The subject of this book is a collection of medical texts in Old English, known since the nineteenth century as Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga and the Old English Herbal and Medicina de quadrupedibus (medicines from four-footed creatures). Dr Kesling gives us the first book length treatment of these texts to be published in over 25 years, greatly advancing the scholarship in an often neglected field of study. She briefly notes the scope of the texts and their sources in the introduction (pp. 1–22), then devotes a full chapter to each of the four collections, the Herbal and Medicina de quadrupedibus being considered a single composite text, before presenting a unifying thesis in the fifth and final chapter, supplemented by an appendix of illustrative quotations and a short index. As the title suggests, this book is written from a perspective of literary scholarship, rather than the history of medicine, but it describes this fascinating corpus of vernacular medical texts, all compiled or translated before the end of the tenth century, in sufficient detail to be of interest to historians of early medieval medicine. The general argument of the book seems to be an antithesis to the historiography of the mid-twentieth century in which the ritual elements of the Old English medical corpus were described as the production of an uneducated, even ‘semi-pagan’ laity. Kesling consistently argues that the texts were produced in a monastic environment, and much of her final chapter is devoted to dispelling the notion that these texts contained heterodox material that would be described as drycræft (sorcery) or wiccecræft (witchcraft) in Anglo-Saxon penitential or homiletic literature, concluding that ‘there is remarkably little similarity between these [medical] texts and the actual practices associated with drycræft’ (p. 185), and noting even that ‘the [ælf] remedy as it exists is clearly a learned piece, part of the wider literary and ecclesiastical tradition of the period’ (p. 92).
Chapter 1 locates Bald’s Leechbook in the context of late antique Latin medical literature, comparing the synthesis of multiple Latin sources to the translation style developed at the ninth-century court of Alfred the Great. This task is no easy feat; many of the source texts, including the Latin Alexander and Galen’s Ad Glauconem have not been printed since the sixteenth century, while sources such as the Physica Plinii and Oribasius, Synopsis and Euporistes exist in multiple Latin versions, some of which may at times agree more closely with the Old English text than those Latin versions quoted by the author; for example on pp. 32–33 in which the Physica Plinii Florentino-Pragensis I.14.8 is syntactically closer to the Old English than the quoted Physica Plinii Bambergensis 13.9, and in the appendices on pp. 192–193 the New Latin Oribasius as found in Molinier’s edition under the siglum ‘La’ may agree more closely with the quoted Old English than the text provided from the Old Latin Oribasius under the siglum ‘Aa’.
There is a slight sense of discontinuity between the first and second chapters, as Chapter 2 considers ‘Elves, the Demonic and Leechbook III’ from an entirely different perspective, focusing almost exclusively on exorcisms and recipes in which Old English ælf (elf) occurs as part of a disease term. In Chapter 3, ‘The Lacnunga and Insular Grammatica’, the author uses a novel and welcome approach to situate elements of that medical compilation often derided as superstitious and ignorant, concluding that they ‘suggest a learned interest in the power of letters, words and language consonant with early conceptions of grammatica’ (p. 129). Chapter 4 considers the Old English Herbal and Medicina de quadrupedibus which are a direct translation of a popular ensemble of late antique pharmaceutical texts, the bulk of which have been published as the fourth volume of the Corpus Medicorum Latinorum. The author provides a solid analysis of the styles of translation, and credibly situates it in the tenth-century English Benedictine reform. This chapter also shows a more thorough engagement with recent work in the history of medicine than the second and third chapters. Some minor points could have been expanded, such as the significance of the α recension of Pseudo Apuleius, Herbarius, briefly discussed on p. 148, or the identity of ‘the tremulous hand’ mentioned in passing on p. 151, although a study of this hand by Christine Franzen occurs in the bibliography.
The final chapter of the book, titled ‘Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England’, ties the radically different methods of analysis in the preceding chapters together with a discussion of prohibitions of magic, ultimately arguing that even the galdru (charms) found in Bald’s Leechbook, Leechbook III and the Lacnunga did not lie outside the acceptable realms of monastic orthodoxy. The chapter contains little discussion of medical practice, but rather considers literary depictions of the Anglo-Saxon medic, or læce, in contrast to those who are condemned for illicit practices. This is indeed a very thorough and welcome analysis and an antidote to twentieth century scholarship in which ‘the medical texts are always brought into discussions about magic or charms in Anglo-Saxon England’ (p. 185). It is perhaps a minor point but the form gealdor found in Bald’s Leechbook would not normally be emended to the citation form galdor on p. 172.
The short appendices, finally, provide extended illustrative quotations in support of the Chapters 1 and 3, respectively, and I note that the author had located these Latin sources independently of Doyle, whom she generously cites throughout Chapter 1. One flaw exists in the book for which I do not think the author is wholly at fault: internal cross references in the book are incomplete, never having been filled in during the page proofing stage, which strikes me as an unfortunate editorial omission as much as an authorial oversight, distracting the reader from the thoroughly researched and well worded argument.
