Tag Archives: Medicines

The Uses and Abuses of Medieval Manuscripts in Reformation England

By Nikianna Dinenis

A familiar image of the English Reformation is one of destruction, of Henry VIII dissolving nine hundred monasteries, scattering their rich manuscript collections to the four winds, and transforming the English landscape into a graveyard of Catholic belief and practice. 

In her new book Reading Practice, Melissa Reynolds presents us with a different sixteenth-century world, one in which medieval manuscripts, far from lost or obsolete, were part of the fabric of everyday life. From the fifteenth century, the literate gentry and middling classes had started to build collections of devotional texts and works of natural history, helping them to navigate the vicissitudes of the divinely ordered world. These manuscripts had long lives; they were family books, passed down through generations, evolving in the hands of new owners, who over time annotated, amended, augmented and censored the texts they inherited, reflecting the new ages in which they lived. While monastery walls decayed with disuse,  folios of religious and medicinal works were kept alive by new generations of Protestants. 

In his 2006 Marking the Hours, Eamon Duffy followed English Protestants as they scrawled across their fifteenth-century Catholic Books of Hours. Ignoring the myriad decrees enjoining them to destroy their old prayer books or urging them to buy the 1545 official Protestant royal primer, many otherwise devout reformists preferred instead to include Catholic books in their new religious practices. There was no one way in which they did so. Over the course of the 1530s and 40s, one reformist reader, possibly the London clergyman John Brygandyne, amended his fifteenth-century Hours by deleting certain popish prayers. At the same time, he added traditional Catholic prayers to a guardian angel; he also drew illuminated initials to imitate the decoration of his original Hours. In a more conventional case of censorship, another owner deleted prayers to the Virgin and sacrament from a fifteenth-century Marian primer. But even this begs the question of why he or she still used it. Perhaps, as Duffy considers, Catholic manuscripts helped people adjust to change through a comforting consistency of habit. 

The same goes for books of natural history, Reynolds shows, which had as much to do with religion as prayer books; people’s relationships to their bodies and the divinely ordered natural world were fundamentally intertwined with religious belief. And again, Protestants preferred to amend or update their fifteenth-century manuscripts, rather than discard them or seek the same knowledge in printed books. After all, Protestants still believed in prognostications, in reading the heavens for godly signs, building upon the rich fifteenth-century culture of almanacs. 

But Reynold’s work shows us that the arc of continuity is only one part of the story. The medieval past was also mined for raw materials out of which to concoct a new Protestant future and worldview, not all of it savoury. 

Collecting manuscripts of natural history was part of a project of English Protestant national identity formation. Men like Timothy Bright, an aspiring, Cambridge-educated physician, and author of several medical works, wrote a treatise in 1580 which extolled “the sufficiencie of English medicines.” He used old English manuscripts of natural history to present a case against foreign medicines by showcasing that English plants and remedies had been revealed to the English people for centuries by a God who favored them, and their health, on account of their piety. Bright collected medieval knowledge to rewrite English national and natural history as a narrative of the teleological march to Protestant truth. 

And there was a dark side to the Protestant fascination with its medieval past, Reynolds tells us. When sixteenth-century readers went looking for the secrets of nature that their ancestors had known, they discovered a world of charms and amulets, material that had provided much of the contents of medieval lay prayer and practice. Many of these charms and remedies related to female physiological matters like childbirth and menstruation and contained recipes for abortifacients. In the fifteenth century this knowledge had circulated freely, but in the active and persecutory hands of sixteenth-century readers, they became newly associated with popery and shrouded in a language of discovery that accompanied all pursuits of manuscripts in an age of print. Readers imagined having stumbled upon a forbidden “secret” female knowledge, and saw a world that needed to be reformed, not only through the censoring of charms on a page but through the vigilant expunging of its practitioners off the page, leading to the first the woman hanged for witchcraft in England in 1566 who was accused of having killed her unborn child with “a certain herb”. 

A charm blacked out by a later reader, in a manuscript studied by Reynolds. London, Wellcome Library, MS 409, f43v. Public Domain Mark
A charm blacked out by a later reader, in a manuscript studied by Reynolds. London, Wellcome Library, MS 409, f43v. Public Domain Mark

In the sixteenth century, the Catholic past was less a discarded relic than a living, evolving, presence in Protestant homes, where in the hands of readers, it provided material for new imaginative visions of the natural and supernatural world. 

Nikianna Dinenis is a PhD student at Princeton University, where she works on women’s reading practices in Reformation Germany.

Introduction – Joyful News of Medicine from Iberian Worlds

R.A. Kashanipour

Nicolás Monardes, Dos libros, El uno que trata de las cosas que traen de las Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de Medicina y como se ha de usar dela raiz del Mechoacan, purge excelentissma. (Sevilla, 1569).
Nicolás Monardes, Dos libros, El uno que trata de las cosas que traen de las Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de Medicina y como se ha de usar dela raiz del Mechoacan, purge excelentissma. (Sevilla, 1569).

