bunnyjadwiga

From
Roy Strong. Feast: A History of Grand Eating (NY: Harcourt, 2002), p. 73-75.:

What is probably the best and most complete account we have of a late medieval banquet describes the dinner given by Gaston IV, comte de Foix, at Tours in 1457. It was staged in honour of an embassy from the king of Hungary, a mission which included not only Hungarians but Germans, Bohemians and Luxemburgers. To that cosmopolitan guest list of a hundred and fifty must be added the whole of the French court. The guests were seated in strict order of precedence at twelve large tables with the host, together with the leaders of the embassy and the most important French notables, served separately, as was customary, at a high table.

The feast was exceptional, not only for the number of courses involved -- no fewer than seven -- but also for the fact that the account actually describes the food served. Up until now, such details were normally passed over in silence or, if mentioned at all, simply remarked in terms of splendour and abundance. The meal opened modestly with pieces of toast that the diner dipped into the spiced wine called hippocras, but then swiftly moved on to 'grands pates de chapons [capons],' 'jambons de sanglier [hams of wild boar],' and seven different kinds of potage, all served on silver. Each table bore a hundred and fourty silver plates, a feat of ostentation that was to be repeated in the courses that followed. Ragouts of game came next: pheasants, partridges, rabbits, peacocks, bustards, wild geese, swans, and various river birds, not to mention venison. These ragouts were accompanied by several other kinds of dishes and pottage. Then came a pause.

Although there is no reference in our account to the placement of the tables, they must have been arranged in a horseshoe forming an arena at the centre. Into that space came what was called an entremet, the first of a series. Twelve men wheeled in a castle on a rock. Whether the men were concealed inside the rock or not we do not learn, but the castle itself had four corner towers and a large keep at the centre with four windows, at each of which could be seen a richly attired lady. The central keep was adorned with heraldic banners bearing the arms of the king of Hungary and those of the other great lords who made up the embassy. At the top of each of the four towers a child sang like an angel (though what they sang we do not learn.)

After this display the feast resumed with a dish called 'oiseaux armes', which has defied definition by culinary historians, served with yet more pottages. But the real distinction of this course was that 'tout ce service fut dore' '-- all the food was apparently gilded, or at least given the appearance of being golden. Then came the second entremet: six men, dressed in the regional constume of Bearn, carried in a man disguised as a tiger wearing a collar from which was suspended the arms of the king of Hungary. The tiger spat fire and the Bearnais danced, to great applause from the onlookers.

Following a fifth course which included tarts, darioles (small moulded dishes, sweet in this case) and fried oranges, another entremet came forth. In terms of sheer spectacle this must have eclipsed everything that went before. Twenty-four men were needed to bring it into the hall, an indication as to both its size and weight. It was a mountain containing two fountains, one of which spouted rosewater, the other 'eau de muscade'. Suddenly out of this rocky promontory rabbits scampered while live birds emerged to fly around the hall. Four boys and a girl, all dressed as savages, descended to dance a morisco. Then the
count distributed largesse to the various attendant heralds of arms, the one from Hungary recieving, in addition to the two hundred e'cus bestowed on the others, a fine length of velvet.

The sixth course consisted of dessert, red hippocras served with certain kinds of wafer called 'oublies' and 'roles', after which came a final entremet. A man attired in embroidered crimson satin appeared astride a similarly caparisoned horse. In his hands he carried a model garden made of wax which was filled with roses and a variety of other flowers, and set it before the ladies (an indication that they must have been seated separately from the men). This, we are told, was the most admired of all the entremets, although what followed in the way of food as a finale must have been equally extraordinary. It involved a heraldic menagerie sculpted in sugar: lions, stags, monkeys and various other birds and beasts, each holding in beak or paw the arms of the Hungarian king.

Unbelieveably, the banquet was not yet over. In came a live peacock with the arms of the queen of France encompassing its neck and the arms of the ladies of the French court draped over its body. In response, all the lords present advanced and pledged to support the cause of the Hungarian king (it was customary to make vows of chivalry on birds). Our account closes with one other important detail. In the middle of the room there was apparently a platform, an estrade, from which singers and an organ provided music during the dinner.

