The Hartlieb *Kräuterbuch* 9-Witness Corpus: A Snapshot-Bounded Census

Johannes Hartlieb's Kräuterbuch (composed ca. 1435–1450) is a German-vernacular illustrated herbal of 173 chapters, attributed in the cited standard references in the modern scholarly record to Hartlieb (Grubmüller 1981; Hayer and Schnell 2010). The work survives in nine catalogued manuscript witnesses on the current Handschriftencensus record (Werk 2317, snapshot 2026-05-24) and no incunable witness is recorded in the cited census and search surfaces. This paper presents a substrate-complete census of those nine witnesses: five stand-alone copies (Berlin SBB Ms. germ. qrt. 2021; Wolfenbüttel HAB Cod. 79 Aug. 2°; Wien ÖNB Cod. 2826; Nürnberg GNM Hs. 18792; Schloss Anholt, Salm-Salm Ms. 46), three witnesses that embed Hartlieb's plant chapters inside Konrad von Megenberg's Buch der Natur (Heidelberg UB Cpg 311; Michelstadt Nicolaus-Matz-Bibliothek Cod. D 684; Erbach Gräfliches Gesamthausarchiv Nr. 2), and one fragmentary stand-alone witness (Linz OÖ Landes-Kultur Ms. 4). Each witness is presented on a common codicological axis. The census is cross-referenced with the wider Hartlieb authorial corpus, which the Handschriftencensus author-record autoren/421 enumerates as 103 werk-entries across approximately 93–99 unique codices once Sammelband-internal overlap is deduplicated. The paper then frames the Kräuterbuch corpus as a structural comparator for the herbal section of Beinecke MS 408 (the Voynich Manuscript) at the level of production ecology only, with no identity inference, and explicitly distinguishes this framing from the authorship hypothesis of Brewer and Lewis (2024), which the project record disfavors on content-side grounds set out in §6.