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bunnyjadwigaAnd herein I begin to wrap up my notes from the presentation I made at Darkover:
The most reliable picture of the women-as-herbalist, and in fact of the healer-herbalist in general, in medieval history, is actually that of the lady of the house as healer, physica, concoctor of medicines and treater of injuries. Whether she be the mother, 'housekeeper,' or lady of the manor, women through the seventeenth century were expected to be nurse and Dr. Mom. From the great ladies nursing wounded knights in the romances, right through Gervase Markham's exhortation:
But we are more likely to see the making of herbal remedies in fantasy as a side business for the fantasy healers. Sometimes that is perfectly in line with their roles as mythic characters -- see the Old Woman in the Swamp and the Young Sorcerer's Girl Student in Teresa Edgerton's Welsh/Arthurian Caelydonn series, or the education of Eilonwy in the Welsh-inspired Prydain Chronicles. The combination of great lady who through her holiness, some mystic power, or some other power, is shown in a lady of the manor in Edgerton's Grail and The Ring, and in history in the stories of St. Francesca Romana, a fifteenth-century woman who set herself to minister to the ill through touch, prayer, ointments and liquids.
On the other hand, I sometimes wonder where the counterpart to Cadfael is in our fantasy world. Anyone familiar with the writings of Hildegard of Bingen on plants and medicines realizes that there would have been women infirmarers and abbesses who were interested in both herbal medicine and physic, as Cadfael is. The fact that Cadfael's type-- the healing monk-- is better documented and more described in history and of course in mythology is no excuse. (Often, we are told that only the use of herbs by monks kept all knowledge from being swept away, which anti-Christian or anti-Catholic writers take to mean that the monasteries or the church drove all other herbal healing underground. There's no evidence of this, and contrary evidence in the fact that Anglo-Saxon, formerly pagan, texts such as the Leech book of bald were written down at the end of the first millenium, and that their writers struggled to reconcile their herbal and medical knowledge with that in the Latin books they had access to. Admittedly, there was a great deal of ancient medical knowledge that ended up in Arabic and/or Muslim hands and was brought back to Christian Europe during the Crusades, often with added information from Muslim practioners.
Another thing that seems to be missing in fantasy is the idea of woman gardeners or herbalists, who gathered and sold raw materials, which we can document to approximately 15th c. France, where the trade was followed by both men and women. Male gardeners, like male cooks, seem to have been the norm in noble houses, and the interest in creating one's own garden and having it laid out just so can be documented to both sexes. However, with the desire to have materials for medication and the still-room, the middle class and upper middle class women would have taken more interest in their gardens. Women were hired in gardens to do weeding, and surviving depictions of workers in the gardens show women doing difficult work. But they seem to have existed within the social structure, rather as proud and independent characters, and thus are not well-represented in fantasy so far. An unusual appearance is the green mages in Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series, where there are natural magic practitioners who work primarily with plants, and sometimes get pressed into service for healing, rather than the other way around.
The trope of the healer/witch/herbalist has been used, overused, abused, mythologized, and turned round and round to the point that it has migrated into and sometimes been relegated to Young Adult Literature and Romance Novels. But if we throw away the fantasy of the historical witch/healer/herbalist, we find that there are a diversity of types and ideas that inspire new thought and ideas.
The most reliable picture of the women-as-herbalist, and in fact of the healer-herbalist in general, in medieval history, is actually that of the lady of the house as healer, physica, concoctor of medicines and treater of injuries. Whether she be the mother, 'housekeeper,' or lady of the manor, women through the seventeenth century were expected to be nurse and Dr. Mom. From the great ladies nursing wounded knights in the romances, right through Gervase Markham's exhortation:
"...you shall understand that since the preservation and care of the family, touching their health and soundness of body, consisteth most inher diligence, it is meet that she have a physical kind of knowledge, how to administer many wholesome receipts or medicines for the good of their healths, as well as to prevent the first occasion of sickness as to take away the effects and evil of the same when it hath made a seizure on the body,"though he does say that he does not intend to make his reader a practitioner, since knowledge of physic would be beyond her. We do have examples of that in fantasy, though the path is somewhat complex: consider the main character in Sharon Shinn's Summers at Castle Auburn.
