Hieronymus Harder

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Index of a herbarium published by Harder
A page from a herbarium published by Harder

Hieronymus Harder (* 1523 presumably in Meersburg ; buried on April 27, 1607 in Ulm ) was a German Latin schoolmaster and botanist .

Hieronymus Harder came from the Lake Constance area and was probably born in Meersburg. He spent parts of his youth in Bregenz , where his father worked as a teacher from 1535. In 1560 Harder passed his exams for the Latin education authority in Ulm and was employed as a Latin schoolmaster in Geislingen from 1561 , from 1571 or 1572 in Überkingen . From 1578 until shortly before his death he worked as the preceptor of the first class of the Latin school in Ulm.

In addition to his teaching activities, Harder dealt with botany and collected plants in the area of ​​the Swabian Alb and Lake Constance. In the following decades from 1562 - as far as is known - he created twelve herbaria in the form of bound volumes, which are among the earliest collections of plants of this kind. He passed it on to high-ranking personalities, for example Duke Albrecht of Bavaria , on whose financial support he was dependent in addition to his schoolmaster's salary. The twelve herbarium specimens that have survived to this day are in collections in Heidelberg , Munich (two, one of them in the archive of the Deutsches Museum ), in the Vatican , in Salzburg , Ulm, Vienna (2), Linz , Überlingen, Zurich and Lindau . In some cases, Harder supplemented missing parts of the plant with colored drawings. Names were given in Latin and German, but precise information about the find is mostly missing. The herbaria each contain several hundred, maximum 849, plants. In addition to wild flowering plants , mosses , ferns and horsetail as well as cultivated plants, including tomatoes and tobacco , which had only been imported from America to Germany a few decades earlier, were included.

literature

  • Werner Dobras: Hieronymus Harder and his Herbaria , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 88th year 1970, pp. 209–222 ( digitized version )
  • Werner Dobras: The amateur botanist and schoolmaster Hieronymus Harder. His life, his plant collections , in: Writings of the Association for the History of Lake Constance and its Surroundings , 114th year 1996, pp. 49-60 ( digitized version )
  • Werner Dobras: Hieronymus Harder and his twelve plant collections . In: Ulm and Oberschwaben, magazine for history, art and culture , vol. 56, 2009, pp. 46–82. ISBN 978-3-7995-8045-8
  • City of Ulm, City Archives: Pressed Nature - The Ulm Herbarium of Hieronymus Harder . Flyer for the exhibition from April 12 to June 16, 2008, Haus der Stadtgeschichte Ulm .
  • Walther Zimmermann: The initial herbarium of Hieronymus Harder . Süddeutsche Apotheker-Zeitung 76 (64) pp. 693-695, 1936; 77 (86), pp. 834-836, 1937; 77 (87), pp. 845-846, 1937; 77 (88), pp. 852-855, 1937. Stuttgart.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Information on the Harder Herbarium in Salzburg (PDF file; 351 kB)
  2. ↑ Information on the Harder Herbarium in Linz (PDF file; 1.1 MB)
personal data
SURNAME Harder, Hieronymus
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German botanist
DATE OF BIRTH 1523
PLACE OF BIRTH uncertain: Meersburg
DATE OF DEATH April 1607
Place of death Ulm