Since the original of this description was in Catalan, I would suggest that the fried oranges are really the cheese balls described in De Nola. Having the ladies sit separately, if indeed they did, would have followed the Eastern European meal tradition.

I was recently looking at a (poorly constructed, juvenile) meme quiz, and realized that of all the shapeshifters of folklore, one has entirely vanished from the minds of modern esoteric types. I find this strange, because it's really one of the strongest legends documented in English-speaking lands.

I refer, of course, to the woman/witch who turns herself into a hare. This change, unlike the classical werewolf's, is entirely voluntary. It is apparently best known in parts of England, where the superstition existed up through the twentieth century, though probably only as a quaint story to tell children and the idle rich. (For instance, Angela Thirkell's Barsetshire novels make repeated references to the grandmother of the half-gypsy keeper, who terrorized the neighborhood in the shape of a white hare until Jasper himself shot her with a silver bullet.)

To meet a hare was, in many parts of England, considered unlucky, despite the fact that hares are the only lagomorphs native to Britain-- rabbits were a rarity imported from the continent, and carefully preserved in warrens. Pikas, the other type of lagomorph known to the Old World, are found in Asia (and, in the New World, in the Rocky mountains), but not in Britain.

The hare as a subject of shapeshifting has some major advantages: hares are relatively common, they move swiftly and silently and usually are seen alone; they make forms in the grass from which they may appear suddenly. They move quickly, and if one had to have the animal's fur for shapeshifting purposes, a hare fur would be easy to conceal about the house. There is a great deal of mythology about them, such as the classical belief that they change gender between their first and third years.

Hares as witches' shapes or familiars were apparently known in all of Britain, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and later in some parts of the [Anglo] United States. These hares are difficult or impossible to catch or shoot, and often accused of lingering threateningly round people's houses, or worse, stealing milk from their cows. Witches that have to travel long distances may take the shape of a hare.

However, as a subject of modern-day shapeshifting fantasy, the hare has two major disadvantages: it's not a predator, and it's considered cute. Cuteness can be forgiven, in for instance the case of werecats and selkies-- but not being a carnivore, let alone a predator, and in fact being prey, seems to have blanked out the modern imagination.

So, if you see a large, long eared rabbit near the house and you run out of milk for your coffee unexpectedly... don't suspect me.

See:
William George Black. "The Hare in Folk-Lore," The Folk-Lore Journal, Vol. 1, No. 3. (Mar., 1883), pp. 84-90.
Bodil Nildin-Wall; Jan Wall. "The Witch as Hare or the Witch's Hare: Popular Legends and Beliefs in Nordic Tradition." Folklore, Vol. 104, No. 1/2. (1993), pp. 67-76.

Interesting notes on the history of tatooing in this essay/study of a mark noted on a body in the writings of Gregory, though the mark itself is not a tatoo.

Burrus, Virginia. "Macrina's Tattoo," The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, vol. 33 no. 3, fall 2003, 403-418.

Living with the Romans, from the Liverpool Museum site:
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mol/exhibitions/livingwithromans/

Includes pictures of the building of a reproduction roundhouse, and info on local (Liverpudlian/Chester) finds.

And 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:

"...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.

The herbal history fantasy group are prone to claim that herbs as medications were 'driven underground' by the Christian Church and/or the Medical Establishment during the middle ages and Renaissance.

Nancy Siraisi, in Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice, p. 141, discusses the types of medication in the medieval physician's arsenal:

Of the three instruments of medicine, medication was the principal form of active intervention by which physicians sought to combat disease. The choice of appropriate medicinal substances and their compounding in proper proportions were central areas of medical knowledge. The foundation of medieval European pharmacy -- as of traditional herbal medicine in other societies-- was the attribution of medicinal powers to commonly available substances, usually plants and often those that might also be used in cooking. Sharp taste, pungent aroma, and unusual texture as well as readily perceptible action of some kind (for example, as a laxative or opiate) were all properties that might lead to the classification of a plant as medicinal. Unquestionably, consistent use of of certain common European plants as medicines began in antiquity and had a continuous history thereafter. But in western Europe, even in the early Middle Ages, this simple "kitchen-garden" medicine was never purely empirical, local, folkloric and handed down by oral tradition-- although these characteristics must surely have been present to some extent -- but seems always also to have contained elements derived from Greek medicine by way of written sources. From the early Middle Ages to the high Renaissance, medicinal recipes were the commonest form of medical writing.

