Hortus Eystettensis. 1613. (Faksimile 2023,edited by Klaus Walter Littger und Werner Dressenhöfer). 367 Farbtafeln. 1096 p. Hardcover. - In Box. 23 x 30.3 cm. -Trilingual introduction, history, etc. (German, English, French).

A heavy set (8.4kg).

When redesigning his residence at Willibaldsburg above the Altmühltal, the Eichstätter Prince-Bishop Johann Konrad von Gemmingen (1561–1612) had the Nuremberg pharmacist, botanist and publisher Basilius Besler (1561–1629) create a magnificent pleasure garden at the beginning of the 17th century. In order to preserve the garden and its treasures for posterity, he commissioned Besler to document the plants, sorted by season, in descriptions and engraved illustrations.

The fruit of this work was the Hortus Eystettensis, published in Nuremberg in 1613, a magnificent three-volume catalog with 367 hand-colored plant illustrations and detailed botanical descriptions of a total of 90 plant families and 340 genera, quite a few of them of exotic origin. The work, unique in its time, not only reflects the extraordinary biodiversity of the Eichstätter Garden. In its sophisticated, elegant presentation, it reveals the novel approach of looking at the world of plants from an aesthetic perspective and not, as before, solely from a practical, medicinal perspective. Written before the advent of modern botanical taxonomy, Linnaeus nevertheless praised the Hortus Eystettensis as 'incomparable'.

Besler's plant catalog lasted significantly longer than the Eichstätter Garden, which was devastated by Swedish troops in the Thirty Years' War in 1643. After many years of preparation - not least on the basis of the baroque botanical classic - a successor location, the Eichstätter Bastionsgarten, was able to open its doors in 1998 at a historical site, where numerous plants from the Hortus Eystettensis are gathered.

The high-quality reproductions of this facsimile edition based on an original copy from the holdings of the Eichstätt-Ingolstadt University Library, as well as the plants depicted in them, are expertly explained from a botanical, medicinal and symbolic perspective; A trilingual appendix with detailed texts on the historical significance of the Eichstätt garden and the Hortus Eystettensis dedicated to it rounds off the volume.