This chapter locates Gavin Douglas’s poem, The Palyce of Honour, within a wider medieval tradition of dream vision poetry. Geoffrey Chaucer’s dream vision poems, The House of Fame and The Parliament of Fowls, as well as Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid are presented as intertexts to Douglas’s vision. Douglas’s text is shown to fracture typical expectations of the dream vision landscape, the dreamer’s interaction with this landscape, as well as the narrator’s conceptualisation of the process of recording the dream vision. The poem is then set in conversation with concepts of Italian humanist poetics, which conceived of the poet as a divine conduit, a prophet, that could transmit divinely inspired discourses. The framework of the narrative grotesque is applied in order to elucidate the ways in which Douglas warps the medieval genre to integrate humanist philosophies of poetics into his work.

Old English medical texts such as the Herbarium frequently direct practitioners to find healing herbs, such as leon-fot above, ‘in fields’ [‘on feldon’]. Though feld has since come to refer to cultivated land ‘devoted to a particular crop’, the Old English word had a sense of wildness about it: ‘open country’, ‘land unencumbered by obstruction’. It was in such open, untamed fields that hybridity could best abound and new healing resources be discovered. And in turn it is in correspondingly open academic fields where the complex texts from early medieval England can be most fully understood. As a conclusion to this book’s eclectic approach, this final chapter first looks closely at a single brief remedy, the seemingly unassuming entry for Lion’s Foot in the Old English Herbarium, through the lens of each previous chapter’s approach in turn. Following this up-close strategy, the chapter then pans back out to examine how the analyses in the preceding chapters intersect with and inform one another.

Extending the previous chapter’s investigation of weaponry into another poetic charm text, Chapter 3 examines the verse incantation of a metrical incantation in Harley 585 (ff. 175r–176r) ‘wið færstice’ [‘against a sudden pain’], which ascribes pain to spears (garas) sent by mighty women from another realm. It is all too easy to dismiss this seemingly incongruous poem as mere superstition or abstract metaphor. But what happens if we look at this incantation in terms of strategies employed within actual Germanic warfare? The speaker – presumably the healer – threatens to return the attack with a flying arrow (‘fleogende flane’), and the incantation makes multiple references to smiths forging weapons of iron. This enigmatic incantation is framed on either side by a recipe and instructions involving herbal preparations. So different in tone and content is the incantation from the herbal recipe that some have argued they constitute entirely separate entries in the Lacnunga. However, when we bring a more complete awareness of specific weapons and battle strategies to our analysis of the text, we see that this incantation not only operates in tandem with the herbal preparation but emerges from the same underlying logic. In this construct, the herbs are the healer’s weapons, and the battle against pain parallels important heroic scenes in Beowulf. An appendix to this chapter then draws from the field of ethnopoetics to offer a newly edited text and translation of the remedy that more fully reflect the complex network of associations in play.

The concept of hybridity has long offered a powerful model for understanding many of the complex and dynamic processes that arise from cultural interactions, but what happens when we push this metaphor to its extremes? Hybrid cars, hybrid computers, and even hybrid literary genres are generally understood as positives, merging the best of two valued models through ‘hybrid vigor’. However, the model is also one that, if left unexamined, becomes fraught with the potential for reductive oversimplification implying the acceptance – or even glorification – of exploitation, appropriation, and subjugation of groups and traditions subsumed during the hybridization process. This chapter first situates the concept of hybridity within the historical and agricultural contexts of early medieval England, offering a close analysis of the Æcerbot land remedy, and then probes the biological basis of the metaphor for parallels that help us appreciate its generative potential as well as its limits. Healing practices open a space where suffering can be navigated and contested, and Old English remedies create healing networks across diverse religious and cultural belief systems. This chapter argues that the process parallels that of biological hybridity, where diverse entities are brought together and crossed in the hope of – but without the certainty of – positive outcomes. In this construct, sites of pain and adversity in effect become sites of hybridization – embodying all of the hope, risk, and power intrinsic to that process.

Chapter 2 examines metaphorical weapons that appear in Old English charms and remedies and asks: what happens when we consider the weapons as more than abstract metaphors for battling disease, when we think of the weapons in more concrete, literal terms? The chapter first brings oral theory into dialogue with approaches from archaeology in an analysis of the Old English Herbarium entry for yarrow, a medicinal herb whose healing properties are deeply connected in traditional lore to the legendary battles of Achilles. The chapter then builds toward analyzing in greater depth an Old English alliterative poem from the margins of Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, opening ‘Ic me on þisse gyrde beluce’, a generically hybrid poem in which weapons serve as metaphors for healing and protection. Old English traditional remedies frequently employ weapons (both as metaphors and also as healing implements) to conceptualize disease and to negotiate power over illness and adversity in early medieval England, providing important glimpses into how ‘battles’ against ailment might have been understood and imagined by the texts’ earliest audiences. In metaphorically equating items of the most elite warrior’s armor – specifically a sword, shield, mailcoat, and helmet – to the four gospel authors, Ic me on þisse gyrde beluce essentially elevates figures associated with Christian liturgy to the highest values of loyalty, honor, and protection within the vernacular heroic tradition. Finally, the chapter concludes by discussing several debated matters of editing and translation.

Chapter 7 returns to the missing healers referenced in the Exeter Book riddle discussed in the Introduction, known as Riddle 5 or Anhaga. Where previous chapters explored medicinal texts and remedies, this last seeks to demonstrate ways that knowledge of Old English healing can inform interpretations of Old English poetry more widely. As ubiquitous as the medieval healer has become in modern film and media, herbal healing and healers are virtually non-existent in Old English heroic verse, and so we can be left with the (false) impression that healing charms and remedies constituted a distinct position in early medieval thought, separate from narrative genres. Outside of the medical texts, one of the only references left to us in surviving poetry laments a lack of healers. Yet this complaint buried within the highly formulaic language of exile and warfare in the Exeter Book’s Anhaga riddle can nonetheless provide an enormously productive key to interpreting the riddle’s warrior persona within a complex network of material objects that have previously been proposed as possible solutions. This chapter explores insights that this seemingly simple riddle can offer into herbal remedies, into material culture, and – most of all – into the playful, probing modes of thinking that subtly but powerfully link concepts of deadly warfare and herbal healing in Old English poetry and culture.