A florilegium is a picture book filled with many species and varieties of flowers that were widely desired for seventeenth-century European gardens. While many aspects of florilegia seem simple and unimportant from our modern perspective, they grow in complexity and significance when placed into their historical contexts. This colourfully illustrated volume offers new insights into how florilegia functioned as material objects that highlighted and showcased many forms of knowledge, thereby revealing the expertise which the gardeners, compilers, and image-makers must have possessed in order to cultivate the once-living specimens and immortalise the flowers on paper and parchment.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes
Core Examples
List of Figures
Introduction
1Picture Books of Colourful Flowers from the Seventeenth Century
2Towards a History of Knowledge
3Making Seventeenth-Century Florilegia
4Overview of Core Examples and This Volume
1 Rare and Curious Flowers in the Seventeenth Century
1Introduction
2Balancing a Diversity and Variety of Flowers
3The Rare and the Curious
4Conclusion
2 Growing Flowers into Rarities and Curiosities
1Introduction
2How to Plant According to Seventeenth-Century Florilegia
3Cultivating Rare and Curious Flowers through Care and Patience
4Preparing Earth for a Good Planting Ground
5A Time to Plant and a Time to Enjoy the Blooms
6Conclusion
3 Picking Flowers for Every Season through Images and Text
1Introduction
2Copying Flowers
3Excerpting Flowers, Extracting Knowledge
4Putting Flowers in Seasonal Order
5Conclusion
4 From Describing Flower Colours to Describing Colouring Flowers
1Introduction
2Modifying and Reprinting Seventeenth-Century Florilegia
3Leafing through a Flower Book
4Describing Flowers and Their Colours
5Describing How-to Colour Flowers
6Conclusion
5 Keeping Flowers between the Pages
1Introduction
2Preserving Flowers on Paper and Parchment
3Losing Rareness and Curiousness
4Capturing Flowers in the Moment(s)
5Pressing Flowers for Rare and Curious Features
6Keeping the Collection as a Whole
7Conclusion
6 Making Colourful Images of Flowers in Life-Size
1Introduction
2Picturing Rare and Curious Flowers
3Drawing Flowers Life-Size
4Adding Colours to Flowers
5Conclusion
Conclusion
1A Customisable Genre Embracing Different Forms of Knowledge
2A Time to Make
Appendix 1: Making Colours Series
Appendix 2: Planting Pigments ColLAB
Appendix 3: Hortus floridus Iesse, Or, The Imperfect Book of Flowers: A
Twenty-First-Century Florilegium
Bibliography
Index of Names, Works, and Flowers
Jessie Wei-Hsuan Chen, Ph.D. (2023), is a historian of art, science, and knowledge currently working at the Huygens Institute of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). She has published several articles which reflect her interests in image making and the visual and material culture of natural history.
