Hortus siccus (1595) of Johann Brehe of Überlingen from the Broumov Benedictine monastery, Czech Republic, re-discovered

Abstract

A forgotten Renaissance herbarium dated to 1595 is described. It is connected to herbaria created by the naturalist Hieronymus Harder (1523–1607) of Ulm. This hortus siccus was recently found in the Muzeum Broumovska, Broumov (Braunau), Czech Republic, to which it came from the collections of the local Benedictine monastery. It is the oldest hortus siccus known in collections in the Czech Republic. It contains 358 specimens as well as annotations and drawings. Its creator was Johann Brehe from Überlingen, a sixteenth-century barber-surgeon. The paper analyzes the representation of species, the purpose of the annotations, and also the meaning of the illustrations which supplement some of the specimens. It also investigates connections between Brehe’s work and Harder’s activities linked to herbaria. Brehe’s herbarium is compared with two similar collections; Johann Jakob Han’s (?1565–1616) herbarium of 1594 and Harder’s herbarium, also of 1594, and both kept in Überlingen. It shares some features with both, while differing in other respects. In particular, we compare representations of plants from the New World and the inclusion of mosses and lichens. Finally, we address the question of how a herbarium created in a town on the shores of Lake Constance, in present-day Germany, found its way to an eastern Bohemian monastery, where its presence was first documented as recently as 1937 by Pater Vincenz Maiwald OSB (1862–1951). We also highlight the importance of Czech monasteries as sources of important, unpublished documents dealing with both the natural and social sciences.