“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.”