94 THE OLD ENGLISH HERBALS 



physician to William the Silent until his assassination. About 

 1569 he came over to England (with his friend Pena, who at one 

 time was physician to Louis XIII.) and lived at Highgate with 

 his son-in-law. He superintended Lord Zouche's garden at 

 Hackney, and later was given the title of botanist to James I. 

 L'Obel's great work, written in collaboration with Pena, was 

 the Stirpium Adversaria Nova, printed in London by Thomas 

 Purfoot in 1571.^ Pulteney, in his Biographical Sketches (1790), 

 makes the extraordinary statement that Christophe Plantin of 

 Antwerp was the real printer. It has, however, been pointed 

 out by modern authorities that the archives of the Plantin 

 Museum show that Plantin bought 800 copies of Purfoot 's 

 edition, with the wood blocks, for 1320 florins. In 1576 Plantin 

 published de I'Obel's Plantarum seu Stirpium historia, and to 

 this he appended the first part of the Adversaria, keeping 

 Purfoot's original colophon. 



Although Dodoens neither lived in England nor had any of 

 his works printed here, his Cruydtboeck became one of the 

 standard works in this country through Lyte's translation. 

 Dodoens was born at Malines about 1517 and, after studying at 

 Louvain, visited the universities and medical schools of France, 

 Italy and Germany, graduated M.D., and was appointed 

 physician to Maximilian 11. and Rudolf II. successively. In 

 the latter part of his life he was Professor of Medicine at Leyden, 

 where he died in 1585. Plantin published Dodoens's most 

 important work, Stirpium historiae pemptades sex sive libri 

 triginta, in which some of the figures are copied from the fifth- 

 century manuscript ^ copy of Dioscorides. Dodoens's first book, 

 the Cruydtboeck, was translated into French by his friend Charles 

 de I'Escluse^ and afterwards into Enghsh by Henry Lyte. 



1 For full title see Bibliography of Herbals, p. 210. 



2 This manuscript, now in the Vienna Library, was bought from a Jew 

 in Constantinople for 100 ducats by Auger-Geslain Busbecq, when he was 

 on a mission to Turkey. 



3 On one of his visits to England de I'Escluse met Sir Francis Drake, who 

 gave him plants from the New World. 



