Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts, 1550–1650

Rebecca Laroche

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351918794
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The first study to analyze print vernacular folio herbals from the standpoint of gender and to present original findings to do with early modern women's ownership of these herbals, Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts also looks at reasons and contexts behind early modern female writers claiming herbal practice. Author Rebecca Laroche first establishes cultural backdrops in the gendering of medical authority that takes place in the herbals and the regular ownership of these herbals by women. She then examines women's engagements with herbal texts in life writings and poetry and asks how these moments represent and engage medical authority. In ultimately demonstrating how female writers variously take on women's herbal medical practices, Laroche reveals the broad range of literary potentials within the historical category of women's medicine.

Chapter 1
“This Manlike Worke of Herbes”: Gender and the English Herbal

In John Gerard’s Herball, the last entry under the virtues “Of water Dockes”—sometimes called “bastarde rubarbe,” “garden Patience,” or “bloudwort”—is a long one. In establishing the efficacy of the herbs in helping patients to “cure” the ague, Gerard cites not only his own experience but also the results of the “notable experiment” of “one Iohn Bennet, a chirurgion of Maidstone in Kent,” a man whom he calls “as slenderly learned as my selfe.” After relating Bennet’s “blunt” (though successful) “attempt” at finding a cure, Gerard expresses the hope that Bennet’s coarse success may motivate those with “greater iudgement in the faculties of plants, to seeke farther into their nature then any of the auncients haue done: and none fitter then the learned phisitions of the Colledge of London; where are many singularly well learned, and experienced in naturall things.”¹

Gerard’s account of the success of surgeons and his subsequent challenge to the other “tripartite” members of the college would seem to be a classic example of competition in the medical market, except that the entry has not yet finished. In a short paragraph separate from the long one recounting Bennet’s experiment (yet still part of the same virtue description), Gerard tells his reader, “The rootes sliced and boiled in the water of Carduus Benedictus. . . adding thereto a little honie, of the which decoction eight or ten sponfuls drunke before the fit, cureth the ague in two or three times [of] taking it at the most” (315). Neither surgeon nor physician came up with this cure, however; Gerard provides the following attribution: “This experiment was practiced by a worshipfull gentlewoman called mistress Anne Wylbraham, vpon diuers of hir poore neighbours with good successe” (315). Outside of royal patrons, archetypal wisewoman, and classical precedent (all of which will be discussed below), Anne Wilbraham is the only actual woman to be named within any English authoritative herbal before 1650, and this distinction would seem to make her exemplary. Her work stands alongside that of surgeons and physicians, and her name balances that of John Bennet in the text. In this way, Gerard affirms her role as medical experimenter, makes her known as one of his practitioner compatriots, and folds her into the establishment of herbal authority.

Describing Wilbraham as a gentlewoman who administers to “her poor neighbors,” Gerard contributes to the constructions of the gentlewoman reader in the text, who stands opposed to “the beggerly rabble of witches, charmers, & such like couseners, that regarde more to get money then to helpe for charitie” (288) seen in Gerard’s entry on tobacco discussed in our introduction. In depicting Wilbraham’s work as charitable, he sets the parameters for female medical experiment. In naming Wilbraham, he introduces another family of influence with whom he was acquainted and into which Anne Pierson married in 1586, the Wilbrahams of Nantwich.² In relating Wilbraham’s success, Gerard not only provides a model for his female readership, he may also present a challenge to find cures to that readership in the way he delivers one to the College of Physicians. In thus targeting his female audience, he acknowledges a broad base of female practitioners who may encounter his text, but again, in naming even one woman experimenter, he is the exception in the establishment of the English tradition before 1650.

