Compendium Salernitanum

Originating in northern Italy, this mid-fourteenth-century manuscript contains 488 miniatures, which were possibly drawn at a Venetian workshop, with explanatory titles in Latin and French. It represents one part of a two volume compendium on medicinal plants, minerals and mining techniques, and various animals. Much of this material is drawn from the Circa Instans, a twelfth-century medical textbook by Matthaeus Platearius, a physician from Salerno. The other volume, a manuscript likely containing the compendium’s text, is lost.

Representative Manuscripts

New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M. 873. A full description is provided here by the Pierpont Morgan Library.


C.B. Rea and J. Rea, eds., Circa Instans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973).

Secondary Literature

Lilian Armstrong, “The Illustration of Pliny’s Historia Naturalis: Manuscripts before 1430,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes XLVI (1983), 27.

Felix Andreas Baumann, Das Erbario Carrarese und die Bildtradition des Tractatus de Herbis (Bern: Benteli, 1974), 103.

Minta Collins, Medieval Herbals: The Illustrative Tradition (London: British Library, 2000).


Summary by Michael Diaz de la Portilla.