Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 by Rebecca Laroche (review)

Through an analysis of twenty-four examples of female-owned herbals supplemented by case studies of the herbal references in the writings of Margaret Hoby, Grace Mildmay, Elizabeth Isham, and Isabella Whitney, Rebecca Laroche seeks to uncover the myriad ways that women engaged herbal texts along with the multiple contexts of their usage. She investigates the texts for their practical value, rather than as reference texts to help modern scholars understand allusions in early modern literary works.

Her work is firmly within the revisionist critique of the concept of the medical marketplace and the tripartite division of medical authority into physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, a model that excludes and subjugates women. Beginning with an examination of herbals written by men, she shows how these intentionally authoritative and comprehensive texts aimed to bring a more complete herbal knowledge to a projected audience of learned men, and to masculinize the herbal tradition. John Parkinson, for example, produced two books on herbals: one for women that demonstrated the delights to be found in plants and one for men that incorporated more intellectual debates and medicinal remedies. The published herbals, through their construction of the female reader, attempted to limit the medical activities of women, but the extensive information they supplied enabled gentlewomen in particular to acquire considerable medical knowledge.

Women signed their copies of herbals to, in Laroche’s view, invoke or confound medical authority. She struggles to differentiate between a simple signature—as done, for example, by a new wife practicing her married name—and one that denotes ownership. This matters because, according to Laroche, these signatures punctured any authority articulated by the book’s male author: a woman who signified her ownership of the herbal did so in order to communicate her acquisition of a certain field of knowledge.

The owned herbals yield evidence on an individual’s relationship to medical authority, although Laroche resolutely eschews any monolithic depiction of female medical practice.

Not all owners of herbals texts used them in the same way, and an individual’s interaction with published works or professional practitioners could change over time. Laroche investigates the effect that personal and family history had on a woman’s representation of her acquisition of and relationship to medical knowledge. Hoby, thrice married and childless, consulted her herbal—or at least noted she did—when her usual physician had died and she had not yet established a relationship with his successor. Mildmay, widowed and the mother of one daughter, relied on Turner’s herbal as the metatext for her writings, but extended and refined the information in it. Isham, unmarried, chose to learn about herbs and medicine as an adult, in preference to the study of Latin. Whitney was of lower social status, and her poetry was more about the need for assistance than the supplying of medical care.

Though Laroche believes that her research adds to scholarship uncovering early modern women’s medical practice, her interest is confined to textual history: how a textual tradition frames participation and how women, in owning the text, reshape the textual construction. This frequently makes her book an unsatisfying work for historians. It is not clear how the analysis of the life histories contributes to our overall knowledge of women and medicine. It is difficult to understand the importance of some of the questions asked, or why these were framed as either/or, as in, for example, are the herbals indicative of women’s medical or leisure activities? Frustratingly opaque statements abound. I am still puzzling over sentences like:

By presenting together herbal treatises and female-authored texts as objects for analysis, this study demonstrates how both male-authored and female-authored writings represent women’s herbal practice as constituting various relationships with medical authority, which itself was paradoxically both solidified and made fluid through publication.

(p. 9)

As is perhaps befitting a work that does not intend to generalize about...