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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
. Afedan does not seem to mean the act of birth itself, although nourishment must both precede and follow it. In the previous chapter, I discussed remedies that promote fertility and conception, including one of the remedies that employs afedan . The Lacnunga ’s afedan remedies, often about conception, are also remedies aimed at women who have experienced foetal loss. These are post
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
forthcoming from Dumbarton Oaks, signal a rising interest in and attention to these important works. Our understanding of early medieval English medicine comes primarily from five texts: Bald , Leechbook III ( LBIII ), the Lacnunga , the Old English Herbarium ( OEH ) and the Old English Medicina de Quadrupedibus ( OEM ). 13 Both Bald and LBIII are in a single, shared manuscript
women in the remedies as they call out for medical attention, share their symptoms and request help. The voices of the wise, experienced, sweating survivors – the women who did not die in childbirth – do not find purchase in the medical tradition. They slide away, and perhaps we can find echoes of them here and there: in the Lacnunga remedies for ‘cardiacus, hatte seo adl ðe man swiðe
, 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