Accusations of plagiarism against Gerard’s Herball should be analysed carefully.  Firstly, Gerard was commissioned to write his 1597 edition by the printer John Norton (Brent Elliot, “The World of the Renaissance Herbal” 34-35; Leah Knight, “Of Books and Botany” 78).  Norton wanted an English translation of Rembert Dodoens Cruydtboeck, even though there was already an English translation (Elliot 35) made by Henry Lyte.  To complete this job, Norton first commissioned physician Robert Priest to do the translation, but unfortunately Priest died before he could complete his translation; any manuscripts he had completed have since been lost (Knight 78).  Norton then tasked the finishing of this translation to Gerard (78).  For the woodcut illustrations, Norton used the same as Tabernaemontanus (referenced in “All is Fair in Plants and Print“); he rented the woodblocks from the publisher Nicolaus Bassaeus (Elliot 35).  Gerard was tasked with arranging the illustrations to match the text (Knight 78).  The order of the plants in this text reflect that of Mattias L’Obel’s herbal (Knight 78), which may be partly because L’Obel was also hired at the same time to make corrections on the text (Elliot 35).

Oddly, it was L’Obel who would later accuse Gerard of plagiarizing his work (Elliot 35).  Gerard was accused of plagiarism a second time by apothecary Jacob Thompson, who edited and expanded upon Gerard’s work in the 1633 edition of the Herball. The 1633 and 1636 editions of the text were also publisher-commissioned works; Norton’s widow and colleagues commissioned Thompson to edit and expand on the Herball “in order to cut out a competitor” (Elliot 35).  In his “Letter to the Reader,” Thompson criticizes the late Gerard for incorrectly matching the illustrations and text and accuses him of plagiarizing the works of Dodoens (Knight 78).

Works Cited

Elliot, Brent. “The World of The Renaissance Herbal.” Renaissance Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, 2011, pp. 24-41, doi: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.2010.00706.x. Accessed 13 April 2018.

Knight, Leah. Of Books and Botany in Early Modern England: Sixteenth-Century Plants and Print Culture. Surrey, Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009.