We reveal the enigmatic origin of one of the earliest surviving botanical collections. The 16 th -century Italian En Tibi herbarium is a large, luxurious book with c . 500 dried plants, made in the Renaissance scholarly circles that developed botany as a distinct discipline. Its Latin inscription, translated as “Here for you a smiling garden of everlasting flowers”, suggests that this herbarium was a gift for a patron of the emerging botanical science. We follow an integrative approach that includes a botanical similarity estimation of the En Tibi with contemporary herbaria (Aldrovandi, Cesalpino, “Cibo”, Merini, Estense) and analysis of the book’s watermark, paper, binding, handwriting, Latin inscription and the morphology and DNA of hairs mounted under specimens. Rejecting the previous origin hypothesis (Ferrara, 1542–1544), we show that the En Tibi was made in Bologna around 1558. We attribute the En Tibi herbarium to Francesco Petrollini, a neglected 16 th -century botanist, to whom also belongs, as clarified herein, the controversial “Erbario Cibo” kept in Rome. The En Tibi was probably a work on commission for Petrollini, who provided the plant material for the book. Other people were apparently involved in the compilation and offering of this precious gift to a yet unknown person, possibly the Habsburg Emperor Ferdinand I. The En Tibi herbarium is a Renaissance masterpiece of art and science, representing the quest for truth in herbal medicine and botany. Our multidisciplinary approach can serve as a guideline for deciphering other anonymous herbaria, kept safely “hidden” in treasure rooms of universities, libraries and museums.

This experiment demonstrates the large potential of macro-XRF imaging for the visualization of fragments of medieval manuscripts hidden in early-modern bookbindings. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century made manuscripts obsolete and bookbinders started recycling their strong parchment leaves to reinforce bindings of printed books. One in roughly every five early-modern books contains a fragment of a medieval manuscript hidden underneath the bookbinding. Systematically investigating these fragments will provide scholars with valuable information about transmission and variant readings of medieval texts. Four case studies were scanned with a Bruker M6 Jetstream mobile XRF scanner. We were able to visualize hidden texts underneath black paint, paper and parchment at such a high resolution that they could be read and dated. One of the findings was an early twelfth-century excerpt of a text by the Venerable Bede in a sixteenth-century bookbinding. In addition, we were able to separately visualize the lower and upper text of a famous palimpsest. The main limitation of the current set-up is the scanning time, which took anywhere between 6 and 66 h. In order to systematically employ macro-XRF for researching medieval fragments, the scanning time needs to be decreased. Nonetheless, this experiment shows that the macro-XRF technique is extremely suitable for visualizing fragments of medieval manuscripts in a non-destructive way in order to read, date and localize them.

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Palaeography, in various forms, has long been known in the Netherlands. One might mention the excellent engravings after charters given by Adriaan Kluit (1735-1807) in his Historia critica comitatus Hollandiae et Zeelandiae, 1777-82; the useful description of the Egmond Gospels, also with fine engraved (and partly coloured) plates, in H. van Wijn (1740-1831), Huiszittend Leeven II, 1812; the 17 lithographed plates of script specimens and text booklet, published (as a schoolbook !) by Jacobus Koning (1770-1832), Algemeene ophelderende verklaring van het oud letterschrift, 1818; or, in a different field, the famous Leiden Hellenist Carel Gabriel Cobet (1813-89), who used his knowledge of Greek letterforms as a crowbar for emending Greek texts. From a later period one should certainly not forget to mention Bonaventura Kruitwagen OFM (1874-1954), if only for his studies about the scripts used by the Modern Devotion (reprinted in his Laat-Middeleeuwsche Paleografica [...], 1942). But all of this is not what we would call modern. Modern palaeography and codicology begin, in our country, with Lieftinck. Gerard Lieftinck lived a long life: his dates are 1902-94. But during the last fifteen years or so he lived a life of retirement, so that already at his death there was a whole generation who had never seen him.

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