People often backwards-generalize the division between a symptomatic or disease-focused 'scientific' medicine and an alternative 'holistic' or 'whole person medicine' seen in today's culture to the middle ages. To be completely blunt, this is bunk.

Even a little study of the methods and studies of physicans in the medieval and early modern period (pre-Vesalius, for instance), shows that they used holistic, whole-body, mind/body theories such as the theory of humors, astrology, and Galen's writings about the bowels (what foods and activities were contrictive, and what laxative) and strove for moderation in their patients' lives. Such theories let to activities such as bloodletting, cupping (applying hot cups to the skin to bring blood and lymph toward the surface), sweating, and emetic, purgative and/or laxative treatments to expel contents of the stomach and bowel from one end of the digestive tract or the other.

Medieval and early modern empirics, or folk medicine practitioners, used combinations of holistic, symptomatic, and symbolic medicine-- but their medicine was almost never *more* holistic than that of the physicians. Even the simplest scan through the recorded documents shows this. Though Culpeper's English Physician is in places 'holistic' by modern medical standards, it was the document of an empiric-- a non-guild-recognized apothecary -- writing based on the usual treatments described by the physicians of his day. But other authors, such as Gerard, who writes of what the common folk do with this herb and that, or even, to reach back to ancient history, Pliny, don't describe holistic medicine. Pliny, in fact, is famous for having written down any superstition or folk belief that people would describe to him, and one sometimes wonders whether his informants for the Natural History succumbed to the temptation to pull his leg about certain beliefs.

There was, it is true, a 17th and 18th century fad for belief in the Doctrine of Signatures, which holds that substances display their medicinal uses by some distinguishing feature. However, the first appearance of the Doctrine of Signatures is in Pliny, and it was taught and discussed in universities as a way of organizing knowledge, so many educated men, philosophers, and physicians of the middle ages and Renaissance knew of and subscribed to it. The last hurrah of the theory was probably in William Coles' Art of Simpling, whose use of the theory was hotly contested.

I am often told that we can have no idea how medieval women, or in fact any peasant empirics, used herbs, since they practiced only in secret, and never wrote anything down. (Thus, of course, the Lore mentioned by Diana Wynne Jones.) This is convenient, as one can thus make any claim one desires and it cannot be refuted by the documentary evidence.

However, it seems unlikely to be true, as references to home-made remedies appear in documents relating to the less prosperous, and we also see references in botanical and medical writings of the period to things the authors learned from peasants, old women, folklore, and etc. Furthermore, there is a certain intersection between those uses for herbs recorded on the extant herbals and texts, and uses recorded by ethnographers in the 19th and 20th centuries, and claimed now as the rightful herbal lore. To me, at least, it seems plausible that the ancient crafts of the herbalists (to blatantly twist poor Budge to my uses) as used in the middle ages do not remain entirely undocumented.

One curious exception is that of Willow bark, a source of salicylic acid. One can hardly turn around or stub one's toe in a fantasy novel without being offered willow-bark tea. (For reasons unknown, fantasy willow-bark tea, unlike its modern NSAID equivalents in real life, can be drunk as much as needed without stomach effects or increasing bleeding in wounds.) While the Egyptians and Hippocrates appear to have suggested willow bark for pain, it drops out of the written medicinal record after that, until 1763, when Reverend Edmund Stone tried powdered willow bark for fevers and arthritis. Allegedly, it was the theory of humors that led him to do so, since willows grow in the same damp low-lying places that are associated with fevers and arthritis. Oddly enough, however, meadowsweet, another source of salicin, is mentioned by medieval and early modern herbalists for fevers, though other herbs of varying usefulness such as camomile and mints were prescribed for fevers and agues in written works.