This chapter considers how and to what ends the English authoritative herbal tradition represented the female herbal practitioner in her various guises. In doing so it asks how the English tradition may have established its medical authority by seeking to limit and exclude those women who practiced to “get money” at the same time that it affirmed, defined, and contained the gentlewoman reader/practitioner. While Gerard’s mention is the only named nonroyal female practitioner, there are other unnamed or pseudonymously named women who handled herbs represented in the texts. That many of them may have been categorized among the “beggerly rabble of witches” delineated by Gerard shows us much about the anxieties in the establishment of the herbal tradition. As we will see, the authorial anxiety in herbal texts stemmed in part from the fact that practitioners existed who preceded textual authority. What is more, the authors could no more have controlled the use of the text than they could have stopped a woman from copying its pages. Thus representing the desired yet uncontrollable female practitioner became a part of the generic conventions of the authoritative English herbal.

The dates framing this study, 1550–1650, roughly coincide with the establishment of this textual tradition with its sets of conventions and anti-conventions not yet catalogued by literary historians. While cultural historians such as Mary Fissell have begun to examine works of vernacular medicine as indicators of social change and Rebecca Bushnell and Jennifer Munroe have provided us with in-depth assessments of gardening manuals from the period, literary historians are only beginning to articulate the tropes and themes of the vernacular herbal tradition.³ A feminist analysis of the herbals’ tropes and themes, especially at this moment when feminist criticism is considering alternative narratives to that of the subjugation of women, will help us to distinguish between the rhetorical and historical realities of early modern medicine. Even though the medical practice of certain women—i.e., gentlewomen—may be informed by the rhetoric of the herbals that looks to limit irregular practice as part of the “aim of minority groups” to establish a system of control run by physicians, surgeons, apothecaries, as discussed in the introduction,⁴ an alternative reading of the gendered language in these texts considers how this language tells us more about anxieties surrounding the formation of the tradition in English—a tradition that had arrived belatedly to the British Isles and had recently been infused with New World plants and practices—than about actual practice. As with the sonnet sequence, England was late in contributing to a textual tradition already well established on the Continent, and some of its best-known contributions to the tradition could be seen as simply translations of continental texts. This late entry into the field colors the pages of the early herbal texts just as the prior presence of Petrarch and Ronsard casts a shadow on the sonnets of Wyatt, Surrey, and Sidney.

Early twentieth-century herbal historians Eleanour Rohde and Agnes Arber place the beginning of a distinctively English herbal tradition between the first work (1551) of William Turner, known as “the Father of British Botany,”⁵ and the Theatrum Botanicum (1640) of John Parkinson, “[t]he last of the great English herbalists.”⁶ In surveying this early stage of the tradition, this chapter considers the herbals of Turner, Rembert Dodoens (as translated by Henry Lyte), Gerard (arguably the most popular of the herbalists), and Parkinson. I have limited the discussion in this chapter to these authors’ herbals as they have four aspects in common: they claim authority, work toward comprehensiveness, appear in print, and are written in English.

All four authors lay claim to extensive knowledge of their precursors, both ancient and continental, thus revealing their erudition. The prefatory materials and individual entries refer to ancient Greek and Roman authorities such as Pliny the Elder (C. E. 23–79), Dioscorides (C. E. 40–90), and Galen (C. E. 129–216) and authorities in Arabic such as Averroës (C. E. 1126–1198/1206). Turner’s work is most overt about this relationship to his ancient and medieval sources, with some of his entries on plants including subheadings that read “Out of Plinie” or “Oute of Galene.”⁷ Unlike other vernacular volumes, however, these herbals are not merely English translations or derivatives of ancient manuscripts but seek to synthesize the knowledge before them. Thus English herbal entries also incorporate the arguments and experiments of continental counterparts, which include the French translations of Jean Ruel (1516)⁸ and Charles de L’Écluse (1554) and similar Latin and vernacular synthesizing projects of Hieronymus Bock (1546), Otto Brunfels (1530, 1531, 1540), and Leonhart Fuchs (1542) of Germany, Pietro Andrea Mattioli (1544) of Italy, Dodoens (1554) of the Spanish Lowlands, and the Latin contributions by Pierre Pena of France and Matthias de l’Obel of Flanders (1570), as well as the description of colonial plants by Nicolás Monardes (1569).⁹ As we will see below, Turner, being the earliest of the English compilers, has a much more fraught relationship with his German, Flemish, and Italian counterparts, but his consolation could be that he would become a resource for subsequent English herbals as well as others written and revised on the Continent. In the 1633 version of Gerard’s herbal, editor Thomas Johnson cites all of the above, including Turner, Lyte, and Parkinson, and of course Gerard, as crucial pieces in the long tradition before him. Of course, for our feminist purposes, it is important to point out that in the English authoritative textual tradition, no woman has a substantial role. While post-second-wave feminist scholars such as Frank Anderson include the work of Hildegard of Bingen in their description of the European tradition, the English authors, most dramatically seen in Johnson’s articulation of his herbal progenitors, claimed a male-only lineage.¹⁰

