The Pharmacy lunette, a scene of medieval life in the Castello di Issogne in the Valle d’Aosta. Photo by Daniel Smail. Image used with permission from the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
Detail of the accountant, or recordkeeper, writing numbers with quill and ink. A figure like this individual likely wrote many of the functional pharmacopeias in the Historical Pharmacopeias data set. The Pharmacy of Castello di Issogne lunette. Photo by Daniel Smail. Image used with permission from the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
A woman walks into a late medieval apothecary shop. Behind the counter are shelves of materia medica, waters, oils, and preserves, and hanging ex-voto offerings of body parts. There, she meets three men: the recordkeeper, the grinder, and the pharmacist.
“What will help my daughter’s melancholy?,” she asks, holding up a coin.
“It will cost you,” says the recordkeeper, hardly looking up from his quill, ink, and ledgers.
“Don’t look at me, I just make the simples simpler,” the grinder mutters into his large mortar and pestle.
Finally, the pharmacist proffers the scales, the ex-voto gloves behind him, and says, “Black hellebore is standard. But, I could give you a hand.”1
Detail of the grinder, preparing medicaments with a large mortar and pestle. The Pharmacy of Castello di Issogne lunette. Photo by Daniel Smail. Image used with permission from the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
The pharmacists and the scales. Note the ex-voto hand hanging from the strings toward the top of the lunette. The Pharmacy of Castello di Issogne lunette. Photo by Daniel Smail. Image used with permission from the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
The Castello di Issogne lunettes, decorations in the portico made by an unknown artist in Piedmontese school of the fifteenth century, were meant to be funny and evocative. These narrative scenes of daily life in the late medieval period depicted interactions of the pharmacy, the market, the guard room, the tailor shop, the small goods shop, the bakery, and the butcher shop.2 As Mauro Cortelazzo has shown, these narratives slip into a subversion of the comic and erotic. By placing the viewer behind the woman entering the apothecary shop, the creator of the scene—perhaps the same Magister Collinus whose name appears in the guard room—may have been playing on the slippage between human and material and, in the case of the apothecary, body and medicament.
“Aq.a bugolose” along with other waters. The Pharmacy of Castello di Issogne lunette. Photo by Daniel Smail. Image used with permission from the Regione Valle d’Aosta.
In the Castello di Issogne pharmacy fresco, cattail sheafs were woven around containers labeled as holding various waters, including infusions of flowers like violet and bugloss. On the shelf above them, pitchers and urns held other fluids, such as oils. A third shelf was left empty as the artist emphasized hanging objects, including corals, candles, tassels, a human figure, a quadruped, seals, a leg, and, of course, the cuffed ex-voto hand. Containers of beeswax, a substance required for light and ritual, rested on the shelves. These substances were at once valuable as commodities and laden with curative powers.
Healing was a tangible craft, grounded in the use of herbs, animal products, minerals, and other materials known to influence the body, along with the context that enabled them to act. The apothecary took on a mediating role between “substances with bodily effect,” as Pablo Gómez has described an expanded list of objects known to influence health,3 consumers’ well-being, and monetary value. Interventions in good health required materials characterized today as pharmaceuticals, ritual objects, foodstuffs, and equipment like alembics. Context mattered. The shop could induce wonder like any Wunderkammer, expertly filled with potent things, made by human hands and the grace of nature.
Images that capture the premodern apothecary’s shop are few and far between. More common are lists of what the shop held and how much its wares were worth. What can these lists—consisting of officially sanctioned medicaments and recipes, shop inventories, assorted medicines available for purchase, and more—reveal about the shared lexicon of healing and the relationship between those words and the substances they represented? To what extent did an apothecary from sixteenth-century Rome stock the same things or label his substances with the same words as the cleric charged with managing medicaments in a monastery in Spain?4 What about a laywoman from medieval England? Should one expect considerable similarities—the apothecary, cleric, and laywomen all stocking largely the same list of medicines with minor variations? Or should one expect different, diverse collections of remedies and medicinal vocabularies unique to specific shops or regions?5 How many unique natural products would be found in a complete catalog? What are these natural products in the first place? How fixed is the correlation between accepted names and the substances in the vessels?
The Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) project tries to answer some of these questions, imagining material worlds from the texts that apothecaries and their professional kin left behind. Members of the HP research network are compiling a collection of historical sources listing natural products and pharmaceutical preparations used in past societies. The collection features assemblages of products found in apothecaries’ inventories and other lists of medicaments in use from Europe, European imperial dominions, and other regions from antiquity to the nineteenth century. The goal is to present this collection in a form that is accessible to historians of medicine, science, and pharmacy, as well as medical researchers and biochemists studying natural products, that is, medicinally powerful substances extracted from nature. The collection is disseminated on a platform that also houses a sister project, the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe (DALME), a collection of household inventories and other lists of things from Europe between 1250 and 1550. The platform shared by these projects allows for team-based transcription and editing of manuscript and printed sources. The resulting records, published online and open access, benefit from a range of tools that enable discovery and analysis.6
Lists as Pharmacopeias
We read these lists as pharmacopeias: assemblages of substances with bodily effects, recorded in a standardized format. Just as the fresco moves the viewer’s eyes up the lunette from the counter to the shelf of waters and beyond to the cakes of wax, the lists we study walk readers through the priorities of past experts in making medicines, whether or not they were sanctioned by regional authorities. By taking lists created by historical actors like the accountant in the lunette, we expand the cast of historical actors contributing to the making and consolidation of pharmaceutical knowledge.
This is a socially oriented expansion of a term used by professional pharmacists and historians alike. As an intrinsically ambiguous word, “pharmacopeia” becomes an access point to a genre of written documents recording information about medicaments. As Matthew James Crawford and Joseph Gabriel have pointed out, it has been understood to refer to a “genre of medical writing that lists simple and compound medicaments as well as the techniques for preparing and administering these medicaments according to a specific medical tradition.”7 More broadly, Crawford and Gabriel suggest that “the term pharmacopeia has been used to refer to the collective knowledge of medical cultures and therapeutic preparations of different substances as held by any society, culture, or group of specialists within a society or culture.”8 Pharmacopeias, then, are lists of medicaments that are always more than lists of medicaments and certainly more than official lists. Gómez has expanded the language to “social pharmacopeias,” encompassing oral and practical traditions of medicine beyond texts.9 Our approach to pharmacopeias targets lists of medicaments rather than isolated references or recipes. This approach makes it possible to view collections of substances in a holistic way, that is, not as sets of isolated medicaments but as assemblages designed with the health of the human body, and limits of access, in mind.
There have been good reasons for a narrow definition of “pharmacopeia” in professional settings. Elevating the term to an official category has helped pharmacists and scholars in the history of pharmacy consolidate authority in the making and distribution of drugs and medicines. The term “pharmacopeia” is used by pharmacists today to identify a published, standardized list of compound medicines, authorized by a government or medical or pharmaceutical society, “an official collection of approved pharmaceutical standards” required for civic safety.10 In defining the word in this manner, pharmaceutical experts have consolidated authority around medicinal substances. In telling the history of official pharmacopeias, scholars point to how the title of the 1618 Pharmacopoeia Londinensis by the Royal College of Physicians in London came to reflect this official designation. Before that, other texts claimed authoritative power using other words, such as Ricettario (collection of recipes), Concordie (concordance), or Antidotarium (collection of antidotes).11 However, by using “pharmacopeia” in its restricted sense, historians of medicine have unwittingly reinforced the hierarchical claims made by major figures in early modern medicine, namely, that only properly trained authorities have the right to determine what is and what is not a medicine. Although the discipline of pharmacy has sought to render this definition unambiguous and official, the ambiguity is a key facet of the underlying history, particularly before the rise of print in Europe during the early modern period.