The preceding information on women physicians, midwives and empirics in general, shouldn't be taken to say that the Colleges of Physicians were not trying to get women out of the medical profession. They were, though not steadily. But I would still characterize the problem as a trade dispute first, and misogynistic second.

There is, for instance, the singular case of Jacoba Felice, brought to court in Paris on charges of practicing, successfully, as a physician. The argument of the Faculty of Medicine of Paris was that she could not practice not because she was a quack, or untrained, but because she was a woman. However, the charges brought against her were specifically on the grounds of not being licensed, not of being a woman:

"That, in these actions, she has often exercised and continues to exercise a medical practice in Paris and its suburbs, that she has practiced and practices it from day to day, although she has not been approved in any official school in Paris or elsewhere, and that she does this without the license of the chancellor of the church of Paris and of the said dean and masters."

(However, I have found no credible evidence that Felice was burned for practicing medicine, as one Canadian journal author claims.)

Even in places where the Colleges of Physicians regulated the activities of 'empirics,' women empirics were often allowed to practice on women, due to the argument that many women would be embarrassed to talk about their illnesses or be examined by a male medical professional. Also as a result, midwifery flourished well into and through the 18th century, since male professionals were generally banished from the birthing-room until the advent of special birthing equipment.

"A memorial of Eleanor Willughby, a seventeenth century midwife," Adrian Wilsong, in Women, science and medicine 1500-1700: mothers and sisters of the Royal Society , describes a country midwife who practiced in concert with her physician father, and sometimes smuggled him into her cases to examine the patient. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's A midwife's tale : the life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary, 1785-1812 speaks of the process by which physicians began to take over the midwives' practice in the early 19th century.

Even when medicine began to be more scientific and less literary/philosophical -- so that a physician's education didn't have to discuss whether the human female had a single or double-horned uterus -- male physicians usually had little practical experience in birthing. What they did have was metal implements, specifically forceps, which were used to assist in difficult births. (In the hands of a rough or inexperienced professional, however, those forceps could do great damage to mother and baby alike.) In fact, 17th and 18th century physicians could, and did, do something similar to partial-birth abortions to save women's lives when the child could not be extracted (since there was no reliable or actually survivable Cesarean section operation). Still, in rural areas, midwives practiced in concert with doctors into the early 20th century.

Just checked the Penn State Center for Medieval Studies page, and their
conference for 2007 will have the theme:
The Grail, the Quest, & the World of King Arthur
Dates: March 30-31, 2007
Cost: $25 for the two-day conference

More information: http://www.psu.edu/dept/medieval/2007conference.html

I went to the one on the medieval garden several years ago and it was
amazingly good. So, if you live within a relatively good travel distance
and are interested in the subject, I suspect it will be well worth the
time.

If we demolish the feminist ideal of the herbalist-witch-healer, we can replace it with a larger more diverse idea of healers, based on the historical record.
Even if we restrict ourselves only to female practicioners, there may not have been many, but they were fairly diverse.
( Read more... )
This greater diversity of practitioners is reflected in children's books such as those by Karen Cushman (The Midwife's Apprentice and Matilda Bone).

So, we discuss the witch because the herbalist persona, in fantasy and in herbal historiography, is irrevocably tangled iwith that of the witch, and specifically the witch of the 'burning times'.

This association of woman healer with witch is most often traced back through Ehrenreich and English's booklet, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: a history of women healers, 1973. This wasn't the first such discourse, but it's the one that gets cited continuously, and erroneously. In a discussion of the Malleus Maleficarum [Hammer of Witches] the 1486 witchfinder's manual by Sprenger and Kramer, they say, in quotes, "If a woman dare to cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die."

