Guest post written by The Antlered King author Marianne Gordon
Marianne Gordon is the author of the Raven’s Trade duology. She is a dark fantasy writer living with her partner and cat in Edinburgh. When she’s not reading or writing, she enjoys riding around the countryside on her motorbike (nicknamed Beastie).
About The Antlered King (released February 2025): In this stunning conclusion to the Raven’s Trade duology that began with The Gilded Crown, Hellevir’s bargains with Death to save the ones she loves—including the princess she risked everything to bring back to life—may just lead to the ultimate sacrifice.
When I sat down to write The Gilded Crown and thought ‘wouldn’t it be interesting if the main character were a medieval herbalist’, I was blessedly unaware of the enormous rabbit hole I was about to tumble into head-first. Cue many, many hours spent trawling books and articles on herblore and hedgewitchery, everything from the historical – Culpeper’s Complete Herbal and English Physician – to the scientific – Dauncey, Howes and Larssons’ Plants that Cure and Plants that Kill series (if you ever want to know the chemical composition of any plant poison, they’re your stop) – to the charmingly whimsical, such as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall’s River Cottage series. It was all fascinating and inspired me to make my own herbal oils and decoctions, but in the process, I came across Burkhard Bilger’s review of John Riddle’s Eve’s Herbs. The review is a little raw, but it’s inspired by a tragic incident that he realises might have been avoidable with herb lore that was once common knowledge; he and his pregnant wife enjoyed a daily cup of pennyroyal tea, not knowing pennyroyal is an abortifacient.
Herbology nowadays – at least in the West – has been pushed more to the fringe of everyday medicine, even though modern drugs are really just the distillation of millennia of herblore. Most modern medicines are still derived from plants – for example, we still use foxgloves to manufacture the heart drug digoxin – or from synthesised chemicals that we wouldn’t know about if we hadn’t used the active constituents in plants as templates – an example here would be the drug rivastigmine, used for treating dementia symptoms, which was originally based on the alkaloid physostigmine, found in the Calabar bean. Modern medicine is for the most part herblore at its most efficient, but it does mean that traditional knowledge of how these plants work is no longer in common circulation. Modern pharmaceutical companies now have the monopoly on herbal knowledge, not because the knowledge isn’t available to learn, but because we just don’t need it at our fingertips anymore when we can buy everything we need from a sterile shelf.
Human beings have been using herbs for millennia, with evidence of plants as medicine appearing in archaeological remains that vastly predate the written word. Herblore was common knowledge not just to physicians like Hippocrates and Galen, but to anyone with plant life around them, passed through communities and traded like food; a favourite example is from ancient Greece, when the plant silphium was used to extinction because of its incredible effectiveness as a contraceptive. Knowledge was often memorised through rhymes and songs, honed over generations through observation not just of plants’ effects on humans, but also on livestock.
Some of the lore, of course, was incredibly bogus and probably caused as much harm as it cured, and its use and abuse was vulnerable to cultural and social ideologies of the time. There is no stronger example of this than in attitudes towards what were thought of typically as female medicines.
John Riddle’s fascinating 1997 book focuses for the most part on herb lore as it was applied in female reproductive health, either to encourage menstruation, as a contraceptive, or as an abortifacient. I would thoroughly recommend giving it a read; it filled me with righteous feminist rage despite being a very neutral, facts-focused book. My two favourite takeaways from it are twin examples of incredible tragic irony in the Middle Ages, which by their mutual influence caused herbal wisdom to be removed from the hands of practising midwives and herbalists and set back women’s reproductive health centuries: the influence of the church, and the influence of academic institutions. A lot of the same prejudice is still causing immeasurable harm today.
By the 13th century the Christian church had made its position on birth control very clear: there should be no interference with ‘natural’ procreation as God intended. There are scholastic debates recorded where the question posed was whether a woman should be allowed to ‘procure sterility’ if a pregnancy posed a risk to her life, and it was deemed to be against church law. Because of the increasingly stern attitude towards abortion and birth control as being by its very nature against God’s plan, midwifery became intertwined with concepts of heresy; to quote Riddle, ‘the craft of women was tragically misunderstood as witchcraft’.
