The volume under review is a Festschrift in honour of John M. Riddle, distinguished professor emeritus of history at North Carolina State University. It comprises eleven essays by distinguished scholars in the fields in which John Riddle has been most active – the history and practice of pharmacology in the ancient Mediterranean world and its reception into the world of medieval Europe and beyond.
John Riddle began his published studies in 1964 with work on the use of amber in Roman times; however, through a variety of publications (ninety-five are listed in a helpful catalogue at the end of this volume) he has engaged with the history and reception of pharmacological knowledge from antiquity to the early modern period. The papers here act as both homage to and commentary on this intellectual journey, moving chronologically from the eastern Mediterranean in antiquity towards medieval western Europe. In a concise and helpful introduction, Alain Touwaide divides these essays into four main parts: the first deals with antiquity and the eastern Mediterranean; the second, with the western Mediterranean in the early Middle Ages; the third with northern Europe and the beginnings of modern botany; and the fourth closes with papers devoted to herbs as we understand them today and the classification of ancient materia medica.
The opening chapters exemplify the scholarly range of this work: John Scarborough’s piece on the court of Cleopatra VII of Egypt explores pharmacological knowledge in antiquity through an episode (Cleopatra’s suicide) well known to a wider audience; Alain Touwaide’s ‘Quid pro Quo: revisiting the Practice of Substitution in Ancient Pharmacy’ deals with a subject which, though perhaps less familiar to the general reader, is nevertheless rather vital - namely, the importance for physicians in the post-antique world of finding and naming substitutes for materials which could not be readily found. This is a key topic for the history of pharmacy in general, despite a lack of scholarship to date.
Subsequent chapters take matters further west and into the Middle Ages, addressing the problems which the transmission and reception of earlier texts created. Florence Elize Glaze discusses glossing practices in medieval Italy, Faith Wallis examines a twelfth-century commentary on the Constantinian Liber Graduum, after which Winston Black explores what is preserved of Constantine the African in northern European medical verse. Indeed, the next essay, Maria Amliad’Aronco’s ‘Problematic Plant Name; elehtre’, though dealing with the Anglo-Saxon world, and hence cast in the introduction by Alain Touwiade as belonging to discussions about northern Europe, has much in common with the preceding essays, showing via a cunning examination of the glosses relating to the word electrum how the plant term elehtre may conceal more than has often been thought.
The central part of this volume consists of three papers which relate to the aftermath of the Middle Ages in northern Europe. Linda Ehrsam Voigts picks up instances of satire about doctors and drugs in Chaucer (though it might have helped to point out that this was entirely in keeping with tradition: both subjects had been the source of such criticism since the time of Pliny the Elder). Gundolf Keil examines in some detail the textual history of a medical text in Old Silesian, the Aphorisms of Roger, which carried excerpts from Roger of Salerno’s (fl 1170) Surgery. Last in this section comes Karen Reed’s discussion of St John’s Wort – a discussion well in keeping with Riddle’s ideas, in as much as the herb has been celebrated recently for a variety of therapeutic actions, but has historically been attested with other, competing claims, amongst which was its role as an abortifacient.
