The 'Old English Herbarium' in a new context (Oswald Cockayne)

This work presents a new translation of the Old English Herbarium , an Anglo-Saxon medical text from ca. A.D. 1000, and an original interpretation of its contents based on modern herbology and existing folk medicine (notably the Hispanic curandera tradition), both of which continue medieval healing practices. New details are included on the life and work of the Rev. Oswald Cockayne, who translated the Herbarium in 1864 and published it in his Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England. Among the details are assessments of his relationship with Joseph Bosworth, Henry Sweet, and W. W. Skeat, information about his controversial teaching career, and little-known facts about his alleged suicide. Translation strategies of the time are assessed, exemplified by William Morris and Matthew Arnold, to shed light on Cockayne's arcane translation style, which helped transform what had been a serious and long-lived medical text into a literary curiosity.; The Leechdoms also contain Cockayne's editions and translations of other Anglo-Saxon medical texts, the Lacnunga and Leechbook of Bald, both originally written in Old English (the Herbarium was translated from a fifth-century Latin work). In prefaces to the Leechdoms, Cockayne suggested several erroneous ideas about the Herbarium in comparison with the other two works. The study shows that Charles Singer and Wilifrid Bonser continued and expanded them and that they persist largely unchallenged in many scholarly studies to the present. It uses work by Linda Voigts and M. L. Cameron, for example, to counter these ideas, which include notions that the Herbarium was useless to the Anglo-Saxons because it was a “mere” translation, that the plants in it would not have been known or available in England, and that the Herbarium is not as representative of Anglo-Saxon medicine as the other two works, which are thought to contain elements of true Teutonic medico-magic. The study questions these ideas and demonstrates that Anglo-Saxon medicine and its texts were part of along-lived, pan-European tradition, which very early included charms and magic. The conclusion reached here is that the Old English Herbarium is representative of the medical practices of its time and is an essential medieval remedy book.