Rules and regulations are certainly key to a healthy society, but the presumption that all use of illicit substances ought to be (or can be) controlled by a singular authority is less relevant in the study of earlier eras. Many of the earliest pharmacopeias sought to have more influence than they could actually command. For example, only a generation after their predecessors in the College of Apothecaries of Barcelona wrote the first edition of the Concordie, the second official reference pharmacopeia printed in Europe, the same group determined that this book had to be entirely rewritten and reprinted.12 Authority could be fleeting, and what it pertained to could be renegotiated and written onto future consumers in texts that sought to stand outside of time. Just as the black market is often key to understanding the real market, HP features documents compiled by and for a wider swath of makers, users, and collectors of substances with bodily effect. By way of example, an abundant corpus of inventories reveals that alembics, a type of distilling equipment of Arabic origin, was part of numerous households on the European shore of the western Mediterranean basin, from Barcelona to Florence, suggesting that many people may have made foodstuffs or other preparations requiring distillations in their home, notably rose water, but possibly also other medicines.13 Those who held medical authority came from a wider cross-section of society than a reading centered solely on the output of regulators would lead one to believe. In practical terms, the authorities certainly included certified pharmacists, but among their numbers we also find drug merchants, ritual practitioners, herbalists, and sometimes even people accused of witchcraft.
By broadening the definition of ’pharmacopeia’ to encompass not only lists of materia medica but also processing equipment, compound remedies, and related tools, we adopt a functionalist approach that aligns more closely with the practices and lived realities of historical actors. This perspective allows us to explore how medical knowledge and practice were rooted in everyday activities, reflecting what individuals and communities actually did rather than merely adhering to the prescriptions or ideals set forth by institutional authorities. Such an inclusive framework also highlights the diverse pharmacopeias developed within non-European knowledge systems, such as those produced by Ottoman practitioners and Nahua healers.14 In doing so, it expands the scope of pharmacopeias beyond a Eurocentric lens, situating it as a global phenomenon enriched by multiple cultural, social, and material contributions. To start this work, however, we begin by adopting this expanded purview when considering vernacular pharmacopeias produced in Europe, such as in Provence, Rome, and Barcelona.
Like all digital projects, Historical Pharmacopeias (HP) must be organized through a carefully designed ontology—a structured framework of rules that defines the entities within the project, their attributes, and the relationships between them. This ontology ensures consistency, facilitates data integration, and enables meaningful analysis, providing the foundational logic necessary to navigate and interpret the complexities of historical medical knowledge systems. The project follows the CIDOC CRM for the upper ontology, but necessarily develops an extension to add more precision to our record typology.15 In particular, we classified every pharmacopeia as reference or functional. Reference pharmacopeias present idealized or normative sets of medicaments, such as those that a practitioner should or could have on hand. In some respects, the phrase can be thought of as referring to the authoritative list that historians of pharmacy traditionally considered to be pharmacopeias. In this category, we divide the pharmacopeias into theoretical texts (like the writings of Mesue or the Antidotarium Niolai16) or pragmatic texts, such as official price lists and official pharmacopeia, that speak to what medicaments a region ought to have and perhaps how much they should cost as determined by an authority. By contrast, functional pharmacopeias describe existing or, in some cases, aspirational stores or collections. In this category, we include documents such as inventories of apothecary shops and pharmacies arising from a variety of legal contexts such as leases, sales, and probate procedures; consumer shopping records (including normative start-up costs); and catalogs.17 An example of a functional pharmacopeia that could be described as aspirational would be a list of preparations that were expected to be on board a ship. With all functional pharmacopeias, we can see what people actually had or wanted to have on hand. This distinction makes it possible to acknowledge how reference pharmacopeias seek to create their own authority and to recognize how local collections might diverge from the norms the reference pharmacopeias were seeking to establish.
