PREFACE

...regarding whose age and writings you will find gathered what is agreed upon among learned men in the Preface to the fragment On the Care of Cattle, which is read appended to Vegetius under the name of Martialis from the Corbie Codex. Many of his precepts on the cultivation of gardens are read also in the books of Pliny, often transmitted in the same words; from which it is possible to suspect that Martialis himself also used some older writer, whom Pliny also copied. I therefore judged this part of the Palladian work to be the most excellent of all, and worthy of the most diligent care and interpretation; in this work, indeed, the comparison of Albertus’s books On Vegetables with Crescentius and Vincent brought me excellent help. Although there are still many things in Palladian garden discipline that I do not understand, or whose authority I have not yet been able to investigate.

He translated the method of preserving fruits, the preparation of wines and olives, and finally the various arts of garden discipline and many of the subtleties of the Greek doctors from the Geoponica agricultural works, which Palladius had read in a much more augmented and complete state before they were cut and confused by an inept man into that barbarism and narrowness of words and chapters, where today it is rarely possible to recognize the names and authority of the writers. I did, however, what I often lamented was omitted by Gesner, namely that I diligently compared the Greek authority everywhere. I also used the handwritten paper codex Gu...