Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through
the Medieval West Essays in Honor of John M. Riddle, 1st
Edition
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© Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham 2012
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Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Herbs and healers from the ancient Mediterranean through
the medieval West : essays in honor of John M. Riddle. --
(Medicine in the medieval Mediterranean)
1. Medicine, Ancient. 2. Medicine, Medieval. 3. Pharmacy--History--To 1500.
4. Materia medica, Vegetable--History--To 1500. 5. Healers--History--To 1500.
I. Series II. Riddle, John M. III. Van Arsdall, Anne, 1939-
IV. Graham, Timothy.
615.3'21'09-dc23
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Herbs and healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West :
essays in honor of John M. Riddle / edited by Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham.
p. cm. -- (Medicine in the medieval Mediterranean)
Includes index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-0038-7 (hardcover) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-4723-8 (ebook)
1. Medicine, Ancient. 2. Medicine, Medieval. 3. Materia medica, Vegetable--Great Britain--Early
works to 1500. 4. Pharmacy--History--To 1500. 5. Healers--History--To 1500. I. Riddle, John M. II.
Van Arsdall,Anne, 1939- III. Graham, Timothy.
R135.H47 2012
610.938--dc23
2011047281
ISBN 9781409400387 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409447238 (ebk)
III
Printed and bound in Great Britain by the
MPG Books Group, UK
Contents
List of Figures vii
List of Tables and Boxes ix
List of Contributors xi
Introduction 1
Alain Touwaide
1 Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Court of Cleopatra VII:
Traces of Three Physicians 7
John Scarborough
2 Quid pro Quo:
Revisiting the Practice of Substitution in Ancient Pharmacy 19
Alain Touwaide
3 Speaking in Tongues:
Medical Wisdom and Glossing Practices in and around Salerno,
c. 1040–1200 63
Florence Eliza Glaze
4 The Ghost in the Articella:
A Twelfth-century Commentary on the
Constantinian Liber Graduum 107
Faith Wallis
5 “I will add what the Arab once taught”:
Constantine the African in Northern European Medical Verse 153
Winston Black
6 A Problematic Plant Name: elehtre. A Reconsideration 187
Maria Amalia D’Aronco
vi Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West
7 Herbs and Herbal Healing Satirized in Middle English Texts 217
Linda Ehrsam Voigts
8 “Kurze versuochte dinge.” Ein mährisch-schlesisches
wundärztliches Rezeptar des 15. Jahrhunderts 231
Gundolf Keil
9 Saint John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum L.) in the
Age of Paracelsus and the Great Herbals:
Assessing the Historical Claims for a Traditional Remedy 265
Karen Reeds
10 Revisiting Eve’s Herbs:
Reflections on Therapeutic Uncertainties 307
John K. Crellin
11 Modding Medievalists:
Designing a Web-based Portal for the
Medieval Plant Survey/Portal der Pflanzen des Mittelalters
(MPS/PPM) 329
Helmut W. Klug and Roman Weinberger
The Publications of John M. Riddle, 1964–2010 359
Compiled by Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham
Index of Manuscripts 367
General Index 371
List of Figures
Frontispiece John M. Riddle xvi
9.1 Saint John’s wort in a Renaissance herbal,
with hand-colored woodcut (far right),
Latin manuscript annotations, and fragments of pressed plant.
Source: Hieronymus Bock, Kreüter Buoch (Strassburg:
Wendel Rihel, 1546), Part I, ch. 23, Von Harthaw/ genant Hypericon,
fols xxviiv–xxviiir. New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, B581.62 B63 272
9.2 Translucent glandular “perforations” in leaves of Hypericum
(probably H. perforatum L.), found pressed in
Hieronymus Bock, Kreüter Buoch. The leaves are approximately
one centimeter long. Source: (Strassburg: Wendel Rihel, 1546),
Part I, ch. 23, Von Harthaw/ genant Hypericon, fols xxviiv–xxviiir.
New York, Columbia University, Rare Book and
Manuscript Library, B581.62 B63 274
9.3 Warding off a demon with fuga demonum.
Source: Italian Herbal, Burlington, University of
Vermont Library, Special Collections, TR F Herbal (disbound),
fol. 27r, lower half: Erba ypericon 281
11.1 Activity Triangle 338
11.2 Collective Effort Model 340
11.3 MPS/PPM public Web site for data presentation 344
11.4 WordPress backend: workspace for main data input 345
11.5 Workspace for researching as well as adding or changing data 346
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Tables and Boxes
Tables
2.1 Substitutions in Pseudo-Galen, De succedaneis
(Kühn’s edition, vol. 19) 34
2.2 Equivalences of materia medica 44
2.3 Substitution chains of three or more items 45
2.4 Materia medica substituted 49
2.5 Substitute materia medica 54
3.1 Establishing nosological terminologies 84
3.2 Glosses of remedies in Gariopontus and other
regional texts of southern Italy 92
Boxes
10.1 Some excerpts from book reviews of and later commentaries on
John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and
Abortion in the West (1997) 308
Note on Font
We would like to thank Alec McAllister for permission to use the LeedsUni font
in this book.
