The analogy of the boiled frog has been recalled by scholars when dealing with the concept of risk, issues and crisis communication. A frog dropped into a saucepan of boiling water quickly jumps out. Placing a cold-blooded frog in a saucepan of cold water and slowly warming the water to boiling point sees the frog become accustomed to the heat and finally succumb. Many organisations react quickly (if often chaotically) to an emergency, but in a familiar environment where they view the potential risk as too remote to damage them, they tend to ignore it – and in some cases, succumb.

The tale is a useful illustration as we determine the differences and similarities of risk, issues and crisis communication and their interconnectivity and how they all come to be considered areas of practice in the profession of public relations (PR). This text seeks to examine these areas and assist the reader in discussing questions that can resolve the respective and combined challenges. This chapter will also discuss the synergies of these three areas and as you read through the case studies in the text you should ponder the existence of each element collectively and individually. They can co-exist and they can stand alone; while the evidence of one may be patently clear it is hoped that after your study of these cases you can observe the missing elements and ponder what might have been had a certain strategy been employed.

The slow, stately chant and the heavy, stressed alliteration of the words weave their spell as the Anglo-Saxon enchanter invokes the Christian God to bless the Earth, mother of crops, and to make her fields fertile and fruitful. He is perhaps unaware that he is addressing Gea, the Great Mother, who creates, nourishes and restores all living beings as had been done for unnumbered generations around the Mediterranean Sea.

So gatherers of herbs had sung and continued to sing from the pages of medieval Latin herbals. The portrait of Earth, the Mother and nurturer of all beings, is depicted holding a cornucopia brimming with herbs and flowers while the gatherer stands in front of her, asking her permission and her support before gathering the herbs that bring health and strength to men (see Plate 2). It is an image that the Greek and Roman world received from pre-Hellenic times and handed down to the Middle Ages in the herbals, those gardens on vellum where the accumulated knowledge of plant lore and their medical properties was preserved and re-elaborated.

Since the dawn of time, the quest for food has trained people to identify and distinguish edible plants from poisonous ones – and thus to learn their healing properties as well. This hoard of knowledge, handed down in oral tradition for millennia, gradually found its way into collections of remedies and medical treatises. The written tradition goes back to the Assyrians and the Egyptians. However, the true ancestors of the Late Antique herbals, which spread throughout medieval Europe, were the Greek works that began to appear in the fourth century BCE. The names of these ancient authors have been faithfully transmitted as precious legacy throughout the centuries, although the greater part of their work survives only in quotations by later writers. Little is known about Aristotle’s work on plants, but his library and his unpublished works were inherited by his pupil Theophrastus (371–286 BCE), the most important and influential botanist of antiquity.

Over the course of human history, the Mediterranean basin has been an area of cultural diffusion and exchange involving various peoples, representing the destination of numerous migrations. In the seventh century, this area experienced intense upheaval when the Muslims entered Syria and very rapidly incorporated Northern Africa, the Iberian Peninsula and the major islands and southern section of Italy, whereby all of these territories were united under a new language and a new religion. Islamic expansion, which integrated areas with diverse traditions and separate evolutions into a vast economic and cultural unit, created the conditions for profound agricultural reform, although revolution is a more accurate description, wherein irrigation played a key role. However, the cultivation of new plants from tropical and sub-tropical regions, which were gradually introduced into the drier and colder climates of the Near East and the Mediterranean, gave rise to the need to construct artificial ecosystems that would provide suitable conditions of humidity and temperature. Indeed, such requirements were doubly pressing given the scale of the cultivation in question. The new species could only take root as summer plants in irrigated areas, in other words, in small areas over an excessively short period of time. Hydraulic systems were quickly transformed and, via the invention of new techniques and the development and diffusion of existing techniques, the Muslims were able to create large areas of irrigated land in the territories in which they settled.

In comparison with other areas of the Islamic world, the advances made within this new agriculture were most conspicuous in al-Andalus, which may be attributed to the constant juxtaposition offered by the remainder of the Iberian Peninsula, for the most part unirrigated land. This agriculture is principally characterised by intensive irrigation of plots, largely involving smallholdings, wherein methodical and well distributed irrigation transformed previously uncultivated land or land with poor yields.

