A Garden of Forking Paths: How to Read a Fifteenth-Century Venetian Herbal

Dr. Sarah Kyle is an art historian and associate professor of humanities at the University of Central Oklahoma. Her research and teaching reflect her interest in how illustrated books of botanical medicine, or "herbals", negotiate Greco-Arabic medical traditions and artistic currents in Italy and connect to knowledge cultures of the wider Mediterranean world. Dr. Kyle earned her PhD from Emory University and is author of Medicine and Humanism in Late Medieval Italy: the Carrara Herbal in Padua (Routledge 2017), in which she contextualizes illustrated herbals in networks of medical, artistic, and intellectual traditions and communities. While she herself lacks a green-thumb, Dr. Kyle has studied wild-crafting, the art of identifying and gathering plants in the wild, and traditional methods of herbal medicine-making in the Appalachian mountains.