But we are more likely to see the making of herbal remedies in fantasy as a side business for the fantasy healers. Sometimes that is perfectly in line with their roles as mythic characters -- see the Old Woman in the Swamp and the Young Sorcerer's Girl Student in Teresa Edgerton's Welsh/Arthurian Caelydonn series, or the education of Eilonwy in the Welsh-inspired Prydain Chronicles. The combination of great lady who through her holiness, some mystic power, or some other power, is shown in a lady of the manor in Edgerton's Grail and The Ring, and in history in the stories of St. Francesca Romana, a fifteenth-century woman who set herself to minister to the ill through touch, prayer, ointments and liquids.
On the other hand, I sometimes wonder where the counterpart to Cadfael is in our fantasy world. Anyone familiar with the writings of Hildegard of Bingen on plants and medicines realizes that there would have been women infirmarers and abbesses who were interested in both herbal medicine and physic, as Cadfael is. The fact that Cadfael's type-- the healing monk-- is better documented and more described in history and of course in mythology is no excuse. (Often, we are told that only the use of herbs by monks kept all knowledge from being swept away, which anti-Christian or anti-Catholic writers take to mean that the monasteries or the church drove all other herbal healing underground. There's no evidence of this, and contrary evidence in the fact that Anglo-Saxon, formerly pagan, texts such as the Leech book of bald were written down at the end of the first millenium, and that their writers struggled to reconcile their herbal and medical knowledge with that in the Latin books they had access to. Admittedly, there was a great deal of ancient medical knowledge that ended up in Arabic and/or Muslim hands and was brought back to Christian Europe during the Crusades, often with added information from Muslim practioners.
Another thing that seems to be missing in fantasy is the idea of woman gardeners or herbalists, who gathered and sold raw materials, which we can document to approximately 15th c. France, where the trade was followed by both men and women. Male gardeners, like male cooks, seem to have been the norm in noble houses, and the interest in creating one's own garden and having it laid out just so can be documented to both sexes. However, with the desire to have materials for medication and the still-room, the middle class and upper middle class women would have taken more interest in their gardens. Women were hired in gardens to do weeding, and surviving depictions of workers in the gardens show women doing difficult work. But they seem to have existed within the social structure, rather as proud and independent characters, and thus are not well-represented in fantasy so far. An unusual appearance is the green mages in Tamora Pierce's Circle of Magic series, where there are natural magic practitioners who work primarily with plants, and sometimes get pressed into service for healing, rather than the other way around.
The trope of the healer/witch/herbalist has been used, overused, abused, mythologized, and turned round and round to the point that it has migrated into and sometimes been relegated to Young Adult Literature and Romance Novels. But if we throw away the fantasy of the historical witch/healer/herbalist, we find that there are a diversity of types and ideas that inspire new thought and ideas.
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 08:19 pm (UTC)Hults, Linda C. The Witch as Muse: Gender and Power in Early Modern
Europe. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. Pp.
352. $49.95. ISBN 978-0-8122-3869-3.
Reviewed by Diana Laulainen-Schein
Arizona State University
Diana.Laulainenschein@asu.edu
The Witch as Muse by Linda Hults is not simply an art history
book with an intriguing theme; it is an exceptionally well-written
monograph produced by art historian who has spent over a decade
thinking about her subject. As such, the book is not for the faint of
heart. The writing is erudite and complex and discusses theories and
principles related to the process of art that are not readily
accessible to a beginning scholar in the field. Beyond art and art
theory, the book is well-researched and one will be hard-pressed to
find errors in her interpretation and application of witchcraft
historiography. General witchcraft historians should approach the text
with an awareness that witchcraft historiography informs her
interpretations of witches in art but without any expectation that
Hults might use art analysis to significantly impact witchcraft
interpretation. Indeed, it is unrealistic to expect broad
interpretations to be accurately drawn from a handful of artists and
their artworks, particularly given the contexts in which they were
created.
Rather than a comprehensive survey of the witch in art, The Witch
as Muse, as stated in the preface, is "a deep rendering of the
artists' engagement" of the theme of witchcraft (xii). The distinction
is important and shapes the text that follows. Hults begins with a
comprehensive and accurate review of witchcraft historiography as it
relates to her task of analyzing "the understanding of witchcraft and
the persecution of witches in specific times and places" (xii).
Chapter Two then presents the constructs of art theory and the
discourses that influenced the artists' decisions as to form and
content throughout the creative processes that produced these images.
