Anne Van Arsdall and Timothy Graham's edited volume is an ambitious and expansive Festschrift for the prolific historian of medicine John M. Riddle. As the title suggests, the collection's contributions are concerned with the historical usage, classification, teaching, and transmission of ancient materia medica, from the creation of the earliest Western drug compendia through the adaptation and absorption of ancient sources into medieval and early modern European medical culture, and beyond. The eleven essays in this volume at times take us somewhat far afield of Riddle's body of work, but nonetheless reflect his scholarship through a number of thoughtful themes.

Alain Touwaide's introduction lays out a four-part division which starts in antiquity, takes the reader through the Southern and Northern European Middle Ages and Renaissance, and ends with two studies firmly rooted in the modern. The introduction itself is a clear and instructive guide to the collection's vision.

John Scarborough begins with a short reading of the available sources for information on the medical culture of Cleopatra's court. Infamous for the reports of medical experimentation found in Plutarch and surviving papyri, Cleopatra VII was equally well known for the beauty recipes attributed to her in antiquity and the Middle Ages. Scarborough constructs a picture of the physicians who worked in the royal household and perhaps lent the queen her medieval reputation for expertise in cosmetics, describing in particular a fish-glue preparation (ichthyokolla) that appears to have been unusual for its time. In the same section, Touwaide produces a fine study of the quid pro quo (or medical substitution) genre, through an analysis of the different types of substitution made in the pseudo-Galenic Corpus Galenicum. He finds that pharmaceutical substitution lists were not simply used for swapping drugs, but were an adaptation strategy for the canonical pharmacy texts which moved around the Mediterranean, translating ancient recipes to new ecologies, socio-economic milieux, local types of therapy, etc.

The second section moves away from ancient pharmacology to the medical terrain of Western Europe transformed by the influx of Arabic-to-Latin translations of medical texts at the end of the eleventh century. Florence Eliza Glaze looks at the glosses of Greek technical terminology added to manuscripts of Gariopontus's Passionarius, a compendium of practical medicine assembled from Latin sources sometime before the second half of the eleventh century. Although previously believed to have been superseded by the new Arabic medical texts in the twelfth century, the Passionarius, Glaze argues, remained a popular teaching text for its ability to translate and transmit a Greek medical jargon. Faith Wallis visits the issue of medical theory in medieval pharmacology in her study of Constantine the African's Liber Graduum, a compendium of simple drugs organized rationally according to the degrees (or intensity) of their qualities. Although this text was circulated and elaborated upon, particularly by Bartholomaeus of Salerno, known for his commentary on the medical teaching compendium the Articella, the text was not absorbed into the Scholastic medical canon which developed during the twelfth century. Winston Black also looks at Constantine's Liber Graduum, uncovering its substantial (yet silent) influence on medical verse written or copied in England, specifically the herbal of Macer Floridus (and its adaptations) and the Anglicanus ortus of Henry of Huntingdon.

The third section moves firmly into the Northern European medical landscape with Maria Amalia D'Aronco's study on Old English medical glossing, an interesting complement to Glaze's discussion. The Anglo-Saxons were receptive heirs of a classical pharmacological tradition, as seen in the Old English Herbarium compiled from earlier Latin pharmacopoeia and in the creative strategies used to translate foreign plant names such as elehtre, for which D'Aronco proposes a new reading. The Middle English texts in Linda Ehrsam Voigts's essay display a remarkable fluency in druglore, as they satirize herbal treatments and their peddlers, while the Old Silesian surgical aphorisms Oberschlesische Roger-Aphorismen, whose manuscript tradition Gundolf Keil investigates, provide another example of the ways in which older textual forms of medical knowledge were updated to meet contemporary needs. Karen Reeds follows in Riddle's footsteps in her essay on Saint John's wort (hypericum), the late 1990s miracle herb. Whereas Riddle's own interest in the drug stemmed from its historical classification as an abortifacient, Reeds here investigates its historical claims for efficacy in the treatment of depression and finds that the historical record (seen through Renaissance herbals) does not support its modern indication.

The two final essays, though thematically unrelated, are a fit pairing for their interest in the applications of long-standing herbal traditions to contemporary pharmacological studies. John K. Crellin's essay discusses therapeutic uncertainty and a nineteenth-century trial over abortifacients, while Helmut W. Klug and Roman Weinberger describe the Medieval Plant Survey, a collaborative, multidisciplinary web portal intended to catalogue historical plant names and bring together texts which cite them.

The volume is supplemented by a listing of Riddle's many publications, as well as by Wallis's edition of Constantine's Liber Graduum, Black's substantial translations, and the copious tables and appendices accompanying most of the essays. Overall, the collection's unifying factor is the individual texts’ resonance with aspects of Riddle's work, and as such it is wide-ranging, perhaps dauntingly so. But its breadth speaks to the flourishing of scholarship in the history of medicine, attested to by the appearance of new book series such as the one to which this volume belongs. Historians of medicine have both returned to the manuscripts with renewed energy and embraced the scholarly possibilities presented by new technology, and this forwards and backwards gaze is a fitting tribute to Riddle's legacy.