List of Contributors
Winston Black received his Ph.D. from the Centre for Medieval Studies at
the University of Toronto and is the Haslam Postdoctoral Fellow in the Marco
Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee,
Knoxville. His research and publications are dedicated to the intersections
of religion and medicine in the High Middle Ages, particularly in the realms
of canon law and pastoral care. He has edited and translated the verse herbal
Anglicanus ortus by Henry, Archdeacon of Huntingdon, published by the
Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies and the Bodleian Library (2012). He
is the recipient of the 2012 Jerry Stannard Memorial Prize for his contribution
to the present volume.
John K. Crellin holds British qualifications in medicine and in pharmacy and
a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in the History of Science. His career spans three countries,
at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in the U.K., at Southern
Illinois and Duke Universities in the U.S.A., and at Memorial University of
Newfoundland, Canada, where he was John Clinch Professor of Medical
History until 2002. He is now Honorary Research Professor at Memorial. His
papers and books span a variety of topics, but with a sustained interest in the
history of therapy.
Maria Amalia D’Aronco taught Germanic philology at the University of
Udine from 1969 until her retirement in 2008. She held the rank of Professor
from 1990 and was Deputy Rector of the university from 2001 to 2008, with
special responsibility for international programs. Her research and publications
address Old and Middle English language and literature and their relationship
with the Latin language and the late classical tradition. In particular, in the field
of Old English medicine and botany, she has studied the diffusion of medical
and scientific knowledge in England from the eighth to the twelfth century.
Among her many other publications, she is principal editor of The Old English
Illustrated Pharmacopoeia: British Library Cotton Vitellius C III (1998).
xii Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West
Florence Eliza Glaze earned her Ph.D. from Duke University and is now
Associate Professor of History and Department Chair at Coastal Carolina
University. Her special interests include the transmission and adaptations
of medical literature from late antiquity to around the year 1200, with a
particular focus on extant manuscripts showing evidence of medieval readers’
efforts to apprehend Greek and Arabic terminologies. She has published a
variety of articles and essays on these interests, and most recently co-edited and
contributed to Between Text and Patient: The Medical Enterprise in Medieval
and Early Modern Europe (2011). She is currently completing a critical edition
and analysis of Gariopontus of Salerno’s Passionarius, which survives in more
than 70 manuscripts.
Timothy Graham holds an M.Phil. in Renaissance Studies from the Warburg
Institute, University of London, and a Ph.D. in Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and
Celtic from Cambridge University. He is currently Director of the Institute for
Medieval Studies and Professor of History at the University of New Mexico,
having previously held positions at the University of Manchester, Corpus
Christi College, Cambridge, and Western Michigan University. His research
centers on Anglo-Saxon manuscripts and their use by scholars of the early
modern period. He is co-author of The Recovery of the Past in Early Elizabethan
England (1998) and Introduction to Manuscript Studies (2007). His previous
edited books include Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives (1998) and The Recovery
of Old English: Anglo-Saxon Studies in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(2000).
Gundolf Keil is Professor Emeritus at the University of Würzburg, where he
was Director of the Institute for the History of Medicine from 1973 until 2004,
then Director of the Gerhard-Möbus-Institut für Schlesienforschung until his
retirement in 2011. The Silesian University of Opava (Czech Republic) awarded
him an honorary doctorate in 2003. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of
Heidelberg in 1961 and his M.D. at the University at Bonn in 1969. He has held
academic positions at the universities of Göttingen, Bonn, Freiburg, Stockholm,
and Marburg. Professor Keil’s research on the history of medicine and medical
texts extends from ancient Egypt to the Middle Ages and Renaissance and into
the era of modern medicine; in recent publications he has dealt especially with
technical medical literature of the late medieval period. He is recognized as an
international authority on the history of medicine.
List of Contributors xiii
Helmut W. Klug holds a Master’s degree in German and English from the
University of Graz. His thesis was on “Kräuter in der deutschsprachigen
Dichtung des Hochmittelalters: Vorkommen, Anwendung und Wirkung in
ausgewählten Texten” (Herbs in Middle High German Poetry: Occurrence,
Use, and Effects in Selected Texts). He started working for the online
Dictionary of Old English Plant Names project at the university in 2005. His
studies of medieval plants led to research on the legend of the mandrake plant,
the analysis of medieval plant paintings, and an inquiry into the seasonings
used in Middle High German cooking recipes. He is interested in the Internet
and social media as means for knowledge generation and academic online
collaboration, as well as in their use in media didactics. He is currently working
as an Assistant Lecturer at the University of Graz and finishing his dissertation.