This method of structuring the landscape is clearly reflected in several agricultural treatises from the Andalusi period written between the tenth and fourteenth centuries. The first treatise, which was anonymous, was written at the end of the tenth century, followed by six of the eight known treatises within the aforementioned period.

A significant number of modern medieval gardens have been, and are being, established in England, on the Continent, and in the United States. Recreated medieval gardens can embody the allegorical gardens of art and literature and give substance to the symbolic plants that flourished in them. They may be used as settings for readings, performances and celebrations, as laboratories for exploring craft traditions, as sources for medieval foodstuffs, and as aids in identifying the medicinal plants found in herbals and receptaria, or the flora of medieval tapestries and Books of Hours. In Paris, in 2000, the Musée National du Moyen Age installed a Jardin Médiéval at the Hôtel de Cluny, the grounds of which include a potager, a garden of medicinal simples, a garden of love, and a celestial garden of Marian flowers, as well as plantings based on the famous millefleurs tapestries in the collection. Planted with medieval species, these gardens are frankly acknowledged by the museum to be neither a reproduction nor a pastiche of medieval gardens, but contemporary gardens inspired by the Middle Ages.

Aside from such recreated gardens made primarily for educational purposes, private owners of medieval estates in England and France are researching and designing gardens for their properties. Many of these projects too are recreations rather than restorations or reconstructions, and vary widely in their commitment to historical accuracy, although archaeological investigations of medieval garden sites are being assiduously conducted in academic contexts.

Dr Sylvia Landsberg, whose book Medieval Gardens is both a historical summary and a practical guide, has recreated a late thirteenth-century royal herber at Winchester Castle, a yeoman’s kitchen garden for Bayleaf (a fifteenth-century Kentish house moved from its original site to the Weald and Downland Museum), and a fifteenth-century nobleman’s pleasure garden at Tretower Court in Wales. The Medieval Garden at The Pennsylvania State University was conceived in 1999 as an extension of the Center for Medieval Studies’ commitment to the inter-disciplinary study of agriculture and landscape. It includes a kitchen garden, a pleasure ground, and a contemplation garden installed in the spring of 2001. An exhibition ground of medieval field crops and an orchard of twenty-five sorts of medieval fruit were added in 2003.

Among the studies in this book about the nature and produce of gardens in the Middle Ages a minor sidelight might be cast by an examination of the use of herbs as a special sort of daily food, that which was intended for particular members of a household.

The garden that was cultivated on any plot available to a household in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly designed primarily to yield produce that was useful to everyone in that house in their daily – and yearly – life. Members of the household had to be fed, of course, and private gardens provided cheap and varied solutions to that continuing concern. But the repertoire of a professional cook had to accommodate the needs as well as the taste of each of his principal patrons. A cook preparing meals in a relatively wealthy house had to take into account the current state of health of those persons individually. He had specifically to answer the requirements of any who were sick, sickly or convalescent. In determining everyday food appropriate to sustain those individuals, the cook was naturally guided by the medical doctrines of his day. A good garden could provide him with a practical source of useful herbs for that purpose.

The role of humoral theory in much of medieval thought is now well recognized. Galenic theories about the nature of concrete reality, things that exist, tended more or less to permeate all philosophic conjecture about the world around us and our relationship with things in it. Both those things and ourselves are constituted by degrees of, and complex combinations of, the opposing qualities cold and warm, dry and moist (see Chart 1). The world was understood to accommodate four elements: earth, water, air and fire. Those four elements are clearly related to four essential qualities that we can sense around us: warmth (in the air and in fire), cold (in the earth and in water), dryness (again in earth and fire), and moisture (again in air and water). Apart from those elements, though, other things existing in the world partake of the same elemental qualities. Some things are moist by nature, and others are dry; at the same time some things are warm by nature, and others are cool. Varying only in intensity, each of those qualities went far to explain and define the physical nature of everything.

Medieval texts dealing with plants can rarely be called botanical in any contemporary sense. Most of them focus on the practical uses of plants as medicine. Although thousands of such herbals, valued for their useful applications, dominate our view of medieval writings about plants, this study considers a quite different kind of non-botanical treatise on plants from the later Middle Ages, one that addresses plants in terms of planetary dominance. Medieval writings on the connections between the celestial and the vegetable, unlike herbals and compendia of materia medica, appear to the modern reader to have little practical application. Nonetheless, a consideration of such writings is valuable if we are to appreciate fully how medieval people understood the vegetable world and its place in the cosmos. There were two kinds of such treatises disseminated in the late Middle Ages: one – made up of three textual traditions – addressing the relationships of all seven planets to plants; and a second cluster of texts, each one about a single plant deriving its powers from a specific planet (see Table 1).