In 1565, the Spanish physician and herbologist, Nicolás Monardes wrote of the great secrets of nature revealed by Spanish encounters of the New World. In the first book of his Dos libros of medicine, Doctor Monardes remarked of the discovery of new and diverse kingdoms in the Occident that abundantly produced gold, silver, pearls, emeralds, and turquoise that were “a greatly admired by the millions all over the world.” The physician, who never ventured across the Atlantic, marveled at the bounty of the Indies as he wrote from the capital and imperial port of Sevilla. He noted that every year hundreds of ships arrived laden with animals and agricultural products—from across the region came “parrots, monkeys, griffons, lions, falcons, owls, tigers, wool, cotton and sugar.” [1] For the doctor, however, the wealth and abundance of the Indies lay not in minerals, animals, and cash crops, but rather in the botany and knowledge of medicine that grew in the Iberian worlds.

Our Indies have given unto us many trees, plants, herbs, roots, juices, gums, fruits, seeds, liquors, and stones that have great medicinal virtues, that have been found to have great effect and precious value, all of which is said to be excellent and more necessary for corporal health than those things known through the world… And as our Spaniards have discovered new regions, new kingdoms, and new provinces, so too have they brought unto us new medicines and new remedies that cure many infirmities, which, without them, would be incurable and without any remedy.

In the Dos libros, Monardes celebrated the remedial uses of saps and resins, bitumen and bezoars, and fruit and stones that came from the provinces of New Spain and Peru, such as the incense Copal from Mexico, the gum of the Caranna from Cartegena, and the Sulphur vivo (quick sulfur) of Peru. He advocated for the use of the Piedra de sangre (blood stone) as a remedy for the bloody flux the Pimienta de Indes (Indian Pepper) as a purgative. In the first published accounts to detail Çarçaparrilla (sarsaparilla), Monardes characterized the plant as critical medicine well known to both Natives and Spaniards from Nicaragua to Peru. Knowledge of the plant could provide remedies to grave pains and afflictions.

El tobaco. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA.
El tobaco. Nicolás Monardes, Joyfull Nevves of the newe founde world (London, 1577). Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA.

Although Monardes championed Spanish discoveries of subject populations and mineral wealth in the New World, he noted that medical knowledge was a product of experimentation and consultation with local sources of authority, including Natives and Africans. For instance, the knowledge of the healing roots of a plant known as Mechoacan, which were used to treat sores and pox among other afflictions, came from indigenous caciques and healers that encountered the first conquistadores in Central Mexico. Similarly, Spanish friars learned of purgative qualities of the milk of Pinipinichi plant from Nahuatl-speaking natives of the region. Africans experimented with sarsaparilla and Natives across the New World knew of the curative properties of tobacco.  Monardes, a resident of Sevilla all of his life, drew upon the diverse sources of knowledge that flowed through Iberian intellectual and material world.  Based on his work, it is clear that he drew upon the experience and perspectives of Spanish merchants and settlers as much as he took inspiration from Native informants and African healers.

Joyfull Nevvs of the new founde world (London, 1577). John Frampton’s 1577 translation of the compilation of the works of Nicolás Monardes. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA.

Within a decade of the publication of  Nicolás Monardes’s Dos libros, the work was translated and published across Europe, with editions in Latin, French, Italian, German, and English. John Frampton’s English publication in 1570 bore the laudatory title Joyfull Newes of the New Found World, which emphasized the optimism and triumphant themes in the original work.

Although some have [medical] knowledge, it is not common to all people, for which cause I did attempt to heal and to write, using all things from our Indies, utilizing to the art and practice of medicine and remedies for the pains and diseases that we do suffer and endure, where of no small profit does follow to those of our time and also unto them that shall come after us…”[2]

El armadillo. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.
El armadillo. Nicolás Monardes, Primera y segunda y tercera partes de la historia medicinal (Sevilla, 1574). Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library, Providence, Rhode Island, USA.

In subsequent works, the doctor went on to provide some of the earliest descriptions of the useful qualities of materia medica from the Iberian World, including tabaco (tobacco), dragon (dragon fruit), and armadillos.  He championed the materia medica of the Iberian world of the sixteenth century.  His work, however, was but one in an expansive intellectual world.

This series of posts on medicine in Latin America and the Iberian World will look at those connections as a means to examine material, intellectual, and power relations. Monardes work demonstrated that the so-called Joyful New of medicine in the Iberian world was not simply a product of colonial discovery, but a result of complex interactions between Europeans, Natives and Africans across Iberian worlds. As the search for remedies took place across the Atlantic , medical knowledge systems created connections within and across imperial boundaries. The history of early modern Iberian and Latin American medicine shows that these connections were the products of local interactions that connected diffuse, diverse, and often disparate knowledge systems that took place on a global scale.  In these posts we will explore remedies from across Iberian worlds, from Mexico to Peru to Brazil and the Caribbean.  The recipes and posts that come in this series, we hope, will further shed light on the fascinating growing scholarship on the history of medicine in the early modern Iberian world, much as Monardes did himself more than four centuries ago.   Joyful News!

[1] Nicolás Monardes, Dos libros, El uno que trata de las cosas que traen de las Indias Occidentales, que sirven al uso de Medicina y como se ha de usar dela raiz del Mechoacan, purge excelentissma. (Sevilla, 1569), 1v, 2r.

[2] Monardes, Dos libros, 2v-3r.