Medieval Herbal Remedies
Subtitle: The Old English Herbarium and Anglo-Saxon Medicine
Publisher: Routledge
Published: June 28, 2002
Language: eng
Number of pages: 350
ISBN-13: 9780415938495
First sentence: In a listing of Anglo-Saxon scholars by importance, somewhere toward the end, but certainly present, would be the Rev. T. Oswald Cockayne (1807-73).
Description: "Translated into Anglo-Saxon around the year 1000, a collection of medicinal remedies known as the Old English Herbarium enjoyed wide popularity throughout Western Europe from the fifth century well into the Renaissance. Its history was later abandoned in the mid-nineteenth century when it fell into the hands of Oswald Cockayne, an eccentric antiquarian whose quaint translation of the Herbarium presented it as a literary curiosity rather than a serious reference on healing." "Anne Van Arsdall challenges the distortions of Cockayne and later scholars by offering a new translation of the Herbarium, which underscores its importance to the medieval world as well as its remarkable similarities to modern herbal medicine. Illustrated with drawings based on the original manuscript, this work restores our appreciation of a fascinating and most revealing medieval text."--Jacket.