in Marseille at the end of the fifteenth century. His inventory (Figure 5), compiled in 1488, included simples, conserves, jams, syrups, ointments, waters, oils, and powders. The last portion of the inventory discussed containers and their ability to preserve the ingredients in the shop. Second of these inventories was that of Steve Villa, an apothecary in Aix-en-Provence in the early sixteenth century. The inventory of his shop (Figure 6), taken in 1506, included waters, pills, troches, simples, oils, ointments, electuaries, powders, and instruments. The weights for these materials were listed in ounces and drams using the measurement symbols mentioned earlier. The final apothecary shop was owned by Jacques Figurat in Carpentras during the early seventeenth century. Figurat’s inventory (Figure 7) was compiled in 1616. It rather resembled de Gréoux’s in its composition, separated into sections based on type of supply: instruments, troches, pills, cordial powders, opiate compositions, electuaries, conserves, syrups, honey compositions, distilled waters, ointments, simples, plasters, and several sections titled “drugs and merchandise.”⁵⁷ The compounds and simples were listed with weights in pounds and ounces. The first comparison of these four inventories only includes what I call full matches: entries in the inventories in which both the natural material and the composition of this natural material were the same. A conserve of scolopendria, for instance, is a separate entry from a syrup of scolopendria. This also applies to powdered versions of natural materials, as a pulverized root might be used in a different type of composition than one in its whole form. Essentially, the first comparison seeks to treat these materials in a manner more faithful to that in which they were written. Roux’s 1488 inventory and de Gréoux’s shared 114 simples and compounds in common.⁵⁸ Villa’s 1506 inventory and de Gréoux’s have ninety-one simples and compounds in common.⁵⁹ Figurat’s 1616 inventory and de Gréoux’s have 110 simples and compounds in common.⁶⁰ Between all four inventories, they only had thirteen items in common: coral rouge, ligni aloes, zedoarie, coloquintide, assa phetida (asafoetida), semen peonie, unguentum Agripa, aromaticum rosatum, lapis lazuli, antimoni, alipta muscata, pillule de agarico, and pillule elephanguie.

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Figure 5.

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, “Inventory of the Boutique of Matheus Ruffi,” 1488, https://dalme.org/collections/global-pharmacopeias-workshop/records/2baa782e-0276-4452-b19e-23eb3491a9bf/5r/.

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Figure 6.

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, “Inventory of the Boutique of Steve Villa,” 1506, https://dalme.org/collections/global-pharmacopeias-workshop/records/69538b2c-3b66-4381-9205-eba3fd596e26/2r.

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Figure 7.

Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, “Inventory of the Shop of Jacques Figurat,” 1616, https://dalme.org/collections/global-pharmacopeias-workshop/records/c417e3b5-ad6f-4fb5-8531-e3a71de94f47/58/.

This first comparison rests on different conceptualizations of the same or similar natural materials. However, how we conceptualize these materials also greatly changes the way we view the inventories individually. Take de Gréoux’s inventory for example. If we remain faithful to the manner in which the inventory was written and count peony seeds and peony roots as separate entries, rather than as one entry, as pieces of the same whole, the number of entries in his inventory essentially doubles. Not including instruments, and accounting for repeats, de Gréoux’s inventory contained over 400 items. If we condense these entries to unique mentions of natural materials—for example, red sandalwood and white sandalwood would not be two separate entries but one, with a note that the inventory included two types—the number of entries decreases to about 200. In essence, what changes between these two comparisons is not so much the number of materials these inventories have in common but the percentage of similarity. Using the structure of de Gréoux’s inventory as is, about 20 percent of his inventory contains simples and compounds specifically mentioned by the inventories of Roux, Villa, and Figurat, respectively. By making this a question of shared simples, that percentage goes up to about 50 percent.⁶¹

Both methods of comparison can provide important findings, but it is imperative to acknowledge the different results these findings may produce, as well as some of the difficulties they pose. On the one hand, we have a comparison where each item is its own entity, where violet water and violet syrup are separate entries. In this case, it seems as though de Gréoux did not share a considerable amount of materials in common with the inventories of Roux, Villa, and Figurat, but this is somewhat misleading. In breaking everything down to its components, in listing violet water, violet syrup, violet honey, and so on all under the subhead of violets, then we see the similarities between the inventories increase dramatically. One shop may have contained violet water and another violet syrup, but the use of the same or similar materials is still a valuable correlation to demonstrate. In this comparison, we deal with a different type of uncertainty. De Gréoux did not list lemons among his simples despite his inventory containing lemon syrup. It is quite possible he could have purchased certain syrups or waters from a distiller or some other seller of goods, making it difficult to ascertain the exact extent of the simples in his shop. In essence, conceptualizing the comparison of these four inventories in two different ways seeks to point out the value in understanding how each inventory conceptualizes medicine and the making of medicine in its many forms. Understanding the manner through which these inventories are similar and different forces us to contend with categories like standardization and individuality. It compels us to contend with how we conceptualize the actors and objects involved in the medical marketplace. To what extent did they exist in a standardized system and to what extent did individual variation come into play? By crafting these two types of comparisons, this study argues that the answers to those questions depend on how we conceptualize the medical world and the apothecaries’ place in it.