Bringing Documentary Archaeology to Pharmacy
We came to this project out of a shared fascination for one of the outstanding types of sources to have emerged during the course of the DALME collection campaign: a small set of apothecaries’ inventories from the later Middle Ages in Europe. These records, which are well known to medieval European medical historians, offer insights into practices of medieval medicine, the spice trade, and the increasing formalization of pharmaceutical practice up to the fifteenth century. The few extant medieval apothecaries’ inventories (only a subset of which are currently available on the website) constitute the ancestors of a body of literature that grows dramatically in volume over the early modern period in Europe, the Ottoman world, and the Americas. These Euro-American sources, in turn, are a subset of a genre of practical or functional pharmacopeias that have attracted much research from specialists working on other parts of the world, notably China, the Arabic-speaking world, and Indigenous communities.
In collecting and interpreting pharmacopeias, we have built on the flexible platform used by the DALME project and extended it to broader spans of time and space. DALME, officially launched in 2021, aims to deepen our understanding of the material culture of late medieval Europe, a period marked by significant shifts in production and consumption that reshaped the relationship between people and their material environment. Despite the wealth of primary sources available—an abundance that increases dramatically after 1250—scholarly attention has been limited and largely confined to a small circle of specialists. A major challenge lies in the discovery and interpretation of archival documents, which are often written in difficult scripts and use unfamiliar terminology. While Europe’s material culture may have exhibited broad similarities, the diversity of languages and dialects across regions (and even more so in overseas territories) created distinct vocabularies for describing material culture. Moreover, the task of linking these textual descriptions with physical objects in museums and archaeological collections is far from straightforward, given the fact that widely accepted standards for accurately correlating words with things have only begun to emerge in the 2000s and are not yet sufficiently fine-grained to describe all the potential relationships. To meet these challenges, the DALME team have developed a pipeline that moves from busy archive to database record, from acquisition and cataloging, to transcription and annotation, parsing and lexicalization, and finally semantic decoding and re-encoding (see Figure 6).18
The “Workflow” page for the Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe project. In the Historical Pharmacopeias project, we used these methods to collect, catalog, transcribe, annotate, and parse functional and reference pharmacopeias.
The DALME project’s methodology has proven to be eminently suitable for the task of editing historical pharmacopeias. Historical pharmacopeias, often with clear formats, listed substances, and columns for amounts and prices, are ideally matched to this structure. Such pharmacopeias often contain detailed descriptions of medicinal substances and can be examined using DALME’s analytical toolkit to uncover patterns in the use, distribution, and evolution of these substances across different areas and time periods. By translating the different hands and record types recording medicinal substances in historical texts into a common framework through machine-actionable data sets, researchers can compare the use of specific substances across different cultures or track the introduction and spread of certain remedies, providing insights into the socioeconomic and cultural factors that influenced medical practices. Moreover, DALME’s approach to documentary archaeology—where verbal descriptions of objects are systematically compared—can be used to trace the evolution of pharmacological knowledge, identifying shifts in medical paradigms or the influence of cross-cultural exchanges on the development of pharmacopeias. This could lead to a better understanding of the historical context in which these substances were used and how they contributed to the medical knowledge of the time. The result is a toolset for the systematic study of historical pharmacopeias, enabling scholars to conduct qualitative and quantitative analyses that can reveal new insights into the history of medicine and pharmacy (see Figure 7).
A detailed inventory from Mathieu Roux’s apothecary shop displayed on the Historical Pharmacopeias website, https://dalme.org/collections/historical-pharmacopeias/records/2baa782e-0276-4452-b19e-23eb3491a9bf/2r/ (accessed September 21, 2024).
By interpreting pharmacopeias as lists of substances capable of influencing the body, we aim to uncover the rich material culture underpinning medical practices in earlier societies. These records also offer glimpses into the ontological frameworks of their creators—how they understood and categorized the world around them. Some records reflect practical concerns, such as grouping medicaments by their physical location in the shop without a clear overarching system, while others reveal more deliberate organizational strategies, such as distinguishing between simples (single ingredients) and compound medicines. These varying approaches illuminate the dynamic interplay between material culture, medical knowledge, and the practicalities of day-to-day operations. Sometimes they are organized by types of substances, separating simples from compound medicines. Others elaborated variants in medicines, such as the different types of “aqua vita,” the concentrated aqueous solution of ethanol, distilled by the ubiquitous alembics, whether ordinary or enhanced with the water lily or mallow flowers.19 In other cases, the principle of organization may have been the part of the body treated, provenance, substance type, spelling, or even value.
