SYRENIAN SIRENUS'S HERITAGE

It is an extraordinary work, one of a kind, and it is worth introducing the reader to the person of the author and the circumstances under which it was created. Szymon Syrenski was born around 1540 in Oświęcim and died in 1611 in Cracow. He was a physician, botanist and one of the most prominent Polish herbalists. He studied at the Krakow Academy and the University of Padua, where he received a doctorate in medicine. As a scholar, he traveled extensively in Europe, visited private gardens of medicinal plants, and drew on the knowledge of ancient masters. It took him 30 years to compile the herbarium. He proceeded to publish it at his own expense in 1611 in the Cracow outhouse of Nikolai Lob, but died that year. The executor of his last will, Gabriel Joannicy, sued the printer, who claimed that he had not been paid (the contract with Syrenius was probably destroyed) and refused to return the manuscript.
Eventually Joannicy, Anna Vasa's court physician, recovered the manuscript and asked the queen to finance the printing. In 1612 he entrusted the work to Basil Skalski's outhouse. Completion of the work in 1613, was made possible by a donation from Anna Vasa, who raised the money for this purpose by selling her own jewels. About 1,000 pieces of the herbarium were published, and in the following years the edition was sold out almost in full. The printing was done, commonly used in the 16th and 17th centuries, in Gothic font, in a variety known as Polish Kraut. At the end of the 17th century, a different font - round italic - began to be used for printing, and the writing became easier to read. Swabacha became a thing of the past, as did Syrenius' Herbarium. In recent years, studies by specialists have appeared, showing that much of the advice contained in the old herbariums, regarding the practical use of plants in medicine, has lost none of its relevance. As a result, interest in old herbal knowledge has returned, including this work. The result was the publication of a reprint of the herbarium, now available on the market.

However, this reprint has no chance of reaching the so-called "average reader" because of the "original sin", i.e. the font, which only a few can read, and if they do read it slowly.
The Krosno Publishing House embarked on an extremely ambitious undertaking: to publish Syrenius' herbarium after transliterating the text into the modern Latin alphabet in a version with contemporary Polish diacritical marks and in a modern font. Due to the time-consuming nature of the preparation of the publication and the volume of the work, it was decided to print it in the form of five separate volumes, corresponding to the division of the text into books made by the author in the original version. The published text is an almost faithful transliteration of the original.