Flora: Federico Cesi's Botanical Manuscripts

• Renaissance art history
• History of Science

"The lasting value of these drawings remains their pioneering use of the microscope. Cesi’s artists, in the 1620s, recorded details of plant anatomy with a precision, and on a scale, that would not be matched for centuries. Engravings were made of a few of the drawings; if the entire series had been published at the time, how the science of botany would have been advanced." (Brent Elliott, in: The Financial Times, 29 May 2015)

“These three volumes are the latest entries in the series of publications that make up “The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo.” (…) As with earlier volumes in the series, these combine outstanding scholarship with beautifully reproduced illustrations.” (Janice Neri, in Isis, 107/4, 2016, p. 836)

“It is a credit to the series editors, scholars, curators and publishers that high standards of scholarship have been sustained throughout the series, including this set (…) it is only with the publication of this goldmine that scholars are in a position to ask well-founded questions with rich returns.” (Sachiko Kusukawa, in Archives of Natural History,  45/1, 2018, p. 181-182)

Brent Elliott was the Librarian of the Royal Horticultural Society from 1982 to 2007, and is now the Society’s Historian. He is the author of Victorian Gardens (1986), Treasures of the Royal Horticultural Society (1994), The Country House Garden (1995), Flora (2001) and The Royal Horticultural Society: A History 1804–2004 (2004). A former editor of Garden History, he is now the editor of Occasional Papers from the RHS Lindley Library; among his contributions to this series are ‘Charles Darwin in the British horticultural press’ (2010) and ‘Eighteenth-century science in the garden’ (2011).

Luigi Guerrini is a historian specialising in the history of science in Italy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and particularly in the history of the early Accademia dei Lincei (1603–30). He has held post-doctoral fellowships and research positions in Italy and abroad. He is the editor of the twovolume edition of Federico Cesi’s Apiarium (2005–6), the author of I trattati naturalistici di Federico Cesi (2006) and a contributor to Part B.VIII of the Paper Museum, Flora: The Aztec Herbal (2009).

David Pegler is the former Head of Mycology at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and co-author of Part B.II: Fungi (2005) in the Paper Museum series. His taxonomic research has specialised in tropical and temperate Basidiomycetes, for which he received a Science Research Council individual merit promotion, and he has published 16 books and more than 300 scientific papers. He is a Fellow of the Linnean Society, London, of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and Centenary Fellow of the British Mycological Society. He has held visiting professorships at the Institute of Terrestrial Ecology, Łódz´, Poland, the Instituto de Botânica, São Paulo, Brazil, and the University of Jilin, China.