Substances with bodily effect include some items that the Dioscoridean tradition reads as simples (aka materia medica, or what scientists since the Enlightenment have called “natural products”). Simples could be animal, botanical, or mineral in origin. They include precious gems, fats, milks, metals, and even soils, as mentioned in the first printed Ricettario Fiorentino (see Figure 8). Many records mentioned simples by name. To take an example, the shop of Gabriellus Maurelli (Marseille, 1428) was said to have held “whole metals” (eynteras de metalli) and “metal simples” (simplas de metalli).20 Simples were raw substances, sometimes prepared as a powder or a liquid. They included common medicaments such as sassafras, hellebore, guaiacum, gold, and bezoar stones. Many of the pharmacopeias, especially price lists and apothecary inventories, also include compound medicines, which combine multiple simples into a remedy that is more than the sum of its parts. There are many recipes for mithridate, theriac, house-made elixirs, and patented remedies.
Nuovo Receptario Fiorentino (Firenze: Compagnia del Drago, 1498/9), title page and lists of substances with bodily effects, including precious gems, fats, milks, metals, and soils.
Beyond disseminating such lists in a machine-readable format, HP will convert records into an actionable data set. This data set will consist of record attributes and metadata (date, location, type), as well as fully parsed text in which each word is associated with a higher order lexical entity and ultimately a supralinguistic semantic concept. By way of example, the same inventory of Gabriellus Maurelli includes an entry for “azafetida,” a local spelling for asafoetida. Through a linkage in the database, this instance can be normalized to “asafoetida.” Since other languages have different ways of referring to the conceptual entity we call asafoetida, all the relevant headwords can ultimately be connected to the supralinguistic concept of the drug. Inter alia, these data relations will make it possible for scholars to search for a concept and identify all instances in the corpus, regardless of language or spelling. That means it will be easier for experts and scholars with different experience to link dried latex (the gum resin often obtained from the roots of Ferula plants, often ground into a yellow powder) to a shared meaning. Although it appears in many different variants and has been linked to a number of botanical sources, the name and the pungent smell have been a constant in apothecary stores. Further connections might enable us to link the Latinized version of the Persian for stinky mastic (aza-foetidus), to its many other names as variants of “devil’s dung” from French to German to English, Spanish, Turkish, and more (see Figure 9).21
Making supralinguistic connections, or Devil’s dung and asafoetida in Marseille. Jean-Pierre Bénézet and Claire Allen, “Inventory of the Shop of Gabriellus Maurelli,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, n.d.), https://purl.dalme.org/df72f143-dba4-4037-822a-66dfb7dafa3a/ (accessed September 21, 2024), fol. 115v.
Seeing New Patterns
The HP collection will enable new forms of analysis that leverage relative frequency, geographic distribution, co-occurrence, and price variation to see pharmacopeias in a new light. How often are simples, compounds, tools, and books mentioned? How many appear in the pharmacopeias? Do they vary over time as products enter the medical marketplace or fade in importance? Are the same products mentioned in functional and reference pharmacopeias? The act of reading across lists with quantitative tools can make it possible to derive measures of relative frequency, where the number of references of a given term are provided as a ratio of the total volume of a set rather than in absolute terms. For a simple example, for any comparative analysis of the popularity of asafoetida across different regions, it would be important to present the figures as a ratio of the number of pharmacopeias from that region. Furthermore, the metadata make it possible for us to evaluate geographic distributions, at least for functional pharmacopeias. Since these kinds of pharmacopeias can be localized, we can map distributions of products by georeferencing the location of record. This technique makes it possible for researchers to trace phenomena such as the rising popularity of New World medicaments in Europe or the transregional movement of Indigenous American medicines. Finally, we can look for co-occurrences, or the frequency by which some substances co-occur (or in some cases do not co-occur) with other substances.