The second trait these herbals share is that they claim to approach comprehensiveness. Indicative of this trait is the language of enlargement, sometimes in conjunction with the word “all,” in the extended titles of these works. That the 1568 edition of The first and seconde partes of the Herbal of William Turner is “corrected and enlarged with the Thirde parte” demonstrates that Turner’s life work strives toward a more complete picture of the names and traits of herbs. Dodoens’s Nievve Herball, or Historie of Plantes purports to “contain” “the vvhole discourse and perfect description of all sortes of Herbes and Plantes.”¹¹ Gerard’s 1597 Herball or Generall Historie of Plantes includes new plants such as the potato, with which Gerard is famously pictured at the end of the front matter, as well as other plants of the “New World,” and is later “very much enlarged and amended” by Johnson in 1633.¹² Finally, and this is a point to come back to in our discussion of gender in these texts, the second title page of Parkinson’s Theatrum Botanicum, the longest of the works, sells the text as:

An herball of a large extent: Containing therein a more ample and exact history and declaration of the Physicall Herbs and Plants that are in other Authours, encreased by the accesse of many hundreds of nevv, rare, and strange Plants from all the parts of the vvorld, vvith sundry Gummes, and other Physicall materials, than hath beene hitherto published by any before; And a most large demonstration of their Natures and Vertues.¹³

The largeness of the volume speaks to its comprehensiveness, a comprehensiveness that the other authors could only attempt to approach, and marks a sense of competition in the later herbalists.

The fact that all of these works appeared in print might go without saying given the nature of this chapter, but it is an important distinction in the history of the herbal, especially given numerous herbal manuscripts in the Middle Ages, most of which, however, simply transcribed or translated classical texts.¹⁴ In print, the herbal solidifies its conventional format, one that first describes the herb and its growing conditions and then provides a list of its medicinal, and sometimes culinary and cosmetic, aspects. Developments within these conventions as seen, for example, in Gerard’s system of indexing, which labels each virtue with a different letter, contribute to the popularity of individual herbals. The importance of print in establishing this group as foundational to the tradition, however, becomes most apparent when we consider the example of Gerard’s text, which has as its foundation a manuscript translation of Dodoens’s Latin treatise Pemptades Sex (1583). According to Johnson, a Dr. Priest, physician, left the manuscript to his friend Gerard upon his death, and Gerard completed and revised the work, with the input of Matthias de l’Obel (living in England), a history that is also hinted at in 1597. The consequence of print in the English herbal tradition has meant that the volume is now known as Gerard’s herbal, not as Priest’s, and contributions to and articulations of the tradition hereafter come to recognize Turner, Dodoens, Gerard, and Parkinson as key contributors to the formation of the English herbal.

The aspect of print most relevant here, however, is how the new technology makes the herbal knowledge accessible to a general buying public and, when this accessibility is combined with the herbals’ being written in English, separates the British tradition from its classical and continen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts, 1550-1650
• 1 "This Manlike Worke of Herbes": Gender and the English Herbal
• 2 Inscriptions in Herbal Texts and the Location of Medical Authority
• 3 Gentlewomen's Herbal Readings and the Absent-Present Physicians
• 4 Isabella Whitney's Herbs: Print Medical Texts and London Satire
• Appendix A: Translating Artemisia
• Appendix B: Female Owners of Herbal Texts
• Bibliography
• Index