Background

Planets loomed large in the Western pre-modern understanding of cosmic forces that affected the terrestrial. Seven planets were understood to rotate around the earth in a geocentric cosmos. The seven in this Ptolemaic model of the universe, accepted in the West before Copernicus and Galileo, included the sun and moon. Planets in the treatises discussed here could be classified in an order beginning with Saturn, the outermost planet in the geocentric cosmos, followed by Jupiter, Mars, the sun, Venus, Mercury, and – closest to the earth – the moon. Each planet was understood to govern the day bearing its name, so an alternate sequence of planets was by weekdays: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday (Mars), Wednesday (Mercury), Thursday (Jupiter), Friday (Venus), and Saturday (Saturn). (See Table 1.) In some cases, the weekday order began with Saturday.

Attempts to identify plants named in these texts are tentative. It would be highly desirable to provide identifications using Linnaean nomenclature, but in the cases of the texts considered here, plant names vary, and identification is uncertain. In A.(1) of Table 1, for example, the plant associated with Saturn, asphodelos, is listed under Affodillus by Hunt and identified with a variety of plants, none of them the golden “daffodil,” Narcissus pseudonarcissus, that is described in fifteenth-century texts.

If there is one thing that we think we know about medicine in the Middle Ages it is that its practitioners made extensive use of herbs. In the wellresearched historical novels of Ellis Peters, the monk Brother Cadfael has his herb garden, and his credentials as healer and as detective depend crucially on his skill with herbs. He is an emblematic healer and herbalist. Whether we have in mind monks, university doctors, barber surgeons or wise women, we suppose that medieval healers of all kinds treated complaints with herbal simples, or with medicaments whose principal ingredients were herbs. Of course they made use in addition of animal parts or excreta, minerals, exotic spices and substances that evoke a satisfying frisson of disgust in the modern imagination, but medieval therapeutics depended first and foremost on herbs. It is not the purpose of this paper to dispute this picture of medieval medicine – in fact its argument will help to sustain the vision of herbal medicine that has proved so compelling – but to try to address the question of how the use of herbs might have been integrated into medical practice. If you were a medieval healer how did you make use of herbs in the course of treating patients, and how did this fit in with other kinds of treatment?

Medical literature of the Middle Ages is eloquent on the virtues of herbs. Herbals, recipe books and manuals on medical therapy can tell us what herbs, singly or in combination, were prescribed for a particular illness or complaint. Sometimes, but by no means always, they give instructions as to how the ingredients were to be collected, and the medicines prepared and administered to the patient. These documents are thus always prescriptive in character. Functionally this literature has much in common with the Merck Manual which, so we are told, “first appeared in 1899 as a slender 262-page text titled Merck’s Manual of the Materia Medica. It was expressly designed to meet the needs of general practitioners in selecting medications, noting that ‘memory is treacherous’ and even the most thoroughly informed physician needs a reminder ‘to make him at once master of the situation and enable him to prescribe exactly what his judgment tells him is needed for the occasion.’

When the Carolingian Abbot of Reichenau Walafrid Strabo wrote in a celebrated poem on his “Little Garden” (Hortulus, ca. 840s) that “the earth is as one house, a whole through each of its parts,” we may at first think we are in the presence of a refreshingly sensitive and modern unified systems approach toward the cosmos and its component parts. The increase of ecological awareness that has blossomed since the 1960s gives us a fresh appreciation for such holistic systems as Alexander Pope’s, who writes in An Essay on Man that “All are but parts of one stupendous whole, / Whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” The evolving Late Antique notion of a “Great Chain of Being” – originally a theological claim tied with the Emanation doctrine of the Neo-Platonists, and much later a driving scientific principle of the Renaissance and Enlightenment – can find facile resemblance to some modern ideologies that consider human disruptions of natural cycles violations of a predisposed, inherent order. When Pope cautioned against presumptuous humans wishing to step beyond their natural boundaries, however, he was thinking of moral boundaries rather than ecological ones:

Of course, Pope did not have ecological impact in mind, any more than he could have imagined an actual asteroid pounding into the earth, a literal colliding of world upon world. Pope simply meant that humankind should be happy with its subordinate, created state – poised halfway between brutes and angels, between mud and God. Likewise, given the current crisis of international trade as the flashpoint of globalization controversy, it is ironic to note that in claiming “each part of the world on another depends,” Walafrid Strabo had in mind not the interdependency of living systems within the delicate biosphere, nor the obligation of humans to respect natural boundaries, but purely and simply the need for humans to distribute local goods throughout the known civilized world. For him the “world” meant the “world of human affairs” and by dependency he meant trade.

