EXHIBITS

Page 608 of Mattioli's Discorsi examines chili peppers from India, which were in actuality a product of the Americas, carried via the Columbian Exchange.

            Using an Italian-language text presented some limitations for our group’s use of the Discorsi. Initially, while setting up this project, we overestimated the similarities between Italian and other Romance languages. In particular, our knowledge of Latin-roots and French were enough to sort out some distinct words, basic grammatical patterns, and the like, but nonetheless proved unfruitful for our larger aspirations with this project. We quickly realized that in order to effectively compare both English and Italian language texts, that our method of extracting meaningful data would need to adapt.

            Rather than read through the prose of the Discorsi as intimately and detailed as we had initially aspired, we looked for quick, recognizable features: dates, names, and illustrations. These features were remarkably similar between the languages and permitted us to quickly scan the bulk of the texts.

            We noticed one jarring commonality between both the Discorsi and the Paradisi: inclusion of post-Columbian Exchange resources. Coined by Alfred Crosby, the term Columbian Exchange refers to the massive exchange of plants, animals, and disease between the Old World (Eurasia and Africa) and the newly discovered Americas.[1] Amongst the most influential of these were potatoes, maize (corn), tomatoes, peanuts, and chili peppers, which traveled from the Americas back to Europe.[2]

            Possibly the most important plant shared between both the New World and the Old World, featured in both of our texts, is maize. Our group initially noticed the prevalence of maize in illustrations but came across some confusion regarding the name of this crop. Corn, the term that we tend to call maize in the United States, was a broader term in Early Modern Europe referring to all grains (wheat, rye, and oats). The word maize is still preferred for international contexts.[3] Maize's spread throughout the world was tremendously influential, affecting traditional cuisines from South Africa to China, though with a special importance in Europe.[4]   

            The secondary scholarship regarding herbals notes the emphasis on gardening as a means to ensure one grew truly medicinal plants.[5] These books typically build off of the scholarship of earlier taxonomists, especially Pliny in the case of the Paradisi. These influences were not only drawn from earlier individuals, though: entire intellectual traditions were often built upon, such as the case of the Mattioli utilizing an earlier herbal by Dioscorides, which was in-turn created by using earlier Roman and Arabic medical treatises.[6]