Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden (review)

Health and Healing from the Medieval Garden is a collection of essays derived from a conference at Penn State in April 2003. Its purpose is to fill lacunae in the area of medicine and gardens (pp. 4-5). It has the usual flaws and virtues of such a collection. The flaws: the writing is uneven and the styles disparate—from very general to highly specific, and the subjects are united by no narrative structure and barely by chronology. The virtues: these are some of the most senior researchers in the field writing on some of their favorite subjects; it is easy to find chapters relevant to one's own interests, and the collection also provides a survey of the field or, perhaps better, a dim sum of its possibilities.

My own interests tend toward the focused and/or the practical, so there were several chapters that caught my fancy. Linda Ehrsam Voigts's "Plants and Planets: Linking the Vegetable with the Celestial in Late Medieval Texts" is a classic. Its purpose is focused, its prose clean, and its goal accomplished: to review three different kinds of texts that relate the seven planets to seven plants. We are given the antecedents of the texts, their manuscript traditions, and an overview of the problems in identifying medieval nomenclature with actual plants. Classifying plants according to their ruling planets had some kind of significance; perhaps, Voigts suggests, it had something to do with practical experience—flavor, for instance, as a signifier of medicinal effect.

I also enjoyed Peter Murray Jones's "Herbs and the Medieval Surgeon." It, too, uses a specific subject, in this case, fistula in ano, to explore the possible practical utility of the plants gathered for that condition by a practitioner. George R. Keiser's "Rosemary: Not Just for Remembrance" provides an interesting and scholarly investigation of a text and its manuscript tradition, as well as an edition.

Deirdre Larkin's "Hortus Redivivus: The Medieval Garden Recreated" had the most unexpected approach to the subject and for that reason was especially enjoyable. She is the associate managing horticulturist of the wonderful medieval gardens at the Cloisters, and she has a specific and important point to make. Namely, that the medieval period was much more down to earth, literally, than our own. Its texts and manuscripts were, she argues, often about something real and practical; its herbal texts, therefore, should be approached with the assumption that they are about actual plants that grow in the ground. Indeed, she suggests that growing medieval plants today might even be useful for the historian, since doing so can provide a shared experience across the centuries. As one who planted an abortifacient garden years ago and watched its herbs kill everything within the bed, I heartily concur.

I would recommend this book to scholars who are already researching a particular topic as well as to students interested in exploring the relationships among herbs, spices, medicines, and gardens in the Middle Ages. The collection will provide such students an overview of the different specialists, subjects, styles, research possibilities, and difficulties of the discipline. It will also give them confidence that the field of healing and medieval gardens is wide open for practical, lively, cross-disciplinary research whose relevance to our own world may turn out to be greater than we currently allow.