The trouble is, that sentence doesn't appear in the Malleus Maleficarum edition they cite. Closer examination shows that English and Ehrenreich are not specifically crediting that sentence to Sprenger and Kramer. It may be a quote that has lost its attribution, from another source; or it may simply be the author's framing of what they see as a continuing trend in the literature of the witchhunt. But the Malleus actually specifically exempts the use of herbs and other usual healing objects in healing, as not being witchcraft:

“Therefore we can answer their first argument in this way: that if natural objects are
used in a simple way to produce certain effects for which they are thought to have some
natural virtue, this is not unlawful. But if there are joined to this certain characters and
unknown signs and vain observations, which manifestly cannot have any natural efficacy,
then it is superstitious and unlawful. Wherefore S. Thomas, II, q. 96, art. 2, speaking of this matter, says that when any object is used for the purpose of causing some bodily effect, such as curing the sick, notice must be taken whether such objects appear to have any natural quality which could cause such an effect; and if so, then it is not unlawful, since it is lawful to apply natural causes to their effects.”

Also,

Again, there are some things in nature which have certain hidden powers, the reason for which man does not know; such, for example, is the lodestone, which attracts steel and many other such things, which S. Augustine mentions in the 20th book Of the City of God. And so women in order to bring about changes in the bodies of others sometimes make use of certain things, which exceed our knowledge, but this is without any aid from the devil. And because these remedies are mysterious we must not therefore ascribe them to the power of the devil as we should ascribe evil spells wrought by witches. (Part I, question 2)

Again
But natural bodies may find the benefit of certain secret but good influences.
Therefore artificial bodies may receive such influence. Hence it is plain that those who perform works of healing may well perform them by means of such good influences, and this has no connexion at all with any evil power.

To this we add the fact that most of those who were excecuted for witchcraft don't appear to have been either midwives or healers. Whether they were in fact practicioners of some pre-Christian or alternative religion, rebels against Christianity, innocent victims, or sufferers of some delusion is unclear, and may have varied from place to place. There is some suggestion that the witch-crazes may have been associated with outbreaks of ergotism (a deadly, hallucenogenic condition caused by consuming the ergot rust that forms on improperly cured and stored rye and other grains), but since these stories don't seem to be associated with stories of fingers, toes, or noses turning black and falling off, I'm inclined to doubt them, as this is one of the major side effects of ergotism.

In their pursuit of role models, of analogies, of mythic figures, feminist historians siezed upon the witch. Diane Purkiss, in her excellent The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations gives us this excellent word-picture, that I think you'll recognize:

Here is a story. Once upon a time, there was a woman who lived on the edge of a village. She lived alone, in her own house surrounded by her garden, in which she grew all manner of herbs and other healing plants. Though she was alone, she was never lonely; she had her garden and her animals for company, she took lovers when she wished, and she was always busy. The woman was a healer and midwife; she had practical knowledge taught her by her mother, and mystical knowledge derived from her closeness to nature, or from a half-submerged pagan religion. She helped women give birth, and she had healing hands; she used her knowledge of herbs and her common sense to help the sick."

Sounds like a great life, right? I'd sure jump at an existence like that.

"However, her peaceful existence was disrupted. Even though the woman was harmless, she posed a threat to the fearful. Her medical knowledge threatened the doctor. Her simple, true spiritual values threatened the superstitious nonsense of the Catholic church, as did her affirmation of the sensuous body. Her independence and freedom threatened men. So the Inquisition descended on her, and cruelly tortured her into confession to lies about the devil. She was burned alive by men who hated women, along with millions of others like her."

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? That would be our prototypical fantasy healer/herbalist.

But the fascinating part here, is what Purkiss says next:

"Do you believe this story? Thousands of women do. It is still being retold, in full or in part, by women who are academics, but also by poets, novelists, popular historians, theologians, dramatists. It is compelling, even horrifying. However, in all essentials it is not true, or only partly true, as a history of what happened to the women called witches in the early modern period."

It's when we begin to imagine the variety of the history obscured by this idea of the herbalist, of the healer, that we can see the diversity of fantastic possibilities which that history suggests.

