A Silent Servant of Natural Knowledge: The Herbarium of ‘The Flying Monk’

The herbarium of Brother Cyprian (1724–1775) is a unique collection of 283 medicinal herbs and other plants that the Camaldolese lay brother collected in the surroundings of the so-called Red Monastery (Červený Kláštor, Slovakia). Brother Cyprian was a lay brother serving the monks of the monastery by undertaking task that required interactions with the external world. He was in charge of managing the infirmary of the monastery, as well as providing medical services to the inhabitants of the nearby settlements. His herbarium contains not only pressed plants, but a compilation of his notes, too, which provide insight into his religious contemplations on the transience of life, recollections of his personal experiences and medical observations. This article reconstructs Cyprian's working environment, and it investigates the making and the use of the herbarium in the context of the material and spiritual culture in which it was created. At the same time, it also sheds light on the intense transformation of the political and intellectual environment of the monastery. Cyprian's herbarium was created between 1766 and 1775, a period in which the province of the 13 Spiš towns, located in the vicinity of the Red Monastery, turned from a contested border region between the Hungarian Kingdom and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth into a less significant inner border due to the Habsburg annexation of Galicia in 1772. This was a time when the region became the subject of various surveys which could serve as an inspiration for Cyprian's herbarium. The study investigates the material aspects of the herbarium and shows how its compilatory nature reflects the multifaceted impact of imperial projects, including wars, medical reforms, ecclesiastical policies, newly founded newspapers, and a growing interest in ‘indigenous’ botanical, linguistic and ethnographical knowledge. It also highlights the specificities of monastic medicine and explores the secular and religious networks Cyprian could be part of.