As the collection grows, we will have a keener sense of what medicaments are normal in a particular location. This requires careful thinking about how to establish likeness and tensions. In some ways, the many pharmacopeias in the data set constitute an assortment of pharmaceutical documents from different times, different places, and different hands. On one hand, they are very much alike in their listing of medicaments. On the other hand, they are very individual. Comparing them requires attention to sampling methods that allow us to see if/when a natural product enters a standardized medicinal lexicon, which can highlight the regionality of certain medicine. Researchers might sort records by region, date, or any other metadata element they want. For example, what might we see if we exclusively compared pharmacopeias from major European centers such as Barcelona, Provence, and Rome from 1300 to 1800? How many documents are needed to accurately represent the medicinal vocabulary of a specific region? Does sampling ignore the idiosyncratic nature of historical documents? Finally, how might we read the presences and absences of natural products? If a natural product appears disproportionately less or not at all in one area compared with another, how might we interpret that—an intentional erasure, a lack of commercial or agricultural access? When making a glossary that reflects a shared European medicinal language, including or excluding medicinal substances needs to be predicated on a standardized, statistically informed reading of absences and presences when comparing sample regions.
A Familiar Scene
One of the most fascinating features of the history of pharmacy and pharmaceuticals is the tension between what has changed and what has stayed the same. When walking up to the counter of the Rothschild Apothecary Shop at the Museum of Science and Technology in Syracuse, New York, one finds oneself adopting a posture very similar to the woman in the Castello di Issogne lunette: staring up at walls of medicaments.22 Here, too, we find dragon’s blood and rose water, oils and elixirs (see Figure 10). While the first represented daily life of the fifteenth century, the second was a painstaking and amalgamated historical reconstruction of a New York shop that closed in the twentieth century. This collection connects many different pharmacopeias, some of which are the functional lists akin to what the recordkeeper of Issogne was creating. Through the immense binders of catalogs created by central New York community members in the 1990s, one could triangulate between the descriptions of medicines and lists describing the contents of the shop/museum, moving between word and object.23
Peering into the Museum of Science and Technology’s Rothschild Apothecary Shop, Syracuse, New York. Student researchers Lara Barreira and Jack O’Brien are taking photos of the collection to develop in visual catalog of the medicaments. Photo by Mackenzie Cooley.
By turning to documentary archeology, we develop better tools to look at the repeated features of life surrounded by medicines, made more secure through a material culture of remedies and experts that could point the way toward better health by adding substances to one’s body. With the HP project, complete with its capacious understanding of pharmacopeias, we hope to create a dataset that allows us to peek into other apothecary shops, household collections, and officially sanctioned stores. Rather than presuming that the official pharmacopeia determined what each shop had on hand, we turn to the lists and collections, reckoning the licit and illicit substances that people hoped to find there.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful for the participants at the “Global Pharmacopeias” conference at Harvard in February 2024 and hope that many of their thoughtful comments are reflected in the framing of this special issue. Funding has been provided by the Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences of Harvard University and the Levitt Center at Hamilton College. We are grateful to audiences at the Drug Discovery for Nature’s Metabolites Symposium at Cornell University and the Phytochem Talks groups of the Botanical Society of America’s Phytochemistry Section and the Phytochemical Society of North America. Thanks to Sharon Strocchia, Elaine Leong, Valentina Pugliano, Barbara Di Gennaro Splendore, Duygu Yilidrim, Michael Stanley Baker, Aleksander Shopov, Katherine Park, Ann Blair, Pablo Gómez, Pamela Smith, Ben Breen, Clare Griffin, and Nandini Bhattacharya, whose comments have influenced our thinking. Finally, thanks to Paula De Vos for her editorial initiative and the chance to work through the comments and feedback we received at the 2023 American Institute of the History of Pharmacy community meeting.
