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.

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The German doctor and botanist Leonhard Rauwolf (1535-1596) was the first post-medieval European to travel to the Levant and Mesopotamia. The travel account that he published on his hazardous journey (1573-1575) is well studied, but the plants he collected during his travels have hardly been subjected to scientific study. The fourth volume of Rauwolf's 16th century book herbarium includes plant specimens collected from the area encompassing modern-day Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. We digitized this valuable historic collection, identified all specimens in the herbarium, analyzed its floristic composition, transcribed and translated the Latin and German texts accompanying each specimen and updated the names with the latest accepted nomenclature. The herbarium book includes 191 specimens representing 183 species belonging to 64 families. It includes original specimens of Linnaean type illustrations as well as historical crop cultivars from the Near East. The Rauwolf Herbarium gives a unique insight in the exotic, unknown and useful species of the Near East from the perspective of a 16th century European botanist.

The sixteenth century was a golden age for botany, a time when numerous naturalists devoted themselves to the study and documentation of plant diversity. A very prominent figure among them was the German physician, botanist, and traveler Leonhard Rauwolf (1535?–1596), famous for his travel account and luxurious book herbarium containing plants from the Near East. Here, we focus on the less studied, early book herbaria of Rauwolf. These form a three-volume plant collection bound in leather and gold, which contains over 600 plants that Rauwolf collected between 1560 and 1563 in S. France and N. Italy when he was a student of medicine. We show the botanical value of Rauwolf’s early book herbaria, exemplified by two exotic American specimens, namely one of the oldest surviving specimens of tobacco (Nicotiana rustica), collected in Italy, and the oldest known French record of prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica). These well-preserved specimens indicate that Rauwolf was eager to collect exotic plants already in his early botanical steps. We further discuss Rauwolf’s professional botanical network during his student years and suggest that the famous Swiss botanist Johann Bauhin (1541–1613), friend and companion of Rauwolf during his field excursions and their medical studies in Montpellier, has played a significant role in the compilation of this precious historical plant collection. We also show that Leonhart Fuchs (and not Carolus Clusius) extensively annotated the three book herbaria. Finally, we reconstruct the story of making of the book herbaria, as evidenced through observations of paper watermarks and handwritten texts in the book volumes, and show that all four book herbaria of Rauwolf were probably bound between 1577 and 1582.

Within the framework of the Dutch national program for the preservation of library and archival materials, Metamorfoze, three national institutions -Instituut Collectie Nederland (ICN, Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB, National Library of the Netherlands) and the Nationaal Archief (NA, National Archives of the Netherlands) -have been given the joint responsibility to co-ordinate a national program for paper conservation research for the years 2004 to 2008. A first step in the design of this program has been the development of a valuation model for paper conservation research. This model is primarily based on the idea that different research options can be evaluated and prioritised beforehand by quantitatively estimating their associated 'success' in improving the preservation of and access to Dutch paper-based collections in a most cost-effective way. In this article, the term 'collections' is used for groups of documents and/or other paper artefacts in libraries, archives and museums. The framework, elaboration and discussion of the Valuation Model for Paper Conservation Research ('Valuation Model', in short), will be presented in this chapter.