Emily Kesling's Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture is an examination of the four main collections of pre-Conquest medicine in Old English: Bald's Leechbook and Leechbook III (both survive in British Library, Royal MS 12. D. xvii), the Lacnunga (fols. 130r–193r in British Library, Harley MS 585), and the collection known as the Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus (surviving in multiple pre- and post-Conquest manuscripts). Kesling begins her introduction with a review of scholarly works that postdate the only other monograph on this subject (M. L. Cameron's Anglo-Saxon Medicine, 1993), followed by a summary of the late antique sources found in many of these medical texts. In the first four chapters, Kesling explores each textual entity mentioned above as it reflects the social setting in which it was created (or copied), and examines the variety of literary sources available to the compilers. Kesling makes strong connections between these texts and the early English church, centering the production of these four texts between the late-ninth and early-eleventh centuries. This connection to the church is further demonstrated in the final chapter (“Medicine in Anglo-Saxon England”) in which not only the content of the medical texts but the practice of medicine itself is situated within patristic, literary, and homiletic traditions in pre-Conquest England. At the core of this study is an effective argument against decades of derisive scholarship that has dogged the genre of vernacular medicine since Oswald Cockayne's Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft (1864–1866).

In “Bald's Leechbook: A Medical Compendium” (chapter 1), Kesling presents pre-Conquest medicine as the beneficiary of intellectual and learned traditions with an examination of the late antique Latin sources of the vernacular remedies in the Bald's Leechbook compilation, emphasizing the variety and depth of medical knowledge available to the compilers. It is certainly not a new approach to Bald's Leechbook (which Kesling acknowledges), but her work is a welcome update and corrective to previous scholarship. The strength in this chapter is Kesling's syntactic analysis and evaluation of the skill translator(s) needed to undertake transforming difficult Latin passages. In her discussion of the alliterative verse of the Latin colophon (which has escaped scholarly notice until now), Kesling proposed that the immediate aftermath of the Alfredian reforms in Winchester provided the milieu and necessary Latin training for both translation and the penning of short Latin verse.

In “Elves, the Demonic, and Leechbook III” (chapter 2), Kesling changes tack to explore more closely the remedies that represent “native” or “Germanic” (that is, archaic) elements found in remedies against ælfe, mære, and nihtgenge in this compilation. Here, Kesling builds upon the previous scholarship of Karen Jolly and Alaric Hall through an examination of the liturgical references and material that appears in the medical corpus, comparing the remedy against ælf-sogoþa with exorcism rituals from pre-Conquest England.

In “The Lacnunga and Insular Grammatica” (chapter 3), Kesling offers a fresh (and much needed) assessment of the compilation known as the Lacnunga. The Lacnunga has been the subject of much of the derision toward the genre of vernacular medicine, but Kesling presents it as a collection that reflects “a general preoccupation with words, language, and esoteric knowledge” (103). She argues effectively that its range and variety of contents are representative of the rising hermeneutic style of the late tenth century. The material of the Lacnunga is set against marginal additions in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 41, an early eleventh-century copy of Bede's Ecclesiastical History. With this comparison, she explores the connection between the medical compilations and remedies and charms that survive in other contexts, demonstrating that medical compilations were dependent upon these “pre-translated” texts, many of which show evidence of deriving from oral tradition.

In “The Old English Herbarium and the Monastic Reform” (chapter 4), Kesling reexamines the extensive work undertaken by Maria D'Aronco and others on the Old English Herbarium, adding to this with another assessment of the translation techniques and the vernacular medical vocabulary that suggest alterations to reflect available materia medica. The Old English Herbarium and the Medicina de Quadrupedibus are established as products of the English Benedictine Reform, but the adaptations undertaken by the translators suggest these texts were intended to serve an audience interested in both the study and practice of medicine. In her assessment, Kesling backs D'Aronco's proposal that Bishop Æthelwold spearheaded the translation project in Winchester.

Kesling occupies the unenviable position of having produced the first monograph on pre-Conquest medical texts since 1993 in a field that has yielded much scholarly work in the twenty-seven years since Cameron's Anglo-Saxon Medicine. She has done a more than admirable job synthesizing scholarship throughout, and her bibliography is excellent. Perhaps the most difficult task she faced is finding a place in which to ground her own literary research amongst the (sometimes abundant) scholarship of her predecessors, most notably in chapter 4. In short, the current organizational structure, while logical, does not always showcase Kesling's scholarship.

The fluid nature of “text” in the medical corpus is possibly unique in Old English literature, and it is difficult to pin down specific variations between source text and extant manuscript version, the latter of which has likely undergone significant emendation, including the incorporation of glosses and notations from exemplar into the main text. If there is a flaw in Kesling's assessment of translation techniques, it is that she assesses the Latin sources without giving much consideration to the possibility of emendation to exemplars, or that the Latin sources were found in manuscripts that may have contained reader interactions such as vernacular glosses that may have guided the translator(s).

Finally, while I understand the desire to connect these important texts (as translation projects or manuscript updates) to periods and centers of reform like Old Minster, Winchester (chapters 1, 2, and 4) or Glastonbury (chapter 3), it has the unfortunate result of maintaining a masculine horizon for the study of medicine, and by proxy, Latin learning. All four medical texts contain (or once contained) gynecological and obstetric remedies, and despite the omission of some gynecological concerns from the Latin source, the Old English Herbarium boasts an extensive variety of remedies for female issues, including several emmenagogues, one of which specifically warns that the use of this herb will expel a fetus. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the Herbarium omissions were specifically due to “the influence of a male monastic environment” as Kesling claims (146), since it differs very little by comparison with the other three textual entities in the number or proportion of remedies for female issues.