Introduction

Summary

The Old English medical collections were first edited for the Rolls Series by Oswald Cockayne in the 1860s as part of a three-volume publication with the engaging title Leechdoms, Wortcunning, and Starcraft of Early England. The major part of these volumes is dedicated to printing four collections of medical material in Old English. These texts are still largely known by the names drawn from Cockayne's edition: Bald's Leechbook, Leechbook III, the Lacnunga, and the Old English Herbarium and Medicina de Quadrupedibus (known together as the Old English Pharmacopeia). In their various manuscript copies, these collections span across five manuscripts and more than 500 folia and represent the earliest complete collections of medicine in a Western vernacular.

As texts whose aims are principally functional, these collections can be considered part of Fachliteratur or technical literature and as such have generally been of most interest to scholars of the history of medicine, codicology, or cultural history and folklore. When these texts have drawn the attention of scholars of literature or history, they have tended to be perceived as evidence of the poor quality of medical knowledge in the period or as a testimony to lingering paganism or popular belief and practice. Evaluations that suggest these works to be of only questionable orthodoxy and outside mainstream ecclesiastical practice are visible even in twenty-first-century publications. For instance, in the most recent edition of one of these texts the editor suggests it was compiled by someone who was ‘not a model of orthodox piety’, perhaps a lay person, who ‘had access to both popular and learned traditions of charms and superstitious practices’. Although assessments of this type have been widespread, this book will contend instead that all four collections mentioned above were almost certainly compiled in major ecclesiastical centres. Rather than being texts which by-and-large depict native pre-Christian tradition or popular yet heterodox Christian practice, these texts reflect the learned environments in which they were compiled and copied.

The four extant collections of medical material mentioned above by name of course do not represent the entirety of vernacular medical writing from the Anglo-Saxon period. Aside from the undoubtedly substantial body of works lost to time, there are also numerous remedies (or sometimes groups of remedies) found in otherwise non-medical manuscripts, as well as smaller portions of what may have once been complete collections.