Cambridge, Trinity College MS O.2.48 is a manuscript herbal that was probably created in Southern Italy in the XIII or XIV Century (for a slightly longer introduction, see this post).

Together with other texts that also appear in other manuscripts, the Trinity ms contains an extensive herbal in which plants are described according to a more or less fixed format:

Common name of the plant, Hebrew name and Greek name. Until now, I have been unable to make much sense of these names. One would expect the common names to be Latin or Italian, but they are not. The Greek names do not look like Greek either. I know too little of Hebrew to say anything about these names, but I suspect they are problematic as well.

Description of various parts of the plant: leaves, flowers and root (usually in this order), sometimes seeds and fruits. Each part is often described with reference to another plant — e.g. “leaves similar to Apium.” Some descriptions mention abstract geometrical shapes or non-vegetable analogues: e.g. “triangular leaves”, “root shaped like a scorpion”.

Medical and magical recipes.

The time of the year when to collect the plant.

For instance, the following is the text in the bottom half of f155r:

Transcription: Nomen herbae Acolumbir, Graeci Ereth, Ebrayci Vanas. Nascitur in Modinia[?] et Arabia. […] Caules tenues, violacei, in summo florem violaceum formatum in modo corniolae […]. Semen parvum, inclusum, nigrum, lucidum, rotundum. Folia similia apio aquatico. Radicem […] croceam formatam in modo scorpionis. In qua radice invenitur quidam vermiculus parvus similis musce grosse et est viridis. Illud vero in collo in suspensum ab omni terrore[?] bestiarum erit tutus. Radix vero in collo similiter[?] suspensa lunaticum sanat. In domo suspensa demones fugat. Et commesta trita in cibis scrupulus i omnem crepaturam sanat in dies iii. Semen vero tritum et cum vino sumptum drachmas i hominem iucundum et hilarem reddit et canum non permittit esse. […] Lege eam mense Octobre et Novembre.

Translation: The name of the plant is Acolumbir, Ereth in Greek, Vanas in Hebrew. It grows in Medina[?] and in Arabia. The stems are thin, purple, having at the tip a violet flower shaped like a small horn [or an “autumn rose” — coroniola?]. The seed is small, enclosed, black, shiny and rounded. The leaves are like those of water Apium. The root is yellow and shaped like a scorpion; inside it, you can find a green worm, similar to a large fly. Wearing it at your neck, you will be safe from all fearful beasts. Similarly, wearing the root at your neck, heals lunacy. If hang up inside a house, it puts daemons to flight. One scruple ground and eaten mixed with food heals all ulcers[?] in three days. One dram of the seed, ground and taken with wine, makes a man pleasant and cheerful and does not allow [hair] to whiten. Collect it in the months of October and November.

Acolumbir f155r

In this case, the flower is compared with that of a plant named “corniola”. This could be a plant whose flower has a small horn (“cornu” in Latin), like Delphinium in the Naples Dioscorides), or a reference to some kind of autumn rose that Pliny called “coroniola”. The flowers in the illustration do feature a “small horn” in one of the lower petals.

The leaves are described as similar to Apium. In the illustration, they are represented as green flowers with dentate petals.

The root is described as similar to a scorpion. The illustration represents it as a lizard (which in the middle-ages was believed to belong to the same family as scorpions).