The life sciences and geoscience did not play any sort of significant role in medieval academia. This changed during the Renaissance, which saw the emergence over the sixteenth century of natural history, in its modern meaning, in particular botany. This a several subsequent episodes of this series will deal with the various aspects of that emergence^[1].

As is the case with almost every development in the sciences during the Renaissance, if one wants to understand the emergence of natural history in this period, then one first needs to know what existed earlier. One first needs to understand what existed in antiquity and then examine how the knowledge from antiquity was received and regarded in the Middle Ages. 

There was no coherent, single area of knowledge in antiquity that can be labelled natural history but rather three distinct areas of information about plants and animals that would partially coalesce…