Among the widespread finds of spindle whorls in bone, clay, lead, and other prosaic materials in early medieval English graves are crystal spindle whorls. They are a footnote to history, often mentioned only because of the possibility that they might represent amuletic objects because of their unique nature. In many respects, they are like the “textile” half of the early medieval English textile metaphors: noted in passing, but rarely understood or considered in any depth. When crystal whorls are spun, however, a different story and set of possibilities emerge. When spun, the “faceted crystals would give a very pretty display of rainbow lights, adding interest to what must have often been a very tedious task.”2 The spinning, rainbow lights must have made the daily task of spinning seem magical, and certainly poetic. The interest such spinning created may also have served very practical functions, stimulating the young or the old to spin more thread, and promising the very young distraction and entertainment whenever the spinner was allowed to work uninterrupted at her task. Such whorls may have sparked the envy of others or increased the respect accorded their owners. For any of these reasons, or perhaps others, crystal spindle whorls became so treasured as personal possessions that they accompanied their owners to the grave, identifying them, at the very least, as women, forever after.

In the early seventeenth century, John Woodall (1570–1643), first surgeongeneral of the East India Company (EIC), published a practical text for surgeons at sea. The Surgions Mate, or A Treatise … of the Surgions Chest (1617) was positioned as a helpful guide for sea surgeons ‘who by reason of their youth and lack of practice’ required guidance, particularly for the extreme conditions of a ship at sea. Diseases, including scurvy, typhus and dysentery, along with accidents, foul living conditions, limited supplies and violent warfare, were only some of the challenges faced by a seventeenth-century crew and ship's surgeon. Woodall innovatively suggested an official inventory of medicines and tools for the EIC surgeon's chest. Across the seventeenth century other experienced practitioners also published guides for fledgling sea surgeons, often featuring rather traumatic case-histories. The hope, in the words of the surgeon John Moyle in Chirurgus Marinus: or, the Sea-Chirurgion (1693) was ‘to save the Lives and Limbs of many’. These surgeons’ accounts allow us to glimpse contemporary medical practices and customs aboard, such as how to treat wounds, ulcers, fractures and dislocations. Woodall's text recommends the use of citrus fruits to combat the ‘lamentable disease’ of scurvy which had ‘so long and so fiercely assailed saylers and sea-men of all sorts’ (and this was one of the earliest printed accounts to endorse the same). However, treatment of illnesses is not the focus of this chapter. My interest is in how a close reading of these texts can reveal something of the lived experiences of the crew and the surgeon on seventeenth-century ships, and even give insights into their cultural, social and emotional lives.

There are perhaps a few (now elderly) former students who can remember the Warwick History Department before Bernard Capp became a feature of it, but none of the current staff members there come close to doing so. Many of them, indeed, were not yet born when Bernard was appointed to a lectureship at Warwick, in 1968, at a time when he was still completing his doctoral research on radical millenarians in the era of the English Civil War, research undertaken at Oxford under the supervision of Keith Thomas. Although Bernard may not have known it at the time, he was to spend his entire academic career in this one institution on the outskirts of Coventry, founded only a couple of years earlier in 1965. He was in due course promoted to a senior lectureship, then a readership, and ultimately – the wheels of meritorious advancement turning more slowly in the preceding generation than in the present one – in 1994 a full professorship.

Bernard had then just published his ground-breaking study of the London plebeian celebrity John Taylor, the ‘water-poet’. It was the fourth of four monographs that were already cementing Bernard's reputation as one of the world's leading authorities on the social and cultural history of early modern England. Four more weighty monographs have followed, accompanied by a succession of invariably original and sometimes field-defining articles and essays, a stream of productive scholarship that shows little sign of coming to an end anytime soon. By my reckoning, Bernard has been published no fewer than seven times in Past and Present, the pre-eminent British journal for early modernists, and arguably for the historical discipline in the UK overall. I doubt whether any other living scholar has matched that – even Bernard's one-time supervisor, the formidable Sir Keith Thomas, has only managed five. Because he never goes on about it himself, it is sometimes possible, if only briefly, to lose sight of what a truly distinguished and influential historian Bernard Capp has been and continues to be.

