Vin Nardizzi

2025-26 Short-term Fellow

“Diligent Search” into the Folger’s Copy 6 of John Gerard’s Herball (1597)

Thomasin Tunstall (fl. 1632) has a poor reputation in the history of botany. In the early twentieth century she was scolded in print for having opened to London markets orchids growing in England’s north. She told John Parkinson where the wildflowers grew; he informed readers of /Paradisi in Sole/ (1629); and then there were none. The Folger owns a rare book that powerfully reframes this misogynous likely story: copy 6 of STC 11750, John Gerard’s /Herball/ (1597), a 1400+ page encyclopedia that Tunstall owned and used in the early seventeenth century.