Footnotes
↵1. For an analysis of the scales and token, serving as a measure of weight and value, see the cover image and analysis in Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, Dans l’atelier de l’apothicaire. Histoire et archéologie des pots de pharmacie XIIIe–XVIe siécle (Paris: Picard, 2013). A focus on melancholy draws on the forthcoming PhD dissertation of Jessica Hogbin and personal correspondence from September 2024. Along with black hellebore, materia medica for melancholy include polypody, melissa (lemon balm), white hellebore, and mercury; in the 1400s or 1500s, purgative simples like the ones listed above were the most common remedies. Michele Savonarola refers to melancholic humors and melancholic disease in his Practica Maior, which was originally compiled in the 1440s. Thanks to Barbara di Gennaro Splendore for her insights on questions of measurement, and topics related to pharmacy and medicine-making.
↵2. This fresco came to our attention during Smail’s visit to the Valle d’Aosta with Riccardo Rao, Paolo Buffo, and Mauro Cortelazzo in May 2024. In English-language scholarship, see Piedmontese School (fifteenth century), Scenes of Medieval Life: Guard Room, Market, and Various Shops (Part 2: Pharmacy), n.d., Fresco, Atrium and Loggia, Castello, Issogne, Italy, https://jstor.org/stable/community.15740978. They are often described as the Maître Colin group. In his forthcoming essay, “Raccontare storie: cultura materiale, immaginario collettivo e linguaggio simbolico nelle “lunette” del Castello di Issogne (AO),” Mauro Cortelazzo reads them as “scenes depicted to articulate a meticulous microcosm conceived to suggest, create, and stabilize a system of power and a set of values.” This article draws on the section “La lunette dello speziale.” For an overview in the well-studied subfield of Italian pharmacy, see Giovanni Carbonelli, “Farmacie e farmacisti in Italia nel secolo XVI,” Archivio di farmacognosia e scienze affini 1, no 2 (1912): 41–64. For recent work on pharmacists and experimentalism, see the writings of Valentina Pugliano, including “Pharmacy, Testing, and the Language of Truth in Renaissance Italy,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 19, no 2 (2017): 233–273. On Venetian pharmacy, Sabrina Minuzzi, Sul filo dei segreti: Farmacopea, libri e pratiche terapeutiche a Venezia in età moderna, (Milan: Edizioni Unicopli, 2016).
↵3. Pablo F. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 52, 127.
↵4. The later example draws on Lara Barreira’s article in this special issue.
↵5. These questions, as well as sections on comparata and the fruit basket analogy in the “Seeing New Patterns” section, draw on the work of Morgan Hodorowski’s presentation at the New World Nature Symposium “Drug Cultures, Pharmacopeias, and Digitization,” Hamilton College, September 21, 2024.
↵6. “Historical Pharmacopeias,” Collections, DALME, https://dalme.org/collections/historical-pharmacopeias/ (accessed August 1, 2024).
↵7. Matthew James Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel, “Introduction: Thinking with Pharmacopoeias,” in Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Matthew James Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019), 3–16, esp. 10–11.
↵8. Crawford and Gabriel, “Introduction,” 7.
↵9. Pablo F. Gómez, “Afterword: The Power of Unknowing: Early Modern Pharmacopoeias and the Imagination of the Atlantic,” in Drugs on the Page: Pharmacopoeias and Healing Knowledge in the Early Modern Atlantic World, edited by Matthew James Crawford and Joseph M. Gabriel (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), 263–68.
↵10. S. Belz, “Das Arzneibudh. Ein wichtiger Pfeiler der Arzneimittelsicherheit,” Bundesgesundheitsblatt-Gesundheitsforschung-Gesundheitsschutz 49, no. 12 (2006): 1205–11, esp. 1207. Thanks to Alaine Touwaide for this recommendation and the conversation on this topic.
↵11. See Nuovo Receptario Fiorentino (Firenze: Compagnia del Drago, 1498/9); Concordia Apothecatiorum Barchiñ (Barcelona, 1511); Antidotarium romanum (Rome: Martinelli, 1585).
