This book is not quite what it seems. The arresting title seems to imply that the practice of healing is, or perhaps was at one time, in some sense a hybrid. This does, of course, make sense. Medicine is always a combination of different disciplines: at the present day, those of the physician and the surgeon, and a compromise between theory, whatever that may be at the time, and practical experience. The history of medicine is to a large degree the story of this latter compromise, as both theory and practice themselves evolved over time. But this book does not focus on medicine as a discipline, or as a set of practices. Its subject is medical texts, or rather a small and very specific selection from those extant in Old English, and the ways in which they can be seen as “hybrids” between different literary genres. This concept of hybridity depends, as the author explains, on an idea of “purity” derived from biological classification and is applicable to literary genres only in a metaphorical sense.

It is now recognized that even biological species are much more porous categories than was once believed to be the case, and the same applies in spades to literary genres. The boundaries of the medical genre have been particularly contested. Historians of medicine, mainly those with a medical rather than a historical background, have been reluctant to include many texts whose intention was certainly to improve health, but whose methods seemed unscientific, while literary scholars have until recently allowed such Fachliteratur to pass under their radar almost entirely. However, the recent survey by Emily Kesling (Medical Texts in Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture [2020]) has made a strong case for bringing Old English medical texts into the literary fold, and Caroline Batten's “The Style of the Old English Metrical Charms” (Review of English Studies 72 [2021]: 421–40) argues that this small group of texts constitutes a literary genre with its own rules.

The present volume adds to this enterprise by applying literary methods to a selection of Old English material under the heading of “remedies and medical texts.” The notion of hybridity allows a surprisingly broad interpretation of this category, including “The Journey Charm” (chapter 2), which protects the traveler from a range of hazards, as well as a more obviously health-related charm, “Against a Sudden Stitch” (chapter 3). Chapter 4 compares the largely medical “Nine Herbs Charm” in the Lacnunga with two charms, one against bad weather and another against poison and bad temper, in the Old English Herbarium. The focus of chapter 5 is on ideas about mandrake, again largely non-medical, transmitted in the Herbarium, while chapter 6 enlists the long series of remedies for ear disorders in Bald's Leechbook in an interrogation of oral theory that draws upon Deaf Studies. Finally, chapter 7 looks at riddle 5 from the Exeter Book, variously solved as “shield,” “whetstone,” or “chopping block.” Here, the connection with medicine is the speaker's lament that no healer can cure its wounds. But this broad range of texts is also very restricted, in terms of the Old English medical corpus as a whole, comprising almost exclusively charms or incantations, words to be addressed to supernatural powers in order to change some aspect of the physical world. These make up a tiny percentage of the corpus; the vast majority consists of recipes, which, other than the listing in chapter 6, are not the focus of discussion here.

Garner's introduction proposes a “poetics of health and healing”, drawing on the work of John Miles Foley on Old English verse and oral epic (1). Garner's main focus is indeed on verse texts, again an atypical selection from a corpus nearly all in very utilitarian prose. The subsequent application of literary methods thus leaves untouched nearly all the extant remedies and medical texts in Old English. From the point of view of the history of medicine, this seems a significant lacuna, especially as most of the discussion seems to concern ideas that, interesting as they may be, bear only a glancing relevance to the text that is the ostensible subject of each chapter, or to medical ideas and practice more generally. This study takes a very different path, then, to most of the now substantial body of scholarship on medicine in pre-Conquest England, which it appears to draw on rather selectively, missing, or ignoring, many useful insights from experts on medieval medicine.

For the historian of medicine, a striking feature of this study, like others coming from the same disciplinary direction, is that it treats the Old English poetic corpus as a “known” or “given,” to which the medical material may be assimilated or compared. For example, the opening “Hwæt!” is said to “activate the heroic register” in a charm, likening it to Beowulf (57). But its use in Beowulf, from another point of view, could equally be said to activate an incantational register at the start of that poem. Indeed, a historian of medicine might want to turn the whole premise of the book on its head, and ask not whether the Old English medical literature is Literature, and thus worthy of literary methods of analysis, but whether the existing literary canon is relevant to the medical corpus, and how literary methods can add to what we already know.

There has, of course, already been much cross-fertilization between the history of medicine and literary studies, so far looking mainly at texts in Latin or later European vernaculars. This is to the benefit of both disciplines, as long as each recognizes the value of the other, and its own limitations. Old English scholars are still catching up with this trend, and thus work like Garner's must be welcomed as helping to extend this stimulating dialogue into new territory.