HERB - Re: Culpepper

[Kathleen Keeler]

Jenne Heise wrote:

> You know, I'm curious as to the popularity of Culpepper in the SCA. For
> one thing, it's postperiod.

Availability?
My botany books list herbals by Albertus Magnus (d. 1280) Bancks (published)
1525) Brumfels (d. 1534), Bock (d. 1544), Turner (published 1551-68) Fuchs (d.
1566), Cordus, L'Obel (d. 1616), Gerard (herbal 1st ed. published 1597).
L'Ecluse (d. 1609). We could add Dioscorides (AD 64), Avicenna (c. 1200), Macer
(c. 1200) and a couple others.
I have no idea where to buy most of those, and the ones I could locate begin at
$100.

Culpeper's 1st ed was 1651.
Maybe that's not far postperiod if you consider that even today the information
in a book is 3-5 years old when the book hits the bookstores-- it takes that
long for the editting, proof reading, printing, binding, distributing.  (Unless
its the latest scandal of course).  Imagining hand writen books the size of an
herbal, hand set letter by letter into moveable type:  the author will have
finished some of the chapters a decade before, and even the last chapter the
author wrote won't be very recent.  (My colleagues who write floras don't see
any problem with including a chapter they wrote 10 years ago, having checked it
briefly against the latest developments.  Newer isn't better if you got it
right the first time.)

> For another thing, the histories of herbals
> I've looked at seemed to imply there was a good chance that a lot of his
> materials were 'made up'-- that is, he was not recording local usage, but
> only his own personal formulas -- and that he was considered something of
> a kook in his time.

I don't know.  When Levelin and McMahon (Plants and Society, 1999, an economic
botany text) write"Other English herbals published in the mid-seventeenth
century were John Parkinson's Theatrum Botanicum and Nicholas Culpepper's The
Complete Herbal, one of the most popular herbals of the day.
All the herbals focused on the medicinal uses of plants but also included much
misinformation and superstition.  For example, Culpepper's herbal had a strong
astrological influence and also revived the Doctrine of Signatures....The most
famous advocate of the Doctrine of Signatures was the earth sixteenth century
Swiss herbalist Paracelsus..." (p. 316)
   They are criticizing herbals, not  Culpeper specifically.

 Botanists, who traditionally wrote about herbals, are looking for the roots of
modern botany--they like Gerard for including plants that aren't useful and
Bauhin (d. 1631) because "for the first time in botanical history [Bauhin
wrote] good diagnoses of the species" (from Lawrence, Taxonomy of Vascular
Plants p. 16)
Do you have a history that has biases more relevant to the SCA?

> Having just ordered a copy of the Complete edition (for the formulas,
> etc. that the standard editions leave out), I know that it's actually a
> reprint of _The English Physician_ which he claimed was a reprinting of
> the lore of the physician's colleges/guilds. However, even given the
> astrological theories of the time, I've heard that his assignments of
> signs to plans was non-standard for the time.  What do you all think?

Hard to know without reading the originals, preferrably in the original
language.  I tried to teach myself enough astrology to imitate a Medieval
physician, but its rough going.  I xeroxed part of a microfiche of
Salmon's Astrological Physick (mid 1500's) but its in astrological
shorthand--very hard going for me.

> And speaking of kooks, I've just picked up a copy of _The Elixirs of
> Nostradamus_,

I too picked it up, but haven't worked with it.  Will look tonight.

> Jadwiga Zajaczkowa, mka Jennifer Heise        jenne at tulgey.browser.net

Jadwiga (and everyone), what Period herbal can a beginner buy that would
represent the time?

Cheers,
Agnes
kkeeler1 at unl.edu

============================================================================
Go to http://lists.ansteorra.org/lists.html to perform mailing list tasks.