I.2 "a Plant is, as it were, an Animal"

Drawing on Jewish and Old Testament folklore, medieval and Renaissance botanists believed the man-shaped mandrake or mandragora, a variety of nightshade, cured barrenness in women, as if its own animalistic vitality could lend life to sterile soil; yet its humanness was more than an analogy of structures. The mandrake screams. With bearded roots and a gnarled face, it "presents the forme of a man", existing "betwixt man and plants, betwixt the fruites of the earth, and things which growe within her bowels." When wrenched from its vegetable bed, it expresses human pain and in doing so participates in humanness -- that is, it becomes animal.