While the pharmacopeia discussed in Chapter 2 were structured around descriptions of plants and animals and their medical uses, receptaria are a different kind of medical compilation. Receptaria list cures by disease, normally starting with the head, moving down through the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, throat, etc., and finishing with diseases of the feet. The ultimate sources of such receptaria are very similar to those of the pharmacopeia, being the encyclopaedic literature of Classical antiquity: principally the Historia naturalis of the first-century Roman aristocrat Gaius Plinius Secundus, or Pliny the Elder in English. In compilations such as Bald's Leechbook and the Lacnunga it can be impossible to tell for certain whether an individual recipe comes from the pharmacopoeia or a receptaria, and therefore Emily Kesling mostly groups such simple recipes together as ‘short’ recipes, as opposed to the ‘long’ passages of aetiology and diagnostic criteria found in those Galenic-Hippocratic sources I will discuss in Chapters 4–6. This literature is utilitarian in its intent, the authorial prefaces tending to stress the intention of providing household remedies to be used when doctors are not available, as explained in the prefatory epistle attributed to Plinius Secundus Iunioris, that is Pseudo-Pliny, who must not be confused with ‘Pliny the Younger’. The texts tend to lack the complex aetiological discussions which characterise the literary output of trained physicians, they have far fewer Graecisms, and they tend to avoid dietetics and preventive medicine.

In 1894, the German explorer Adolf Count von Götzen arrived at the borders of the kingdom of Rwanda. Götzen was about to cross Africa for exploration and to investigate the progress of the Congo Free State on behalf of his government. He himself was a trained diplomat from a noble family. Only one European had set his foot into the kingdom; two years before, the Austrian Oscar Baumann had roamed through the border regions of Rwandan but was pushed to leave after a few weeks. He had seen neither the capital of the kingdom nor met its ruler, Rwabugiri. Götzen, however, was awaited at the borders by a young man introducing himself as Schirangawe, a son of Rwabugiri. His father, he told Götzen, wanted to have him at this court for negotiations; his task was to guard him and to serve him with all means necessary on his way. When Götzen eventually reached the residence of Rwabugiri, Schirangawe asked him to wait and stay on his side of the river separating his camp from the residence of his father. As the night was approaching, the German agreed, but the next morning he crossed the river. Halfway, an envoy blocked his advance trying to explain the diplomatic rules for his reception at the court. Götzen nonetheless ignored him and stormed with his soldiers into the compound. The court put a good face on this outrageous behaviour. The negotiations were polite but short, nothing more than “ceremonial palaver”, as Götzen noted. The next day the German demanded food, which the Rwandans courteously refused because they still had not received gifts from the guest.

In England, after Mary I's pregnancy experiences in the 1550s, several commentators argued that her so-called pregnancies were in fact molas, false, unnatural conceptions, rather than ‘true’ foetuses. Many critical observers to these events, and those writing in the centuries afterwards, argued that the misdiagnosis of Mary's pregnancies was the result of ‘foolish’ women and midwives. Yet, as we saw in the previous chapter, many of Mary's English and Spanish male physicians also believed she was truly pregnant, based on the physical signs of her body. What did these men know about true and false conception, and how did they get the diagnosis so wrong? This chapter explores the knowledge about false conceptions and moles that Mary I's physicians would have learnt during their medical studies. The issue of human generation was a prominent one in European medicine and natural philosophy, and false generation was of particular interest to physicians, anatomists, and natural philosophers over the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth centuries. Not only did the study of false generation offer key insights into embryological development and the nature of the soul, but it helped to explain the uncertainties attached to the reproductive body. Like Mary I's physicians, the doctors and philosophers who investigated and wrote about false generation commented on its ability to render true generation and pregnancy deeply uncertain.

European knowledge about moles and false conceptions formed the backbone of the theories about false generation in British medicine and midwifery that were discussed in the previous chapter. These ideas were circulated by the movement of people, as well as print and correspondence. From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, many English and Scottish students travelled to Italian, French, German, and Dutch universities to study both formally and informally.

