Medical Authority and Englishwomen's Herbal Texts, 1550-1650 (review)

This book explores the wide variety of women's relationships in the period 1550-1650 with herbals, that is, books containing descriptions of herbs, their properties and virtues, and their medicinal and other uses. The Introduction stresses that the herbals will be studied for their utility rather than, as in the past, for their literary influence. Although ostensibly written for a male audience of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries, such books were often owned, read, and used by gentlewomen, who thus inserted themselves into the practice of medicine from which they were theoretically excluded by their gender and lack of formal training. But by copying, adapting or epitomizing recipes from herbals, these women appropriated the books' authority and made the knowledge they contained available to those unable to afford handsome illustrated folio volumes.

Each of the four following chapters deals with a discrete topic. Chapter 1 is a close reading of some of the herbals to uncover their implied gender positions. These can be overt: John Gerard's 1597 Herball contains the only reference before 1650 to a named woman practitioner, a gentlewoman who helped her poor neighbours out of charity and who is implicitly contrasted with beggars, witches, and unlicensed practitioners who charged for their services. They can also be less obvious, bearing on the English herbal genre's uneasy sense of belatedness: written in English, printed, and therefore more widely available than their continental predecessors. Laroche considers John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum (1640), which refers to 'this Manlike Worke of Herbes and Plants' and 'masculinizes the herbal tradition' (p. 34) by contrasting the medicinal uses of herbs with their use by women which privileges 'delight', and William Turner's New Herball (1551), which scapegoats illiterate 'herbe wives', servants of apothecaries, making them responsible for the corruption of knowledge. Laroche then looks at ways in which herbals use the myth of Circe the witch (often in the entries for the herbs mullein or moly), invoking anxieties about unregulated medical practitioners, with the herbalists playing the prophylactic role of Hermes. The gentlewoman practitioner, in contrast, is associated not with the witch Circe but with queens, specifically Elizabeth I, dedicatee of two of the earlier herbals and constructed as the mother of the nation, hence responsible for her children's health.

Chapter 2 deals with a completely different subject: female ownership of herbals, of which Laroche has accumulated more than twenty examples. She wrings an impressive amount of information out of a few signatures, and in some cases has acquired other documentary evidence such as letters or original compositions, to supplement the bare names. Laroche points out that a signature claims ownership, of a text and of an expensive book; indicates literacy (or steps towards literacy); associates the signatory with the authoritative status of the book; warns off rival owners; implies a future audience; or may mark a gift, a change in ownership. All these possibilities of course apply to other types of books, such as books of devotion, but Laroche argues that in herbals we learn about the descent of knowledge, involving male as well as female relatives, and about shifts between private and communal ownership. Female ownership also shows how knowledge cannot be ring-fenced by the medical establishment's attempts at institutional control.

Chapter 3 examines the place of herbals in the life writings of three early modern women. Margaret Hoby's diary shows her herbal (Gerard's, apparently) filling the gap between the sudden death of one physician and the acquisition of a replacement. Grace Mildmay's autobiography witnesses to her extensive medical practice, largely learnt from her governess, and her development of recipes from the herbals. Elizabeth Isham wrote a less well-known autobiography. After deciding against marriage she determined to study the herbal, rather than Latin, as more edifying and also possibly because her family had suffered from physicians and their often invasive treatments...