While John Gerard’s The Herball or Generall History of Plants might not match Nicholas Culpeper’s later herbal offering, The English Physitian, in print runs, as Rebecca Laroche demonstrates in her study, it was a book that made a deep impression on female readers in early modern England. Gerard’s tome of herbal lore and botanical illustrations takes a starring role in many of the scattered cases we now use to reconstruct women’s reading practices. Lady Anne Clifford, for example, was careful to include his title when displaying her library, and thus book learning, in her commissioned family portrait. Selections of the medicinal virtues of individual herbs frequently appear in household receipt books such as the “digest” painstakingly copied by Elizabeth Freke in her notebook of remembrances and recipes. In many early modern homes, the herbals of William Turner, John Gerard, and John Parkinson provided the central textual information for medical activities. However, as Laroche shows in Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650, herbals also served other functions within the lives of women—from providing embroidery samples to acting as family archives. In this sense, a study of herbals and how they were read, far from being specialist, is revealing of the general cultural and intellectual landscape of early modern England.

Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts opens with sketches of how three women, Elizabeth Digby, Elizabeth Bulckley, and Anne Clifford, read Gerard’s herbal. Laroche’s three chosen examples remind us that readers’ individual circumstances dictated how they interacted with and appropriated information from printed books. Here, we see one reader, Digby, transform a herbal entry into a recipe and another reader, Bulckley, or compiler A of her notebook, create her own personalized epitome with information relevant to her own garden and needs. The theme of “individuation” is central to Laroche’s arguments for “the herbs a woman chooses to use, the herbal she reads, the method and the context in which she uses herbs and reads herbals are as variable as the physiologies, biographies and climates involved” (19). While Laroche devotes the first chapter to a nuanced analysis of the gendering of English herbals, linking the language employed in the writing of Gerard, Turner, and Parkinson with anxieties surrounding the formation of the herbal tradition in England, the remainder of the work is devoted to reconstructing social and personal contexts of herbal ownership and reading.

Laroche approaches the recovery of reading practices in a multifaceted way. In chapter 2, “Inscriptions in Herbal Texts and the Location of Medical Authority,” she traces and contextualizes fifteen early modern ownership notes and inscriptions and more than twenty instances of herbal ownership documented in life writings, wills, inventories, and artworks. Ownership notes are not easy historical sources for analysis, and Laroche, with patient archival digging and a bit of imagination, provides useful social frameworks around her nuggets of information. Many of the examples, such as the detailed exploration of the Burton family’s copy of Gerard, demonstrate how this careful archival work allows us to get closer to understanding the reasons behind a book purchase or the fortuna of particular copies.

Laroche’s claims on herbal ownership are twofold: first, that “acquisition of herbal knowledge through text is not necessarily matrilineal nor is it homosocial” and, second, that “the herbal is both individually and socially owned” (99). Her second argument, with its emphasis on household collective, location, and social and familial ties, extends far beyond implications for the owning and reading of herbals to other sorts of books within early modern homes.

In chapter 3, “Gentlewomen’s Herbal Readings and the Absent-Present Physicians,” Laroche returns to the idea of “individuation” by framing the herbal reading of Lady Grace Mildmay, Lady Margaret Hoby, and Elizabeth Isham with detailed reconstruction of their daily lives, their relationship with male medical authority, and household needs. While two of the women in the case studies, Mildmay and Hoby, are familiar to literary scholars and historians alike, Elizabeth Isham’s life has only recently become widely known through the collaborative Constructing Elizabeth Isham project. Using tools gleaned from methodology developed in history of reading, literary criticism, and manuscript studies, Laroche offers us creative readings of well-known texts. In her examination of Elizabeth Isham’s herbalism, she suggests that Isham’s choice to pursue herbalism over Latin was a result of a number of factors including the poor health of her sister and mother, her position within a country estate, her enthusiasm for needlework, her religious conviction, and the fact that Isham came from a family of skilled female healers.

Herbals and herbalism, as Laroche demonstrates, was gendered in a variety of complex ways. Laroche’s meticulous endeavors in untangling these webs of meaning not only add to our understanding of gender and knowledge in the period but also pave the way for further studies. For historians of reading, the work’s appeal lies in its focus on a small, determined sample of texts and readers, enabling Laroche to build up in-depth, detailed histories behind both book production and individual readers and readings. While Laroche’s focus on the social, familial, and personal is to be applauded, at times I wondered about the intellectual frame. How did these women interact with other medical books or even other works of nonfiction? Finally, on a related note, what place did herbals and herbalism occupy in the minds of early modern men who are, of course, also part of the household collective? Laroche’s fascinating study thus prompts us to explore new questions in new settings.