Who counts as a historian? Whatever the criteria may be, Gervase of Tilbury (c.1150–1222), the English jurist and author of the Otia Imperialia (‘Recreation for an Emperor’) presented to the ill-fated Holy Roman Emperor Otto IV (r. 1198–1218), seems rarely to have met them, at least in modern eyes. Most studies of the Otia, an encyclopaedic text of history, geography and mirabilia (‘marvels’), have focused on its geographical content (especially its relationship to the Ebstorf mappa mundi), or the lively content of the mirabilia. Its historical material, however, has been much neglected, to the extent indeed that Gervase has not often been considered a historian at all, even being characterised as a mere ‘littérateur’. This article considers Gervase's practices as a writer of historical material, and specifically how these practices were deployed in his account of the history of the British Isles. Gervase presented this history in two sections: the first from the legendary origins of Britain to the death of Cadwalladr, and the second as an account of English history from the Norman Conquest. As a guide to the events of this history, Gervase is of very limited reliability: his first section is almost wholly derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth, while his second is factually incorrect in most of its contents, diverging considerably from other contemporary accounts. The value of Gervase's historical writing, therefore, lies not in its assembly of ‘facts’ but in how Gervase shaped existing material for his particular audience. This in turn leads us to consider whether Gervase's many inaccuracies might be the result not of incompetence but of deliberate design, with the accuracy of facts subordinated to a wider purpose.

Although Robert's Chronography primarily circulated within the Benedictine network, its dissemination extended beyond Benedictine Normandy. Norman Cistercians showed an early appetite for Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's tradition. The abbeys of Savigny and Le Valasse acquired early copies of the Chronography. In addition, the Beauvais manuscript independently reached the Cistercian abbey of Mortemer in Normandy, fifty kilometres south-west of Beauvais, where the series temporum was updated and continued locally. Shortly afterwards, the Mortemer manuscript was copied at the Cistercian abbey of Ourscamp, in Picardy, just outside Normandy. The early transmission of the Chronography and independent copies of the Beauvais manuscript suggest that Norman Cistercians participated in the enthusiasm for universal history-writing. Did they use a different approach to Eusebius–Jerome's and Sigebert's tradition? This question is pertinent because historiography, though particularly developed in some communities, has traditionally been considered an exception within Cistercian writing. While historiography played a crucial role in shaping the identity of Cistercian communities, Cistercian writers tended to prioritise spiritual and theological exploration. Cistercians were key to transmitting texts like Sigebert's chronicle and the Vita Karoli Magni in Normandy, though universal history-writing was not a priority. With the exceptions of Otto of Freising, pseudo-William Goddell and the later Cistercian chroniclers Helinand de Froidmont (d. after 1229) and Alberic of Trois-Fontaines (d. 1252), White Monks were not prolific writers of world-chronicles, contenting themselves with either sparse continuations of Sigebert's Chronographia or local annals. In contrast to the attention and praise received by the Mortemer ‘chronicle-cartulary’, the Continuatio Mortui Maris has been inter¬preted as an unsophisticated chronicle serving the local audience at Mortemer.

The tradition of Eusebius–Jerome and Sigebert provided Norman chroni¬clers with a framework to structure the unfolding of time as the succession of power. As we have seen, Robert of Torigni, along with the Savigny, Mortemer and Ourscamp chroniclers, negotiated the ebb and flow of English kingship within universal history in relation to the rise of Henry II. In the second half of the twelfth century, John of Salisbury (1120–80) joined the same chronicle tradition, writing his so-called Historia Pontificalis as a continuation of Sigebert of Gembloux. A contemporary of Robert of Torigni, John was a prominent member of the Angevin political network. However, unlike the monk-historians analysed so far, John was a secular clergyman and a scholar. Secondly, the Historia Pontificalis cannot be counted as part of the Norman textual community, for John did not access Sigebert's chronicle through the Beauvais abridgement of the liber chronicorum. This makes John of Salisbury an outlier from the tradition discussed thus far, but a helpful one. Despite the different ways in which John approached universal chron¬icle-writing, he still considered himself a continuator of Sigebert's tradition and, as we shall see, shared many of the preoccupations that impacted Robert's Chronography.

Scholarship has so far overlooked John of Salisbury as Sigebert's continuator, admittedly not without reason. Historiography was not a prominent feature of John's written production. Christopher Brooke described the HP as ‘an unfinished, semi-satirical, semi-serious essay in history as viewed from the papal curia’. According to Marjorie Chibnall, editor of the HP, John was mainly concerned with human conduct and used historiography as a storehouse of moral examples.