↵12. This set of minutes is transcribed in full in Don José M.a. Suñé Arbussá, Las concordias de Barcelona del siglo XVI, Discurso leído en al acto de recepción del Académico electo, 17 marzo 1977, en la Real Academia de Farmacia de Barcelona, 40–43. Biblioteca Amer, “Llibre del Gremi d’ Apotecaris,” Manuscrito 21v–22r.
↵13. Daniel Lord Smail, “An Alembic Made of Lead,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, 2022), http://dalme.org/features/an-alembic-made-of-lead/.
↵14. On Ottoman Pharmacopeias, see the forthcoming work of Duygu Yıldırım. Cooley, Yıldırım, and Anna Toledano have made a similar argument about expanding the study of natural history into nature studies in, “Introduction,” Natural Things in Early Modern Worlds, (London/New York: Routledge, April 2023), 1–14, esp. 3–5.
↵15. “CIDOC Object-Oriented Conceptual Reference Model,” https://www.cidoc-crm.org/ (accessed September 23, 2024).
↵16. See Daniel Lord Smail and Mackenzie Cooley, “A Medical Book in an Avignonese Pharmacy (1492),” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, 2023), http://dalme.org/features/a-medical-book-in-an-avignonese-pharmacy-1492/.
↵17. For example, G. E. Trease and J. H. Hodson, “Inventory of John Hexham,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, n.d.), https://purl.dalme.org/7d9b6e85-7afb-471f-b20f-347d921ff5b2/; Tomás López Pizcueta, “Inventory of Francesc de Camp,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, 2024), https://purl.dalme.org/67225aa5-db38-476c-b6cc-5b5d414a5c51/.
↵18. Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale, “Workflow,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, http://dalme.org/project/workflow/ (accessed September 21, 2024).
↵19. “A Table of Prices of Medicines in Rome, 1609,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, n.d.), https://purl.dalme.org/588a223b-de9b-4bcb-ae57-de511be39dad/ (accessed September 21, 2024).
↵20. Jean-Pierre Bénézet and Claire Allen, “Inventory of the Shop of Gabriellus Maurelli,” in The Documentary Archaeology of Late Medieval Europe, edited by Daniel Lord Smail, Gabriel H. Pizzorno, and Laura Morreale (DALME, n.d.), https://purl.dalme.org/df72f143-dba4-4037-822a-66dfb7dafa3a/ (accessed September 21, 2024).
↵21. Poonam Mahendra and Shradha Bisht, “Ferula asafoetida: Traditional Uses and Pharmacological Activity,” Pharmacognosy Reviews 6, no. 12 (2012): 141–46, http://doi.org/10.4103/0973-7847.99948; Michael Adams, Wandana Alther, Michael Kessler, Martin Kluge, and Matthias Hamburger, “Malaria in the Renaissance: Remedies from European Herbals from the 16th and 17th Century,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 133 (2011): 278–88, esp. 284. Adams et al. note on p. 284 that “Dried juice of devil’s dung (Ferula assa-foetida) was boiled in wine, filtered and then drunk with sugar or honey . . . [It was a] common spice in India and has been used in Central European medicine for centuries. It got its name ‘devils dung’ from its repugnant smell. The drug consists of the dried resin of the milky juice from the roots. It contains esters of ferulic acid (60%) and carbohydrates (25–30).” It describes the essential oil and related in vitro assays in human blood.
↵22. Rothschild Apothecary Shop, funded by Upstate Medical University Life Sciences, Museum of Science and Technology. See https://www.most.org/explore/life-sciences/. (December 7, 2024).
↵23. Thanks to Emily Stewart at the Museum of Science and Technology for the chance to explore these catalogs and visit the collection. Caitlin Blanksteen’s NEH-funded curatorial studies project considered medicine, wonder, and apothecary museums; I am grateful to her research. Thanks to Lara Barreira and Jack O’Brien for their work in the collection.
This open access article is distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0) and is freely available online at: https://hopp.uwpress.org.
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