Karen Reeds, Princeton Research Forum and Visiting Scholar at the University
of Pennsylvania, is an independent historian of science and curator. She is a
Fellow of the Linnean Society of London. Her books and exhibitions include
Botany in Medieval and Renaissance Universities (1991), A State of Health:
New Jersey’s Medical Heritage (2001), Visualizing Medieval Medicine and
Natural History, 1200–1550 (2006; co-editor, with Jean A. Givens and Alain
Touwaide), “Come into a New World: Linnaeus and America” (American-
Swedish Historical Museum, Philadelphia, 2007), and “Botanica Magnifica:
Photographs by Jonathan Singer” (New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, 2012).
John Scarborough is Professor in the School of Pharmacy and the Departments
of History and Classics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Among his
books are Roman Medicine (1969, 1976; 2nd edn in preparation), Facets of
Hellenic Life (1976), Symposium on Byzantine Medicine (ed., 1985), Folklore
and Folk Medicines (ed., 1987), and Medical Terminologies: Classical Origins
(1992; 2nd edn published as Medical and Biological Terminologies: Classical
Origins, 1998). He is co-editor, with Paul T. Keyser, of The Oxford Handbook of
Science and Medicine in Classical Antiquity, to appear in 2013.
xiv Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West
Alain Touwaide has been investigating ancient, medieval, and Renaissance texts
on botany, medical substances (including venoms and poisons), and pharmacy
for over three decades. His activity focuses on locating manuscripts, recovering
and publishing texts, interpreting them, and making them available for further
investigation, be they historical or pharmaceutico-medical. Originally a classicist
(Ph.D. from the University of Louvain, Belgium), he crosses the boundaries
of—and brings together—traditional disciplines (humanities, sciences, and
medicine). Currently a Historian of Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution in
Washington, D.C., he is a co-founder and the Scientific Director of the Institute
for the Preservation of Medical Traditions.
Anne Van Arsdall is a Research Associate of the Institute for Medieval Studies
at the University of New Mexico. From 2003 to 2010, she was editor of the
annual AVISTA Forum Journal, devoted to medieval science, technology,
art, and medicine. In addition to her book, Medieval Herbal Remedies: The
Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine (2002), she has published
a number of articles and given presentations primarily in the field of early
medieval medicine and topics related to it. Those topics include ancient and
medieval legends connected to the mandrake plant, and the relationship of
texts to the transmission of technical knowledge, particularly as seen in early
medieval medical texts.
Linda Ehrsam Voigts is Curators’ Professor of English Emerita at the University
of Missouri, Kansas City. Her research concentrates on medicine and science
of medieval England, especially on texts in the vernacular. With Patricia Deery
Kurtz she published on CD Scientific and Medical Writings in Old and Middle
English (University of Michigan Press, 2001). A second edition (eVK2), along
with an electronic edition of Lynn Thorndike and Pearl Kibre, A Catalogue of
Incipits of Mediaeval Scientific Writings in English (eTK), can be searched via a
link at http://www.medievalacademy.org.
Faith Wallis is Associate Professor at McGill University, Montreal, and holds a
joint appointment in the Department of History and the Department of Social
Studies of Medicine. Her publications include Bede: The Reckoning of Time
(Liverpool University Press, rev. ed. 2004), Bede: On the Nature of Things and
On Times (with Calvin Kendall, Liverpool University Press, 2010), and Medieval
Medicine: A Reader (University of Toronto Press, 2010). With Steven Livesey
and Thomas Glick, she edited Medieval Science, Technology and Medicine: An
Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2005).
List of Contributors xv
Roman Weinberger is a Web and software developer with several years of
professional experience. In addition, he has a M.Sc. degree in Psychology/
Cognitive Sciences from the University of Graz. His areas of expertise cover
software development (Zemd Framework, WordPress, Ruby on Rails) as well as
cognition, e-learning, and knowledge management. At the University of Graz
he supervised the development of the PharmXplorer project at the Institute of
Pharmaceutical Sciences and the online Dictionary of Old English Plant Names
at the Department of English. His research interests are computer security, the
Semantic Web, and the Open Source Movement. He is currently working at
TAO Software.
xvi Herbs and Healers from the Ancient Mediterranean through the Medieval West
Frontispiece John M. Riddle