In the remaining five chapters, Hults traces the use of the witch as a
central figure in art by examining major artists who addressed the
theme, including Albert Durer, Hans Baldung Grien, Frans Francken II,
Jacques de Gheyn II, Salvatore Rose, and Francisco Goya.
The chapters unfold chronologically while generally focusing
thematically and, by consequence, geographically. Within each chapter,
Hults provides a concise yet informative and essential review of the
social and political milieus in which the artists worked. These
details allow Hults to place her discussions of various artists in
both the larger historical and the more personal individual contexts
in which the art of witchcraft was produced. With those frameworks in
place, she moves on to detailed and fascinating analyses of individual
works of art; these analyses are what truly mark The Witch as
Muse as a work of distinction.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-28 03:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 08:20 pm (UTC)the artists' creativity but also of the intellectual arguments about
the nature of witchcraft, arguments that were constantly being
refashioned over time and that varied by locale. This is an important
point when placing this text in the larger context of witchcraft
historiography. Studies of witchcraft can begin from "below" amongst
the general populace, who generally were responsible for the immediate
accusations of witchcraft, or from "above" amongst the elites, who
debated the issue in intellectual discourses and were responsible for
the judicial processes that condemned accused witches. Hults studies
artists who necessarily operated in the world of the elite. As such,
their art provides a window of understanding into elite belief. That
window, however, necessarily privileges masculine discourses, thereby
focusing the discussion on the femininity of the accused, particularly
in the early chapters. The chapter that covers Goya, however,
refreshingly details the breakdown of the stereotypically female witch
alongside the rise of skepticism and Enlightment ideals. The window of
understanding is also obscured by other factors as discussed below.
At this point, it is important to note that like many potential
readers, I am a witchcraft historian, not an art historian. The
comments that follow, therefore, are heavily influenced by my vantage
point and in many ways reflect difficulties with this perspective
rather than with deficiencies of Hults as a scholar and author. The
natural inclination for a witchcraft historian is to approach this
book with the intent to discover what can be learned about the
construction of witchcraft belief. Indeed the first question that came
to mind was what, if anything, a study of the images of witches could
lend to an understanding of the witchcraft phenomenon. That question,
however, turns out to be inappropriate for this text. Uncovering the
motivations of the artists in producing their art is central to Hults'
purpose. Those motivations are personal and related to the immediate
world of the artist, and she is both thorough and persuasive in her
analyses of these motivations. Despite that success, the extent to
which those motivations can be used to extrapolate a larger view of
belief is limited, particularly if one wishes to go beyond the elite
world in which artists operated.
A recurring problem for a witchcraft historian is the multiplicity of
layers through which the evidence, in this case the art, is filtered.
Filtered messages are, of course, a problem with other kinds of
documentary sources. In the case of the most common evidence used in
the case of witchcraft study, court documents, historians must
consider whether the voices of the court officials are a true
reflection of the individuals who accused and were accused.[1] In the
instance of art, the problem is intensified as the "meaning" is
filtered further though the brush of the artist who is not necessarily
interested in reporting events as he sees them but in producing a work
of art that will appeal to potential patrons or purchasers. There
seems to be a further problem with any attempt to use art as an avenue
of understanding witchcraft accusation, namely that beyond the intent
of the artist is the filter of what the viewer sees. It should perhaps
go without saying that there is no guarantee that the messages sent
and the message received were the same.
1999.
no subject
Date: 2007-01-08 08:21 pm (UTC)lies a version of the truth cannot be assumed when examining the works
of an artist. Hults' title is indicative of this problem in that the
witch is a muse, a guiding spirit, and an inspiration to these
artists. The "problem" is primarily one for some readers, however,
since the text is more about how the subject of witchcraft was used,
how it influenced artists and their art, and how the resulting art was
a reflection of contemporary views on witchcraft.
One issue with the book that is solely the fault of the publisher is
the reproduction of the artwork. The art in this text is central and
the poor quality makes it difficult to study the various details that
Hults discusses so thoroughly. Luckily, in this day and age, readers
can search the Internet to find images that they wish to study more
intently. Doing so often yields the added bonus of seeing the artwork
in the original colors but is necessarily more unwieldy than simply
turning a page in the text to study the image. It is recommended that
readers of this text do take the time to seek out these more detailed
images, though, since the greatest of Hults' many accomplishments in
this text is her exquisite analysis of the details in each piece of
art.
NOTES
[1] Marian Gibson deals extensively with this problem in her volume
Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. New York:
Routledge, 1999.