This chapter explains the value of incorporting materialist analysis into studies of intellectual history and the history of science by examining the curious case of a tiny anonymous herbal that was one of the most popular English books of the sixteenth century. It shows that these works of natural history have been receiving increased attention from scholars and that this scholarship is unfortunately limited by too much attention upon herbals’ authors to the detriment of those figures who commissioned, marketed, made, and sold botanical books to an eager early modern public.

This chapter demonstrates how and why the little Herball became such an amazing commercial success, and it raises the possibility that the audience for English herbals did not rise and fall with the expensive texts preferred by elite scholarly readers or gentry. The publishing history of the little Herball reveals that the purchasing preferences of Tudor London’s middling readers, as well as the regulatory constraints upon bookmaking and bookselling, created the economic conditions that later enabled the large, illustrated folio herbals of Turner, Gerard, and Parkinson to come into being. In other words, these large books with named authors on their title pages were a secondary development in the tradition of the printed English herbal, suggesting that the “author-function” that governed a text’s authoritative value was initially irrelevant to English readers. The association between herbals and particular botanical authorities did not result from readers’ perceptions of their accuracy but can be traced to commercial concerns: their publishers’ desire to sell an old and profitable text in innovative new ways.