Last time I was in the public library in Madison, I was looking for a book on CD to listen to in the car. Flipping through the adult non-fiction on CD, the best I could come up with was something that looked like a popularized history (and is).
Thomas Cahill's Mysteries of the Middle Ages: The Rise of Feminism, Science and Art from the Cults of Catholic Europe. This is the Books on Tape Version, read by John Lee. (http://www.booksontape.com/bookdetail.cfm/7098-DL)

I surprised myself. I liked it. I disagreed with most of his conclusions, and felt that the commentaries on modern politics will soon make it dated. But it was fun to read, and I didn't catch him on too many factual errors (though I think I have earlier evidence of toilet facilities). Yes, he's a popularizer (for a sample, see http://www.randomhouse.com/features/cahill/mysteries_excerpt.html ) And I could have done without the digression about the modern Catholic church at the end. And his conclusions are shallow.

Why did I like it? Because it was a story, and it was read by someone with a superb storyteller's voice. I suspect I'd want to listen to John Lee read St. Augustine, or even Calvin.

I admit that I think I listened to it in a very different spirit than I would have read it; had I read it, I would probably been as incensed as the Library Journal reviewer who slammed it, October 15 2006: "It is difficult to conceive of an audience that would benefit from reading this silly and superficial book."

But as a story, read to me, it had a good deal of the character of a lecture, either in the SCA or in school, created by a person with a good command of language and analogy. It was perfectly clear to me that the author was picking out what he saw as the good bits to share with the reader, and making a loose argument of the conversational type. Perhaps that's how I lecture, though I hope I don't "trample history into a muddled paste of great figures and exalting moments, ignoring nuance or exception." (Perhaps I do. Perhaps I am, in my thoughts on herbwives and fantasy. Ah well.)

I disagree with Cahill on nearly every exact conclusion he draws (such as St. Francis' part in the development of the 'plastic arts' of drama etc.); but on the other hand, I revelled in his argument that the Middle Ages weren't as bad as all that (and his condemnation of A World Lit only by Fire, Manchester's ghastly anti-medieval, anti-Catholic text), and generally his enjoyment of his subject and of the play of words.

So, where did this stereotypical fantasy herbwife/healer/midwife/witch come from?
She makes her appearance in the early 1970s. There's a number of factors going on here:

1. The rise of feminism, which comes into it in several ways. There's the development of fantasy, and the development of female roles, at the same time.

2. The rise of women's interest in and participation in the fantasy reader and writership. About 35 years ago, there was a surge in women reading and writing fantasy. The tradition of women in fantasy goes back further than that, but up to about 15 years ago, the major female fantasy/sf writers could be traced by a literary geneaology back to that Grand Dame of FSF, Andre Norton. The surge of fanfic, particularly by women, also dates to that era.

Early on, there was a surge in fantasy fiction role models of the type I think of as the Artemis, running-jumping-whacking-people kind. (Artemis was a major cult figure for the early women's movement: young, athletic, free-legged and free-loving, hanging out with Daddy and doing boy stuff, unencumbered by children, house, women's work, etc.) But there were some women and girls (I think it may be called third-wave feminists) who didn't feel able to identify with this picture. These Bagginses ("We have no use for adventures here, Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!"), among which I count myself, wanted someone to identify with, someone who might actually wear a skirt and not disdain nuturing, caring activities.

An example of this non-non-traditional heroine would be Maggie Brown, of Elizabeth Scarborough's Song of Sorcery and later books. Maggie isn't an herbalist, though her grandmother is; but what she is, is a hearthwitch of the most extreme kind; her magic can do all kinds of housewifely tasks, but to raise a cyclone, for example, she needs to tell it she wishes to whip a VERY large quantity of eggs, "right there." When I first encountered her as a teen, I was enraptured. Here was someone I could identify with.

