[Trinity] General discussion of Trinity College MS O.2.48 Apuleii Herbarium

[Koen G]

JKP: the fruits do indeed look like eggplants. I've looked at historical eggplant names a bit but still can't connect it to any of the three synonyms given in the manuscript :/
Rene: my link to camphor came from the Hebrew "cemehor", but the Latin and Greek names look completely different.

Marco: I'm in the process of quickly going over the plants that have the "grows in..." phrase in the beginning. This is only an indication, since I miss any mention of origin further in the paragraph, but still...

There are generally three categories:

1. Most plants get a description of the terrain on which they grow: mountains, coast, sandy ground, shade, near rivers, "everywhere"... I think these are considered common in the text writer's home region.
   
2. A region in southern Italy (including Sicily, or bench-bench-lia as I now call it).
   
3. An exotic place.
   

The exotic locations are the following:

• Arabia (common), at times with indications of terrain, usually mountains.
  
• India, India Maior or India Minor. Rarely with further specification, e.g. near rivers
  
• Cappadocia
  

The following I've found only a few times or once so far:

• Alexandria
  
• Cilicia 
  
• Ethiopia
  

I'm still going over the last pages, but I'm getting close to 50 exotics. This is a minority of all the "new" plants, but in itself I'm surprised by the high number. I kept note of all the folios of exotic plants but I still have to type this into a decent format, if you're interested I will put the list here when I'm done.