The German »Macer«, translated into Thuringian dialect in the first half of the thirteenth century, is the earliest extensive herbal in German. It treats 97 herbs in an equal number of chapters. This central work of German medical literature is critically edited here for the first time. The introduction gives a short history of the herbal genre, surveys the complicated history of the text and its transmission, and analyzes the texts that accompany it in manuscripts, thereby providing a brief literary history of early German medical literature. Latin source texts are printed in an appendix.