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Hybrid creatures emerging from the pages of Old English medical texts readily capture the modern imagination. A powerful medicinal root in an Old English herbal is rendered with distinctly human arms and legs; a swarm charm inscribed in the margins of Bede’s Old English history addresses bees as Valkyrie-like beings; an entry in the compilation known as the Lacnunga identifies a wayside plant as both herb and mother. Yet the most powerful forms of hybridity in the Old English healing tradition are more subtle and pervasive: linguistic hybrids of Latin and vernacular, cultural hybrids fusing Christian liturgy and Germanic lore, and generic hybrids drawing simultaneously from an ambient oral tradition and an increasingly ubiquitous culture of writing. Hybrid healing seeks to meet such textual hybridity with a methodological hybridity of its own. Drawing from a range of fields including historical linguistics, classical rhetoric, archaeology, plant biology, folkloristics, and disability studies, a series of close readings examines selected Old English medical texts through individually tailored combinations of approaches designed to illustrate how the healing power of these remedies ultimately derives from unique convergences of widely disparate traditions and influences. This case-study model positions readers to appreciate more fully the various forces at work in any given remedy, replacing reductive assumptions that have often led early medieval medicine to be dismissed as mere superstition. By inviting readers to approach each text with appropriately diverse critical frameworks, the book opens a space to engage the medieval healing tradition with empathy, understanding, and imagination.
Gemyne ðu, Mucgwyrt, hwæt þu ameldodest…. [Remember, Mugwort, what you declared….] ( Lacnunga , MS Harley 585, folio 160r) Wyrt ricinum, ic bidde þæt þu ætsy minum sangum…. [Ricinum plant, I ask that you be present at my song….] (Old English Herbarium , MS Harley 585, folio 93v) In the Old English Herbarium , entry 93 (for the herb named in the header variously as wælwyrt, ellenwyrt , or ebulus
Sæt smið, sloh seax. [A smith sat, forged a knife.] ( Wið færstice , l. 11) Bogan wæron bysige. Bord ord onfeng. [Bows were busy. Shield caught point.] ( Battle of Maldon , l. 110) The remedy commonly known as Wið færstice [‘Against a Sudden Pain’], which appears in Harley 585 ( Lacnunga , entry cxxvii), evidences the fundamental hybridity of form and function also found in Ic me on þisse gyrde beluce
conventionally known as the Lacnunga (MS Harley 585), which includes almost 200 entries with instruction for healing various ailments. 27 In addition to these vernacular remedies, there are also extant collections translated from Latin into Old English, most notably the Old English Herbarium , which is organized by herb rather than by ailment. The Old English Herbarium survives in four manuscripts, dating from the tenth to the twelfth centuries: Bodleian Library, MS Hatton 76; British Library, MS Harley 585; British Library
as marginalia—serves the dual function of being both aid to identification and a healer’s weapon against disease. For instance, garclife , a flowering plant whose nomenclature (literally, ‘spear-burr’ or ‘burdock’) ‘refers to the towering pointed and spear-like florescence of the plant and its burr-like fruit’, 25 appears in the Lacnunga (entry cvxvi; f. 186r) as part of a lung-salve; in the Herbarium (xxxii; f. 186r) with remedies for such ailments as sore eyes, warts, or snakebite; and in Bald’s Leechbook
, as even the speaker becomes akin to an encircled plant, metaphorically harvested into God’s own hand. And in the metaphorical battle narrated by Wið færstice and investigated in Chapter 3 , the practitioner is pitted against causes of pain that are personified as living and formidable foes attacking with weapons comparable to the healer’s own, while the plants of the Lacnunga ’s ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ and the periwinkle and ricinum plants of the Old English Herbarium , all discussed in Chapter 4 , are alive in the
inclusion or occlusion of impaired and unimpaired multisensorial experience—in Old English verse. Here, early medieval legal and medical texts, including the Leechbooks and the formerly maligned Lacnunga, still have more to tell us about potential counternarratives to hierarchies of the senses in Old English verse and early medieval material culture—not in a capitulation to a ‘medical model’ of disability but as textual traces of embodied experiences and concrete contexts for Old English sensorial poetics. Despite the mountains of scholarship on orality and aurality
direct speech to plants ( Chapter 4 ), the poetic battle narrated in the Lacnunga remedy against sudden pain ( Chapter 3 ), the protective poem for travelers ( Chapter 2 ), and the elaborate ritual for poor crops ( Chapter 1 ) all seem to have been relatively novel forms emerging in their own present moment from crossings of diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, yet their singularity renders them from another perspective anomalous. But what of healing in the everyday, if such a word can even be applied? In truth, the
from the more usual experiences of their intended audiences. Illness in Old English texts can be interpreted in a similar way, the source of many physical ailments in the underlying medical philosophy understood as beings from other realms, creatures that while distinctly ‘other’ nonetheless share human commonalities and, in some instances, even participate in human battles. For instance, the remedies known collectively as ‘elf charms’, which figure prominently in the Leechbooks and the Lacnunga , operate on the premise
exceed those connected with our modern English terminology. And if we take into account herbal and medicinal contexts, the possible connections with whetstone become even more apparent. While herbs would of course more typically be chopped on a cutting board, certain remedies do indeed call for chopping herbs on a whetstone. Lacnunga remedy XXXVIII, for instance, calls for a healer to ‘nim þon(ne) hwetstan bradne ⁊ gnid ða buteran on ðæm hwetstane mid copore þ(æt) heo beo wel’ [‘take then a broad whetstone and