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Jacques-Philippe CORNUT

Canadensium Plantarum Historia Enchiridion Botanicum

apud Simonem Le Moyne, Parisiis 1635, in-4 (17x23,5cm), (16) 238pp. (2), relié.

Canadensium Plantarum Historia Enchiridion Botanicum

First edition, illustrated with 68 full-page figures.
Contemporary full-parchment binding, ink title to spine. Later handwritten annotation (19^th-century) on verso of first endpaper: “Ouvrage vanté par Linné [Work extolled by Linné] phylos.bota. article 17”.
A work steeped in the tradition of Renaissance herbalism, the Canadensium Plantarum Historia is set apart by its modern system of classification: it contains the very first descriptions of over 70 species of Canadian flora by the French botanist Jacques-Philippe Cornut (1606-1651).
This work, emblematic of the medicinal herbology tradition, is also characteristic of the seventeenth-century passion for botany – a passion reflected in the author's horticultural observations.
The finely executed figures are attributed to Pierre Vallet (1575-1657), an artist who, it is interesting to note, became the French court's first botanical painter under the patronage of Marie de Medici – an indication of the prominence that the discipline had acquired. Plants were being studied more descriptively in order to facilitate species characterisation, as evidenced by the construction of the Jardin du Roy between 1626 and 1636.
These gardens played a central role in the genesis of this book: Cornut never actually set foot in Canada, and specimens of the plants he describes were provided for him by the botanists Jean Robin (1550-1620) and Vespasien Robin (1579-1662), who were responsible for the upkeep of the garden of Henri IV and that of the Faculty of Medicine, forerunners of the Jardin des Plantes. The plants themselves were brought back by French explorers, contributing significantly towards the opening-up of the New World and the forging of intercontinental links. The Canadensium Plantarum Historia follows this trend, the description of plants from the distant land of Canada being accompanied by an unpublished list of flora in the environs of Paris (Enchiridium botanicum parisiense).
Carl von Linné (1707-1778) would subsequently emphasise the major influence of Cornut's work on his own observations of Canadian and North American flora in his Philosophica Botanica, as indicated by an ex-dono inscription in the book: “Work extolled by Linné phylos.bota. Article 17”. Bibliothèque Americaine, 566 (H. Ternaux).
Published five years before America first witnessed the printing of a book on its soil, the Canadensium Plantarum Historia is representative of the transition from the Renaissance to the modern era – a transition marked by an encounter between the Old Continent and New France.

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