Medicine by this point had become the domain of the educated, trained at university institutions; you could not be a physician, surgeon or apothecary without a license to practise. Those who did not have university backgrounds were vilified, their practises dismissed as folkloric superstition. The once respected ‘wise woman’ who for centuries had been the custodian of traditional medicine, and who was only one link in the long oral tradition transmitting medical knowledge between generations of women, was now hounded not just for offering reproductive wisdom, but any curative wisdom at all. Between 1450 and 1700, nearly 200,000 midwives (most of them women) were burned at the stake.
Medical knowledge was lost in waves. These educated young men who read the texts of the ancients, like Galen, Dioscorides, Hippocrates, and could treat an open wound or remove a cataract, often lacked the common knowledge needed to treat women. Their cures often contained myriad expensive and rare ingredients, and if anyone – not just a woman – couldn’t afford them or even reach an apothecary, Riddle points out the tendency of the medieval imagination to turn to fantastical fictions, such as licking a frog to cure a sore throat, or using donkey dung as an abortifacient. In terms of help for reproductive problems, women were effectively alone.
University institutions didn’t foster knowledge, but restricted it. The Church didn’t destroy superstition, but actualised its spread.
It wasn’t all horrific; nunneries and priesthoods provided environments for research into plants and their uses, and were a means by which a lot of information was preserved even if it wasn’t always available to the commoner. However, this dearth of knowledge on women’s reproductive health persisted and its field of study continued to be treated as something clandestine. Even into the 19th and 20th centuries, newspapers had to use strained euphemisms to advertise their abortion medicines so as not to attract governmental ire; for example, Beecham’s Pills were marketed as a laxative to ‘assist nature in her wondrous functions’, and other medicines which claimed to help women’s troubles contained extracts of pennyroyal, tansy and savin. The herblore was still there and pushing its way through like a well-bedded plant shoot.
Today, herblore should not be construed as a replacement for modern medicine. Without the entrenched knowledge of the kind herbalists or wise women would have had, its simply too dangerous, and even then, herbs aren’t harmless. Before researching for The Gilded Crown, I had no idea that the raspberry tea I was planning to give to a newly pregnant friend (which I found soothing) should not be drunk in the first trimester because it can affect absorption of minerals like iron and calcium. I didn’t know the ginger I was cooking in my curries had blood-thinning properties, or that St John’s Wort, an effective treatment for mild depression, should not be taken alongside other medicines because it can diminish their efficacy (a bit of a shock to me when I was taking the contraceptive pill).
But there is a caveat on giving all our faith over to Big Pharma. I could wax lyrical for quite some time about how modern medicine historically chose to ignore 50% of the population in medical trials and research because women’s bodies were seen as having too many extraneous variables for scientifically accurate testing – e.g. fluctuating hormone levels – and that it wasn’t until 1986 that the NIH in America advised that females should be included in studies unless there was adequate rationale for exclusion. It was not until 1993 that it became a Federal mandate. Even today much of what we buy on the shelves – including painkillers for period pain – have dosages most suitable by default for male bodies.
Regardless, when the apocalypse hits and the manufactured medicine runs out, perhaps we’ll start to relearn the power within the hedgerows, and foragers will have their time to shine. In the meantime, with informed caution, there’s no reason not to reclaim herblore while also maintaining a healthy respect for modern pharmaceuticals.
There are many women we don’t learn about in schools in favour of their male counterparts, largely forgotten as a result of the same prejudices that saw the loss of so much herblore. I wanted to mention three who must have lived fascinating lives.
Trota of Salerno. Trota is an enigmatic figure about whom we know very little, but was likely active during the 12th century in the Italian coastal town of Salerno, and was supposedly one of many women who were practising professors at the medical school there. Her work, Practica secundum Trotam, ‘Practical Medicine According to Trota’, covers a range of gynaecological and non-gynaecological ailments.