Pharmacopeias and Medical Publications

First published in 1492, the Italian physician Quiricus de Augustis’s Lumen Apothecariorum was a successful, practical work on the making of medicines influenced by the Galenic and Hippocratic traditions.⁶² Over the next fifty years, a total of fourteen editions were published across continental Europe. While Lumen, for all intents and purposes, is a reference pharmacopeia and reads like a reference pharmacopeia, it does occupy a somewhat transitional space. In Italy, it was published a few years before the greatly influential Riccetario Fiorentino. In France, the first reference pharmacopeias of influence were produced by the medical faculties of the Universities of Montpellier, Paris, and Poitiers beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century. Lumen is a reference pharmacopeia operating without the authority of something like the Riccetario Fiorentino or La Pharmacopée by Laurent Joubert, the dean of the medical faculty at Montpellier. It is a reference pharmacopeia that described compound remedies not from a place of control but out of a desire to instruct. It is with this type of medical publication that de Gréoux’s inventory shared 187 simples and compounds.⁶³

With the corpus of Mediterranean medical texts (fifth century to nineteenth century) identified by De Vos and organized into a list of the most commonly used 439 simples, de Gréoux’s inventory shared 103 natural materials in common.⁶⁴ The similarities between de Gréoux’s inventory and the texts explored by De Vos demonstrate a different type of globality than that challenged by the earlier section on simples and their origins.⁶⁵ In this case, the globality of the simples relates to their use rather than their origin. It is a globality in which apothecary shops across Europe shared similar inventories, somewhat regardless of the origin of the items in those inventories. A helpful way to conceptualize these two categories, globality of use and globality of origin, may be through naming conventions among simples and compounds. While not an extensive list, there are seven items among de Gréoux’s inventory whose names seem to reference their geographic origin: unguentum egiptiacum, unguentum Aragon, semen petro Macedonici, foli indi, boli armenia, raisins de Damas, and succre de Madere.⁶⁶ These were all fairly common simples and compounds in inventories and pharmacopeias across Europe. The distinction between globality of use and globality of origin highlights the multiplicities apparent in investigating the effect of medicines used on a global scale. Take unguentum egiptiacum, for example: an ointment made from simples such as verdigris, honey, and vinegar and used to treat wounds.⁶⁷ From its name, we might investigate its potential connection to Egypt and the products from that region. From its mention in French apothecary inventories and European medical publications, we might investigate its use in European markets.⁶⁸ Therefore, the distinction between globality of use and globality of origin is essentially a question of significance. Is it more important that some simples and compounds retain a connection, however tenuous, to their place of origin or is it more important that these simples and compounds were widely available and in use in other regions?

As De Vos’s work on the emblematic 1775 inventory of Jacinto de Herrera’s shop in Mexico City demonstrates, this use often stemmed from a shared philosophy, in this case Galenic pharmacy.⁶⁹ De Gréoux’s shop shared materia medica with Herrera’s as well: birthwort, zedoary, peony root, sandalwood, borage, violets, roses, poppies, hermodactyl, rosemary, myrobalan seeds, juniper, celery, anise, lettuce, mallow, fennel, poppy, parsley, sagapenum gum, mastic, storax, sweetgum, gum tragacanth, chamomile, mallow, camphor, galangal, white coral, red coral, to name a few. However, a comparison between the inventories of de Gréoux and Herrera especially highlights what was not in de Gréoux’s shop: spices. Though not completely missing from his inventory, de Gréoux stocked a noticeably smaller amount of spices than did Herrera, or as was listed in Lumen. He stocked cubebe (tailed pepper, Java pepper) and amomum (false cardamom), yet many shops stocked several kinds of pepper, cinnamon, cardamom.⁷⁰ In addition, there was a whole section of Herrera’s inventory, including barley, wheat, garbanzos, and lentils in fine flours, that seem to have been rather uncommon materials in European shops.⁷¹

While this study has found striking overlap in investigating de Gréoux’s inventory in comparison to similar material and material that diverged practically (as a reference or functional text), temporally, or geographically, it has also found variances based on discrepancies in these categories. For instance, the way the materials were listed in de Gréoux’s inventory (1547) and in Figurat’s inventory (1616) demonstrates that they did not necessarily agree on what was considered a cordial powder and what was considered an electuary, with many of de Gréoux’s electuaries listed as cordial powders in Figurat’s inventory. That being said, the categories of compounds could be rather mutable, bringing into question whether this indicates a fundamental disagreement between de Gréoux and Figurat’s understanding of electuaries and cordial powders or whether this indicates the interchangeability of these two categories. In the case of de Gréoux’s lack of spices, as well as resins, it would make sense that over time transportation practices for materials such as gums, resins, and spices that were difficult to transplant grew better over time. However, de Augustis’s mention of several different types of pepper throughout Lumen potentially suggests a different reason that deserves further investigation. In essence, while these comparisons have produced more information, it is information that often further complicates our understanding of early modern apothecary practice. This is something that HP attempts to address. By providing a larger sample size, by providing a reference in the form of our glossary of medical vocabulary, we can craft more stable comparisons, comparisons backed by a richer set of practices.

Globality of Use and Globality of Origin

What does it mean for an apothecary shop to be a global enterprise? Was de Gréoux’s inventory global because it contained materia medica from Europe, Asia, the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, and the Americas (regardless of how long some of these “exotic” materials had been on the market and had been accepted into European medical practice)? Or was de Gréoux’s inventory global because it shared certain commonalities with materia medica used throughout Europe, as well as in some of their colonial establishments? In questioning different methods of studying apothecaries’ inventories, as case studies or as comparative projects, we must also question how far our understanding of globality propels us. Just as we have begun to think of medical practitioners as interconnected through networks of exchange, the same can be thought of the simples and compound remedies used by apothecaries such as de Gréoux. By using different methodologies to investigate apothecaries and their inventories, and by drawing attention to important distinctions in these methodologies, including types of globality and types of comparison, this article has sought to demonstrate apothecary shops as transitive sites of global exchange and knowledge. By building a temporally and geographically far-spanning corpus, by developing tools such as the forthcoming glossary of pharmacological vocabulary, HP attempts to provide more space for comparison without losing the detail and more space for detail without losing inclusivity. HP strives to develop standards of investigation that allow us to view the development of medical practice as an act of multiplicity.

Index