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Alternatively, the Old English Herbarium begins with twenty-nine remedies using betonica (wood bettany) for ailments that include a ‘shattered skull’, ‘watery eyes’, ‘pain in the loins’, ‘blood gushing through the mouth’, ‘not getting drunk’, ‘feeling unwell or nauseous’ and snakebite. 3 One needn’t look hard to find remedies that are strange or shock-provoking. All too
proposed that it was Symphytum . Bierbaumer does not positively identify this plant’; Anne Van Arsdall , Medieval Herbal Remedies: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine ( London : Routledge , 2002 ), p. 203 n. 230 . The Dictionary of Old English Plant Names groups ban-wyrt , galluc and hals-wyrt under ‘comfrey’; Peter Bierbaumer and Hans
Đeos wyrt þe man mandragoram nemneþ ys mycel ⁊ mære on gesihþe ⁊ heo ys fremful [This plant that one calls mandrake is great and glorious in sight and it is beneficial] (Old English Herbarium , Cotton Vitellius C.iii) … what with loathsome smells, And shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth That living mortals, hearing them, run mad…. ( Romeo and Juliet , Act 4, Scene 3
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
Đeos wyrt þe man pedem leonis ⁊ oðrum naman leonfot nemneð, heo bið cenned on feldon ⁊ on dicon ⁊ on hreodbeddon. [This plant which some call pedem leonis and others lionfoot, it is known in fields and in ditches and in reedbeds.] (Old English Herbarium , Cotton Vitellius C.iii f. 24v) … that I might knock on others’ doors and learn how to listen to the conversations going on among my fellow scholars in other fields and
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.
Gyf hwylc man hyne begyrdeþ mid þysse wyrte ⁊ hy on wege mid him bereþ, he bið gescylded…. [If any man encircles himself with this plant, and bears it on the way with him, he is shielded….] (Old English Herbarium , Cotton Vitellius C.iii, f. 46v) Evincing traits of multiple genres, cultural traditions, and modes of meaning, a 42-line Old English poem inscribed in CCCC MS 41—not in a medical text but in the margins of Bede’s Old English History
Bucklandia populnea observed by the Assam Tea Deputation growing along the watercourses at Cherrapunji was known to the Khasis as the Dieng doh tree, and gave its name to a local clan. 44 The herbarium of the Calcutta Botanic Garden, dating from the time of Wallich’s return to India in 1832, included part of the collection made by the Assam Tea Deputation. Missionary
Charm’, and plants in the Herbarium such as periwinkle and ricinum , which are the actual recipients of invocations. Focusing more specifically on matters of orality and literacy, Daniel Donoghue argues that the ‘actual emergence of literacy from orality’ is ‘the least interesting part. What is of more interest is that relatively rare condition (from the modern literate point of view) when the two retain a functioning vigor in an ongoing negotiation, resulting in a poetics of hybridity’. 15 This nuanced model of hybridity
room. This established the botany collection on a far firmer footing, demonstrating the power of donors to impact upon the disciplinary landscape of museums. Melvill had not been working alone in the herbarium. The College’s Department of Botany was a valuable source of expertise and specimens. William Crawford Williamson, who had been the first curator of the Peter Street Museum, was appointed Professor of Natural History in 1851.22 By the 1880s he was formally based in the new Beyer laboratories next door and passed freely to and from the herbarium. There he worked