Cleopatra the Physician. Active in the late 1st century AD, Cleopatra was a medical writer, and the author of a text cited by Galen, called Cosmetics. There is a tendency to conflate her with the Cleopatra of the Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar persuasion, i.e. Cleopatra VII Philopater Philopatris, but Cleopatra was not an uncommon name and the Physician was active a century after the Queen. According to Galen, her works were organised topically, and the strength of dosage was left to the physician’s discretion according to the severity of the illness. The works covered everything from hair loss to antiseptics, and followed ‘humour theory’, which linked the four elements with the four humours of the body; air to blood, fire to yellow bile, water to phlegm, and earth to black bile. Despite the dubiousness of the grounding science, her treatments seem to have been effective, given how often they were cited by notable physicians in the following centuries. For dandruff, Cleopatra recommended myrrh and green leaves of white myrtle, ground up with olive oil and used as an ointment.
Hildegard von Bingen. Born around 1098, Hildegard was a German Benedictine Abbess, a prophetess, and something of a polymath. She joined the nunnery at the age of 14 at a time when nunneries were the alternative for women who either couldn’t or didn’t want to marry, and in the Middle Ages it was often the only avenue by which women could establish themselves as intellectuals. Hildegard wrote widely on theology and mysticism, but also medicine (Causae et Curae), the natural sciences (Physica), and music. In her medical texts she discusses 437 medicinal uses of 175 different plants, and modern medicine has proven many of her methods sound. It’s likely that Hildegard incorporated a lot of folkloric wisdom alongside her learning from ancient texts, as the Latin texts she quotes are mixed in with German terms. She lived into her eighties, invented her own language called Lingua Ignota, and you can listen to a modern iteration of her music here. It’s rather lovely.
Sources
Bilger, B. Review of the book Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West, by John Riddle (1997). Herbalgram, 45, 70. [online] Available at: https://www.herbalgram.org/resources/herbalgram/issues/45/table-of-contents/article763/.
Dauncey, E.A. and Howes, M.-J.R. (2020). Plants That Cure: Plants as a Source of Medicines, from Pharmaceuticals to Herbal Remedies. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, Quarto Publishing.
Dauncey, E.A. and Larsson, S. (2018). Plants That Kill: A Natural History of the World’s Most Poisonous Plants. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.
Riddle, J.M. (1997). Eve’s Herbs: A History of Contraception and Abortion in the West. Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press.
Cleopatra the Physician
Plant, I.M. (2004). Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome: an Anthology. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, p135ff.
Hildegard von Bingen
www.vatican.va. (n.d.). Apostolic Letter proclaiming Hildegard of Bingen as a Doctor of the Church (October 7, 2012) | BENEDICT XVI. [online] Available at: https://www.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/apost_letters/documents/hf_ben-xvi_apl_20121007_ildegarda-bingen.html.
Campbell, O. (2021). Abortion Remedies from a Medieval Catholic Nun(!). [online] JSTOR Daily. Available at: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/.
Joseph (n.d.). Letter? I ‘ardly know ‘er: The unknown language (and letters) of Hildegard von Bingen – Medieval Studies Research Blog: Meet us at the Crossroads of Everything. [online] sites.nd.edu. Available at: https://sites.nd.edu/manuscript-studies/2015/10/01/letter-i-ardly-know-er-the-unknown-language-and-letters-of-hildegard-von-bingen/.
Trota of Salerno
Green, M. (2008). WHO/WHAT IS ‘TROTULA’? [online] Available at: https://celt.ucc.ie/whowhat2008.pdf [Accessed 29 Feb. 2024].
Still, C. (2017). For Trota: Practitioner of Women’s Health in the Middle Ages – The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [online] Metmuseum.org. Available at: https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/trotula-womens-medicine-in-middle-ages#2 [Accessed 13 Feb. 2025].
Green, M. (1998). In Search of an ‘Authentic’ Women’s Medicine: The Strange Fates of Trota of Salerno and Hildegard of Bingen. [online] Available at: https://ddd.uab.cat/pub/dynamis/02119536v19/02119536v19p25.pdf [Accessed 13 Feb. 2025].
