Rembert Dodoens (1517-1585) was a medical Professor from Belgium with a particular affection for botany. His interest led him to publish a number of works on the medical aspects of plants.
'Cruydeboek' from 1554 was heavily influenced by the work of Leonard Fuchs. Indeed, many of the woodcuts were taken from Fuchs' Herbal but Dodoens added a large number of new illustrations and wrote his own text. The work veered towards being a pharmacopeia and Dodoens broke with the alphabetical arrangement of Fuchs, grouping plants according to their characteristics in 6 different sections (the first image above shows the cover of 4 of these).
'Cruydeboek' was hugely successful, particularly after it was translated from the flemish into french ('Histoire des Plantes' by Charles de L'Ecluse, 1557) and english ('A Niewe Herball' by Henry Lyte, 1578). "It became a work of worldwide renown, used as a reference book for two centuries."
- This is the easiest link to the blocks of thumbnail pages from 'Cruydeboek' with high resolution images available (it was digitized by the great Kurt Stüber).
- The originating (dutch) site is Plantaardigheden but they do have a short outline in english.
- These are a few of the many sites online with information on Rembert Dodoens.