Chapter 5 turns to questions of transmission and reception, focusing on the mandrake root (mandragorum) as it appears across manuscripts versions of the Old English Herbarium, a text preserved in four manuscripts dating from the tenth century to as late as the twelth. Centering its analysis on the anomalous entry for the anthropomorphized mandrake in a historically neglected manuscript, this chapter challenges the privileging of lavishly produced manuscripts over less visually appealing counterparts. The beautifully illustrated copy of the Herbarium in MS Cotton Vitellius C.iii has typically served as an authoritative base text, with the copy in MS Harley 6258B most often being viewed as demonstrating far less care and planning in its production. However, it is precisely the omissions, organizational departures, and other ‘flaws’ that suggest a close connection of this seemingly lesser text to the actual performance of medical practice. This chapter is thus aimed at helping to rebalance the historical privileging of literate culture over oral tradition in scholarly treatments of the Old English medical corpus, a tendency that risks reading natural variation across versions as ‘mistakes’ and connections to folklore as irrational. Finally, by applying approaches found in Matthew Hall’s groundbreaking Plants as Persons and Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking to the mandragorum entries, this chapter confronts our societal privileging of human over plant. An Appendix offers a newly edited and translated text of the mandrake entry reflecting the chapter’s analysis.

Chapter 4 examines ways that herbs are sometimes invoked as actual sentient beings in early medieval medical texts. Bringing studies in medieval rhetoric to bear on orally performed incantations required by Old English healing recipes, this chapter offers a close analysis of the direct address employed in two medical texts within the Harley 585 manuscript in order to communicate with a wide range of plants, specifically mugwyrt (mugwort), wegbrade (waybread), attorlaðe (identified as cockspur grass or possibly betony), and mægðe (mayweed or chamomile) as they appear in the Lacnunga within the so-called ‘Nine Herbs Charm’ and the herbs ricinum (castor-oil plant) and peruica (periwinkle) as treated in the Herbarium. While the charms in the Herbarium and the Lacnunga both involve direct address in soliciting the respective herbs’ assistance, the specific manner in which the herbs are addressed – and, consequently, the relationships implied between healer and herb – differ markedly from each other. Such variation in the two types of address and the attendant methods of persuasion reflect distinct cultural differences between Latinate and Germanic modes of expression and conceptions of herbal healing, yet their juxtaposition within a single manuscript devoted to healing practice nonetheless suggests that these variant strains of thought were not seen as competing or mutually exclusive. As with many aspects of early medieval culture, such variation in the rhetorical devices employed for the persuasion of plants reflects the productive hybridity emerging from Germanic and Latinate influences and helps us better understand healers’ complicated conceptions of herbal power.

This opening chapter introduces the book’s eclectic approach and provides essential context for the Old English remedies and medical texts, works that are often less familiar than the more canonical heroic poetry. Framing its discussion through an investigation of a somewhat cryptic Exeter Book riddle that alludes to a lack of healers in a time of unending pain, this introduction invites readers to observe the meaningful overlap across traditions, genres, and modes of meaning within early medieval healing lore. After a detailed critique of ‘hybridity’ as both a biological reality and a theoretical concept, this chapter provides an overview of the subsequent chapters, each of which tackles a question or issue in the medical corpus that has been particularly troublesome or confusing to modern-day readers. Through its series of close readings, the volume seeks not only to offer a way through such complex texts but also to uncover what these remedies can teach us about healing logic and thought in early medieval England.

Chapter 6 continues to examine early medieval notions of health and healing by analyzing ways that remedies in Bald’s Leechbook challenge modern conceptions of hearing and deafness. Centering discussion around remedies in the third chapter of Bald’s Leechbook, this chapter brings important work in Deaf studies to bear more directly on our perception of medieval oral/aural culture. Although scholars in Deaf studies have long applied interpretive models from oral theory to analyze the cultural expressivity of signed storytelling, the influence of Deaf studies has yet to be fully felt in the fields of oral theory or Old English studies. A hybrid theoretical approach bridging these two fields productively complicates our understanding of early medieval England as a largely oral/aural culture, and evidence from surviving medical texts, law codes, and the archaeological record indicates a range of sensory perception that seems to have been widely recognized. The entries in Bald’s Leechbook suggest a worldview in which the capacity for hearing, though important, was not assumed. Rather, the faculty of hearing itself is described as changing and changeable, in terms of experience rather than identity. Old English texts describe a variety of circumstances that might temporarily or permanently limit one’s auditory range at any point in one’s life – through such forces as violence, illness, wind, or disease. This chapter’s hybrid approach seeks to broaden our awareness of health and healing beyond a modern medical model and to productively complicate our understanding of both hearing and deafness in pre-modern eras.

This chapter examines the material ways in whichromances were preserved and categorised – ratherthan erased – by early modern readers. The chapterbegins with a discussion of Protestant polemicistswho crafted lists of romance texts to warn readersagainst them. Paradoxically, in doing so suchpolemicists created their own romance canons. Theirbooklists effectively define a genre. This chapterargues that these polemical catalogues expand theearly modern conception of the medieval romancegenre by including new forms, such as thecontinental prose romances gaining popularity in thesixteenth century, along with lighter, comical‘jests’. The chapter also shows that the cataloguesdefined in early modern romance lists reflectmaterial, paratextual decisions made by WilliamCopland, the primary printer of medieval Englishromance in the late sixteenth century. Despite theconsistency of the books included in suchcatalogues, however, the case studies that concludethis chapter – the romance collection detailed inRobert Langham’s letter describing the 1575festivities at Kenilworth and an antiquarianSammelband now housed in the Bodleian Library –demonstrate that early modern romance catalogueswere used to characterise and serve very differenttypes of readers.

This introductory chapter situates this study withinexisting scholarship on the post-Reformationreception of later medieval literature. It definesthe medieval romance genre and explores the variousthreads of the book’s methodology: its interest inperiodisation, memory studies and materiality. Italso introduces the book’s framing metaphors – thecatalogue, the collage, the monument, and the museum– as possible alternatives to the notion of thepalimpsest. The palimpsest is a useful metaphor forunderstanding the relationships between present andpast, as it emphasises materiality and complicatesnotions of linear historical progress and simplechronological development. However, it is easy toforget that the palimpsest is a metaphorfundamentally based on erasure. By focusing on thegenre of romance, Difficult pasts offers analternative to a literary history centred onerasure. The new metaphors explored in this chapterembrace the temporal complexity of the past, butthey also highlight early modern efforts to preserveand engage with, rather than destroy, medievalpredecessors.

I conclude with a summary of what has been learned inthis book by focusing on a final case study of the1517 copy of Robert the Devil housed in the BritishLibrary. I then return to the idea of thepalimpsest, assessing what has been gained throughthis attempt to find narratives that do not rely onerasure. I follow Sarah Dillon in finding value inthe term ‘palimpsestuous’ as a means of moving thepalimpsest metaphor beyond the idea of destruction.Overall, then, Difficult pasts suggests‘palimpsestuous’ codicological metaphors fordescribing the place of the medieval within thepost-Reformation world. It urges us to consider whatremained, rather than what was lost, after theevents of the Protestant Reformation in England. Andit argues that books – and in particular romancebooks – continue to provide a special material siteat which to explore notions of historiographicpresence, distance, continuity and change overtime.