Humanistica Lovaniensia 68.1 (2019), 237-249 https://doi.org/10.30986/2019.237 The Meaning of Flora DOMINIK BERRENS The term Flora usually refers to the natural vegetation of a particular geographic region or a scientific work that catalogues such vegetation. These meanings have evolved from a metonymy of the Roman goddess Flora. It was previously assumed that this metonymic use began in the seventeenth century and was initially limited to book titles. However, the present article challenges these assumptions and demonstrates that the metonymic use of Flora was employed much earlier, and not in book titles, but in poetry and letters. * According to the Oxford English Dictionary [henceforth OED], in modern times the term Flora 1 often denotes “a descriptive catalogue of the plants of any geographical area, geological period, etc.” or “the plants or plant life of any particular region or epoch”, that is either a certain type of scientific literature or the content of such a scientific work. 2 The term is, of course, derived from the Roman goddess Flora, but its use in the aforementioned sense is likely a neologism of sense coined in the early modern period. 3 In this article, I firstly give an overview of how the term was used in the seventeenth century and how it got the meanings it has today. Secondly, I discuss three texts – two letters and a liminary poem – from the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century, which seem to have been largely overlooked for the historical etymology of Flora, but challenge the current state of research. * I would like to thank Johannes Berrens and my colleagues at the LBI for Neo-Latin Studies and the ERC project NOSCEMUS – Nova Scientia: Early Modern Scientific Literatur and Latin, especially Martin Korenjak, Irina Tautschnig, and Stefan Zathammer, for the fruitful discussions and their comments. I would like to express my gratitude to the referees and the editors for their helpful suggestions on this paper. 1 I have capitalised the term throughout this article in order to highlight the fact that it is a metonymy and acquired the more technical meaning only gradually, as I show in the following. 2 All citations of the OED refer to its online edition, available at www.oed.com. 3 One can speak of a neologism of sense if a new meaning is assigned to a pre-existing word.