So, the herbalist of fantasy has some standard attributes:

Exclusively female
Generally lives alone, in the woods or at the edge of the town
Raises, compounds and dispenses her own medications
Medications are uncannily reliable.
Respected and/or feared by the community
Some sort of tension or conflict with 'the authorities,' whether church or otherwise
Often practices 'older'/pagan religion; always very close to nature
Often a witch or other magic-worker.
Makes a living from her herbalism/curing
Strong sense of responsibility for her patients

The first two examples in fantasy literature I gave, because they really outstanding ones:

Keisha, in the second and third books of Mercedes Lackey & Larry Dixon's Owl Mage trilogy, Owlsight and Owlknight. Keisha is a young woman who has just moved out of her parents house into a comfortable cottage provided for her because she is the village healer. She grows, compounds and dispenses her own herbal remedies, as well as trading for them; she is paid for her healing by a sort of barter-salary arrangement where food and other things are provided for her use. She is aware of the medical basis for her treatments, and she is able to do some magical healing. She won't leave her village to go to a far-off healer's college because that would leave her village without a local healer. And yes, she later comes into conflict with authorities over a healing intervention.
Juniper, in Monica Furlong's Wise Child, who is a practitioner of an earth religion, who cures by both herbal and magical means, who is a lot more educated and tolerant than her Christian neighbors. She lives on a hill outside the village, and is feared but respected by the villagers, and in conflict with the Christian priest. [Curiously, though the story seems to be set around the turn of the first millenium AD in Britain, a Church Inquisitor makes a late appearance; the Inquisition was organized in the 13th century.]

Stumbled across this one on the Web-- it's this Saturday and the registration deadline is Nov. 27:
http://www.moravian.edu/medieval/program.html

Hm... interesting note on the "Natural Trumpet" performance.
Since it's free, I've signed up to go.

There's also a Sephardic Music performance at 4:30 pm, $5. I'm considering going to that.

Something I quoted in my "Beyond the Herb-Wife" presentation, about the certain witchcraft-related beliefs, from the MALLEUS MALEFICARUM

And what, then, is to be thought of those witches who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put them in a bird's nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members, and eat oats and corn, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report? It is to be said that it is all done by devil's work and illusion, for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said. For a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of the nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one; adding, because it belongs to a parish priest.

http://www.malleusmaleficarum.org/part_II/mm02a07a.html

Some notes from my presentation at Darkover, "Beyond the Herb-wife: Feminism and the Fantasy Herbalist."

I started out with a disclaimer:
"I've been an herbalist, studying herbs and their history for over 25 years. I'm also a feminist and a pagan. But more than that, I'm a librarian. And if you know librarians, you know that they like fantasy, they like fiction, and they like non-fiction-- but they like the fiction and the non-fiction on separate shelves."

"We're going to be talking about the stereotype of the herbalist/healer/midwife in fantasy, and in history, and in feminist historiography. In the course of that, we're going to be taking on some foundational mythologies of fantasy, of women's studies, and of herbalism. I'm hoping I won't offend anyone, but please feel free to say something, make a comment or a question, if you want. If anyone is so offended they feel they have to leave, that's fine; I'll understand."

I then read out the definitions of herbwoman and herbs from Diana Wynne Jones' Tough Guide to Fantasyland to show the stereotype.

This is the exhibit I put together for the Drew library, which should ( I hope ) get put up tomorrow (11/16):
A Medieval Garden of Botanical Illustrations
http://depts.drew.edu/lib/exhibits/2006/botanical.php

commentary and proofreading welcome.

In a moment of madness, I suggested that I could present on:

"Beyond the herb-wife: feminism and the fantasy herbalist."

at Darkovercon.

So, now I have to write something to present. Urgh.

More later on this topic... any suggestions of fantasy herbalist characters I can throw in, I'll happy to take.

*muse muse muse*

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bunnyjadwiga

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Entries tagged with history

French feast with Hungarian touches

The good old-fashioned witch hare

Ink history?

Roman Britain museum site

Herbwives, Fantasy, Healers-- we're down to the last 6 cards!

Medieval Medication (more on the herbwife, part eleventy-seven)

Holistic Herbalism?

More on midwives

Penn State Medieval Studies Conference

herbwife & history, part IX, I think

Herbalist as Witch, part VI

The Herbalist and the witch, part V?

Segue: listening to a historian

Herbwife & Healer & Fantasy, part III

Beyond the Herbwife, Part II

Moravian's Undergraduate Conference in Medieval/early Modern Studies

In which Springer and Kramer Fail to Get the Joke

Beyond the Herbwife, part I

What I've been working on

Another fine thing I've gotten me into...