Abstract
In this paper, I demonstrate that from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, gardening horticultural knowledge in Portugal was much more accessible through Spanish and French agricultural treatises than through any other kind of garden literature. So, focusing on agricultural treatises, the aim of this paper is to present the results achieved so far by investigating the circulation of these books, to assess which authors were the most popular and which editions and translations had the greatest success, and to evaluate their depth and scope as regards the character and key features of Portuguese gardens. As far as possible, I will do this by comparing these with horticultural literature sources used in other European countries.
Furthermore, I highlight the following texts as the works with the greatest circulation in Portugal: Gabriel Alonso de Herrera’s Agricultura General (1513), Miquel Agustí’s Libro de los secretos de agricultura, casa de campo, y pastoral (1626), Louis Liger’s Oeconomie générale (1700) and João Garrido’s Agricultor Instruído (1730). On this basis, I aim to establish a connection between the theoretical knowledge available during the said period and the Portuguese gardens themselves. Until recently, horticulture was understood as an art conveyed exclusively by praxis.
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Notes
- 1.
Art Treatises in Portugal was a research project (with the reference PTDC/EAT-EAT/100496/2008) undertaken by the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas (Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities) of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (New University of Lisbon), with funding from the Foundation of Science and Technology/Ministry of Science.
- 2.
The first collection of the Latin authors Cato , Columella , Varro and Palladius was printed in Venice in 1472, in Reggio in 1482, 1496 and 1499, and in Bologna in 1554. Nine other editions of this collection were printed during the sixteenth century. All information on these sixteenth-century editions can be found in Fussell (1969).
- 3.
There is one methodological issue that needs pointing out here, besides all those relating to the database and already discussed in Art Treatises in Portugal (Rodrigues 2011c): this is the risk of associating a sixteenth century copy with its actual usage in that century, because sometimes libraries were only established much later and the book may have been bought at a time when it was no longer up-to-date. But in this case, it seems probable that Herrera was known and being used in the early sixteenth century.
- 4.
Kitab al-Felahah by Ibn-al-Awwam was rediscovered in the Royal Spanish Library of San Lorenzo del Escorial in the middle of the eighteenth century and hailed as the greatest of all medieval treatises on agriculture, but was totally unknown in most of Europe. Due to the conflict between Moors and Christians, it was known in the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula up until the fifteenth century and condemned for a long time in the northern Christian area (Olson and Eddy 1943: 100–108).
- 5.
On John Evelyn see Michael Leslie’s paper in this book.
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Rodrigues, A.D. (2016). Gardening Knowledge Through the Circulation of Agricultural Treatises in Portugal From the Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries. In: Fischer, H., Remmert, V., Wolschke-Bulmahn, J. (eds) Gardens, Knowledge and the Sciences in the Early Modern Period. Trends in the History of Science. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26342-7_15
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