“The World Health Organization … estimates that about eighty percent of the world’s population still depends on traditional medicine for primary health care,” observes Mark Blumenthal, Founder of the American Botanical Council, and, he continues, “in most countries herbs are not ‘alternative’ or ‘unconventional’ but integral to the dominant health-care system.” This was obviously the case in the European Middle Ages, where herbs for healing were grown by monks and nuns in their carefully organized enclosed gardens, and were also sought in the wild, mainly by “cunning” (knowledgeable) women. With access to books to supplement what they knew, the monks and nuns followed a long written tradition of herbal medicine in Latin and could verify in books much of the lore they learned orally. There must have been uncloistered women herbalists, on the other hand, who were secular practitioners trained by other female healers and could neither read nor write. Thus their voices are lost or appropriated by male authors.

The one medieval woman herbalist whose voice is notably “heard” is the famous nun Hildegard of Bingen. Around 1155 she wrote in Latin the Liber simplicis medicinae, the first book of her nine-book Physica, recently translated by Bruce W. Hozaski as Hildegard’s Healing Plants. Hozaski suggests that “in reading Hildegard’s uses of plants” it seems possible that she is writing from experience, not just copying previous Latin texts, since “the plants she uses are generally those which could be collected from the woods and fields or grown in the convent garden.” Similarly, Anglo-Saxon women’s practical experience may be reflected in the set of recipes reported in this essay.

The seven herbal remedies examined here respond directly to women’s maladies, and some of them, or some details of them, are not to be found elsewhere. They are recorded as a group in the Anglo-Saxon manuscript of ca. 950 now officially designated British Library, MS Royal 12 D 17 and called Læceboc: “Leech-book,” that is, “Doctor’s Book.” The Leechbook manuscript as a whole “consists of three books, the first two largely drawn on Latin texts, and the third featuring more native English material, including more charms and other ‘magical’ remedies.” The first two books of this manuscript are specified as Bald’s Leechbook after the owner, who is named in a colophon near the end of Book II along with his copyist “Cild.”

Anglo-Saxon England inherited a large body of medicinal plant lore from classical antiquity. Although Latin medical texts provided much useful information to the Anglo-Saxons, they also presented numerous problems not encountered by their original audiences. Two of the greatest problems, identification of the Greek and Latin plant names and access to non-native plant species, were both mentioned by Cyneheard, Bishop of Winchester, in a letter written shortly after 754 to Lull, Bishop of Mainz: “We have some medical books, but the foreign ingredients we find prescribed in them are unknown to us and difficult to obtain.” Even if foreign plants could be acquired and in some cases cultivated in English herbal gardens, there remained the problem of interpreting which plant species was referred to in the various herbal descriptions or recipes. This problem had clearly existed for the original audiences of these texts too, as both Pliny and Dioscorides, for example, give numerous alternative names for the plants they discuss, and after the passage of time, such variants only multiplied. For a speaker of a Germanic language like Old English, with his or her own set of names for plants from an entirely different geographical region, the difficulty of identifying the plants named in the sources would have been far greater.

Bilingual glossaries of plant names were one aid in dealing with this linguistic difficulty. As will be shown below, the earliest versions of these seem to be Greek-Latin glossaries, but they must have existed for numerous other languages as well; those with Old English glosses existed from at least the late seventh century. Such lists present myriad problems for modern plant name scholars, both those interested in the medicinal use of particular plant species and those interested in identifying the Old English names of modern plant species. The Latin and Greek names are hopelessly garbled, different Old English names are often assigned to a single Latin or Greek term, or one Old English term is found as a gloss for numerous apparently different plants.

The difficulty of making sense out of such problems is well known and has been summed up clearly by Charles Singer in his 1961 introduction to Cockayne’s Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England: